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I decided to share my theory (if we can call it that) about the origin of the ‘incel’ slur. I’m not claiming it’s terribly original or anything but I welcome your feedback about it because it’s a pure culture war phenomenon in my view and I wonder if my theory is sound.
To start with the obvious, pretty much every human community that ever existed have had concepts of the feminine and masculine as collections of desirable traits. This entails that men and women who refuse to live up to these ideals are disadvantaged in various ways. One way is social shaming. Again, let’s leave it that here; I’m aware that I could go off on dozens of tangents here and add dozens of qualifiers and interpretations to make my argument nuanced and elaborate, but I want to keep this concise.
One way to shame unmasculine men is to use the slur ‘nerd’ on them. This was the norm for a long time in Anglo-Saxon societies, and it sort of made sense. After all, nerds are interested in things and machines, not humans, who are anything but machines. The traits that make you a nerd, especially a hard-working and employable one, are exactly the traits that are useless, detrimental even, if you want to be a socially savvy, sexually successful cool guy. If you’re too boneheaded to correctly read the carefully calculated, covert signals women send out to you to indicate sexual interest without coming off to their social circle as dirty sluts, you’re not a real man. Especially if you’re also not interested in playing team sports etc.
At some point though, the Third(?) Industrial Revolution happens, and the computerization of science and the economy is in full swing. The men most disposed to become computer scientists and programmers happen to be nerds. Before that, programming used to be seen a lowly, dull desk job, basically not different from being a secretary, and a significant chunk of programmers were single women as a result. But now, society starts believing that learning to code is a secure path to having a high-paying career and the American Dream. It seems that only the sky is the limit in the digital revolution and the booming online sector. Young women come to realize that calling undesirable men ‘nerds’ just comes across as dumb and baseless to most people.
However, none of this means, of course, that unattractive male traits just disappeared, or that society is open to abandoning social shaming as a tool of controlling men. In fact, due to an unfortunate combination of the unintended(?) long-term consequences of feminist messaging and socially harmful, pathological trends like online porn addiction, endocrine disruptors, sedentary lifestyles, social atomization, the disappearance of male rites of passage and male bonding rituals etc., it seems that a growing segment of men are socially illiterate, repulsive and dull skinnyfat manchildren. Women no longer want to dismiss them as nerds, but they definitely want to dismiss them as…something.
At this point, due to online trends, society discovers the ‘incel’ term, and just starts using it as a replacement of ‘nerd’, basically. Later, online journos discover that the term was actually invented by some Canadian female college student 20 years earlier who was a romantic failure and started a long-defunct online message board for other college women in the same situation, who applied the term to themselves, not as a slur, and definitely not as something that conveys anti-feminist views etc., but all this is long forgotten and nobody cares anymore, so it doesn’t matter. Fast forward a few years, and it becomes normal for leftist women and their male ‘allies’ to dismiss anyone and everyone as ‘incel’, even married men with children as long as they come across as sufficiently deplorable to the average feminist.
It may well have made its way out into wider society and lost all sharp edges of definition, like other terms of disapprobation such as "racist" and "Nazi", but it originated as "involuntarily celibate" meaning someone who wanted romantic relationships and was unsuccessful for no reason they could discern easily.
But it became popularised, and unfortunately set as the image of the 'incel', by that young man who killed young women because he felt aggrieved over not getting the love life he felt he deserved. And if you read any of his writing, it's clearly evident why he couldn't get and keep a girlfriend and it was down to his own flaws and lacks. The kind of person who goes and murders random people, after all, is not the kind of person who can manage to get on with others in the ordinary way of things.
Are you referring to Elliot Rodger? He killed four men and two women.
He was at least as much misandric as misogynistic.
Oh, he hated and resented everybody, but he was operating off an inflamed sense of grievance - how dare his (few) male friends dump him when they got girlfriends, and how dare girls not be his girlfriend when he was such a catch? But his writing is full of evidence as to why he had such problems making friends and attracting girls, and every time I feel a little sorry for him, he spouts some horrible nonsense.
He definitely had problems, but making him into some kind of hero or "see? that's what drives people like me to acts of desperation" by self-identified incels is not the way to go. "Yeah, I admire the guy who wanted to murder as many women as he could" is not going to persuade women that you're the boyfriend they want.
I think you're correct, I was mixing him up with the Canadian shooter Marc Lépine. Another guy who blamed feminism for his problems, which was not in fact the reason he was troubled.
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Are you referring to Elliot Rodger?
Despite all the crying and complaining about incel killers, there's basically only three, and two were before the term came into being (Rodger and LePine).
Exactly. I was about to point that out, but I wasn't sure if the OP is referring to E.R.
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