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I'm gonna be honest, some years ago morbid curiosity lead me to visit the most prominent incel forum - this was before "incel" simply became the alias for "angr

I'm gonna be honest, some years ago morbid curiosity lead me to visit the most prominent incel forum - this was before "incel" simply became the alias for "angry misogynistic males". The forum regulars were mostly self-proclaimed incels. They'd analyze "chads" to the most microscopic detail, and draw conclusions - to them, if there was a correlation, then that implied causation, because in the end, they were desperately looking for answers which they had no control over. Things they could change, such as social skills, attire, and what not were usually the laughing stock. No way were women interested in any of those aspects - women were, in their eyes, attracted to some male because his inherent facial features - again, often to the microscopic details. These guys were obsessed with the immutable (or near immutable), and would daydream about spending hundreds of thousands to alter their faces and bodies, to meet their own perceived beauty standards - which was always a beauty typical to masculine male models. But, yes, it became too much. These guys would practically do nothing but post sob stories, detailed analysis of male faces, and rants on women. It became one nasty echo-chamber where top posters were just feeding each others misery. If you were an incel, you were so simply because of your genes. There was nothing that could be done, other than very expensive and extensive surgeries. And then you had the extremists. Those that would idolize mass murderers, perceived or self-confessed incels. They'd start catfishing girls on dating apps, stalk people, all that. It was extremely toxic. Truly a bizarre, but sad community. I can def. see some normal kids joining just for the laughs, then slowly get normalized and radicalized, starting to both doubt themselves, and believing the propaganda.

ColanR 6y ago
Like that paradox for self-help groups: anyone in the forum who was actually successful in self-help wouldn't be on the forum anymore. The people who never got out would be the ones who looked at the wrong things.
- mdoms 6y ago
  I have spent time on incel forums too, and I disagree with this assessment. There were lots of instances of guys who "got out" of inceldom, found partners and entered successful relationships. They would come to the forum and share their success stories and advice (and in most cases it was the common sense generic advice you would expect) and in every case the poster would be ridiculed in one of two ways. Either they were never an incel to begin with, just a Chad who had a prolonged dry spell and who had been an imposter or interlocutor (regardless of their tenure on the forum, often of several years) or they were just a flat out liar and imposter who had just come to give the same trite, cookie-cutter advice that they hear from every Chad and Stacey every day. The success stories only reinforced their toxic ideology.
  - heavenlyblue 6y ago
    > The success stories only reinforced their toxic ideology This is a bit of a blanket statement. I am pretty certain there were also a lot of guys who learned something useful from those stories.
    - chalst 6y ago
      You're not contradicting the GP. If the bringers of the success stories are outgrouped, that is what determines the evolution of the culture.
- jamestnz 6y ago
  > Like that paradox for self-help groups: anyone in the forum who was actually successful in self-help wouldn't be on the forum anymore. This is exactly the view of Canadian woman "Alana" who initially coined the respectful, non-perjorative term "incel" as part of a self help group for people who had reached college+ age but, for one reason or another, not entered the dating world. They were not "losers" or "virgins"; they were "involuntarily celibate". The term started off as "invcel" (for Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project) but was shortened to "incel" for aesthetic reasons. She was a closted, queer, academic, socially-awkward woman who eventually made the transition from "awkwardly not dating, to awkwardly dating", and having made that transition, identified with others who had not, and wanted to help others still in that situation. It wasn't until later that the whole thing got taken over by weird misogynist extremists. Alana says the big mistake she made, back when she started a movement in her 20s, was that she overlooked what she now calls the "student government problem": You can’t build a movement of people whose whole reason for joining the movement is to leave it. It’s not just that the people who find love then go disappear. It’s that you don’t get to have what every other movement takes for granted — the old guard. Instead, the people who stayed in Incel were the ones who got stuck — the people who felt the most bitter, the most abandoned. When young people showed up with questions, the people who should’ve been there to give them hope they’d moved on. Even, eventually, Alana. I highly recommend the following podcast interview with Alana: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/76h59o https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/76h59o
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  I was a member of a small self-help group that practically disappeared in two years, because everyone was too busy doing their awesome projects, and didn't have time to post. That was when I realized that self-help groups that persist for too long are suspicious. Okay, in theory, the members that solve their problems and leave could be gradually replaced by new members, so the group could exist for a long time. But in practice, it would be unlikely to have the members sufficiently balanced, so the evaporation of the most successful ones would increase the fraction of the ones who are unusuccessful for all kinds of reasons. Also, trying to grow a group is in tension with vetting the potential members.
hhas01 6y ago
Let me guess: sky-high on OCD, paranoia, and narcissism quotients; rock-bottom on empathy and personal grooming? Ugh. Hope you picked up a gallon of eye bleach on your way out.
gridlockd 6y ago
Fair enough, but the problem is that a lot of what an incel may believe appears to be true. You're ignoring all the research that supports them. It's not that mutable attributes do not matter, but sexual selection is more a like a sales funnel than a breakdown of pros and cons. If you are very short, your attire can not make up for it. If you have an ugly face, muscle mass isn't going to revert that. Very high earning potential can make up for these shortcomings, but at that point you might question the motivation of the potential partner. See Table 5.4 (looks) and 5.5 (height): http://home.uchicago.edu/~hortacsu/onlinedating.pdf http://home.uchicago.edu/~hortacsu/onlinedating.pdf We'd all like to live in a world where we can tell everyone "If only you work hard enough, you will find success in the end". We like to believe in cosmic justice. Unfortunately, that's not how nature works. Evolution works by discarding the weakest contenders from the gene pool. That ungrateful job is performed by the females, and it's unsurprising that those rejected males would harbor resentment, power fantasies and other moral delusions.
- chalst 6y ago
  In societies where most women eventually settle on one life partner, sexual success is much easier than career success. Your remarks on nature reflect incel fantasies, not the dominant reality.
- danmaz74 6y ago
  You might know an answer to a question I have. Does the "involuntary" part mean that an incel would settle for a woman he would consider very physically unattractive, but isn't able to find a partner even this way?
  - privacy_bodger 6y ago
    What would "this way" constitute? I can't claim to speak for the incel community but my guess would be that in general they are probably not seeking out hideous women, but they're probably not turning down offers either. Anecdotally, as a virginal twentysomething, long before incels were a thing, I had the idea that I might be better off targeting the lower end of the beauty spectrum. I don't think it makes much difference to your chances of success. Women don't generally think "well seeing as I'm physically hideous, I'd better accept this unappealing romantic offer". I eventually ended up having some totally hot partners, as well as rejections from less conventionally beautiful people. There's also the issue that you probably wouldn't have a very active or joyous sex life, which your partner will probably have a problem with even if you don't.
watwut 6y ago
For me, instructive was reading Elliot Roger manifesto. There you could see from his own words why he has no girlfriend and no chance to have one. And you could also see how he is interpreting events he just described in completely twisted way. And then he makes up rules of female attraction. Fullfills them, nothing and the conclusion is not "maybe my rules are bad". The conclusion is "it is unfair cause I did everything". And it almost does not matter even, because if he tried to tweak on rules, he would still had no success. But he ended up building ideology in his head that lead to him killing multiple people which was basically failed plan to kill even more.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  I watched the videos of Elliot Roger, and I had a strong feeling that he didn't even want to have a girlfriend. It was just that he wanted to be admired, noticed that having an attractive girlfriend is considered a success, and resented that he didn't have this specific mark of success. His entire strategy was whining: "Hey, I am so awesome, why don't the attractive girls approach me?!" I don't remember hearing about any specific step he made to approach girls, not even saying "hello". He was just a guy addressing other guys, expecting that he should somehow magically obtain a girlfriend without even trying, insisting that he deserves it. I strongly suspect he was a gay in denial. Before anyone gets performatively offended, no, this isn't a statement about gays in general, this is a statement about Elliot Roger specifically. Watch the videos to understand what I mean. His only reason to get a girlfriend was to impress other guys. Incels are bitter about not being attractive and not having sex. Elliot Roger was bitter about being so awesome and yet not having any girlfriend; there was never a hint of any sexual desire towards the hypothetical girlfriend or women in general, no hint of any specific activity he would want to do with the hypothetical girlfriend.
  - watwut 6y ago
    I don't think there is anything to suggest he was gay. It is not just that he had no way to approach women. He had no friends either, neither males nor females. He did not talked to anyone except parents and 1-2 friends his mom found him when he was preschooler. (Third refused to associate with him anymore.) And the two treated it as chore. He was profoundly alone, except like minded people on Internet where he had a lot of contact. And it was like that for years, because he refused to go to school after one day and was learning from home - visiting once in a while for contact with teachers. He socialized on Internet and world of warcraft. Literally. It is just that. His inability to have girlfriend was extension of him being profoundly alone and profoundly incapable of any relationship. But, he was not gay. Homosexuals have nothing to do with any of this.
skyfaller 6y ago
Pickup artists are toxic and awful, but one thing you could say for the pickup community (at least back when I was researching it) is that one of its core ideas was that attractiveness is a skill that can be learned and doesn't depend on genes, wealth or anything else that is difficult/impossible to change. Self-improvement or "inner game" was part of the program. Unfortunately the pickup artist scene seems to have ended up overlapping with / feeding into even more toxic communities like incels and gamergate, and I don't fully understand why. I guess because at its core pickup artistry was also founded on misogyny, using women as objects and conquests to be won. EDIT: I guess reminiscing about pickup artists is a little like being nostalgic for Dubya in the era of Trump. The horrifying awfulness of today doesn't excuse the people who sucked in the past, and their past awfulness laid the groundwork for the even more awful people to come.

ColanR 6y ago

Like that paradox for self-help groups: anyone in the forum who was actually successful in self-help wouldn't be on the forum anymore. The people who never got out would be the ones who looked at the wrong things.

mdoms 6y ago
I have spent time on incel forums too, and I disagree with this assessment. There were lots of instances of guys who "got out" of inceldom, found partners and entered successful relationships. They would come to the forum and share their success stories and advice (and in most cases it was the common sense generic advice you would expect) and in every case the poster would be ridiculed in one of two ways. Either they were never an incel to begin with, just a Chad who had a prolonged dry spell and who had been an imposter or interlocutor (regardless of their tenure on the forum, often of several years) or they were just a flat out liar and imposter who had just come to give the same trite, cookie-cutter advice that they hear from every Chad and Stacey every day. The success stories only reinforced their toxic ideology.
- heavenlyblue 6y ago
  > The success stories only reinforced their toxic ideology This is a bit of a blanket statement. I am pretty certain there were also a lot of guys who learned something useful from those stories.
  - chalst 6y ago
    You're not contradicting the GP. If the bringers of the success stories are outgrouped, that is what determines the evolution of the culture.
jamestnz 6y ago
> Like that paradox for self-help groups: anyone in the forum who was actually successful in self-help wouldn't be on the forum anymore. This is exactly the view of Canadian woman "Alana" who initially coined the respectful, non-perjorative term "incel" as part of a self help group for people who had reached college+ age but, for one reason or another, not entered the dating world. They were not "losers" or "virgins"; they were "involuntarily celibate". The term started off as "invcel" (for Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project) but was shortened to "incel" for aesthetic reasons. She was a closted, queer, academic, socially-awkward woman who eventually made the transition from "awkwardly not dating, to awkwardly dating", and having made that transition, identified with others who had not, and wanted to help others still in that situation. It wasn't until later that the whole thing got taken over by weird misogynist extremists. Alana says the big mistake she made, back when she started a movement in her 20s, was that she overlooked what she now calls the "student government problem": You can’t build a movement of people whose whole reason for joining the movement is to leave it. It’s not just that the people who find love then go disappear. It’s that you don’t get to have what every other movement takes for granted — the old guard. Instead, the people who stayed in Incel were the ones who got stuck — the people who felt the most bitter, the most abandoned. When young people showed up with questions, the people who should’ve been there to give them hope they’d moved on. Even, eventually, Alana. I highly recommend the following podcast interview with Alana: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/76h59o https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/76h59o
Viliam1234 6y ago
I was a member of a small self-help group that practically disappeared in two years, because everyone was too busy doing their awesome projects, and didn't have time to post. That was when I realized that self-help groups that persist for too long are suspicious. Okay, in theory, the members that solve their problems and leave could be gradually replaced by new members, so the group could exist for a long time. But in practice, it would be unlikely to have the members sufficiently balanced, so the evaporation of the most successful ones would increase the fraction of the ones who are unusuccessful for all kinds of reasons. Also, trying to grow a group is in tension with vetting the potential members.

hhas01 6y ago

Let me guess: sky-high on OCD, paranoia, and narcissism quotients; rock-bottom on empathy and personal grooming? Ugh. Hope you picked up a gallon of eye bleach on your way out.

gridlockd 6y ago

Fair enough, but the problem is that a lot of what an incel may believe appears to be true. You're ignoring all the research that supports them. It's not that mutable attributes do not matter, but sexual selection is more a like a sales funnel than a breakdown of pros and cons. If you are very short, your attire can not make up for it. If you have an ugly face, muscle mass isn't going to revert that. Very high earning potential can make up for these shortcomings, but at that point you might question the motivation of the potential partner. See Table 5.4 (looks) and 5.5 (height): http://home.uchicago.edu/~hortacsu/onlinedating.pdf http://home.uchicago.edu/~hortacsu/onlinedating.pdf We'd all like to live in a world where we can tell everyone "If only you work hard enough, you will find success in the end". We like to believe in cosmic justice. Unfortunately, that's not how nature works. Evolution works by discarding the weakest contenders from the gene pool. That ungrateful job is performed by the females, and it's unsurprising that those rejected males would harbor resentment, power fantasies and other moral delusions.

chalst 6y ago
In societies where most women eventually settle on one life partner, sexual success is much easier than career success. Your remarks on nature reflect incel fantasies, not the dominant reality.
danmaz74 6y ago
You might know an answer to a question I have. Does the "involuntary" part mean that an incel would settle for a woman he would consider very physically unattractive, but isn't able to find a partner even this way?
- privacy_bodger 6y ago
  What would "this way" constitute? I can't claim to speak for the incel community but my guess would be that in general they are probably not seeking out hideous women, but they're probably not turning down offers either. Anecdotally, as a virginal twentysomething, long before incels were a thing, I had the idea that I might be better off targeting the lower end of the beauty spectrum. I don't think it makes much difference to your chances of success. Women don't generally think "well seeing as I'm physically hideous, I'd better accept this unappealing romantic offer". I eventually ended up having some totally hot partners, as well as rejections from less conventionally beautiful people. There's also the issue that you probably wouldn't have a very active or joyous sex life, which your partner will probably have a problem with even if you don't.

watwut 6y ago

For me, instructive was reading Elliot Roger manifesto. There you could see from his own words why he has no girlfriend and no chance to have one. And you could also see how he is interpreting events he just described in completely twisted way. And then he makes up rules of female attraction. Fullfills them, nothing and the conclusion is not "maybe my rules are bad". The conclusion is "it is unfair cause I did everything". And it almost does not matter even, because if he tried to tweak on rules, he would still had no success. But he ended up building ideology in his head that lead to him killing multiple people which was basically failed plan to kill even more.

Viliam1234 6y ago
I watched the videos of Elliot Roger, and I had a strong feeling that he didn't even want to have a girlfriend. It was just that he wanted to be admired, noticed that having an attractive girlfriend is considered a success, and resented that he didn't have this specific mark of success. His entire strategy was whining: "Hey, I am so awesome, why don't the attractive girls approach me?!" I don't remember hearing about any specific step he made to approach girls, not even saying "hello". He was just a guy addressing other guys, expecting that he should somehow magically obtain a girlfriend without even trying, insisting that he deserves it. I strongly suspect he was a gay in denial. Before anyone gets performatively offended, no, this isn't a statement about gays in general, this is a statement about Elliot Roger specifically. Watch the videos to understand what I mean. His only reason to get a girlfriend was to impress other guys. Incels are bitter about not being attractive and not having sex. Elliot Roger was bitter about being so awesome and yet not having any girlfriend; there was never a hint of any sexual desire towards the hypothetical girlfriend or women in general, no hint of any specific activity he would want to do with the hypothetical girlfriend.
- watwut 6y ago
  I don't think there is anything to suggest he was gay. It is not just that he had no way to approach women. He had no friends either, neither males nor females. He did not talked to anyone except parents and 1-2 friends his mom found him when he was preschooler. (Third refused to associate with him anymore.) And the two treated it as chore. He was profoundly alone, except like minded people on Internet where he had a lot of contact. And it was like that for years, because he refused to go to school after one day and was learning from home - visiting once in a while for contact with teachers. He socialized on Internet and world of warcraft. Literally. It is just that. His inability to have girlfriend was extension of him being profoundly alone and profoundly incapable of any relationship. But, he was not gay. Homosexuals have nothing to do with any of this.

skyfaller 6y ago

Pickup artists are toxic and awful, but one thing you could say for the pickup community (at least back when I was researching it) is that one of its core ideas was that attractiveness is a skill that can be learned and doesn't depend on genes, wealth or anything else that is difficult/impossible to change. Self-improvement or "inner game" was part of the program. Unfortunately the pickup artist scene seems to have ended up overlapping with / feeding into even more toxic communities like incels and gamergate, and I don't fully understand why. I guess because at its core pickup artistry was also founded on misogyny, using women as objects and conquests to be won. EDIT: I guess reminiscing about pickup artists is a little like being nostalgic for Dubya in the era of Trump. The horrifying awfulness of today doesn't excuse the people who sucked in the past, and their past awfulness laid the groundwork for the even more awful people to come.