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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10749 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 9, 2026

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I suspect the average incel in 2026 would just be an average man in 1986

What makes you say that?

Let's try to build a profile of the "average incel" in 2026. I found this study from May of last year, which surveyed over 500 American and British incels about their beliefs, identity characteristics, socioeconomic status and so on. It found:

  • Roughly 30% had an AQ-10 score that would meet the clinical referall threshold for an autism assessment (compared with the 1% of the population).
  • More than one in three met the criteria for moderate depression or anxiety.
    • One in five claimed to experience suicidal thoughts nearly every day.
    • Half of participants selected the highest response for all three items pertaining to loneliness
  • 50% lived with their parents

Do you think the "average man" in 1986 was an autist who lived with his parents and contemplated killing himself every single day?

Ignoring the fact that this is obviously a very extreme selection, combination effects mean that potentially as few as 3% of surveyed incels were "an autist who lived with his parents and contemplated killing himself every single day".

(0.5 * 0.3 * 0.2=0.03)

Then you get into the fact that these people in 1986 wouldn't be living with their parents (the proportion has massively gone up recently), would have had more opportunities to meet people in IRL and improve their social skills, etc.

Sure, 3% is the absolute floor of how many in the surveyed sample met all three criteria. But like, come on, it's obviously significantly higher than that.

I'm just saying, you took the maximally negative interpretation of those results and the maximally positive looks very different.

More importantly, you are trying to build a picture of the 'average incel' by consulting a survey whose gloss begins:

This community operates almost exclusively online, often serving as an outlet for misogynistic hostility. Concerns about violence from incels have positioned them as a growing (inter)national security threat. This study, the largest primary investigation of incel harmful attitudes and beliefs to date

and then taking the worst possible combination of responses as representative of the average person who persistently can't get a girlfriend in 2026 (which is how the common parlance uses the term). I'm sure you're posting in good faith but I think your sampling and interpretive strategy is very bad.

I have a lot more sympathy with incels than the people who conducted with this study, and have repeatedly argued (here and on the blog) that the panic about incel-motivated violence is completely unfounded. But I do recognise that, along numerous axes, incels are a systematically different demographic from non-incels. The idea that the average man from 1986 would resemble the average incel in 2026 just strikes me as a facially extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

The average Western man in 1986 had a high school diploma and the overall ability to perform grunt work and not much of anything more complicated than that. The attributes he had going for him were that he was neither a cripple nor an imbecile, was not severely abusing either drugs or alcohol and was not an extreme wifebeater, and had an average job, a functioning cock and the ability to sire children. He had little to no understanding of female psychology and sexuality and only had a vague notion that society expects him to be a faithful husband and father,

In 1986 these attributes earned him the ability to have a middle-class lifestyle, a car, savings, his own home and a worthy wife. In 2026 they guarantee him precisely nothing, zero. I'm guessing this is what OP is referring to.

I'll rephrase that: "physically" average. Many of those things are downstream of environmental factors, as in, things they cannot control. Put another way, they wouldn't be living with parents and battling serious depression in 1986. I earn more than the NZ median, and still live at home.

I am sceptical. For one thing, I suspect rates of obesity among 2026 incels would be dramatically higher than among 1986 men.

Fair, but I'd still argue that's (partly) downstream of factors that didn't exist in 1986. Less digital overload, less loneliness, etc., meaning, obese incels already blackpilled before they became obese and simply don't have the incentive to make themselves presentable anymore. Anecdotally, if you looked at my friends (all mid-20s college educated white males), you can't "tell" that some of them are incels.

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