Incel culture and it's ascendancy into/merger with evangelical right-wing doctrine

I thought it was probably worth marking this out as a discussion, but also as a place to chart the evolution of what was initially grotty laughable gamergate-style misogyny and has grown in very little time to, effectively, a cultural connecting hub between school shooters, anti-abortion/anti-womens-rights zealots, ‘alpha male’ idealism and a repositioning of the nuclear family in a pretty successful effort to reassert male dominance in the west. Bitcoin bros and broettes are espousing the benefits of ‘women keeping the kitchen clean’, Tate’s army of dweebs is telling women they’ll die alone if they insist on being independent.

I don’t think it can be understated how much of a movement has sprung up at this point, far beyond the twitter echoes, and how much damage it can do.

An anecdotal starter: I and two friends went out for drinks about a month ago. Both women successful in their careers, one my age and confident in herself, one 27 and less so. We were discussing the tricky world of dating culture, and the 27-year-old told us she was taking a break from dating because ‘men won’t want women with a high body count’. I was pretty much sure this was Tate-tweet stuff and said as much, but when she said that no, this is what men on dates were telling her, my other pal went full incandescent/incredulous.

Further chat revealed that, within the younger-friend’s friendship group at least, the general consensus is that folks (in that London at least) are being actively told on dates: good luck with the whole ‘career thing’, you’ll be a cat lady and men want someone chaste, ideally, keen to be servile.

It always struck me as odd that incel culture, directly tied to shootings, was never seized on as something to condemn/deride in the political sphere – sweaty gamers getting vengeful is a Mary Whitehouse dream – but I think increasingly it seems as though actually, it plugs into ( both extremeist and ‘moderate’) right wing ideology vastly more than I’d really considered.

Anyway yes. It’s fucked. Maybe no one wants to discuss this and if so we can let this thread die like I wish that culture frankly would.

You listened to that QAA episode as well, eh.

actually no! link it?

i find podcasts oddly repellant but i’ll give it a good go if it’s tied into all this stuff.

Unfortunately it’s a paywalled one. They cover manosphere stuff in a spin-off series, this one was specifically about how a number of self-styled playboy influencers are turning towards organised religion. I guessed because it only came out a couple days ago.

I don’t think it’s a particularly new thing - since the end of WW2 the standard right wing evolution has been to be a woman-hating chauvinist in your salad days and then become a woman-hating bible thumper once you get too old to run around. You can just see it happen much more clearer these days because of social media, and specifically the requirement these guys have to record themselves constantly for the awful career path they chose to embark on.

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I think in terms of it being new, i guess it feels more like a smarter form of recruitment drive within the alt right, though i can’t tell if that whole incel movement was started for that purpose or absorbed into the doctrine retroactively.

Tate references his faith in god increasingly repeatedly, which is what first made me pause and think a bit more about the possible endgame there.

this is def true. I think even someone as cynical as me was caught off guard that the full veil-off link between the two would have been scrambled to be covered up/talked down, but… here we are. The world is always worst than you’d even assume eh.

that’s what makes grifters in particular hard to chart i think – they’ll pivot towards cash/fame in a heartbeat, so it’s tricky to then understand if it was always the plan or just the next cashgrab.

Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates is a good (but obviously very depressing) book about incels and related groups. she often makes the point that it’s an ideology in the name of which mass killings have been committed against a particular group, which if it were any other ideology/target group then it would be viewed as terrorism

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yeah this is i think the biggest shock to me. even a couple of decades ago the right would have at least tried to suggest these guys were outliers/outcasts and not representative of their ideology. But… silence.

(also thank you for the rec)

Intieresting to note that ‘Incel’ (originally “Incvel’”) was a term coined by a queer woman and the initial community was actually not poisonous, but positive.

The Reply All podcast had a good ep about it, you can probably also find this easily on Google.

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It’s so tiring. From cradle to grave men are bombarded with gender essentialism and specifically along the lines of might and dominance. It’s marketed and reproduced in practically all forms of capitalism, whether you’re buying soap or looking at jeans that might fit you.
The fact that real life is not actually like that, and that cooperation is ultimately the best form of human relations, coupled with the alienation/necessary economic subjugation of our actively melting societies mean a lot of more vulnerable or suggestable men retreat back into the fantasy as a surrogate for actually living well. And then it becomes a self perpetuating cycle, the grifters come in to get a buck, vulnerable men pay them and get further radicalised etc. The fact is those grifters have nothing in the way of actual substance so they just fall back on mid-20th century archetypes that began the whole charade in the first place.
Tl;dr it is as ever fixed by greater social equality and reclaiming the means of production.

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Will do my best. It’s the one medium I struggle to get my head into for some reason.

And yeah I think it’s also still quite a helpful reminder or where that underlying rage comes from, and to adjust expectations accordingly

I think I’ve been thinking about it more actively since seeing quite a lot of ‘real men procreate’ stuff on Twitter starting to creep in. Couldn’t be a better obvious alignment of creep culture and evangelist shite

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I think what’s so odd about the incel lot is that (unless I start going full tinfoil) it’s kind of like the other end of the thread - kids growing up with a ‘girls won’t date me’ mentality suddenly finding mileage in a much broader community online to nurture something insanely hateful that unconsciously ends up with them finding their way back to standard boilerplate fascism while considering themselves ‘alt’

I sometimes worry - as a socially awkward person who really struggled with romantic stuff (and still does but I’ve let go of the “it’s cause I’m nice” bollocks) - that if I was a bit younger I might have gotten drawn in to that whole mess. Feels like Gamergate (can’t believe it was so long ago now) revealed a really easy way of trafficking this stuff in through barely seemingly innocuous Star Wars takes or whatever.

I mean, one big problem is that the standard pathetic lonely teen boy google search of “how do i get a girlfriend” or “jeeves can you tell me how to be more attractive” virtually thrusts you straight into a shitstorm of grossness

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remember reading years ago that south korea was a decade ahead of us in the living life online/ people not having romantic lives alienation thing and the reporting from their elections the other year was some of the bleakest stuff I’ve ever read.

still kind of hard to see it being an organising force for a political party over here though

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Absolutely identify this, extremely glad that as a young teen especially I didn’t get subjected to this shite

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May have more insightful stuff yo say later but your anecdote made me very angry.

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Think stuff like this is quite useful, basically could do with more non-dickheads making content aimed at boys/young men, putting some non-dickhead voices into spaces that are currently very dickhead heavy

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really really good post this

I don’t think you would’ve done, and I don’t think I would’ve done either.

The reason being, the whole thing can work only on men who might believe it when told ‘this is not your fault, it’s the women who are to blame’.

I just don’t think I could’ve been convinced of that. Kinda like how I don’t think there’s any way I could’ve been made in to a fascist. You can’t get 100% of people to fully believe that foreigners or immigrants are actually damaging the fabric of society. I’m thinking about the Brexit referendum and how targeted online ads were used to sway the votes that could be swayed. They didn’t try to show the ads to everyone, just those who could be pushed to vote a certain way.

I’m not claiming to be more resilient or innately better at detecting bullshit then an average person. I would guess there’s various aspects of my privilege that caused me to never get sucked in to various corrosive ideologies.

Maybe this is all very arrogant of me, idk

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