Incel

An involuntary celibate, or incel for short, is someone who is unable to form a romantic or sexual relationship, despite desiring one. Self-identified 'incels' in 2023 often believe that structures of oppression to be the cause of their inability to form meaningful sexual relationships.

Origin

The term was invented in the late 90s on a mailing list created by a sexually successful lesbian who wanted to start an 'incel movement'. On her webpage, she hypothesized that the 'incel movement' would be similar to the previous gay liberation movement.

Others have credited communist economics student and avant-carde philosopher Henry Flynt for the term, for a lecture he gave called the, "Creep Lecture", at Harvard. Here, he gave a speech which referred to his own 'involuntary celibacy' verbatim. He 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.

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 occured in pre-history. Some liberal commentators like to paint pre-history as a giant orgy, while social conservative commentators often portray pre-history as a brutal sexual landscape that left up to 80% of the male population masturbating in bushes. Both of these are extreme takes, and its possible the reality was somewhere between these two takes.

A very vocal minority of social conservatives misappropriate TMRCA ratios to falsely insinuate that 2-4x as many women reproduced than men throughout pre-history. They do this to imply that monogamous marriage was invented to solve the issues with incels in pre-history. There is no known, reputable citation for the claim of enormous sexual access skew in pre-history. There was a large disparity in sexual access when the agricultural revolution arrived, as mentioned in a Pacific Magazine article. However, this is contrary to the claim of pre-history being more brutal in sexual access skew than in more agricultural and geographically-close populations.

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 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.

Relationship to income, income inquality, and social status

The relationship between incel 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 causes incel.

It is important to note that there is high sexual success among the very poorest classes in America, 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.

In America, top athletes and popular Hollywood celebrities have almost unfettered access to sexual intercourse. Among some basketball players, their sexual partner count is in the thousands, or tens of thousands. Popular male celebrities often refer to celebrity as opening up a world of women, 'like being in a women's locker room for the first time', and many engage in large amounts of casual sex with fans.

Incel denialism

Some people believe 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 occurence of forced celibacy in mental hopsitals for example, has caused some academics to opine one could interpret an amendment of the US consitution 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.

Some of the more compelling incel denialism takes involve the notion 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 incel that eliminates logic-holes in the definition would include an addedum that incel 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

"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.

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