No Stupid Questions

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

Since I haven't seen it mentioned...it might be the same attitude you displayed with the question OP. Immediately wondering which woman's fault it is that a man is acting badly.

A digital upbringing it seems. Self taught, doomscrolling with no one around who loves them enough to tell them they are slipping away into darkness.

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?

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.

What's your definition of incel? Just involuntarily celibate, or also full of hate?

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.

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.

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.

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"

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.

A man can become incel for a variety of reasons. Experiences with peers, parents divorcing, and so on.

At one point I think I could've ended up an incel but strangely enough being a lone wolf and having the Internet to access stopped me whereas for others they continued down that path.

From being a lone wolf type I never really dip too much into other people's crap. And having a resource like the web allowed me to learn multiple perspectives.

If incel and simp were on a continuum, I'd prefer to be somewhere in the middle. Don't want to sit rage and whine about what's unfair in regards to romance, etc and go off the deep end but I certainly don't want to be a doormat either. Life keeps teaching me that moderation is key, time and time again.

As I've gotten older, I realized my true issue is with narcissists and narcissism. And that's something that knows no gender, nationality, etc.

Great topic, thank you.