Incel
An involuntary celibate, or incel for short, is someone who is unable to form a romantic or sexual relationship, despite desiring one. Online, self-identified 'incels' in 2023 often believe that structures of oppression are a primary cause of their inability to form meaningful sexual relationships.
Origin
The shortened term 'incel' was coined in the late 1990s on an internet 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. This is because the term 'involuntary celibacy' was virtually never mentioned in 20th century Western literature except for Henry Flynt's published musings. His most notable musing on involuntary celibacy was a lecture he gave called the, "Creep Lecture", in the Adam Hovre uppercommon room at Harvard. University on May 15th 1962. Here, he gave a speech which 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.
The founder of Utopican socialism, Charles Fourier considered incel to be just as important as material deprivation. As such, he created rules for his voluntary communes where incels were to be relieved, sexually, by a corps of women, either as punishment or as a general duty. Wikipedia administrator Molly white aka GorillaWarfare, who wrote the Wikipedia incel article has called Charles Fourier a "random old man" who is "not important", in a Twitter exchange about the history of incel.
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. Computational biologist Melissa Wilson Sayres claims there was a large, 17:1 disparity in gendered reproductive skew directly after pre-history, when the agricultural revolution arrived.[1] This may be contrary to the claims some social conservatives, blackpillers and fascists make about of pre-history being more brutal in reproductive skew than in more agricultural and geographically-close populations.
Polyamory and incel
Modern, self-described 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 don't have an huge underclass of sexually frustrated males like in patriarchal Muslim countries.
Additionally, female nerds are much more rare than male nerds, and in order for all male nerds to get laid with female nerds, polyandry, or at least polygynandry might need to take place if more women aren't encouraged to become nerds.
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 'vaginocapitalism' and explicitly identify as social movements or parties. Alex's groups seem to have accomplished little except personal aggrandizement for Alex and a few stigmatizing TV shows. Nonetheless, Alex has had minor success in advocating against prosecutorial abuse in his local Russian town, including psychiatric abuse, which in the past was ocassionally directed at him. If there were a broad, self-identified left-wing incel movement in the USA, 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 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