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By David Futrelle
The “Involuntarily Celibate” Redditor who calls himself Insale thinks that all he and his fellow incels need is for the media to pay a little attention to the lack of a party in their collective pants. Once the women of the world see their sad plight, Insale thinks, they will presumably line up for the opportunity to cure incels of their perpetual celibacy.
If not, well, maybe Insale will go on a hunger strike until the government steps in to issue him a girlfriend.
Insale’s colleagues on the Incels subreddit have not exactly been impressed by his plan.
“You’ll just be a male anorexic,” declared one commenter. “Maybe they can send you to a treatment facility and you can get rejected by the anorexic Stacies.”
“They would just laugh at you,” added another.
On the exceedingly unlikely chance that Insale actually goes through with his plan and women are indeed inspired to sign up for his offer of love and intimacy, I would strongly suggest they take a look at his comment history first. Even a cursory examination suggests that Insale’s ongoing celibacy is not the result of a lack of media exposure. It might have a bit more to do with the fact that he likes to openly fantasize about bashing women’s heads in.
Here he is offering his opinion on a YouTube video in which a woman discusses her depression.
He had a similar response to a YouTube video of a different woman discussing her social anxiety.
Then again, he thinks all women with mental illness are faking it.
He’s also a strong believer in “discipline” for women.
![insale[S] 9 points 2 days ago Women need to be disciplined by a proper man.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/insale3-e1499451215317.png?ssl=1)
He’s also not a big fan of “femoids,” by which I think he means “feminists.”
![insale[S] 0 points 22 hours ago Femoids deserve to be punched and beat at any chance. They are not humans. Objects don't have emotions.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/insale8.png?ssl=1)
Naturally, he manages to see himself as the real victim.
![nsale[S] 5 points 2 days ago Society doesnt want me to be happy. I'm not good enough to be smiling. Society treats me like a subhuman.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/insale7.png?ssl=1)
Indeed, he thinks the government should step in on his behalf, hunger strike or no, by forcing women to have sex with him and other incels.
Nonetheless, he insists — at least when he is posting outside of the incel subreddit — that he is actually quite the gentleman.
![insale[S] -4 points 2 days ago Why don't I get partners? I respect women believe me. No one respects women more than I do.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/insale9.png?ssl=1)
Insale, like most of his fellow incels, vehemently rejects the idea of seeking professional help for his problems, dismissing therapy as a “scam” and defending his vile comments online as a form of therapeutic “venting.” In fact, even by his own admission, his exposure to the incel community online is making him angrier, more hateful, and less hopeful about the possibility of improving his life.
Indeed, several days ago he declared that the subreddit had “ruined” him.
![insale[S] 9 points 2 days ago I dont know man. The nature of female behavior that I've read on this sub has completely polluted my innocence. I used to believe girls were innocent, sensitive, lovable human beings until i stumbled upon this sub and started getting influenced. permalinksavecontextfull comments (107)reportgive gold I fucking hate this sub but I can't stop coming back to read more. It has ruined me. by insale in Incels [–]insale[S] 5 points 2 days ago I would do anything to suffer from amnesia and forget everything I've learned about female nature. I'd rather live a false reality of a blue pilled cuck than be miserable black pilled incel without any hope.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/insale10-e1499452861751.png?ssl=1)
The incel ideology pretty much poisons everything it touches. Media attention isn’t going to solve your problems, guys; the only way you can move forward is to free yourself of the incel community and its noxious, hateful, and self-destructive ideas.
FYI: Despite the references above to r/incels being banned by Reddit, it hasn’t been. Periodically the mods of the subreddit set it to “private.”
Reddit Incel threatens hunger strike until the government gives him a girlfriend
July 7, 2017 We hunted..
I read an article claiming, ironically, that the term “incel” was originally coined by a woman, and telling her story. I think the incel community reached this state at a slow but steady pace. Being the most extreme guy in a community of extremists wins you validation, so everyone “ups the ante” and the consensus slowly shifts. The only way to shift it back to something moderate is if the community values balance, or nuance, or accuracy of facts, (which they don’t) or if outsiders are able to give them regular reality checks (which they can’t).
During the 20th century came the idea that a “Real Man”(TM) is one who has lain with a variety of women. This idea got so strong that lots of young men become insecure if they haven’t “gotten laid” enough. Not news for the feminists on this website, but you might be underestimating how big of a deal this is for some men. Hopefully a guy will eventually get enough reality checks to realize that sex isn’t about winning, that human connection with a woman he loves is more important than a one night stand, but some men fall through the cracks and become obsessed with “getting laid”. They feel like they’ve failed at being a man, at being a male human if they can’t “score”. “Loser” is one of the worse insults for men, it implies life is a competition and you’ve lost, and it is usually thrown at men who don’t have enough sex, (or the wrong kind). Their sexual frustration is about much more than sexual activity.
There are a lot of people with depression and anxiety and social anxiety (like me), which can make dating the opposite sex nearly impossible (haha me too). Of course if you also happen to subscribe to the cult of the alpha-male you are not going to blame your loneliness and sexlessness on your psychological issues, you are going to turn your feelings into hate and direct at “teh enemy!!!!” They think they would be finally happy if they could become alpha-males. They think they could achieve the vaunted alpha-male-hood if only women would finally grant access to the all important Vajayjay.
These guys are already mentally unhealthy and socially isolated even without the alt-right. With the alt-right they have people who will validate certain delusions, and the ability to get quick validation by being more and more extreme, they get the dopamine high of righteous anger, they can blame all their problems on other people. I think the alt-right is basically a unhealthy coping mechanism for an entire community of men with severe psychological problems. The fact that some of these communities get more and more extreme over time is a side effect of how the coping mechanism works.
The community does infact help these lonely guys, but obviously causes more problems than it solves. It’s like trying to treat your psychological depression with heroin, only works temporarily and then makes things worse than before. Without human connections outside the alt-right they never get the reality check they so sorely need. Indeed they would instantly rebuke any facts you through their way. As the community grows, their influence of the real world grows, and ther inflence of the real world on them shrinks. So like a heroin addiction that hurts everyone else too.
I think feminists underestimate how damaging insecurities around sex can be for men. What feminists call “Toxic Masculinity” socializes men to believe they are failures at life if they don’t get laid. The alt-right community gives them temporary relief from their issues, but makes things worse in the long run.
I literally laughed out loud when I saw the title of this post. Reading it made me experience a range of emotions, from amusement to horror to sadness. Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to this blog–Never know how you’ll feel reading from post to post.
Not sure how to put this, but I’m morbidly fascinated by incels. Probably because of all of the “manospherians,” these were the bunch that, had I delved into 4chan and reddit, I would have been more likely to become. I certainly feel their pain; rejection sucks, and untreated mental illness really can warp your view until the bile spewed in the incel community starts to make a sick sort of sense. I’ve experienced it myself when a depressive bout comes over me; it is like it warps reality and suddenly everything is awful no matter how good things are going. I’ve heard the term “emotional reasoning,” meaning reasoning from feelings rather than being rational, and based on my own experiences it seems that a lot of this type of thinking comes from “feeling it’s true”. The emotions are the well-spring of the thoughts, which further reinforce the emotions, and so on. Resulting in a positive feedback loop. So the means of moving on is to deal with the issue on two levels: the rational and the gut level. Learning to think through things to see if they actually make sense in a logical way, and also learning to be mindful of emotions and see them for what they really are. However, this takes a lot of deep reflection and painful, painful honesty. Let me tell you, it isn’t easy to change your thinking, and it is incredibly easy to slip back into old thought processes.
On a side note, by their standards I am probably an “incel,” since I’m 29 and a technical virgin with very little likelihood of that changing in the near future. But, well, this fact isn’t really anyone’s fault. And in making a point of mentioning my “Scarlet V” the responses I’ve had have been…enlightening. Not many care if you’re a virgin. And you might even get kudos for your self control. So, it doesn’t really matter. Being an older virgin might mean a lack of opportunity, or a lack of socialization (in my case), or any number of things. It isn’t a reflection of your worth as a person, just as having a large number of partners is equally meaningless in terms of your value as a human being.
Side side note: my family is on a big DNA test kick. Taking the results with a grain of salt, but my screen name came from the fact that we have a lot of Neanderthal DNA in our heritage. Cool stuff!
QuantumInc — I think you are mostly right. There is a great deal of pressure on young men to “prove their manhood,” and having sex with a lot of attractive young women seems to be one of the requirements. Being seen as a stud (not necessarily being one) confers a great deal of status in some male groups.
But the problem is that the self-image of young men* is under constant attack, and if you accept the validity of “toxic masculinty,” you subject yourself to standards that only a tiny percentage (if any) of men can satisfy, which leads to the result that you can never have enough sex with enough sufficiently attractive women to ever make you feel that you have achieved irrevocable manhood.
It seems obvious to me that incels are actually voluntarily celibate, but either they are not ready for a sexual relationship (quite understandable, but something no Real Man ™ is allowed to admit), or they are afraid of getting emotionally involved with someone and therefore becoming vulnerable (Real Men ™ are NEVER vulnerable or not in total control of their emotions). Blaming it all on the notion that women aren’t attracted to them for totally shallow and spurious reasons (wrist size, my ass) is a way of saying “It’s not my fault; it’s women and their hypergamous nature.” I’m not sure whether the misogynistic attitudes that are actually what repels women are just a part of the woman-blaming excuse or are actually cultivated to keep the fearsome women beyond arm’s length. But it does seem like the incel thing is a coping mechanism for fears about one’s masculinity.
When I was a teenager, I assumed that girls didn’t find me attractive because I was a total nerd and ranked fairly low in the boys’ pecking order. I have since discovered that girls have different ideas about what they find attractive than my male peers thought they did. At the time, sex was not an issue, because it was unthinkable for college-bound members of my high-school class to have sex. Birth control of any kind was simply not available to kids from “respectable” homes, and the girls were very well aware of what a pregnancy would do to their life plans — and the boys understood that. So being an “incel” in the literal sense was unavoidable and therefore there was no virgin-shaming at all. (Then I went to prep school for a year, and virgin-shaming was there intense — so I can understand the phenomenon. It was so intense that my 18-year-old roommate was very proud when he lost his, even though his “conquest” was a 12-year-old town girl.) I was very unhappy that women didn’t seem to want to sleep with me in college. (I know now that there were some who WERE probably interested, but I was so convinced that I was unattractive that I did not pick up on the signs at the time.) But it never occurred to me to blame women for not wanting to sleep with me — I always assumed that it was my job to be the sort of guy they wanted to sleep with, and if I didn’t succeed, well, that was on me. (As it happened, when the Sexual Revolution hit, I was already married.)
So I tend to see the incel thing as one way of coping with the unattainable demands of Real (Toxic) Manhood. One can only hope that these (mostly fairly) young guys can snap out of it before they are permanently warped. The incel echo chambers are unquestionably a serious obstacle to real adulthood.
*I am pretty sure that the same is true for young women, but I don’t have direct personal experience of that.
Incel: Women suck, because they don’t have sex with men like me.
MRA: Women suck, because if they ever have sex with men like me, it’s just for child support monies.
MGTOW: Women generally suck; having sex with them is not worth marriage, divorce and child support.
PUA: With this one simple trick, you can bypass women’s sucky sexual agency and have children without supporting them.
Neomasculinity: Women suck, because they’re ruining society with their promiscuity and unsupported children.
Red Pill: What if I told you that women suck?
Black Pill: Don’t you tell me how much women suck!
“It’s pretty clear that this Insale character doesn’t care whether or not women actually want to be with him.”
You basically described a prostitute client’s attitude. It’s funny whevener someone comes up with this “cure” for incels. Hey, those nutjobs spend days writting crazy ideas about turning women to sex objects for their pleasure in internet? Why won’t they try it FOR REAL?
Y.
@Hashtag Ravenclaw
38 and in the same boat as you. Yes, except I don’t think it’s even pity they’re after. I have to admit that in my lowest moments I’ve had fantasies of pity relationships being thrown my way, but for self-esteem’s sake it always involved some desire on their part.
They want the government to give them a companion. As if a woman were the equivalent of a food stamp, wartime rations, or a sack of grain. Women’s desires are completely irrelevant it seems. even from the perspective of their own egos.
Yzek: yes, thank you.
Pretty funny how pro-prostitution folks have different standards on how its ok to treat a woman depending on whether or not shes a prostitute. U hate wome w a frightening passion? Well go see a prostitute, those dont count, its ok to hurt them 😀
One of the things that strikes me about this thinking is that the poster wants ‘a woman’. Because ‘women’ are fungible.
@Arctic Ape
Thanks for the laugh (yet again). You’re a treasure.
@yzek
@Sally
I don’t know who suggested that incels do this but I certainly fucking didn’t. As WWTH said, why wish these guys on sex workers? In any case it’s pretty clear that incels don’t want to have sex with prostitutes.
More importantly: I’m “pro-prostitution” if by that you mean someone who doesn’t necessarily want sex work banned or stopped in the name of feminism. I’ve done sex work and I have several friends ‘in the industry’. One of them was murdered by a client a little while ago. So no, I don’t think that it’s ok to hurt sex workers and I don’t think anyone else here does either. I’d appreciate you not making assumptions.
@yzek
Might want to read the comments policy, buddy. We don’t take kindly to ablist slurs around here.
Yzek is a troll from 4Chan, so.
It was someone on the first page called “covered in cat hair” whom I’ve never seen before, and for all I know that was yzek’s or Sally’s sock. That’s certainly nothing I’ve seen a regular here say. I was going to push back on the idea that the cure for incels is sex workers, because who wants to inflict them on sex workers? but WWTH beat me to it.
That kind of shit never goes unchallenged here.
What’s with Sally only coming here to say Swerfy things? Does she lurk every day and wait for someone to bring up sex work?
Sally, when you’re jumping into the comments to agree with and thank an anti-feminist troll, you might want to rethink your feminism.
QuantumInc,
That’s why its called toxic masculinity. We’re well aware that patriarchy hurts men too. What’s with the scare quotes?
When we speak up about it we are told we just want to feminize men or that we are calling all masculinity bad.
Agreeing that sex workers should be respected and safe with their clientele.
Supporting sex workers rights to do the work they choose safely isn’t what Is call pro-prostitution.
I feel the same way about coal miners, EMTs, actors and lumberjacks.
I think you’re ‘splaining to people who do fully understand that. Why would you make the assumption that feminists just can’t grasp what men go through?
@GrumpyOld SocialJusticeMangina
I think it’s deeper than virgin shaming. I went to high school in the mid 2000’s (in a relatively liberal area, where birth control was readily available and we all got comprehensive sex education) and the “respectable” people didn’t date or have sex. My guess is that incels have already been blaming women or people in general for their problems, and they go on the Internet and end up radicalized.
I’m sick and fucking tired of people acting like insecurity and pressures regarding sex and relationships is somehow gendered.
Just because the movies portray it that way, doesn’t mean it’s the reality.
Men seem to think young women don’t spend a lot of time being made to feel like shit because no one asked them to prom or they haven’t had a boyfriend yet because the only women visible to them are the pretty and socially adept ones who are pursued by the good looking guys.
It’s not just young women either. As we get older, there’s immense pressure on us to be married and we’re socialized to tie our self worth in with our relationship status. There’s even a derogatory term for unmarried women. Spinster. There’s no equivalent term for men. They’re just bachelors.
As someone who spent years of my life beating myself up for not being sufficiently attractive to men (other than street harassers) I just loooove it when men tell women that we just don’t understand how much it hurts men to be lonely and feel rejected.
Only a small handful of my ‘clique’ in high school weren’t virgins thru graduation. Millennials, the younger ones in particular, tend to have less sex, at least early on, than previous generations. I do think that part of the ‘incel’ phenomenon is related to that. These dudes (a lotta them fairly young) assumed high school and college gals were just gonna be throwing blowjobs at em, and, when they got none, they assumed it was cos Stacy was tossing at Chad instead
None of which, of course, is to say that these guys’ bitter entitlement is anyone’s fault but their own. They can’t see women as being individuals (some millennials abstain, some have lotsa sex, some in the middle), nor can they accept them as people (with agency, humanity, and rights). That’s their own failing
‘Incel’ doctrine states that any attempt to better oneself in order to get sex/relationships is a waste of time. And, fellas, you’re not wrong. That’s a recipe for failure, and, more than likely, relapse into deeper bitterness when you realize women can still say no. My advise, and y’all fuckers really don’t deserve it, make yourself into the type of person that you would like to be around and with. Maybe you get some dates by being a decent, non trash, person. But, if ya did it right, it won’t really matter, cos you won’t need to base your value on whether you’ve gotten laid. Just a thought…
Ah, yzek, the returning troll. Must have gotten bored again.
You forget that many of us are men. We’ve had to deal with this shit too.
I’ve said it before here, but I think another one of the reasons that men think that pain around not being successful at dating or hooking up being gendered is that they do not realize that being pursued actually does take social skills. The traditional female dating role does not involve sitting there passively and accepting or rejecting suitors.
Women are expected to be open, friendly and flirtatious so that men will want to ask us out. But we can’t be too friendly. Too aggressive with the flirting and we’re seen as slutty and desperate. Men are always saying they wish we’d be assertive and make the first move, but when we do that, we’re often punished for it socially. However, if we don’t flirt enough, we’re cold and unapproachable. There’s a thin line we have to walk and the line is arbitrary and ever shifting.
Look at dating advice for women. It’s filled with instructions on how to touch his arm in the proper flirtatious but not slutty way. Make eye contact, but only for a certain amount of time. Don’t stare! Laugh at his jokes, even if they’re not funny. Be witty, but don’t act like you’re smarter than him. Be interested in the same things he likes, but don’t be better than him at his hobbies. The male ego must always be flattered. We can’t seem uppity. But we still must be confident. Because insecurity is unattractive. But still be vulnerable because men like to feel strong and tough and needed.
Then there’s all the rules about our appearance. Break these rules and we’re ugly and doomed to spinsterhood. Wear makeup. But it has to be natural looking or it’s tacky and slutty. Look perfect at all times, but don’t spend to much time on looking perfect. Or else you’re vain. Work out, but only to get slimmer. Don’t be too buff. Be thin. But don’t diet too much. Because that’s vain and besides it’s boring when women only order soda and diet coke. Wear clothes that make you look hot, but don’t look too sexy. And don’t ever express insecurity over how clothes make you look. Be beautiful but be the kind of beautiful where you don’t know you’re beautiful but don’t think you’re ugly either. And for God’s sake don’t let on that you have any kind of bodily functions!
I mean, I’m not saying that traditional dating roles are always easy for men. But they seem a lot easier than the woman’s traditional role. Really, I wish it was more socially acceptable for women to make the first move. It’s hard for a socially awkward person to put themselves out there like that (I speak from experience) but it’s a hell of a lot easier following a list of complex and ever changing rules in the hopes that you’ll get a guy to ask you out.
I disagree.
Reason for disagreement: I’m a man who was deeply insecure about sex when he was younger. Just because I’m a feminist doesn’t mean that I wasn’t there.
However, unlike many other men, I also recognise that my own feelings of inadequacy are not anyone’s problem other than my own.
Edit:
This. As ever, WWTH speaks truth. Traditional gender roles are simply a bad thing (unless you choose to follow them, in which case more power to you.)
People born 1950-1979 abouts tended to have more sex earlier, in part because condoms and the birth control pill became much more widely available. Over time, people started having less sex for various reasons, and the “sexual revolution” had died down a bit by the time millennials were in high school and college.
I think the reason that incel mans think that the pain of dating and hooking up is gendered is because they don’t consider women whole people with actual human wants or desires.
They’re sexbots, or children, or sub-humans, or whatever flavour of insult that’s popular this week. I don’t think they’re able to even think about women as people, because as soon as the “woman” thought arises it dredges with it this horrible slime-coated benthic net of hate and anger and fear. The very concept of woman-as-person is suffocated under the mass of anger they’ve dredged from the depths.
And that slimy net, that abyssal trawling line filled with the corpses of rotten dreams? That’s what places like r/Incels fills your net with. That’s the stinking catch our procrustean protagonist sails out for, every day. Every morning, every time he browses over to Reddit, he’s sailing out to dredge up some quivering aquatic corpse of hyperbolic misery. Drowning himself in the hate, because it’s easier to do that than face the fact that the world owes him nothing.
In short, I totally agree, @wwth! I got sorta metaphoric in there for some reason. Woops.
Some people have said hello to me and welcomed me back. Hello! I didn’t miss you, just wasn’t browsing on something I could type on easily at the time. I’ve missed you all!