The Onion

It is a sad story:

When Alana started a website for lonely people struggling to find love, she had no idea it would become linked to a community of hate and anger directed at women, which would ultimately lead to the deaths of several innocent people in her home city.

• https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45284455

it wasnt even hidden it happened real time on the front page of reddit everyone once ina while ppl would crusade their sub and youd watch their opinions morph, they like banned woman and said femcels arent real the first time I saw it I think

I would have went with DarkMageOfTruth69, but maybe it was already taken

Imagine if the "manosphere" actually did things like raising awareness for testicular and prostate cancer, teaching men how to be good dads/husbands/sons, how to be financially sensible, how to build a career, etc. instead of blaming all their problems and all the world's problems on women and feminists lmao

I would stop identifying yourself as an incel. It's more than just being involuntarily celibate and you seem far too well-adjusted.

You are looking at the etymology of the term "incel" and then assuming that's the actual meaning. But it isn't. Incel culture is not about people who are too poor to date. If it were, they'd be complaining about minimum wage in the next paragraph, right? But that is not what we see.

I see incel culture tied to sexism, selfishness, and often an willingness to try hard. Do we see it waxing and waning together with the economy? I don't think we do, so I don't think it's closely connected.

We need a tinder for poor people, those who don't have the economic means to date, but would have their situation bettered by joining forces with one or more like-minded and equally fin-locked partners.

We could call it Prolescroll, PlentyOfRamen, Stumble, econHarmony

Tbh at this point calling yourself an incel because you're involuntary celibate is like calling yourself a homophobe because you're scared of gay people. Technically accurate, but do you really wanna go there?

I dont think that counts my dude. You just broke. You could probably go get laid if you really wanted to. These guys online are different.

It's a lot of things. It's a measure of vulnerability, and of the social expectations and needs of men or women. It's not exclusive to men, though I think the culture that surrounds it is certainly more outwardly destructive.

At its core, it's a feeling of inadequacy, and that inadequacy is a vulnerability exploited by others who either feel similarly as a way to elevate themselves or just because they're cruel enough to use it to benefit themselves. It can begin with poverty, with bad experiences, with neglect or abuse. It can begin in ignorance, or by being mislead. I think it's also a lack of self awareness, a lack of self care, and often a lack of time or energy for either.

In the end, there's not enough of the world that says it's okay to fail and it's okay to be vulnerable and that you can spend that time on yourself. People will always feel cheated, and there will always be experiences that leave you feeling alienated or hurt. What pains me is that too often it's easier to find anger and resentment in those moments than it is to find the support you need to build yourself back up and feel okay again.

I bring this point up because, as toxic as incel culture is, I rarely see it tied back to the shitty economy. Just people pointing fingers at each other as though the Male Loneliness phenomenon were entirely the result of people’s personalities.

Because it is. Women aren't magically getting rich while all the men go bankrupt. Thinking you are lonely because you are poor is a cope fantasy that is 100% due to some kind of personality flaw you are harbouring.

Yeah this was my main problem with it was it was just very surface-level. Like I'm glad it's being brought to the table for discussion for mainstream audiences, but it felt a bit glossed over like something I'd heard from an NPR story on video games; "did you know about this thing called incel culture? it's all the rage with the youths."

I don't know what the solution is or how I want to see it conveyed, but I recall Polytechnique doing a better job at instilling horror in me from incel culture than Adolescence, albeit it was more subtle, and that was from 2009.

When the term was first coined, it was not an insult. It was from a support group for people who had trouble finding a partner.

It became an insult as a direct consequence of the incel community being as hateful and toxic as it is. As an insult term it doesn't actually have anything to do with not getting sex at all

Human beings have brains that were forged during hardships and ice-ages to make us inclined to form groups for survival. Those same drives make us desperate for a social identity, to the degree that we literally can die without social identity. (A fascinating field of study btw.)

This has made the internet the most dangerous tool we've ever created, because it has allowed people to deconstruct the very notion of group identity and exploit the drives in our own brains to connect with others. This is why we have so much absurd bullshit now, so many conspiracy theories, flat earthers, incels and redpill grifters, science-deniers and chemtrailophiles. People are finding their own, almost random group identities to connect with, groups that often have no real connection to reality, and just offer validation for people's feelings.

Validation for feelings is the next most important thing for humans, because it reflects how our brains actually work. Most people are under the impression that the brain is the seat of intelligence, that brains are calculating machines that work out problems and come to logical conclusions. Even if you don't think this, you have most likely at least become comfortable in trusting what you work out in your head.

But brains are not reasonable or rational, there was no such thing in the ancient world that shaped our brains. That world was just threats and signs of threats. If your ancestor had a brain that could accurately connect the sign of a threat to an actual threat, they would likely be prepared and survive. See a paw-print by the watering hole? Maybe there's a predator around.

That same tool now functions the same way in a vastly different environment, and it tells us wild stories that aren't even connected with reality to explain the things we feel. The brain notices you feel fear, it looks around and pieces together things to explain that fear. Feel sad? Brain digs around and starts randomly tying strings together to explain it. No reason, no logic. This is where much of our mental health epidemic is coming from, unchecked brains doing what nature intended them to do, in a world nature never intended.

Why? How?