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.