Incel

Involuntary celibacy, or incel for short, is an online sub-culture and movement surrounding highly alienated, usually male individuals who believe structures of oppression to be the cause of their inability to form meaningful sexual relationships. The status of being an incel is typically referred to as involuntary celibacy or inceldom. This is based on the culture of a subreddit that arrived over a decade after the first few, self-described incel forums.

The incel movement is usually supportive of reactionary and bigoted sentiments, especially misogyny. Incel forums serve as a prominent recruiting ground for the alt-right and other far-right groups, in part because of their mutual tendency towards racism and anti-Semitism. Self-described incels have perpetrated multiple terrorist attacks and mass-killings, as part of a rising tendency of right-wing extremism in the West.

Origin

The shortened term "incel" was coined in the late 1990s on an internet mailing list created by a lesbian who wanted to start an "incel movement". On her webpage, she hypothesized that such a movement would be similar to the previous gay liberation movement. Others have credited communist economics student and avant-garde philosopher Henry Flynt for the term, given that involuntary celibacy went virtually unmentioned in 20th century Western literature outside of his published musings. Flynt's most notable commentary on the topic came in a lecture he gave called the "Creep Lecture" delivered in the Adam Hovre uppercommon room at Harvard University on May 15, 1962, in which he referred to his own involuntary celibacy verbatim. Flynt hypothesized that the word "creep" was just a shorthand for incel, and that "creeps" have a greater latitude in creative thinking due to being excluded from social arenas which demand high social conformity.

Charles Fourier, a founder of utopian socialism, considered involuntary celibacy to be just as important as material deprivation. As such, he created rules for his voluntary communes where incels were to be sexually relieved by a corps of women in his Phalanxes, either as punishment or as a general duty.

Involuntary celibacy itself is most likely timeless. Most initial references to involuntary celibacy in literature are about women not being able to afford a dowry. There is debate about how much involuntary celibacy occurred in prehistory. Some liberal commentators like to paint prehistory as a giant orgy, while social conservative commentators often portray prehistory as a brutal sexual landscape that left up to 80% of the male population masturbating in bushes. Both of these are extreme takes; it is possible the reality was somewhere in between.

A very vocal minority of social conservatives misappropriate TMRCA ratios to falsely insinuate that two to four times as many women reproduced throughout history as men. They do this to imply that monogamous marriage was invented to solve the issues with incels in prehistory. There is no known, reputable citation for the claim of enormous sexual access skew in prehistory. Computational biologist Melissa Wilson Sayres claims there was a large, 17:1 disparity in gendered reproductive skew directly after prehistory, when the agricultural revolution arrived. This may be contrary to the claims some social conservatives, blackpillers and fascists make about of prehistory being more brutal in reproductive skew than in more agricultural and geographically close populations.

Organizations

Self-described "incel forums"

There are a number of forums for self-identified incels. Most are on Facebook, and some ban misogyny. Misandrist digital journalism outlets and DHS-funded counterterror groups seem to have financial or personal incentives to only reference incels.co as the only meaningful incel forum. The aforementioned forum is right-wing, generally looked down upon, and contains rhetoric that is stigmatizing toward incels, which the administrators implicitly encourage.

Demographics

While solid information about the incel movement is hard to collect because of its hostility to outsiders, certain demographic patterns can be enumerated. An informal poll of a popular incel forum revealed that over 90% of its participants were under the age of 30. Practically all of them are males (they ban women on sight), and 80% of them were from Europe or North America. Over half of them identify as white, with other ethnic groups mixed in as well. A poll taken on incels.co revealed similar results.

Criticism

Some people believe^{[weasel words]} that involuntary celibacy is not real. Wikipedia most notably takes this position, but rarely elaborates on why. They are wrong,as forced celibacy is common, such as in prisons or mental hospitals. The occurrence of forced celibacy in mental hospitals for example, has caused some academics to opine one could interpret an amendment of the US Constitution to legally defend state-subsidized sex-workers for the severely mentally or physically disabled. Notably, the Netherlands took such an approach for around 10 years, offering such state subsidies to the severely disabled.

Other criticism includes the view that many self-described male and female incels refuse to lower their standards. Some self-described incels respond that standards can create an involuntary situation as forcing romantic attraction is not dissimilar to rape, another form of sex most incels can, in theory have, at the risk of long amounts of jail time. A definition of inceldom that eliminates logical holes would add that it is "the inability to have legal sex with someone you are attracted to".

Sexual deviancy

In modern, incel forums there are a large amount of pedophiles, zoophiles, and fetishists. These people create stigma for incels who are less sexually deviant.

Hot takes on incels

Hot takes on incels

Further "Left-wing inceldom"

It is possible to offer a left-wing alternative to right-wing inceldom. Instead of identifying female hypergamy as the oppressive structure that prevents men from finding worthwhile partners, left-wing inceldom finds social atomisation and prevailing patriarchal norms to be the problem.

See also

• Manosphere

External links

YouTube videos on incels:

• "INCELS Part 1 - Introductions, Truths & Admissions" and "INCELS Part 2 - Analysis, Advice & 'Chadsplaining'" by Vaush
• "Hegelian Recognition and Incels" by Cuck Philosophy
• "Incels and the Last Man" by Zero Books

Subreddits on incels:

• r/IncelTears, dedicated to cataloging instances of incel sexism and bigotry
• r/IncelExit, for people seeking advice on exiting the incel movement