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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.
The kernel of truth at the center of this is that even men who are objectively, even wildly, sexually successful can still harbor the sexual resentment that sits at the core of the incel label.
Incel, properly understood, is more like "unemployed" than it is like "disabled" or "nerd." Most men are involuntarily celibate (they would like to have sex but can't find a partner) for periods of their life. I've expanded the metaphor elsewhere:
What we see is a lot of guys retain the incel talking points and resentments, that they formed when they couldn't get laid, even after they are getting laid. A lot of guys continue to hate women for withholding pussy even after some women stop withholding it! A lot of guys who came into themselves are still mad about rejections in high school. Which I understand, there was a period between 16-18 when it seemed like I had somehow already missed the boat: every girl I hit on who didn't reject me immediately eventually told me she had lost her virginity some time ago to her [asshole] ex bf, and that now she wasn't really interested in that kind of thing anymore. And it's easy for those kinds of rejections to fester, even after one goes to college and none of it matters anymore. Or, a lot of guys who came into their own after college, once they got a good job, feel like they missed the boat in that ok fine I can date women now, but half of them got fat after college, and i can never get that back, they're always going to resent not getting it back then.
That's the dynamic I think you're seeing!
I acknowledge that the phenomenon you're describing is real, but I wish we had separate terms for "men who resent women because they can't get laid" and "men who can get laid, but resent women because of lingering grievances brought about from earlier rejections".
Accepting these as the choices is still accepting the incel-yellers frame. There is a possibility that the complaints the men have do in fact have validity and are not merely some sort of injured pride.
All three can be true. This is what you absolute conflict theorists ignore: the people you hate may be making bad faith accusations, but their accusations may also have more than a little truth to them. Of course you won't acknowledge the latter because admitting your enemies have a point would be conceding ground to them, which conflict theorists (who do not care about the truth, only about winning) can never acknowledge. But your enemies still might have a point.
There are actual incels, and incel-adjacent misogynists, and some of them have been legitimately injured by feminists and have reason to be resentful, and some of them are just shitty people who can't get laid for good reason, and some are just plain old misogynists resentful that they can't get laid as much and as easily as they would like.
Your enemies are never going to concede that calling Elon Musk (with 10 kids by 3 attractive women) an incel is at all wrong. By conceding that any of their accusations have truth to them, you validate such bogus accusations as well. It is not a matter of conflict theorists not caring about the truth; it is a matter of conceding true things assists in establishing lies.
No, they aren't, because they are also bad-faith conflict theorists.
Calling Elon Musk an incel is obviously ridiculous, but it has nothing to do with whether incels and incel culture does in fact exist. And if you take your position, which is that you can never admit your opponents might even accidentally be right about something because that would be giving them a "win," then you are no longer able to actually distinguish between what's true and what's not, only between what helps your cause and what doesn't.
I know what's true and what's not; I know men with unjustified anger at women exist. But I see no reason to accept the "incel" framing of that phenomenon when it brings in all the stuff that isn't true also, and by accepting that framing I implicitly validate that too. That brings no one closer to truth.
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