What kind of upbringing makes an incel?
What kind of upbringing makes an incel?
Something I've always wondered is what kind of women were in the lives of incel men when they were young. Did they have a bad relationship with their mother? Did they lack sisters or other female family members? Or is their family situation irrelevant? Maybe some particular situation in their early years caused them to develop a complex around women?
I think boys and men have serious issues in our society that are not getting the attention they need. This along with changing social structures leaves some men behind. And they turn to the dark corners of the internet where other men just like them seem to care about them, and seem to have the same problems as them.
Boys and men are falling behind in schools and universities. Many colleges that have affirmative action are now having to use it to boost enrollment for men. Many of these rules were originally meant to increase numbers for women.
Women and girls have issues that society needs to help them with, and often times these issues get a lot more attention and are met with sympathy and understanding.
Whereas sometimes for men’s issues, the base reaction of society is to say stop crying and be a man. Men asking for help in and of itself is generally seen as not a manly thing to do.
This is an oversimplification of the issues, but just making fun of incels without trying to understand where they are coming from is probably not the best strategy to get them the help they need.
This in turn, leads them to start listening to men like Andrew Tate and other asshats.
There’s no real blanket statement for this. It will always be anecdotal evidence.
My anecdotal evidence is that incels I’ve met tend to be men who were always turned away by women for being weird in one way or another. This can be never bathing, weird anime obsessions, never holding a job because they perceive themselves as above it, etc. And because of this constant spurring of them and depression or anxiety they start to blame whatever they can. They see being in a relationship with a women as what would make them happy, but women don’t want them. So it must be the women’s fault. From there they just go further and further down the rabbit hole.
All anecdotal by the way and in no way is this a blanket every incel statement.
I had incel like behaviour for a while when I was younger I had a pretty normal family and upbringing, but I spent a lot of time online I really resonated with the "nice guys" memes of the late 2000s - I genuinly believed that I was really nice and that no one saw it because they were "sluts" (which they totally weren't and it's shocking that I thought that) and that they only liked guys who were sporty I was good in school, I got good grades and I think I leaned into the trope shown in media where the smart guy is always a jerk, so that didn't help I had nerdy hobbies too and would assume women in those spaces were fake nerds, when really they were more nerdy than me!
I'm so glad I matured out of that headspace, I hate the person I was - but tldr I think the nice guy memes were a big influence, and while they're not as widespread now, they are on some corners of the Internet
Honestly I have doubts it's related to female exposure; I grew up in a family of men, my mom was the only woman in the entire house and had her own bathroom. She was an oncology nurse and worked crazy hours. I learned more about women dating women than I ever did from hints and lessons from Mom. I'm more inclined to think it's related to the men in their lives and the examples they set in their interactions with women. The men online who shovel misogyny and bullshit about alpha men are doing more harm to the male sex than anything else I've seen.
If you look up studies on "incels" you'll find most report that incels have an incredibly high rate of mental health disorders, mostly untreated and sometimes undiagnosed. Issues like depression, anxiety, and autism are very common. These mental health issues affect their ability to form social connections which can eventually lead to inceldom where they surround themselves with other incels and feed off each other. I read one study that called this "tendency for interpersonal victimhood (TIV)".
Upbringing could certainly have an effect on people's mental health, but not everyone with mental health issues is an incel. Becoming an incel is an extra step only some take and I don't think anyone truly knows how it happens.
Nothing to do with upbringing.
I was borderline incel. Viewed positive female peers (family, etc.) as completely different from "tainted whores" or whatever.
Bad experiences, chronic isolation are what make an incel. Lonely men without supportive friend groups who turn to the Internet for their social needs. Rejection and dismissal from real world people, acceptance and empathy from the hive mind.
Loneliness does a lot more damage than a shitty upbringing.
Hypothesis: what matters here is a social toolbox for engaging with "attractive"/compatible women in a non-romantic/sexual way.
I.e. someone who, even as a teenager, had lots of female friends, is likely to have a learned how to deal with them as persons, beyond "I'd like to hit that".
(Paradoxically, such a person is more likely to find a romantic partner, because they might have lots of M-F acquaintances/friendships that can potentially become something more.)
Someone who never learned that, can only interact with (to them) attractive women through the lens of "I'd like to hit that", which has a much higher risk of ending in failure.
If someone in the second category was always raised on the values of romantic success being a requirement for a non-failed life, and possibly with a touch of chauvinism/misogyny, they might wind up caught up in a frustrating loop of failure.
This is how incels can happen.
Lack of personal accountability ("my baby is a perfect angel," "he's just a kid")
Discrimination (racism/sexism/propensity to find scapegoat for issues)
Not teaching conflict resolution at all ages
Popularity of toxic masculine celebrities
Mental disorders not being treated/toxic behaviors not being called out
I want to add to this that it's also a self circulating thing too. It's easy to start reading text that's antiwomen, seeing videos about it, slowly further looking into more and more negative things. Some guys literally brain wash themself on this. That's why some media worry me.
For example I recently watched a video that discussed the negatives of Captain Marvel as a movie. Not long after my videos started showing negatives of other shows and movies like velma, shehulk and snow white etc.
Then not long after that all my videos started showing anti women, and more just outright incel videos.
My casual take: I’m not sure if it’s 100% upbringing but for most it seems some sense of entitlement. They deserve the pretty girl because something-something even though they might not be bringing much to the table attraction wise.
And now I just had a passing thought. We don’t seem to hear about gay incels much. Is that even a thing?
I don't think, that there's a certain type of environment, but some combinations of environments, character traits, and maybe just events in life.
What I noticed is, that incels fundamentally lack the ability to see other people as people, but more as automatons, NPCs. You manipulate levers and dials in a certain way and get a predictable result. To me, that sounds a bit autistic. Most people who have that trait in one form or another (I'd include myself), learn that this is not actually the case and humans are in fact a bit more complex.
But if you don't learn that and then end up in a life situation, where you are sexually "underserved" (which is very likely for autistic people, ask me how I know), but desperately want love, but also don't understand, that you're might be the problem, I guess there's a chance, that you could become vulnerable to that mindset.
On the other hand, there's the loudmouths of the movement, who I personally suspect to just be socially incompetent narcissists. They can't fathom that someone doesn't want them, so they'll create a narrative, why everyone else is at fault.
Content consumption. A guy is lonely and goes to Google and types "how to talk to girl" or a variation of that, which is fine and normal mind you, and instead of the top search results being positive and genuinely helpful it's the beginning of a rabbit hole that directly leads to this kind of woman hating BS. Couple that with terrible male role models in that guy's life and there you have it.
It's a lack of positive male role models in a person's life. If they see people calling women hateful evil sluts, they may assume any negative interaction with a woman is because she's a hateful evil slut, and they may not look inward. Don't have to look inward, in fact, because the answer is obvious - just a useless slut just like whatever podcaster has told them.
Isn't it going to be more likely the men who taught him to hate women than women? That's kinda incel thinking that the women caused it / deserve it, somehow. Incel is a cult, it's fed by a lot of stuff online. It's my take that extremely unbalanced overblown ego + not getting what they want = hate the things that don't just give them what hey want, rather than be capable of self reflection. And the whole upbringing of men is socially oppressed by toxic masculinity to "be the best" (= toxic ego / never question the self), because if they are "the best" it's others that are wrong, it can't be them, and they can't handle the cognitive dissonance of having any faults (aka being human) which would equate them to being not "the best". So by their maths, the equation is "actually it's everyone else that's the problem and if I have to twist logic, reason and reality while crating crazy conspiracy theories, rather than self reflect, I will"
I've never met any incels in the real world. I assume it's because like many other synthetic groupings of individual traits, they're a minority that has worked themselves into an echo chamber which has simply gotten loud enough to be noticed by others not within that group.
I find that actually going out and interacting with people in the real world, absolves most individuals of these kind of horrendous traits. In the real world, people can call you out for your bullshit and you can't just close the browser tab and run away from it.
Permanently Deleted
Toxic male role models (boomer parents have this is far too large of a quantity) a long with modern society/the internet. There a lot of people looking for someone to blame for how their lives turned out. The Internet makes incels if you watch a couple of the wrong videos/frequent the wrong forums.
Same ahit that makes nice girls / femcels. Just toxic propaganda repeated over and over again woth the aim of making a person believe its never thier fault and always someone elses.
Well, I personally know five. Four are mormon. I think it has something to do with being raised to think you're better than women.
I think incels are a group of sufficient size that you can just state relatively is that all of the above are likely to be true to some portion of them whether that be extremely negative experiences with women such as abuse from a parental figure, they mentally don’t connect well with the women they meet and thus are unable to form meaningful relationships or they just fell into it and are on the edge and not in the deep black pill stuff but identify with the word.
https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-08/ran_cn_incel_phenomenon_20210803_en.pdf presents three main ideas (on page 4) being
history of abuse/mental trauma, social skills deficit and/or lack of awareness/distorted boundaries.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/finding-a-new-home/202301/new-research-on-why-incels-hate-women?amp Whereas this one (looking for the extremist and violent incel subcategory of incels) basically hits upon every possible reason from abuse to indoctrination to just active toxic masculine.
Nothing to do with upbringing. They lack the social skills and in most cases, attractiveness, to easily attract the opposite sex. Most you'll notice really tried in their teen and younger years but when that didn't pan out their brain essentially created a safe space in their mind where it can't be their fault. It MUST be women are terrible people because I'm a great person and they don't want me. Think of it like kids who've had a shit childhood. They see the world through a protective lens they've created to make their unpleasant reality easier to swallow.
Internalized logical fallacies combined with perceived (or real) trauma along with a lack of critical thinking skills or self awareness required to understand that their thinking is illogical.
The brain is a dumb piece of meat that was shocking into awakening and it is scrambling to make sense of the world and its experiences. It doesn't do a good job if left to its own devices and very often makes mistakes that if not rectified early on can become near impossible to unlearn due to cognitive dissonance.
These lines of thinking have existed for a very long time, becoming louder during the age of information, and all it takes is for someone not in a good headspace to read something that both reaffirms their sorrow as well as shift their personal responsibilities onto another entity. Our brains eat that shit up if not critically analyzed.
So when someone attempts to say that their perceived persecution is wrong or self imposed they become angry feeling invalidated on a personal level.
Having your child only have the internet as a guide for how men should act. Or to only get their answers about women. It breeds paranoia. It takes every tragic story and repeats it causing a false sense of ubiquitous understanding that all women are evil. It was especially bad in the early 2000 with MRA brigading everything. Reddit especially was welcoming to beat women subs, subs about getting off on women who cry, raping and create awful backstories to somehow justify women were in general deserving of vitriol and abuse. They had stories that women were con artists coming up with ways to fool men/be vindictive/ toy with emotions so they deserved to be tormented. The Reddit ‘MO’ was that ‘this was free speech at its finest’. At one point I witnessed one story of one women who lied about getting raped and it was copy pasted as a statistic with men believing this was more than one woman and more than one experience.made up stories were everywhere. Not one person could give first hand experience. It was always a friend of an uncle or cousin and for whatever reason this was enough for them to take on as evidence it was pervasive.
I think these kinds of websites are getting a bit more healthier in that people are catching it and calling it out for what it is. That is not to say there are some deep recesses that a developing mind prone to believing everything could get sucked in.
So with this I would suggest if you do have a child (or even man) somewhere that you’re worried about and starts saying some really fucked up shit about woman you sit them down to do a gratitude list with them about all the wonderful women they know(and help them define what makes a great person - catch out poor definitions like trying to define women by their worth to men or attacking women’s sexuality). Remind them that humans are a complex mix of individuals and that not all a person does is all about them. Help that needle find the balance cuz it’s real easy to go ‘all things are bad’ real easy cuz the human mind tends to focus on the negative. It’s a good exercise to do about anyone and anything really. Catches out a lot of unfounded negative energy and keeps it in check.
It is not linked to the past, it is a rejection trauma.
It is considered normal in our societies to be with someone. And as a man, you are culturally expected to be able to find a woman, and you are responsible for it. If you are a single man, it is because you choose it or because you're a failed man. The media like to talk about how you now have sex at 11 and how men have many relationships. When you're still virgin at 18, you already feel like a miserable failure. And the longer it goes, the harder it become. For some men they don't even need to be virgin, they may have had their first relationship by luck.
Then came #metoo. Many men discovered how hard women had it because of men. And this broke something: before, when you were bad with women, you merely had to man up. There was only one model for men, but it was there. After metoo, this model was broken. Now men are completely helpless.
This second point is reinforced politically by the fact that the left spend a lot of time to talk about women problems, but never talks about how men should be to be successful with women. You have feminist movements spreading hatred against all men, and this is also hard. When communication makes it like all men are assholes and can't behave with women, but no one tells you how you should do instead, you just feel attacked and helpless.
With that, these men are completely destroyed. Suicide is an option an this point. But hatred is another one. And fascism lives out of hatred. But fascism came later. First there was hatred as an exit of this situation for the desperate men: it's not their fault, it's women fault. That's only the only way you can go out of the misery. And with hatred, you can start to blame them for everything that's happening. You're single because the women are stupid and prefer the machist men. And feminism is a fraud.
And oh boy do fascists love this situation! Now they can easily radicalise you because you already did the job. Because the progressive left abandoned these men, the fascists gladly took the opportunity. And you now have a strategy and a market around this.
Not all men fall for this. But the pain and hardship is shared by many men nonetheless. The problem is societal: there is no counter-model to the one old toxic one that's been discarded by #metoo. You can't merely make your own model, because the point is to be attractive to women. Which means it actually is a problem for women too. But the progressists unfortunately forgot those men in their fights for the rights of the sexual minorities and the women, so these men are alone.
As a man, you no have 3 solutions : you are lucky enough to be with a woman already ; you embrace the toxic masculinity of the fascists ; or you're left alone in a no man's land of solitude and despair. The incels are the men going from the 3rd to the 2nd category.
Society is changing. The process will take time with highs and lows. We're getting into a low with this problem, and we'll go to a new high when we will have fixed it. But for now, incels will be the symptom of the failure to include men in feminism.
Too much unfettered internet access.
I blame deep space 9 and the hideous misogynist ferengi gets a hot girlfriend bollocks. Nerd gets hot girl has been a trope for decades and it feeds the entitlement complex.
if you had to state something, probably over-bearing, over-nurturing mothers. but i highly doubt anyone would say that is the sole factor. it's a combination of many things. even just being small or less masculine than peers can contribute. heck, being a completely normal person who is just a late bloomer can do it.
Yes, let's blame the women again.
The better question would include the father of the incel or what kind of parents does the incel have?
Why not just take responsibility for who and what you are and I don't know, just live your life? Get help and get over it. Women don't owe you anything.
I'm more interested in how the incel would treat a woman if he ever found one.
An incel is someone who has been rejected by all women. They are undesirable and are not intelligent enough or wealthy enough to be attractive.
Usually this person is hateful with little or no emotional intelligence. They could be self absorbed or narcissistic. They blame everyone (mostly women) but themselves for all their faults and mistakes.
Classic examples from pop culture include:
Hal Stewart (Tighten) from Megamind
The Phantom from The Phantom of the Opera
Agent 47 from the Hitman series
Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants
Claude Frollo from the Hunchback of Notre Dame
Richard III from Shakespeare
Lord Farquaad from Shrek
Jacob from twilight