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“You say you want a revolution”: Incels, Ideology, and Charles Murray
For those that are unaware, Incel is a portmanteau of “involuntary celibate,” and encompasses men who fit just what that description implies, but also a range of other behaviors and opinions. The term was originally coined by a female Canadian university student as a reference, and the name for an online support group, to people of both genders that struggled to garner romantic relationships. Incels today are almost all men and are quite far afield of the original version of that term. In addition to their virginity, they have a developed system of thought on women, society, and romantic life.
To put it bluntly, the vast majority of Incels consider women non-human. The kindest might deign to mark them as animals, or human-like creatures, hence the common use of the term “foid” (female humanoid). In their minds, women are incapable of love, loyalty, selflessness, real strength, or rational thought; they live to engage in casual relationships with high-status men (“chads”), and when they are inevitably made worthless anatomically and physically by this, spend the rest of their lives with desperate low-status men who provide them with money while they have children born of countless extramarital affairs. But maybe women who chose not to follow this path are slightly more highly regarded? No. Not even a little. Unmarried women are unimaginably selfish evildoers who live to lead on an endless stream of innocent men, and those that chose not to have children deserve instant death because they haven’t fulfilled the one purpose that women have in the world as breeding sows.
Educated women, career women, and the vast majority of women over the age of 18 are given to similar contempt. The first two groups because they had nothing to do with their own success, which was earned solely from their bodies and looks, and the third because all women over that age (often much younger) are regarded as “used up”, having already had hundreds of partners. Simply put, their “femoids” have no intelligence except cunning, no worth except as objects, and no reason to exist outside of the biological imperative. In keeping with this lovely and totally rational system of thought, female survivors of sexual assault are the lowest of the low, and in incels terms not only deserved what happened to them but enjoyed it, labeling it a violation only when it happened at the hands of an unattractive man.
“Soyciety”* perpetuates this state of affairs, and helps to keep Incels, as well as their MGTOW, red pill*, and black pill* brethren, down. Incel history posits that until the early 20th century, men had been in absolute control of every civilization that ever existed, and that the West made a mistake in granting women wider rights and equal status with men. Societies like Saudi Arabia, where women are treated as property and have little to no say in everything from government to their own personal lives, are the ideal from which the West has strayed, and will eventually overtake the West. Men are second class citizens and should unite to rise up and take back their traditional rights in order to put history back to rights, consigning universal suffrage and consent laws, among many other things, to the past. They are enthused to use concentration camps (which would double as breeding centers) and widespread sexual assault as weapons in carrying out that revolution, which would be easily won when all men realized the truth of their ideas, and because women are so inferior in physical strength and intelligence.
Naturally, there is also a healthy amount of racism mixed into Incel beliefs. Most buy into the standard “Jews run the world, Rothschilds are hiding under my bed and stopping me from getting women, using capitalism to enslave me” line. They also have a deep obsession with height, skin color, race characteristics, and canthal tilt; women are hypergamous (always seek to marry those of a higher genetic and social position) and thus Incels are denied their “looksmatch”, as is almost any man under 6” who doesn’t look like he just stepped out of a Harlequin romance novel. It should also be noted that their ratings of women are wild, with most supermodels falling into the 5-6 range on a 10 scale, in large part because they either don’t look like 2-D Japanese anime girls or because they lack the features that make men attractive (height, strong jaw, etc).
Of course, in a society like this, especially when women are beings of such evil, Incels are incapable of having romantic lives. Some try to blend in as socially normal, while others run to the other extreme, becoming NEETs (not in education or training) who take up residence in their parents’ basements and/or live off of government benefits. Few have hobbies beyond viewing adult material, video games, “blackpill” philosophy, and spending hours on Incel and related forums (many of which encourage pedophilia and the grooming of younger female relatives, hence they are often hosted on servers outside the US). They occasionally report on their interactions with females in the real world, largely adding up to detailed first-person narratives about a history of anti-social, abusive, and sometimes all-out criminal behavior. A few, both in the US and abroad, have committed large scale violence, like school shootings, and estimates put their numbers anywhere from the thousands to the hundreds of thousands.
What causes this phenomenon? Incels have received a lot of press, even internationally, in the last few years, and the majority of those detailed reports hit the nail on the head; untreated mental illness, closeted homosexuality, poor family relationships, and/or simple malignancy are the main ones. But I would like to posit another, which is both economic and philosophical. Charles Murray, in Coming Apart, argued that men in “Fishtowns”, areas of low economic development with poor social cohesion or community formation, were vastly more likely to turn to drugs, crime, dependency, and suicide than counterparts from higher economic statuses with more coherent communities. I think Incels fit into this, but not in a neat, tidy way.
Some percentage of them, in addition to the other issues listed above, do choose to become Incels because of the impact of the factors Murray explored, in the same way, that their counterparts might choose drugs. Bad backgrounds will always have an impact. However, some measures of incels come from “Belmont” rather than “Fishtown” and have a variety of options presented to them in life, a pretty great amount of privilege in some cases. And I think their anger, and Incel status, flows from a sense of entitlement. Life has not been perfect since childhood and when they see others of the same background, and even worse ones, flourishing, rather than seeking to find the font of their romantic (and other) issues, they shift blame. Many tales are told in Incel forums of young men dropping out of high school and college because all was not as they expected; women didn’t throw themselves at them, courses were challenging (although all “foids” will obviously pass because of their sex), and social lives took effort. In essence, they absorbed and idealized a warped picture of 1950s America (one which conveniently cut out a lot of the casual racism and some women’s dependency on drugs as the post-war society demanded that they give up jobs which had given their lives purpose), and feel that they deserve a white picket fence, three kids, a dog, and a loving wife. Society, romantic norms, and evil women like me, who chose careers over marriage with kids (and engage in male pursuits like boxing and higher education), are the root of their problems and must be eliminated in order to re-establish paradise.
I’ll end this on a slightly preachy note. If you have a child, grandchild, or friend that you think might be falling into an ideology like this, please reach out to them. Communities like those centered around Incel ideology are borderline cults, and they do as much damage to their members as their members seek to do to women at large. Some men get out, but other men end up ruining their lives (and others’) in pursuit of fulfilling Incel thought, and any time that can be prevented from happening is a wonderful thing.
* “Soyciety” = Present-day society, which has been robbed of ‘manly’ virtue by allowing women equal rights and status to men. The soy moniker is based on the argument that soy introduces high amounts of estrogen to the body, and Soyciety also sometimes encompasses the argument that elites are using chemical means to ‘feminize’ society through chlorinated drinking water, vaccines, etc.
*”Red Pill” = “The incel red pill can be explained by the 80/20 rule, which says that 80% of women desire just 20% of men. This means that the vast majority of men will never be desirable and consequentially will never find sexual fulfillment and happiness.”
*”Black Pill” = “The Red Pill’s nihilistic cousin. The idea behind “redpilling” is that men recognise that the world is unfair and stacked against them in favour of women. From there, they can game the system by becoming an “alpha” male, going to the gym, treating women poorly, and so on. The black pill rejects this, saying that there can be no personal solutions to systemic problems, and that the world was, is and always will be stacked against men who are “genetically inferior”, and that women are inherently wired to prefer men with particular kinds of facial features, bone structure, and body type.”
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Don’t worry, @user_648569, your hat seems to be covering it.
This describes quite a lot of people, possibly all people.
Is my Peter Paul & Mary tribute band.
Or Ricochet’s Rat Pack tribute act (if you eschew Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop).
(Sorry, trying to reply to Matt’s comment but the mobile version does not want to cooperate).
It’s not just the mobile version. Any conversation with more than one page of comments, trying to reply is getting us kicked back to page one, losing what we are trying to reply to. Max is (hopefully) working on it.
But it is working for a few people, like @percival somehow. Are you doing some work around?
Push the button, Max!
If you stop the new page from loading, you can get things quoting properly. You just have to be faster than Ricochet page loads. 🤣
Just stop the reload as soon as you click reply. If I miss, I’ve been able to back up and the comment is still there.
Who’s gonna be who?
I got dibs on Sinatra.
Not true for me. The quote disappears, but I had discovered the stop technique.
Percival
I got dibs on Sinatra.
Good with me, I always preferred Dean.
(Is that gif working, I can’t tell?)
I guess that makes Old Phil as Sammy?
Yep, thanks! How do I embed a gif correctly?
I just drag from one tab and drop it in the other.
Regarding “incels” it is a sub-subset that I don’t want to explore. But I am a man with fewer years left than he has lived and, like many or most Ricochetti, I’ve experienced a lot and witnessed a lot more. Whether I believe in fallen Creation ex nihilo (which I do) or evolution, I’m sure many commenters here have lived on farms and seen the mating procedures of animals. I can’t think of any warm-blooded creatures besides Man in which the female blandly or genteelly accepts the advances of the male. Cats, ducks, and chickens, in my viewing, are particularly violent, and the sex act is literally scarring, with bites, and feathers flying (not so much fur). Even female goats spend more time rejecting male suitors than engaged in the reproductive act itself.
Men and women are biological creatures, too. And it is only a spiritual veneer (some would say an evolutionary benefit) that keeps reproduction “kindly”. Sex, pairing and reproduction has always been a rough trade, so to speak, and if it is to be believed Christianity itself elevated the status of women, and made marriage a loving relationship rather than a practical or self-interested one.
The relationships that are described by consideration of “incels”, if they do in fact represent something new, are an outgrowth of two major things, the entry of women into the work force (now essentially an economical requirement) and the disassociation of sex and marriage from reproduction. This is a profound alteration of an essential human interactive process, and its results may be devastating, as we are seeing glimpses of now.
With China’s one-birth policy and sex-selective abortion, millions of Chinese men have no chance of marrying, or otherwise fitting into an age-old monogamous family relationship. But there is at least the PLA for them to channel their frustrations and to express their disaffection.
I finally clicked on that link. That’s horrifying.
At risk of sounding like an Ozzie & Harriet conservative, women and men were made artificially unequal by way of culture, then made artificially equal by way of culture. The incels seem to be making them artificially unequal through a micro-culture.
It’d probably be a better thing if we could worry less about pointless generalities for the different sexes and focus on actual individuals’ needs and wants.
Honestly, that’s the most anodyne content you’ll see from them. The stuff that’s culled from message boards, blogs, and real life interactions (on sites like r/inceltear and in uncensored documentaries) is 1000x worse. Making fun of victims of sexual assault, trading tips about how to groom young female relatives, etc.
My best guess/interpretation is that they (often willfully) misunderstand sex differences and inequalities. For example, they love touting the statistic that men have a higher percentage of geniuses than women, but fail to ever mention that women’s mean IQ is higher. Or in physical strength; I’m a Muay Thai fighter, and while I know the vast majority of the men I fight with have better upper body strength, I (and most women) have better leg flexibility and are lighter on our feet, which comes with its own host of advantages. Your last point also hits the bullseye on their attitude; they’re incapable of seeing women (and even most men) as individuals and harm themselves and others in the process.
More male morons, too, as these guys prove.
“they love touting the statistic that men have a higher percentage of geniuses than women”
FWIW, this can’t be a rational part of their argument because genius is an arguable term, and doesn’t have so much to do with IQ as with world-effecting inspiration.
Your gif worked in your original comment, but my quoting the comment seems to have broken that copy.
There are definitions of genius that use an IQ cut-off, such as 142 or 145. Nowadays, it is generally said, a high-IQ, plus some other factors.
A high IQ and $5 will get you a cup of coffee, I’m told.
“A high IQ and $5 will get you a cup of coffee, I’m told.”
I knew that.
Rationality doesn’t really enter into the equation much there. Pseudoscience and twisting statistics/scientific papers yes, well thought out or rational arguments no.