By David Futrelle
It’s time for another peek into The Comments I Don’t Let Through. This time, the comments in question come from the self-described “slightly web famous” blogger Robert Lindsay, who considers himself a leftist of some sort despite hating feminism and “the PC Left” and being sort of a huge racist.
Lindsay took issue with a recent post of mine in which I suggested that the fact that incels were seriously discussing the question “does female sexual pleasure matter” and mostly concluding that it doesn’t might give some hint as to why these guys are incels. Because if you’re this much of a hateful, selfish freak, women are generally going to be able to sense this, and will probably turn down your sexual advances.
This might seem like a relatively uncontroversial opinion. But Lindsay was evidently quite irritated by my assumption that guys who call themselves “involuntarily celibate” and who spend a good portion of their lives on a message board catering to “involuntarily celibates” complaining about being “involuntarily celibate” … might actually be celibate.
“Um, this crap about incels never having had sex or not having any sex has got to stop,” he wrote.
Er, the entire premise of the incel movement is that the guys in are 1) celibate and 2) believe that their celibacy is “involuntary.”
“I got some news for you people,” Lindsay continued.
A lot of the guys on incel sites have definitely had a good fair amount of sex, especially for men in this era. I wonder why a lot of them are even on the incel sites.
What incel sites are you reading? On the biggest incel forums, like Incels.co and the Braincels subreddit, the regulars constantly complain about not having sex, and quite a few of them claim to be virgins. Which makes sense, because, you know, THEY CLAIM TO BE INCELS.
And it’s pretty clear from what they write that most of them do indeed have little or no experience with sex; they write about women and their body parts like befuddled space aliens encountering a new species for the first time.
You really need to stop with this incels can’t get laid crap. It’s not even true. Also a lot of them are out and out volcels. They could definitely have sex if they tried, but they won’t even try for some reason.
I actually don’t think that incels, generally, “can’t get laid” in that it is impossible for them to ever have sex due to some immutable characteristic about themselves — because they are too ugly, or short, or autistic, or whatever bogus explanation they themselves give for why they believe their celibacy is truly “involuntary.”
I think they can’t get laid right now because they hate themselves and hate women, and there really not a lot of women who are attracted to this particular combo. Some of them, particularly younger guys who have sort of fallen into the incel movement, may be able to work through their bitterness and misogyny and actually turn out to be decent enough guys to be dateable. Others seem too far gone to fix.
And quite a fair number of them are either gay or gay-leaning bisexuals. Quite common on incel sites. And there are also gay incels on there. Please explain to me how these gay men’s sexism and misogyny is keeping them from getting laid.
In all the time I’ve spent reading incel forums I’ve run across only a tiny handful of gay incels — maybe two? There are, to be sure, a larger number of incels who talk about being attracted to crossdressers and trans women — though this does not mean they’re gay or even bi. But even these incels are transphobic as hell. They generally refer to both crossdressers and trans women with the ugly term “traps,” and if anything their ideas about them are even more fucked up than their ideas about cis women.
As I mentioned earlier, I do agree with Lindsay on one point: I don’t think the guys who call themselves “involuntarily celibate” really are celibate involuntarily. They’re not celibate because of how they look; they’re celibate because of all the poisonous ideas bouncing around in their brains.
Not all of these poisonous ideas are their fault. While I hesitate to diagnose anyone over the internet, it seems pretty clear that a lot of them are clinically depressed. As someone who’s been dealing with depression for decades, I know how insidious it is, and all the subtle and not-so-subtle ways it can distort your thinking.
Unfortunately, incels tend to belligerently reject the idea of seeking out help for their depression, to assume that the only real way they can be fixed is for some woman to swoop in out of nowhere and have sex with them. When this doesn’t happen, they blame allegedly too-picky women for keeping them locked forever in their their own personal hell.
One of the more pernicious aspects of the incel mindset is the assumption that everyone else in the world besides them and their incel brothers has it easy when it comes to dating and relationships and sex. As incels see it, handsome Chads with perfect bone structure bounce from one woman to the next, and no woman has any trouble finding a Chad partner for herself, even if sometimes she has to share her Chad with several other women.
This is of course ridiculous. While most people in the world eventually do find a partner for themselves, dating and relationships are difficult — some of the time or even much of the time — for pretty much everyone, even those who are generally considered attractive and charming and really very decent people all around. Everyone feels lonely sometimes, even those with partners. And even so-called Chads and Stacies have romantic and/or sexual dry spells, sometimes lasting for years. Being celibate — or a virgin — is not a moral failing, even if it’s not your choice or your preference.
The problem comes when you define yourself and your life by your allegedly involuntary celibacy, and take up the entire set of deeply poisonous beliefs that permeate the incel subculture, thus ensuring both continued celibacy and a lot of misery, both for yourself and for those you blame for all your problems.
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