Incels don’t want sex, they want something else.
This is what Wikipedia tells us an Incel is:
“Incel (/ ˈ ɪ n s ɛ l / IN-sel; a portmanteau of “involuntary celibate”) is a term closely associated with an online subculture of people (mostly white, male, and heterosexual) who define themselves as unable to get a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one.”
Leaving aside the false demographic prescription, there is another big problem with this description. When did we get the idea that Incels wanted sex in the first place?
Consider how Incels justify their beliefs. There is a sexual hierarchy, based on the 80-20 rule, which is the idea that 80 percent of women want only 20 percent of men. The sexual revolution and liberal feminism has meant, for incels, that women and the top 20 percent of men have most of the sex, while the lower 80 percent is missing out. Other ideas they interpret from science, like biological determinism and evolutionary psychology, which they use to suggest that due to their weak genetics like short height or facial structure or physique, women don’t find them attractive. Some complain that because they are not white, women don’t want them. Some blame dating apps. Or social media in general.
Even if this were all true, consider why they would argue all this. The most common critique is they justifying their own prejudices, which I will admit is part of it. But there is something else they are trying to accomplish which is often overlooked.
The most infamous incel, Elliot Rodger, wrote a 149-page manifesto detailing his life and struggles with women. Aside from the shambolic prose, it’s clear he was extremely neurotic and sensitive. He needed to not only write an autobiography to create his identity, he also needed to shoot people who had done nothing to him. The fact that he died actually helped him – it solidified his identity, making it immortal and unchangeable. He is the most extreme kind of Incel.
But there are thousands and thousands of Incels not even close to being as extreme as Rodger, yet nevertheless share something important in common with him.
Their identity is predicated on not being able to have sex with women and this identity must be maintained at all costs.
They actually bask in their inferiority and notoriety, given generously to them by the media and the public, serving only to tell them that their efforts at identity creation have been more and more successful. The pleasure they derive from this is greater and longer lasting than any orgasm with a real woman would be for them. Why else would they profess hate for women, but give female journalists the chance to ‘learn’ more about them?
In a rare instance where an incel publicly revealed his identity, 19-year-old Jack Peterson was banned from the forum incel.me after another user questioned his status as an incel, accusing him of bringing up a previous abusive relationship in order to brag about it. He thus spent spent three days straight (occasionally passing out) producing a 30-minute video and PowerPoint presentation that outlined in extensive detail why he believed he was sufficiently ugly and sufficiently mentally ill to still be considered an incel.
Incels spend their energy not trying to obtain sex, but instead trying to live up to the identity of being unable to obtain it, therefore compounding their difficulty in getting it. This is done to avoid the difficult self-question: “If I’m not an incel, then what am I?”
In 2018, a NYT opinion columnist famously suggested giving Incels access to prostitutes and sex robots to cure their needs. He was criticized by the media for all the wrong reasons (objectification of women, legitimizing incel beliefs, etc). But he was wrong for a totally different reason than they gave.
Incels are unhappy, therefore they point to their lack of success with women as the reason. If they were given access to sex, regardless of whether they eventually took it or not, they still would be not happy. The incel identity is a mask for other issues.
It could be a mask for many things. Internet addiction, desperate future economic prospects, high neuroticism, parenting, loneliness…. each incel is unhappy due to his own unique blend of reasons.
They manufacture the anger, the suffering, the frustration, in order to avoid the bad thing that would destroy their crafted identity: success with women. They rationalize their feelings with science, statistics, and anecdotes, from which they use as a mirror to reflect their feelings until they have a sense of identity.
The best healing balm for them would be intimacy and later along the line, love. This would change their identity. They would think of themselves not as frustrated by the difficulties of the modern world and female nature, but as passionately devoted to loving another person. The possessiveness that love provides would satiate their own powerlessness, but the sacrifice for another that genuine love entails would be the death knell for their previous identity. They would stop worrying about identity maintenance and focus on direct action, which Incels normally avoid like a cockroach in their dinner. The wild, fermented instinct of love would smash their barriers and if not bring to them to better life, at least it would change their self-identification.
But love requires one to be worth loving, and many incels have constructed an identity which at its core holds a pitchfork and shouts ‘I dare you to love me!’. They have accurately perceived women like rich, powerful and handsome men, and have identified themselves as not these men, but the issue is they exclusively focus on these qualities to the exclusion of others.
They also know subconsciously that women also want from men love, kindness, intelligence and humour. In order to not be available for a woman’s love or even just casual sex, they incorporate none of these traits into their curated identity. Women want from men intelligence, warmth, humour, not merely attractiveness and status. Give a man wealth and a prestigious job but no kindness or humour and what you have is a Patrick Bateman-esque robot, not a Casanova. But to incels, maintaining their identity is more important, so they disregard this essential element of relationship formation.
And why would they desperately yearn to maintain their identity? To give their life a fixed orientation, and to avoid the pain and uncertain chaos of change. But as long as they fiercely maintain their identity, they can never be loved, or love themselves. The incel’s identity maintenance is a defense against the risk of shame in pursuing love.
