Free-floating pornography, persistently sexualised media and ubiquitous swipe-on-sight dating apps have made sexual relationships - or, at least, sex - seem like something everyone is having without us, and that we might be failing by not having enough of. Smartphones and gaming are replacing face-to-face interactions, the sort that might force one to confront one's social difficulties or develop a better understanding of the lives of others. But human connection in the real world has become rarer, and often feels more difficult, than it used to be. It's easy to conclude that the incels should just log off, look up, and get outside more - in the past, they might have been forced to do so. A new uncertainty about their place in the world is leading men to spiking levels of anxiety and depression.
Women are surging ahead, out-enrolling men in colleges and universities. As many as one in three American 18- to 34-year-old men are unemployed, living at home, or at or near the poverty line, due to a confluence of factors ranging from economic shifts to student debt. In his book Man Out: Men on the Sidelines of American Life, author and former New York Times reporter Andrew Yarrow describes millennial men as the "new lost boys". But we should still be paying attention to what this level of desperation is telling us - incels are the bleeding edge of a generation of struggling men.Ī new uncertainty about their place in the world is leading men to spiking levels of anxiety and depression. These men are obviously operating under a dark, self-perpetuating cloud of delusion. Even the most attractive among us has experienced being single when we might prefer not to be, and women aren't obliged to have relationships, much less sex, with anyone. Their conclusions are wrong, to put it mildly. At least two mass shooters have left behind manifestos identifying themselves as adhering to incel ideology, and explaining their actions as taking revenge on the world that hasn't given them the women they think they deserve. At its most horrifying extremes, self-described incels have taken their anger out on the women they believe are refusing them. Today, the incel subculture has become not just self-reinforcing but self-radicalising, often with tragic outcomes. All men should deserve a chance with women, incels tell themselves, but some men have all the luck while they get left out. And the incel community has developed elaborate, and elaborately misogynistic, theories to blame others for their plight, centered on the idea that women are shallow, stupid and cruel - exclusively choosing only a handful of the most attractive men to be with and disdaining the rest. Members believe that their looks or personal traits have consigned them lifelong loneliness, and similarly downbeat peers are always willing to add more fuel to that fire. These communities tend to be self-reinforcing. The incel subculture has become self-reinforcing in online forums.
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