Incel: The Most Mindless, Unoriginal Insult of All
Abject Hypocrisy and Astounding Ignorance As To The Dynamic Role of Social Proof and Hypergamy In Female Sexual Attraction,
Why does every [woman] do what others do?
Can't a woman learn to use her head?
Why do they do everything their mothers do?*
Why don't they grow up like their fathers instead?For a decade, the slang term “incel” has predominated much discourse on the Internet and social media. The word first achieved mainstream prominence in the wake of the Elliot Rodger murder-suicide. It has since become an off-the-cuff insult mindlessly spurted out by man-hating feminists, cam whores who regard their paypigs and most men generally in equal or even greater contempt and disdain, as well as soft, leftist men who orbit these and other odious elements in the discourse. Such people see branding someone as an incel as this devastating remark that cannot possibly be overcome by those it is used against. To the contrary, one would be hard pressed to find a more worn-out, mindless, or meaningless insult. Even so, such incessant screeching and squealing remains somewhat effective, particularly as it centers around male preoccupation with success, or lack of success, with women, a virtue (or deficiency) that has been prominent in history and the lives of great men through the centuries, as the will to sex and the will to power are closely intertwined.
Spurting out “incel,” often but not always with no or little knowledge or awareness of who precisely this insult is lodged against is, in many ways, more akin to a grunt or other involuntary exhortation of a farm animal than it is a remark or rejoinder of a thinking human being. Such exhortations are invariably made with the same reflexive speed with which pigs squeal in response to any number of negative stimuli—being herded from one pen to another, being prodded by an electrical shocker, among many other negative sensory sensations that is their lot as so much livestock. The bleating of so much sheep also comes to mind when considering this morass of dull, boring sheep-like people who are but the very quintessence of the herd mentality. Of course, such guttural, reflexive reactions more fitting of docile farm animals than thinking men and women is characteristic of the mental malaise that typifies much of much of the content on social media platforms. That mental malaise, whereby automatons mindlessly repeat the same tired refrains seen millions of times before, is exhibited in countless ways, millions of times over, each and every day. Search “bingo” or “bingo card” on twitter, sorted by latest results, and readers will find that some variant of the stupid joke about how this or that “was not on my bingo card” is regurgitated every few minutes, even as it is already been seen tens of millions of times before. Find any random image, video, or story of an attractive woman wearing revealing or risqué attire, and it is almost certain you will find someone replying “would,’ either just typing that or more often with memes that were stale years ago, notably one with a number of Japanese politicians rushing a podium as one Japanese man with white hair and glasses shouts into the microphone. Nobody cares that the possessor of some forgettable, boring twitter account would have sexual relations with a woman who would not in a thousand years. A few, if not taking interest, might find such comments moderately amusing if such replies possessed even the faintest glimmer of originality or creativity. The laughing meme from Goodfellas is another, as there are thousands of others. Stale memes and boring, tired refrains uttered millions of times over are, like cliches, the maggots of the mind that consume the propensity for meaningful and interesting thought, both for the pig-people who utter them and those who are afflicted with their incessant, droning prattle.
Insulting a man or group of men—again, often, but admittedly not always, without knowing what that man looks like or his relationship status, or anything about him—is characteristic of an unpleasant trend that seems more peculiar, although not exclusive, to women, or at least certain types of women. This tendency, to the surprise of few to no one, is exhibited in memes that are not yet quite so stale. In addition to the “incel” insult, other off-the-shelf, guttural exhortations include comments about imagined penis size or, some variant of the “incel” comment that hypothesizes a lack of success of women. Very often these are mixed in with speculation that a person lives in his mother’s basement.
Two popular memes attacking the lack of originality and thought in such weiblich insults. The second meme is a variant created by this author, eliminating the incorrect use of the word “literally.”
Whenever people fail to put any thought or reflection in how they express an idea or utterance, they are not just bleating out tired refrains heard millions of times over like the sheep that they are, they are also, therefore, necessarily failing to put any thought into these ideas or really rather utterances they spew out like so much bile. No instance better demonstrates this axiom than the reflexive blurting out of “incel” on a constant, unremittent basis. Aside from the utter dearth of creativity or even intelligence, the insult in question is also fraught with irony, as well as ignorance regarding the true dynamics of how female attraction actually works. As will be shown later, the proposition that inceldom necessarily and only stems from being physically unattractive is a dubious one. Beyond that however, this underlying assumption stands in naked contradiction to purported values about “body positivity” and the evils associated with conventional beauty standards, or any beauty standards at all, as these and other issues relate to women and other groups in the progressive stack. In their mindset, it is fine and good to ridicule young men for a purported lack of success with women, particularly if such misfortune stems from perceived or actual shortcomings that fail to meet ideal physical standards for men. But insulting or disparaging a woman for being not just overweight but obese, or even simply for making no effort at all to be more attractive is somehow misogynist, sexist, and so on. Such moral inconsistencies can only be dismissed and condemned as cognitive dissonance at best, abject hypocrisy at worst.
Beyond that, however, attributing supposed or actual inceldom to ugliness or otherwise falling short of ideal physical standards for men reveals a staggering level of naïveté if not outright ignorance as to the actual dynamics of female attraction. At best, physical attractiveness is a necessary but insufficient condition for men to succeed in the romantic and sexual marketplace, but even that statement is not entirely true, as wealth, status, but above all social proof can override physical shortcomings. On this matter, readers are directed to “Smitten With Charlotte and Cindy,” a comparative review and analysis of an 80s teen comedy Can’t Buy Me Love and Tom Wolfe’s novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, as the phenomenon of social proof weighs heavily in both narratives. In Can’t Buy Me Love, Ronald, played by Patrick Dempsey, yearns for Cindy Mancini, played by the beautiful but tragic Amanda Peterson, the blonde cheerleader and hottest girl in school. When a suede garment of her mother’s is ruined at a kegger, a garment her divorced mother expressly forbade Cindy from wearing, Ronald agrees to buy a replacement for 1500 dollars (over $4100 in 2025), and in turn Cindy goes out with him for a month. When the other hot, popular girls see Ronald with Cindy, their revulsion of him as this untouchable nerd shatters and, after he breaks up with Cindy before she can do so per their agreement, many of those women promptly pull their ankles right over their shoulders for him. Even though they were previously repulsed by him and routinely mocked him, these young women became attracted to him because Cindy dated him. The social proof she provided was the hidden key to unlock sexual access to them, as it completely and totally circumvented their prior, overtly negative assessment. The novel I am Charlotte Simmons concerns a beautiful would-be scholar, Charlotte Simmons, who hails from poor white Appalachia, and thus is ostracized and “othered” by her rich-white-kid peers. Notwithstanding this, her remarkable beauty draws interest from three suitors, Hoyt Thorpe, the frat boy, Jojo Johansson, the one white starter on the school’s basketball team, and Adam Gellin, an editor for the school newspaper and the one serious student who excels academically, something Charlotte purports to value, but of course actions always speak louder than words. For the purposes of this essay, the relevance of this novel is that Adam’s efforts with Charlotte fail, even as the omniscient narrator recounts how Charlotte’s internal dialogue notes that she finds him handsome, especially his facial features. She even begins to feel physical attraction to him as he nursed her back to health after a mental breakdown on what arguably could be considered sexual assault of the date rape type at the hands of Hoyt Thorpe, before being unceremoniously dumped, mocked, and insulted by Hoyt and his associates in Greek Life. What prey tell was the reason for Adam’s failure to court Charlotte?—she sensed her female peers, many of whom were hardly friends at all but were at best “frenemies,”[1] disapproved of him. That disapproval by her peers, regardless of what he did, was the kiss of death. Conversely, much of Charlotte’s attraction to Hoyt and even to a lesser degree JoJo was driven by the approval by her frenemy peers.
Some might object that these accounts are fiction. “Can’t Buy Me Love is not real, it’s a movie,” many will object. To the contrary, culture and society embrace literature and now select cinema to provide the individual with extraordinary “life experiences” that many might not be able to experience themselves, imparting wisdom and commentary on values and morals, while also providing unique psychological insight and important social commentary, providing the viewer or reader with unique perspectives that otherwise would be inaccessible. This important role of literature and quality fiction more generally is the hallmark of high civilization and culture. In this instance, these and other such narratives are both consistent with real life experiences of the author, and likely most readers, as well as non-fiction material. Consider for example an infamous New York Times piece, “The New Math on Campus,” also discussed at length in this comparative review. This article in The New York Times examines single life in college campuses as women now outnumber men, featuring interviews from coeds attending Duke and Chapel Hill, two of the schools Tom Wolfe had visited and for which the fictional DuPont University is a composite of. In that article, one sorority girl explains that her boyfriend had fucked five or six of her sorority sisters, that she knows of.[2] Rather than perceived as a harbinger of unfaithfulness or other negative attributes, this is seen as validation. Her hot, bitchy frenemies fucked him, “so he is good enough for me” is the feminine, estrogen ridden “rationale” that governs much of the mate selection process in the mind of many women. Other commentary by another sorority girl is also illuminating. As explicated in “Smitten with Charlotte and Cindy,” this excerpt explicates how important social proof and hypergamy in female sexual attraction really is:
Note this statement from “Jayne Dallas, a senior studying advertising…,grumbl[ing] that the population of male undergraduates was even smaller when you looked at it as a dating pool.” Her direct quote could just as easily have been taken directly from Sexual Utopia in Power: “Out of that 40 percent, there are maybe 20 percent that we would consider, and out of those 20, 10 have girlfriends, so all the girls are fighting over that other 10 percent. . ..”
That rationale positing that 20 percent figure—she means 20 percent of the male population—needs to be scrutinized. It is highly doubtful, implausible even, that only 20 percent of the male student population at universities like Duke or Chapel Hill are physically attractive. Something else is at play here, namely whether men are perceived to be desired or sought after by other desirable women, and, of course social status, two factors which are closely intertwined and can create a chicken-or-egg cycle of reinforcement, as the absence of these factors can be self-perpetuating in their own peculiar, vicious way.
In order to best discern what women like Dallas mean by that twenty percent, it is important to examine and emphasize the pernicious role fraternities and indeed the larger Greek system play in American college life. An important and influential essay called “The Rating and Dating Complex,” written by sociologist Willard Waller in 1937 examines how fraternities game the advantage in status their members have. After describing what the author describes as a “rating and dating complex,” in which the desirability of dating prospects consists very little of natural physical features, or kindness, or having common interests, but very different things, he sets forth the criteria that female coeds value the most:
Young men are desirable dates according to their rating on the scale of campus values. In order to have Class A rating they must belong to one of the better fraternities, be prominent in activities, have a copious supply of spending money, be well-dressed, smooth in manners and appearance, have a "good line,” dance well and have access to an automobile. Members of leading fraternities are especially desirable dates; those who belong to fraternities with less prestige are correspondingly less desirable.
If one were to edit or redact certain very dated phrases, such as “smooth in manners,” “having a good line” (whatever that means) one might think this was written by a neo-Victorian hold-out in the late 70s or throughout the 80s, the age of movies like Revenge of the Nerds or Pretty in Pink, with college life and indeed to some degree much of modern American life being a mere extension of American high school and its trappings. But of course this was not written the in the 80s, but, as already stated, 1937. Even as Waller describes pernicious phenomena that originated in the roaring 1920s, his observations seem strangely familiar to modern America today. With this built-in advantage for fraternity men, fraternities, even 100 years ago, gamed the system by hosting socials that were open to multiple sororities and even “unaffiliated women”—but not unaffiliated men, with very limited exceptions. While one would be hard-pressed to assert that dating, or rather “hooking up”—or, calling a spade a spade, fucking--is “almost exclusively the province of fraternity men,” as Willard observed in 1937, it may not be far off the mark. As Jana Matthews has documented, these sorts of tactics have been handed down through the generations to this very day. One amusing but bitter irony is that America’s incredibly stupid drinking age of 21[3], part of America’s puritanical legacy, even as it has at once devolved ever further into a modern Sodom and Gomorrah in most other facets of modern American life, facilitates and strengthens the advantage fraternity men have with hypergamy and social proof. This is because both sorority and unaffiliated women under 21 have at least some difficulty obtaining alcohol with the one notable exception being parties and social gatherings at fraternities. By way of exercising an underserved monopoly on alcohol to persons under 21, fraternities wield the most number of venues and the venues largest in size, scale, and status to meet, date, or more frequently these days “hook up,” as those far and away surpass other competing venues in size, scope, while also having access to higher end locations not available to the general student body. As Lisa Wades articulates:
In 1978, the popularity of the movie Animal House ratcheted up expectations for college fun. Beer and liquor companies took advantage of the moment, spending millions in the 1980s to convince students that drinking was a mainstay of college life. Starting in 1984, when the U.S. government financially pressured the states to raise the legal drinking age from 18 to 21, control over campus parties was thrown increasingly into the hands of men who occupied large, private fraternity residences in which they could flagrantly break liquor laws. Fraternities again came to dominate the campus social scene.[4]
Women of course place much higher value on social status, are much more sociable than men, and so having a monopoly of venues serving alcohol that are available to fraternity men, sorority women, unaffiliated women, but very few to no “unaffiliated” men ensures that Waller’s observation remains true to at least some degree--just replace the word dating with fucking. Are all or even a majority of men whose families cannot or choose not to expend $2-3000.00 a year on dues (that is, quite obviously, an extra eight thousand over four years) to pay others to be their friends really these untouchable, grotesque, loathsome Golem creatures, or is that a lot of otherwise attractive white women are psyched into sexual conquests they purport[5] to resent by the blinders of hypergamy and social proof, while turning a blind eye to many young men who otherwise have much to offer, with perhaps a couple who could be the living apparition of James Dean?[6]
These and other suggestions indicate that while some condemned as incels are not physically attractive, others are otherwise decent, perfectly suitable young men who are adversely impacted by the sort of thought process, if one can call it that, of Jayne Dallas and the droves of other white women of her ilk. Few women will ever admit this but women are, by and large, attracted to male promiscuity, and nothing is more deleterious to a man’s romantic fortunes than the perception that that man is not desired by other desirable women. An interesting social experiment that someone with the means and ability to carry it out would be to have two men, or even the same man go into single’s bars or other similar venues in accordance with two different scenarios. In one instance the subject mingles while being seen with any number of indicia of social proof, either by way of other women at the venue showing interest or even two or three wing-men who offer similar such social proof. In the other instance, the subject either enters alone, or even with a friend who also does not enter the foray with such social cues. The latter could be a male model, or a real-life approximation of Adam Gellin himself. If his efforts do not fail outright, the “difficulty setting,” to use a term from gamer parlance on the Internet,” will, at the very least, be much higher.
The manner in which Joy Division has become incredibly mainstream perturbs this author sharply. One irony to consider—how many midwit lemmings among millenials and zoomers shoot-off about “incels,” notwithstanding songs like “Isolation” which speak about the pain of the estrangement and alienation from being an outsider.
These and other considerations beyond the scope of this essay indicate that much of this phenomenon ultimately stems from other social ills that have harmed millions of men. Social estrangement and isolation is becoming an ever increasing problem in this dystopic shithole, for both men and women. Of course, single motherhood and the lack of suitable father figures as a role model are a key component, just as not having the advantages of such, which used to be a baseline minimum in our society, also create a sort of stigma.
That many men condemned to the untouchable status of inceldom do not conform to monolithic stereotypes of physical repulsiveness, as well as the appalling hypocrisy and moral inconsistency underlying the use of this pejorative together punctuate how abjectly stupid the term is. Alas, the problems underlying loneliness and alienation in society—a plague that harms both men and women in increasing numbers—are too complicated to convey effectively and succinctly in a tweet reply consisting of only a couple sentences. Memes, such as those featured above, do provide an effective and efficient method of responding, insofar as they attack the utter lack of creativity, imagination, and therefore intelligence in those who constantly blurt out the same word or phrase over and over again, like so many dumb farm animals they mimic all too well. The mindless, reflexive manner in which people blurt out this buzzword in turn indicates these “ideas,” to the extent they can even be called ideas, have not, to put it mildly, been well thought out at all, if any thought has been put into this drivel at all.
This unfortunately has not prevented this insult from being entrenched in the consciousness of large swathes of the populace, particularly women. Memes depicting how women and the male contingent of leftist rabble stupidly resort to the same tired insults over and over again—or how the NPC script runs shallow— of course have been widely disseminated, although not yet so stale as to be utterly and completely unpalatable. What truly is unpalatable and utterly boring is the constant, unremittent blurting out “you’re an incel” in manners so braindead and thoughtless they are reminiscent of the squealing and squeaking of dumb and not altogether endearing farm animals. Refrains, like those by yours truly, noting how truly worn-out, mindless, and boring these invectives are, if repeated more often, should help begin to reduce the frequency with which we are all bombarded with this mind-numbingly stupid refrain. Even so, some of the underlying premises of this moronic insult need to be attacked and dismantled with much greater commitment to that most essential purpose.
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[1] This term first gained widespread popularity from the film Mean Girls, but had been coined sometime before. It describes how modern white women congregate in cliques of women they call friends, but these friendships are defined by competitiveness, jealousy, backstabbing, and other sorts of intrigue.
[2] Readers are implored to consider what this reveals about the differences between men and women, although that is changing with seeming advent of perverse phenomena such as cuckoldry, polyamory, among others. This and other aberrations notwithstanding, most men would be more than a little skeeved at the prospect of a potential sexual partner having had sex with five or six of his friends. A woman could be a veritable lingerie model, and the prospect of kissing that mouth would at lest give most some pause, to say nothing of oral or penetrative sex. Women on the other hand, at least those of the sort to belong to sororities (attractive, privileged, but nonetheless insufferable) seem to regard this with some favor.
[3] This unjust law must be condemned outright. As futile as attempts to legislate the color of the sky, college kids under 21 and even high school kids will drink, and quite frankly should drink in moderation. This author’s contempt for this stupid throwback to American puritanical hang-ups is only enflamed by learning that this law only serves to help bolster the undeserved status of the Greek system. Add this and indeed the Greek system to this ethos; Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you.
[4] Matthews further explicates how this is exacerbated by “a controversial policy held by all Panhellenic sororities that prohibits alcohol consumption inside sorority houses. This rule—which chalks its necessity up to liability concerns and insurance regulations—means that any social get-together involving alcohol (which is pretty much all of them) is displaced to fraternity houses or third-party venues.”
[5] This essay by Jana Matthews, which is entirely or largely an excerpt from her book makes for frustrating reading, as it, among other distressing anecdotes, retells how a sorority girl found out fraternities manipulate the ratio of men to women for the purposes of fucking them. Imagine being a coed at a prestigious university, supposedly where the nation’s intellectual elite are cultivated, and not understanding the raison d’etre of your average fraternity. It is difficult to not succumb to the more vicious and darkest presentiments of truly misogynistic thinking.
[6] Part of James Dean’s enduring mystique as an icon of popular culture is his image as a loner. This is ironic because in American culture and society, there has traditionally been an overt stigma to being an outcast or outsider. This is in tension with American presentiments about rugged individualism. Interestingly, the German mind has traditionally entertained very different conceptions about solitude, or being an outsider. Whereas terms like “alone” and other words that loosely translate as “einsam” in German have uniquely negative connotations in the Anglo-American mind, “einsam” does have positive connotations in the German mind. See e.g. in eine einsame Spitze, meaning to be brilliant, but literally translates to be at the secluded or solitary top. Lone wolf has ambiguous connotations in English, but more often negative than positive. “He is a lone wolf” could be a positive or negative comment depending on the context. Einsamer Wolf is, as far as this author is aware, thoroughly positive in connotation. This raises the question why a figure like James Dean would become an enduring sex symbol in his day and through the ages. Have Americans—particularly women—become more conformist since the 1950s? It would seem so.