Behind Closed Doors: What the Incel Community Teaches Us About Resentment

At first glance, the Reddit community for incels is shockingly abrasive and vitriolic. It doesn't take more than a few minutes to find an image downplaying sexual assault, asserting men as the more intelligent gender, or worse, justifying violence toward "Stacies," those slores who can't seem to keep it in their pants. 

For those unfamiliar with the Reddit group, "Incel" stands for involuntarily celibate - AKA, a guy who can't get laid no matter what he does or tries. Put simply, Incels say women don't want them, and they harbor a mutual hatred for themselves and the female population. The phrase "normies," on the other hand, is a general label for non-incels, or people who get laid at some frequency. "Chads" are attractive, often muscular dudes who get tons of pussy - aka, guys who are popular in the way a high school quarterback might be. Stacies are those pesky women who will have sex with all guys except the ones they deem unworthy, which is seem as a cruel withholding. And finally, roasties are women who visit the group to offer advice, ridicule, or worst of all, commiseration. (Not all women perceive themselves as flawless, baby-skinned, rose smelling sex magnets.) In fact, roasties have apparently angered enough incels to necessitate a community rule: 

Those claiming there are as many female incels in the same situation as male incels are banned. Most can agree that women can be incel in some situations, but saying that there are many incel women in the same situation as incel males will get a warning and your comment removed.

Ironic, considering the founder of the word is female. Lest I confuse you with my sardonic tone, though, let me be clear: I don't actually find these terms - Chads, Stacies, roasties, normies - to be that outrageous. In fact, they're not totally different from the social buckets many other groups categorize by. Feminists might call Chads fuckboys, while tons of women resent the superficial and unattainable appreciation for blonde-haired, big-boobed, size 0 swimsuit models. (Perhaps we might say they represent a percentage of the Stacies.) The rest of us are normies - and I actually dig that word. 

There are even more similarities between incel aggrievances and those of non-incels: Incels, for example, reallyfuckinghate when women go for terrible, rude, borderline-abusive guys because they're hot or wealthy, and the majority of females find it equally enraging when men choose the aforementioned Beautiful Barbies whether or not they would make for engaging or intelligent partners. In short, incels are angry with the same things many of us are angry about: Only the beautiful in our society are deemed worthy, and there's nothing many of us can do to become those people despite all our other good qualities. We all need love and affection, and to be deprived of that is a terrible and isolating experience; and we all want to find like-minded communities of people who understand us. I don't blame incels for that at all. (I do, however, have a big problem with those who only want late-teen-to-early-twenties conventional hotties, considering it's based in the shallow and biased perspective so many of them lament.) 

But the interesting - and terrible - development of a group once meant to provide communal support has derailed into something sinister, and it certainly prods us to examine the ways we channel our frustrations with the inadequacies of this world we live in. Members don't rally around posts like "This is why I never open my mouth to talk to females unless it's to abuse them" overnight - it's a breeding ground of anger and resentment left unchecked that can make a group of rejected men hate women. (And hate, as we know, is an emotion very similar to love.)

The misogyny incels demonstrate has been associated with the rise of the alt-right, and it's been a powerfully misogynistic community as a whole, even if not everyone who's part of it thinks that way. Consider it a powerful example of the confirmation bias - it's easy to hate any group of people when you're looking for support to back up your claim. There are many bad people in the world of all shapes and sizes and colors, so cherry picking one out of five, eight, ten women to exemplify the shallow and cruel behavior some women have is an easy exercise. This group, like many others, has decided that the small percentage of bad apples represents the group, and all deserved to be punished. (One such individual is Elliot Rodgers, the mass shooter of Isla Vist, California, who went on the spree because of lifelong female rejection. He was a member of the "slut hate" community as well.)

The thing is, though, that it's not entirely different from extreme feminism. Believe me, I do call myself a feminist - one in the inclusive and empathetic majority. There's a far side of feminism too, an angry and abrasive echo chamber that thinks all men are Chads who actively want to undermine their personal agency. Modern feminism is meant to elevate both genders, but certain factions have certainly created the aura of "man-hating." For any gender and group, rejection, oppression, repression, and ridicule breeds contempt. Contempt, in turn, breeds hatred. And hatred makes us seek ways to assure ourselves that our foes are lesser than we are. All of a sudden, the opposite gender is an "other" group that poses a threat to our "in" group. Blind sexism, racism, and violence follow.

The problem with the incel mindset poses a couple questions much larger than sexism or lookism or whatever other buzzwords have been thrown around about them - put simply, it's "why do some people react to their pain with so much anger?" It's not unfair to feel a great deal of pain when you're cut off from love and sex; after all, they are deemed by many as the most rewarding experiences in life. It's not uncommon to feel like you'll never be attractive or arousing enough no matter what you do. It's not unreasonable to feel angry when the community you've created is infiltrated by "normies" telling you to take a shower to comb your hair when you know it's not easily fixed. And a changing cultural landscape - where women want to be empowered equals - can make men feel threatened if they have a scarcity mindset where only so much of that empowerment exists. 

It also illustrates how important sex and affection and love are. Despite our society's complicated relationship with sex, sexuality is a huge part of our psyches and our overall happiness, and to deny its importance creates many problems. The kind of unhappiness that might drive a group of men to promote the oppression of women, and the kind that tells us that demanding sex from our partners is ever OK. I don't honestly know what might get an incel laid would be - certainly telling him to go to the gym and work on his self-confidence would be incredibly insensitive, as there's usually a more pervasive reason he's struggling to connect with women.

The most important thing for all of us - incel, feminist, normie, or roastie - is to remember that while we are entitled to feel the way we feel, we are also responsible for channeling it in a constructive way.