Incel

An involuntary celibate, or incel for short, is an online 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.

Incel self-identification has been a heterogenous phenomenon, even when using the somewhat obscure neologism. An attempted 'incel movement' began as an academic project with the goal of fueling academic research into incel. This lasted for at least 7 years, resulting in sympathetic academic papers published by Denise Donelly and Elizabeth Burgess, among others. Later, there was a movement to treat incel as a medical condition, most notably through incelsite.com and incelsupport.org from 2003 to 2007. This movement split in 2008 between those who blamed genetics for their condition and those who did not, establishing separate forums. 8 years later, self-identified 'blackpilled' incel forums formed in 2016. These are the most publicized forums in the US as of 2023, are usually male and typically contain misogynistic elements, often intersecting with "red pill-ers", MGTOW, "negging" advocates, and similar online groups.

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. In particular, Wikipedia almost entirely references the culture of the 2016 r/incels subreddit, which was founded by a pedophile, and its descendant board, led by Ļamarcus Șmall. Non-misogynistic forums for self-identified incels exist on Facebook and have since at least 2016. The longest lasting one being led by Keith Karvelis, and is over 8 years old. The largest non-self-identified incel forum is arguably reddit.com/r/deadbedrooms, with about half a million members.

The causes of incel are highly debated both within self-described incel forums and outside of them. The only legal organization which explicitly caters to incels in the USA is the International Professional Sexual Surrogates Association (IPSA), with at least one of their surrogates hanging out in various self-described incel forums. IPSA offers help for fearful virgins, gynophobics, and other forms of 'love-shy' and/or incel men. Purchasing sex directly is illegal in the country with the most self-described incel forums.

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 movements"

There have been very few forums or meetups that have explicitly identified as an incel movement. One notable exception being Alex Podnebesny's Russian forums and groups, which rail against "vagino-capitalism" and explicitly identify as social movements or parties. Podnebesny's groups seem to have accomplished little except personal aggrandizement for Alex and a few stigmatizing TV shows. Nonetheless, he has had minor success in advocating against prosecutorial abuse in his local Russian town, including psychiatric abuse, which in the past was occasionally directed at him. If there were a broad, self-identified left-wing incel movement in the US, at most Alex would be seen as a martyr figure, given how much he has been tortured by his local government for his views, including incel-related views.

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

The relationship between inceldom and income, income inequality, or social status is not proven. It is popular to hypothesize that low income, high income inquality, or low social status produces incels.

It is important to note that there is a higher rate of sexual activity among the very poorest classes in the United States, making it seem as if there is the same amount of sexlessness among the poor as there is among the rich. However, among the very poorest Americans, there is a large split in this demographic, with about half having many sexual partners, and the rest having none of very few.

Analysis

Polyamory and incel

'Blackpilled' incel TCP/IP bulletin boards are overrun with men who think that the cause of involuntary celibacy was the sexual revolution and social liberalism in general, specifically female promiscuity. One blatantly false part of their gripes is their issue with polyandry, which, unlike polygyny is mathematically very beneficial to reducing the amount of incels. Polyandry means one women dating multiple men in a long-term context, which, by definition "shores up" incels, thereby reducing them. If social traditionalists equate female liberation with matriarchies, they may have missed that most matriarchies are in fact polyandrist rather than polygynous and lack a huge underclass of sexually frustrated males like in patriarchal Muslim countries.

Criticism

Some people believe^{[tendency-based slant]} 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

• Alex Podnebesny

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