If one was to stack up all the column inches written in the last five or six years about the “incel” movement, one would probably comfortably make it to the moon and back, and still be waiting to read a piece written from the perspective of one of the incels themselves. While I shall not be breaking that streak here, it’s still notable that one of the most written about fringe groups in modern society is also one of the least understood.
“Incels”, for those few of you still unfamiliar with the term, refers to people who consider themselves “involuntarily celibate”. Or, in other words, people who despite their best efforts have been unable to find a person willing to have sex with them. Self-identified incels are almost always men.
Incels have many theories about why they are involuntarily celibate. Sometimes, these are written with a heartbreaking self-awareness. Six months ago, a reddit user called “Iaminhellsadly” posted to the /suicidewatch board on Reddit that he was considering taking his own life because “I’m sick of being 22 and still never even having been told yes when it comes to a relationship, I don’t resent anyone for rejecting me, I’m just exhausted of all the rejection.”
Twenty or thirty years ago, of course, being a 22-year-old virgin would not have been particularly remarkable. Twenty or thirty years before that, it might even have been seen as the normal state of being for a person of that age, at least outside of North America. That it is now seen as a state of being so desperate that a young person might consider taking their own life over it can only really be ascribed to the internet.
Further down that same reddit post, you’ll find examples of how incel-ism blends naturally with a broad anti-modern worldview. One person replies with the following:
“I read scientific articles about the human fertility and they said that even in the Mesolithic, women preferred to “date” and have children with more violent men (hunter gatherers) rather than the ones who were keen on raise up children, paint, put makeups and helping them (the women) in the houseworks or in repairing or crafting stuff”
In this analysis, which is fairly representative of a broad swathe of incel thinking, the incel is unable to find a sexual partner primarily because his virtues do not align with the vices of women: Women don’t like nice guys, they only like the hyper-masculine testosterone-addled bad brutes. Read enough incel-ism online, and you’ll find this theory coming up again and again – the problem is not the men who can’t get sex, the problem is the women who don’t know what they’re missing out on by virtue of their terrible preferences in men.
Go deeper into the bowels of the internet – where at least some of your sons, I assure you, will end up – and you’ll find the darker stuff again. This is where you find the gurus of the movement, always always anonymously, telling young men that the real problem is female empowerment. Once women were let off the leash, in this telling, they were free to pursue their real preferences: Black men who are more physically capable and, well, endowed than you are. It’s where you start to see the memes of young white women with mixed race-children, and where talk of romantic failure blends seamlessly with lengthy posts about how the black African man is coming to take advantage of western “whores” who do not appreciate what they have in nice white guys.
For those who understand these corners of the internet, nothing I am saying here will be new. For those who are blind to it, accidentally or wilfully, nothing will make sense.
Understanding the rise of overt racism on the right as a direct function of the sexual failure of a generation of young men sounds so much like a liberal, left-wing smear that there’s a temptation to dismiss it, rather than to address it. Yet does anyone imagine, for a second, that the likes of Andrew Tate would be nearly as popular as they are if a huge part of their image wasn’t tied up in virility? There’s a reason that these “influencers” drape themselves with legions of large-breasted women in their 20s: Their appeal to young men isn’t based directly on misogyny or on racism. Instead it is based on the idea that “being like me and embracing my ideas will get you girls”.
Accompanying the ideas about how to get girls are, of course, endless theories as to why young white men are unable to get them right now: The respectable version of this kind of theorizing is the idea that young men are aimless and addled by pornography and computer gaming, and that in order to get back in the game they need to be re-masculinised. Thus you have occasionally well-intentioned projects like retreats for young men in which they spend days schlepping through the woods and engaging in physical activities – the idea being to reconnect the young man with his hunter-gatherer instincts. The less respectable version simply blames pornography and computer gaming on the jews and the foreigners and ties all of this sexual failure into the idea that there’s some kind of global conspiracy out there to keep you celibate while stealing “your” women into degenerate lifestyles.
When you transpose all of this over to the political world, what you get is an angry movement that rejects almost everything mainstream and starts extolling a time before, when things were different. This largely explains the burgeoning “tradwife” movement – or at least the online part of it – in which attractive women on the internet cast themselves as the perfect wife. “Tradwives” exist, of course, and many of them live happy, fulfilling, and rewarding lives. But very few of them have the bandwidth to spend their days making videos in full makeup about what great wives they are and how they provide good cooking, childcare, and all the other “traditional” wifely services to their husbands, and achieving a good life for themselves in return. These women are often understood to be talking to other women, but in fact the whole point of the movement is to get clicks and engagement from men pining for the “perfect” woman.
There was a time before, this movement says, when all women were like this. A time before feminism, and immigration, and the internet, and wokeness. We must work to bring it back.
This, of course, is all a big lie. There was no perfect time before: Hundreds and Hundreds of millions of men throughout history have died virgins, without knowing love or marriage. In Ireland in particular, the “time before” was often a time when second or third sons, having no land or marriage prospects, were packed off to the Priesthood or overseas to live unhappy, lonely lives.
One can, and indeed should, oppose many of the consequences of feminism, immigration, wokeness and the internet without falling into these holes of anger and resentment and extremism, but sadly very many are falling right in.
The saddest thing is that it’s all largely a manufactured grievance based on nothingness: It’s been conjured out of the idea that young men are being in some way historically deprived from access to female bodies and female companionship, because it suits just about everybody to reinforce that message all the time. Pornographers sell a fantasy, as do most of the “e-girls” making money selling themselves online as twitch streamers or onlyfans models. Big business and entertainment make money from selling products that purport to enhance sexual attractiveness. Politicians win votes by positioning themselves as champions of the sexual liberation that everybody – everybody but you, anyway – is enjoying.
It’s all fake.
As, it should be said, are the solutions: Hardline right wing politics has many virtues and vices, but it’s not going to get you laid. Embracing some kind of white master race theory might make you feel better, but in most people’s eyes you will remain a loser. There’s a reason, after all, that you don’t find many attractive 20-something women attending white supremacist events.
Part of the solution to all of this is not resentment, but awakening: Young men today live in the most privileged and comfortable time ever to be a young man in the west. Optimism and endeavour is attractive. Resentment and depression is not.