Men who identify as incels have “fundamental thinking errors” about what women want, research shows.
A study at Swansea University found incels - or involuntary celibates - overestimated physical attractiveness and finances, while underestimating kindness, humour and loyalty.
The study’s co-author Andrew Thomas said “thinking errors” could “lead us down some quite troubling paths”.
He said mental health support was crucial, as opposed to “demonisation”.
The term refers to a community, largely online, of mainly heterosexual men frustrated by their inability to form romantic or sexual relationships.
The idea dates back more than 30 years and was popularised by a website offering support for lonely people who felt left behind.
Study: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00224499.2023.2248096
Men need more mental health help, to avoid getting to the point of identifying as an incel, a point before which are many milestones from “casual” misogyny, to toxic and fragile masculinity, to full on gendered violence (from stalking to rape to murder, most of which perpetrated by “normal” men, not self identifying incels), that our society would rather frame as “boys being boys” or whatever, than address.
Looking at the end result and saying “oh, well, now we need to intervene” is one of the most pathetic and useless ways I can imagine to tackle this problem - because they’re looking at incels being demonised as the problem, rather than the system that created them and the impact it, and they, have on those who aren’t cis men (needless to say, an impact much worse than well earned demonisation).
Misogyny isn’t a mental illness, it’s a systemic part of our society, and while those who have gone through the pipeline and come out idealistically violent and toxic undoubtedly need help, ignoring the environment that creates them is the opposite of helping.
I know people are going to hate this take …
These people are victims, and to do anything other than try to support them is victim blaming. They are literally perpetuating a cycle of abuse.
They feel left out of society, a society that judges them based on whether or not they are a provider. Then makes it impossible to be a provider. They have been told they are worthless and undeserving of real emotional connections.
Wouldn’t you be angry if that was you? I don’t know why people are so surprised that people that are left out create insular groups. It is these groups that the sadness and anger they feel is magnified into what we see expressed in the world by them.
They can be helped the younger they are the easier it will be. Everybody who laughs at this and says they deserve it is perpetuating the abuse and victim blaming.
Lots of people are left out of society, that’s no excuse for violent hatred. There are plenty of men who don’t turn into disgusting abusive trolls; the ones who do don’t get a pass because life is hard.
It’s obscene to suggest that they don’t have a choice or bear responsibility for their actions. It insults and directly harms both them and their victims.
I never said it was. Not everyone turns to violence, but you find that in any group that has felt left out of society some members will turn to violence. Tell them they shouldn’t be violent while at the same time not being willing to work toward a society where people don’t need violence to feel heard will never make things better.
what is an excuse for violent hatred?
im seeing a lot of it all around me right now being justified by progessives.
They feel left out of society, a society that judges them based on whether or not they are a provider. Then makes it impossible to be a provider. They have been told they are worthless and undeserving of real emotional connections.
No, they fucking haven’t.
Incels are mostly straight white men, the central and most catered to demographic in our society. This does, in fact created an overinflated sense of entitlement in them that may never realistically pan out for all straight white men, but to say they have been “left out” of a society that literally focuses on them above and at the expense of everyone else is not only being deliberately ignorant, but using the exact rhetoric that pulls them in in the first place, and claiming that holding them accountable for their choices is “victim blaming” is borderline sick (and also implies that, say, KKK members are also just “innocent victims”).
They have actual victims.
Never mind that if the people systemically and institutionally left out of society and actually victimised for who they are (and not for their violent actions, like incels are) - racial and religious minorities, disabled people, queer people, and so on, are able to deal with the world while actually being marginalised and excluded without turning in to volatile and violent bigots, the straight white men can sure fucking deal with not getting everything they think they’re owed by society just for existing.
I’m so sick of this bullshit rhetoric, usually pulled out after mass shootings, and only ever and exclusively in defence of straight white men. It’s just more proof of their entitlement and privilege, not less.
I am not trying to defend bad behavior merely try to get people to think past the outward displays and to the root of it. I will never say anger or violence is okay.
I would never suggest that straight white men have not historically been deferred to. But I can’t think that the solution to fixing marginalization in society is to marginalize a different group instead.
It seems like the best way to prevent the mental state that leads to mass shooting is to include these people. Make them feel like they can contribute to make it better. Would you shoot up a school that you helped build? But if all you were told was you need to sit down and shut up wouldn’t you want to destroy?
I genuinely hope that you are not suggesting that just because someone is historically privileged that can’t be later marginalized. The liberation of women is one of the greatest accomplishments of the modern era. Along with the ongoing work to lift historically marginalized groups. It is no different than breaking any other cycle of abuse. I genuinely hope that this continues. We will be a better society for it, but turning it into a zero sum game will only lead to further problems.
The best thing we can do is work in the manner that Gandhi taught. And that includes love for all people. Remember there are many men who have not yet fallen down this hole. They have people whispering in their ears that society hates them. Getting angry at these people, tell them that it doesn’t matter if they are having a hard time, just because someone else is having it harder will only lead them down that hole. That is what breaking the cycle is all about. Hating someone just because someone like the hates you will only ever make things worse. It is up to each of us to remember that no one was born this way. Everyone you, me and the next school shooter. Is truly just a kid needing a hung at heart. Remember that is the only way out.
it’s possible to be a victim and a perpetrator at the same time and in multiple facets.
People say that about other groups all the time. What’s your explanation for poor people committing more crime?
Stealing food so you don’t die is different from abusing women because you’re sad. What a creepy comparison.
Stealing food, the only crime that has ever been committed. Of course that’s specifically what I was referring to. You’re great at judging people.
Poor people commit more crimes because more activity by the poor to survive is criminalized.
What kind of crime do you think I’m talking about? I guess I need to be more specific when I’m dealing with people who get up in the morning wanting to hate people.
What do we gain by judging them?
Asking honestly and to whoever cares to reply.
This is wildly known but it is always good being backed by science. The only problem I see is incels being beyond disgusting at times. When you get bombarded by animal porn and rape threats, you stop caring about their well being.
But maybe others have higher tolerances and can handle them.
Also the whole extreme violent misogyny thing. It’s really hard to give half a shit when they celebrate things like state mandated marriage, Eliot Rogers, and the Polytechnique shooter.
I hope they get better, but even if I was into guys it’d be a hard sell for me to date a former incel because I see the shit they pull.
It’s an embracement of the things they feel don’t cost them anything anymore, they just have nothing left to lose in that dept, in their own minds. They could try, just like any other person, but rather than trying to be good and risking failure and rejection, it can feel preferable to embrace the darkness and be able to have confidence in their own control of their path forward. They’d rather be rejected for being vitriolic scum, than trying to be funny and charming and failing at that.
Imo anyway, I’ve never been one and can’t speak from personal experience, simply been around in some seedy internet spaces before, and I understand toxic masculinity well.
Yeah maybe it’s just being a woman and a gay one at that, but I’ve been desperately lonely and confused why I couldn’t succeed romantically, but the thought of hating those who don’t love me back never made sense to me. I didn’t want revenge I wanted to know what I was doing wrong. And that really hits to the situation here. I’d never want to date someone who’d rather be rejected for being a cruel asshole than for being socially inept or ugly. Maybe they can change and I get that but it’s like dating someone who used to be really racist, it’ll take a lot for me to believe you’ve changed enough and then you add in that their bigotry was towards you and that it had impacts.
People make mistakes, so if it’s truly a former incel, I don’t see the problem.
People make mistakes, but also someone having been in a hate group against you is a valid reason not to date them even if they’ve completely changed. Incels are a misogynistic hate group.
There are people that don’t need more mental health help?
Yup this makes sense.
I was on the path to becoming an incel before I met my ex gf. I was in my early twenties, overweight and hopeless with women. I am also autistic.
I was kinda stuck where I was with no idea of what I wanted in life or where I should focus my efforts.
The feeling I most often associated with my life from 18 to 21 was intense loneliness. Being told I’m a good looking guy that any girl would be lucky to have, yet being touch-starved to the point that I cried uncontrollably for for an hour when my ex held me for the first time.
To clarify, I never had any ill sentiments towards women, but I have seen how intense loneliness can absolutely fuck with ones mind. I was lucky that I met someone and was in a relationship for some time to actually properly learn all this about myself. But I can totally see how others would not be so lucky.
If you take a young adult male, who’s lonely, touch starved even and doesn’t know what they want from life, and then label them with a term like ‘incel’ that will only make them feel worse and push them further towards doing something terrible to themselves or others.
Unpopular and all as it might be, these men are people who deserve compassion and understanding. Not hatred and vitriol.
Amazing, laughed out loud at this title.
This is a bit of a raw spot for me.
I was an incel in the mid eighties to early nineties, before we had the term. It was conspicuous that a) as a teen I had a raging, compulsive libido (which was not uncommon) and b) society gave zero fucks about my overwhelming frustration and expected me even to learn trig and grammar. This drove me to become a frustrated, bitter, antisocial, misanthrope, much of which carries on to this day, though now my acerbic vitriol is finely distilled and crafted before it is slung at penetration velocities.
This is to say my sexual frustration as a teen and young adult figures into my own (well diagnosed) madness, though in full disclosure, I’m pretty sure compound neglect did the heavy lifting.
I
lost my virginitybecame sexually active at twenty-six, and was able to enjoy many relationships both fulfilling and disastrous, but it did mean realizing the misogynistic bubble in which my young adulthood was spent did not have an accurate view of what women, or heck, the whole of the human species, was about. And the paths I forged were not clear, easy to find roads, rather rabbit-trails and deer tracks.Our society does very, very little to recognize our teens navigating their developing sexual drives. (Parents, teachers, ministers and politicians alike seem to resent that our kids are horny, except when they are athletic superstars.) Much of the US still teaches abstinence-only sex ed (often seasoned with large doses of right-wing Christian ideology, such as women have only value as an untouched virgin, and men are obligated to go into a relationship blind, then committing to be a provider). Even our more comprehensive sex-ed omits ideas like opt-in consent.
Our society really dislikes and disregards our teens, and the consequences of this have always been stark. Sexual frustration consistently figures into our history of spree killers and rampage killers, our domestic terrorists like Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh. It was a common driving factor for the rise of the alt-right in 2016, and is useful in both the transnational white power movement and the Christian nationalist movement. When you need an army of V8-worshiping warboys eager to ride eternal, shiny and chrome, chastity commandments are your friend.
I hypothesize that young people getting laid don’t turn into terrorists, but both here in the states, and across the middle east, young people sexually frustrated are easily radicalized.
I don’t know how to fix this problem, and it’s only gotten worse with the advancement of faith-based initiatives and most recently the Dobbs ruling. I have little hope and though my embitterment has gone political, it persists with sympathy for the newer generations being driven into fascist militarism
Findings revealed that incels have a lower sense of self-perceived mate-value and a greater external locus of control regarding their singlehood
He added they had also observed a “bidirectional relationship between mental health and incel ideology”.
“So the worse an incel’s mental health is, the more they seem to then buy into ideology,” he said.
IMO this is all because the whole ideology is cope. Someone believes their problems are caused by an external adversary and there’s nothing they can do about it because that’s the most comfortable path of least resistance emotionally.
Though honestly I think a bitter and depressed person is going to have a pretty tough time becoming genuinely kinder and funnier, even if they can bring themselves to accept this as closer to a realistic solution than something based on a presumption of women being shallow gold diggers.
