The online incel community has taken a break from blaming women for their ongoing failures in life to issue a collective tantrum over Netflix’s new drama Adolescence, which dares—dares, mind you—to portray incel culture as the toxic, rage-filled echo chamber it so demonstrably is.
I had no idea that incel was a term that people used to self-identify.
I thought it was only a slur.
When the term was first coined, it was not an insult. It was from a support group for people who had trouble finding a partner.
The ultimate irony is that the first popular incel support community was started by a woman.
Also a great demonstration of how thin the wall between support group and cult is.
Well, no. It got toxic because the people the group helped didn’t need to go to the group anymore. So the only people left were the ones too toxic to find a partner which led to even more toxic people getting involved
Damn that’s a pretty logical process to explain the decay of Internet self help groups
Yeah, if you don’t have a greater community surrounding the support one, there’s just no reason for people to stick around once their problem is solved.
Yeah for an opposite example, I take part in a support group for a certain form of alternative relationships and you have the opposite pressures. People who are well respected in long lasting relationships stay, and people who can’t make it work flit out fairly quickly. What this means is the advice is pretty good for those who listen to it.
“I am Jack’s self hatred directed at women.”
It became an insult as a direct consequence of the incel community being as hateful and toxic as it is. As an insult term it doesn’t actually have anything to do with not getting sex at all
Ehh some definitely use it to insult those who aren’t getting laid
Just like the n-word
It is a slur in some context. Like when you suggest that we take men’s issues seriously. For fucks sakes its 2025 and the producer of The Boys talks about men being raped is funny. I am tired of hearing about there not being any good male role models when they are there, but liberals only ever talk about the Andrew Tates of the word and refuse to grasp that they are popular because they one of the few places that won’t tell you horrible men are.
I hate myself for being a man. All I feel anymore is guilt and shame. And there is nothing that can be done.
Um, that’s not healthy there…
I mean, I’m a dude, and I realize most dudes suck… But that doesn’t make me hate myself. It just makes me want to be “better” so I’m not “one of those men” or one of the dudes who when women are bitching about shitty men, they turn and say,“Well, not you, of course!”
I think this is where Reich Wingers distort the message: The message shouldn’t make you hate yourself for being a dude, but should make you hate the toxic masculinity you were taught, and for you to rise above that.
That sounds like continuing to ignore these issues.
Hell, you even admit being shit is the default for men.
Ignoring what issues? That men, quite often, due to what adults teach kids, are shitty people? Or that it takes a bit of deprogramming oneself to start treating women like equal humans, rather than objects to be won?
Yes, it is the default in our society, for men to be shitty. Because we are still teaching our kids toxic masculinity, rather than healthy masculinity.
With no real alternatives suggested.
The alternative is to learn to not be a shitass… This is another part of toxic masculinity: Demanding to be spoonfed every single thing they have to do, rather than perform the emotional labor themselves of self-introspection.
So, go learn how to not be a shitass, and strive to be the one dude in the room that women tend to say,“… but not you, of course!” when bitching about toxic masculinity.
Don’t take it personal, because well, you’re doing exactly what misogynist claim women do: Being irrational and emotional over a set of facts.
If you have kids? Don’t teach them that the default acceptable behavior is toxic masculinity. For example, don’t be a bully, and don’t be afraid to stand up for others who may be weaker than yourself against bullies. Abhor violence, but accept sometimes the threat of violence is a deterrent to toxic behavior. etc etc.
Its not complicated, but it can be difficult to start down the track of that self-introspection.
I dont have kids. But i imagine my hypothetical son would be better off if there was a community he could talk to. But as it stands you can’t even get support of you where, say, sexually assaulted.
There’s plenty of support communities for SA survivors… Not sure what you’re going on about. If one needs some assistance locating such a support group in your area? If so, feel free to DM me, and I’ll be more than happy to assist them!
But, without kids, you can, of course, work on yourself, to make yourself a good human.
Seriously, though, the toxic incel subculture didn’t just happen all on its own. It had a lot of help from the other side (which I can’t in good conscience categorize as either liberal or feminist, though it had some of those elements), and developed iteratively over the course of years. I’ve been online a long time, and remember when it started out as the gender-neutral “invcel.” But our culture’s black-and-white, polarized thinking couldn’t handle the concept that there was a whole range of invcel men, from unattractive dorks at one end of the spectrum to raging misogynists at the other end.
Like, for example, if we complained that we treat women as people, with respect and kindness, but none of them want to date us, clearly we were self-entitled Nice Guys™ who felt that women were vending machines that you put in kindness and sex falls out. Never mind that “being ourselves” and treating women with respect and kindness was exactly what we were told to do to find a relationship, by parents, teachers, friends, and popular culture. And never mind that an alternate mental model exists to explain our expectations, one in which women like men, and want to be in relationships with men, and all else being equal, would choose to be in relationships with men that were nice to them.
But, of course, if we tried to talk about the shock of realizing that lots of what we’d been taught about women and relationships was just plain incorrect, obviously we were raging misogynists and should be shunned. Meanwhile, the actual raging misogynists were waiting with open arms to offer incel men a community with a sense of belonging, validation, and a coherent theory to explain their problems. (A theory, I must point out, bolstered by the hate-filled reaction to them from outside of the community. It’s a dynamic that cults exploit to keep their members disconnected from the wider world.) Bam, that’s how today’s incel subculture was made, in a mutually-reinforcing cycle.
Maybe if I were younger, I would’ve fallen into it. I don’t know. I know that I did end up in some of the online spaces that tried to address men’s problems without telling us we’re horrible, and it’s all our fault. It was wonderful while it lasted, but outrage and self-righteousness give people a much better emotional high, while nuance and empathy are passé, so those spaces are gone AFAICT.
“I hate myself for being a man” you know what is the worse about this? not the idiot saying it but the feminazis giving like.
Yeah, IIRC it was a reddit thing for awhile. Never really got into it myself since by the time I bumped into them they’d already gotten big into blaming women for not sleeping with them.