Nobody talks about incels any more. It's like they just disappeared. Did we solve it? Was it magic? Or are they just lumped in with the white supremacist terrorists now?

Anyway. 'Member incels?

    • OgdenTO [he/him]
      hexagon
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      4 years ago

      Where can I read more about this? Is this idea from a book?

        • Iminhere3000 [none/use name]
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          4 years ago

          Wilhelm Reich is interesting. Some of his early writings are really good. He recognized some of the deeply fucked things about modern capitalist life. After immigrating to the us he was harassed by the fbi (I think) and kinda lost it. His paranoia was real though and he ended up being jailed on some dumb shit and died in prison.

        • OgdenTO [he/him]
          hexagon
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          4 years ago

          Thanks, I will check this out.

          I thought it may have been from Zizek.

    • leftofthat [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      I'm imagining this as narration in a movie while a montage of violence is occuring

    • Irockasingranite [she/her]
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      4 years ago

      Of course it is the exact kind of community that the more well-adjusted people tend to eventually leave, while the worst of them are stuck in it forever. Thus the concentration of bitter misogynists steadily increases, until they're all that's left.

      • them_fatale [she/her]
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        4 years ago

        yeah exactly, if it's a club of 90% people who are normal and maybe a little introverted, but mostly just haven't met the right person, and 10% what we would think of as incels now, of course the 90% will all fuck sometime and become essentially normal, while the 10% just self-radicalizes.

    • gayhobbes [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      I get that she was being cute, but the term involuntary celibate implies that you are forced to not have sex, which implies you are entitled to sex. I’m not shocked it turned toxic. This is why rhetoric matters so much.

  • buh [she/her]
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    edit-2
    4 years ago

    you don't hear about them anymore because they haven't had a chance to do a mass shooting since malls are closed and schools are online due to covid. and even if they did a mass shooting, it would be out of the news cycle immediately because of covid, the fires, the economic crash, and the protests.

    essentially they got cucked out of relevance lol

    • Woly [any]
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      4 years ago

      Uhhh, hate to break it to you bud, but all the school shooters are walking around Portland and Kenosha with crocs and assault rifles now.

    • DalaiLamarxist [none/use name]
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      4 years ago

      You hit the nail on the head about medias involvement. So many movies and tv shows center around the idea that sex is all there is to life and if you're not having sex you're a loser. Well it took a long time before I had sex, and I ate up that BS. I really developed some messed up views on women and relationships. If incel culture was a thing when I was a teenager I know 100% I would've been fully into that. Most incels are horribly toxic, but I can't help but feeling pity for them.

    • quarantine_enjoyer [none/use name]
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      4 years ago

      Like seriously, watch some old comedies, rom coms or action movies and just think about how fucked up the relationship dynamics are in those movies.

      old? nothing's changed in modern TV / movies, if you're talking about the things I think you're talking about

    • Budwig_v_1337hoven [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      messaging I got as a teenager

      When I turned 18, some friend of my mother thought it'd be a cool idea to gift me The Game - and it fucked me up hard for a while

    • lvysaur [he/him]
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      edit-2
      4 years ago

      It's also more complex, it is definitely due to white supremacist nonsense.

      1. tell white males they're better than everyone else

      2. WMs spend their whole lives with latent superiority complex, or at least a "phew I may suck but at least I'm still white so I got that going for me" complex.

      3. since white supremacy is an unsustainable bubble that began progressively popping in the late 1800s, the social currency of whiteness only decreases with time. There are more POC now in every "desirable" white position: top colleges, well paying jobs, and of course dating white women.

      4. WMs at the bottom lose their last bit of currency, the fact that their whiteness has value. Imagine being told you have a 300k trust fund and then suddenly realizing that it's only 5k. This is what happens when le virgin sees le stacey dating not only "Chad", but also "Jamal"

      This is why Eliot Rodger (technically only half, white dad Asian mom) had such a vile hatred of Asian men. Multiple times in his diary he was seething whenever he saw Indian, Black, or East Asian men with white women. Because he fancied himself half white, and thus more deserving of such attention.
      The fact that POC men could attain white women meant that any sort of racial self worth he had was now worthless.

      Of course the mayos on reddit/4chan whitewashed his crimes--he was known as simply an "incel" shooter, but 4 out of his 6 victims were men, all POC men (the other two white women). He was a white supremacist incel.

      • wtypstanaccount04 [he/him]
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        4 years ago

        This also results from schools and colleges teaching radlib versions of intersectionality that completely ignore class. I feel that this is deliberate.

        • lvysaur [he/him]
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          edit-2
          4 years ago

          You're right, but they don't just ignore class, they ignore a whole lot of stuff (including the "intersection" between race and gender, the difference between ethnicity/caste and race).

          I can't even count the times that libs equate race discrimination with caste or ethnic discrimination (discrimination towards Irish, caste bias in India). They completely ignore the fact that these categories are not bolstered by physically observable and inborn delineating boundaries--Brahmins look the same as Shudras and Irish look the same as Anglos, so the discrimination eventually starts to disappear with modernization. Not so for race.

          I'm sure some of it is deliberate, most of it is simply because the vast majority of people can't really think critically (I know it sounds edgelord but it's true)

  • wtypstanaccount04 [he/him]
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    4 years ago

    Incels are a byproduct of any number of issues, chief among them capitalism and toxic masculinity. I think one of the core issues is that there is a very large amount of pressure on men to lose their virginity, while material and social conditions have made this significantly harder to achieve. Apps like Tinder are a great example of capitalism wedging its slimy way into the dating market and making gender relations much more toxic. I think incels are a good example of the changing expectations of men. With movements like me too, there is a lot being said about what men shouldn't do, but not a lot about what they should do. This isn't taught in schools either. This leads to men googling "how to get gf and sex" and an instant pipeline to pickup artist sites.

    • ItGoesItGoes [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      I think one of the core issues is that there is a very large amount of pressure on men to lose their virginity

      I have to add that that Western society is hyper-sexualised and Westerners overhype sex. Not to mention toxic puritan conceptions such as virginity, etc.

  • PermaculturalMarxist [they/them]
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    4 years ago

    "The 'dangerous class', lumpenproletariat[incels], the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue. "

  • GothWhitlam [he/him]
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    4 years ago

    Just like the MRAs they've made the move over to Q territory.

  • PresterJohnBrown [any]
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    4 years ago

    Mostly victims of industrial alienation in society, which makes them susceptible to right wing indoctrination.

  • ItGoesItGoes [he/him]
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    4 years ago

    It's a bit like the chicken and the egg: did inceldom turned them into right-wing white supremacist misogynists or were they already that way? Most likely a combination of both: they were already like that, but their condition further radicalised them.

    What I'm sure of, tho, is that – as some other poster already expressed – political ideologies have a lot to do with sex. I believe many incels and right-wingers are like that because they are unable to have sex or are sexually repressed.

    • Poetjustice [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      Agreed. The early signs were there pre-incel culture with shit like forever alone and friend zoned for ever memes. While in a vacuum, they’re charming harmless memes, they ended up reflecting how a lot of dudes on the internet actually feel about sex and women.

      • OgdenTO [he/him]
        hexagon
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        4 years ago

        You're right, forever alone and friend zone are the precursors to inceldom, they are in the same headspace.

        I always figured that the friend zone and forever alone youth just gained some life experience and went outside, got older, grew up.

        I guess the incels are those that don't?

        • Poetjustice [he/him]
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          4 years ago

          The memes were always mainstream so I'm sure most grew out of that mindset as they got older and matured to find their partners but the attitudes of entitlement are definitely still there, and those who are undatable because of their shitty politics or general unpleasant company have let it fester.

    • lvysaur [he/him]
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      edit-2
      4 years ago

      It’s a bit like the chicken and the egg: did inceldom turned them into right-wing white supremacist misogynists or were they already that way?

      It's the opposite, white supremacy turned them into incels.

      The vast majority of "forever alone" men don't commit shooting sprees or even consider doing so.
      A disproportionate majority of incel shooters are also white.

      White culture/history tells white men that they are omniscient, all powerful, etc. White men internalize this. The bottom-of-the-barrel men start to see this white privilege inevitably slip away, and it radicalizes them because they feel a sense of loss. They grew up thinking they were up 50 points, but in actuality they were only up 5.