No mention of what plan is in place to help stop young men from going down this path
When I was young the peers not getting laid were just nerds or shy or ugly kids, but these days they’re literally terrorists. The youth these days eh.
Incels are a pretty worrying breed but I don’t trust the government to do anything about them. No doubt this study is just a pretext for more over the top surveillance and restrictions on internet usage
These disenfranchised and often alienated young men need help, not ridicule. It seems to be a growing problem no one ever seems to want to address, the more these young men are shunned from society, the further down the Incel path they’ll inevitability end up.
Gotta do more to prevent younger guys getting to that point in the first place. Gotta ask yourself why young men are open to the folk spreading this shit in the first place.
Social media algorithms have to shoulder a lot of the blame. They direct you to worse and worse shit from stuff that starts off quite innocent.
You also need to tackle social issues that leave men feeling left behind in the first place. People can list stats like men before the age of 55 are more likely to die by their own hand than any other cause of death yet very little is done about it.
im not sure anyone understands how easy it is to fall down the incel rabbit hole, i started to fall down it when i was 15 but found myself disagreeing with more and more until i realised that the pages i was on was promoting a completely toxic mindset
doesnt help that youtube promotes these ideas. before andrew tate ate his ban, he was everywhere and anywhere. search warhammer 40k, there he is. checked out overwatch 2? THERE HE IS.
shit has gotta better but now its replaced with fresh and fit and sneako clogging my shit up.
you can block this stuff on youtube with an add on for your computer but not for your phone sadly
I remember when I first joined Reddit I subscribed to the men’s rights sub thinking “oohh this’ll be all about issues that prominently impact men” only it turns out to be mostly hating women and feminists.
Every possibility of why these young men feel like they’re being treat like shit explored other than the fact that maybe they are treat like shit.
Lonely men with no hope could be a destructive force in society. How is this news?
As soon as I first heard of the Incel movement I was like “Yep, they are 100% gonna make it on to the terror watchlist in my lifetime”
Socially awkward boys, with low self esteem and no confidence get mislead.
For some good news, I recently did a lil project looking at what happened to Reddit incels.
The majority stepped away from incel spaces after being in them for nearly 2 years, many heading instead to places like /r/ForeverAlone, and their use of misogynistic language went back down close to what it was before they went incel.
I’m not gonna go around defending a toxic ideology that has been responsible for dozens of mass shootings, all whilst lauding the messed-up perpetrators as “heroes.” It’s outright impossible to defend a community that idolizes mass killers like the Isla Vista gunman. These people need psychological intervention before they endanger even more lives.
What I will say is that society isn’t helping things. Because the main culprit here is economic woes and extremists pushing the blame game on others. Said economic woes disproportionately affect men because social status and wealth is largely what makes a man an attractive suitor.
As economic hardship worsens, radical ideologies rise. We saw this with Russia during the First World War. We saw this with Germany during the Great Depression. America is on the verge of civil conflict with hundreds of mass shooting incidents annually, and Britain saw its worst mass shooting since Dunblane just last year.
The younger generations have been screwed by a decade of austerity, tax cuts, an ailing economy, and social media addiction to the point where people have become far more selective about sexual partners. [27% of American men between 18 and 30 being virgins should be an alarming statistic.](https://boingboing.net/2021/03/22/adult-male-virginity-soars.html) Yet it’s largely dismissed as BS.
Here’s the thing. The kind of teenage boys and grown men frequenting these forums aren’t the ones getting drunk at house parties, carrying their high school or collegiate football teams, owning homes, earning living wages and generally having a decent life. They’re an underclass that has been largely bullied and ostracized throughout school, college and their adult lives. Is it no surprise then that they’re turning towards these echo chambers?
Deplatforming won’t do anything to fix the problem. You’ll just be playing a game of whack-a-mole because for every community you purge from the clear web, another two will take their place. If you truly want to stamp out manosphere ideologies, you need to be asking yourself why people are turning to misogynistic self-proclaimed playboy knobs like Andrew bloody Tate in the first place, and then address these core problems.
Let’s start by making the cost-of-living more affordable, so that a single man wouldn’t have to live with their parents well into their twenties… That would be a good start.
The thing that gets me is people love to say “incels are terrible!” And then just stop. Generally calling people who don’t think they’re bad, bad doesn’t make them change, it just reinforces their beliefs and further drives them towards the only group they identify with.
This is our opportunity to “connect the dots” between these very real challenges and what the feminist movement has struggled (and often failed) to describe for decades.
Your ordinary man is every bit as much a victim of our society as your ordinary woman. Only a few people truly benefit from our system. I’m a through and through feminist but when we have a feminism that sees things as male vs female, we have a problem. When we have a feminism that doesn’t try to solve the issue of angry, forlorn, and depressed men, we have a problem. When we have a feminism that doesn’t acknowledge the ways that women enforce a system of gender expectations that hold men prisoner, there’s a big problem.
For me, feminism is about undoing the masculinism that has been privileged in society – across history, it’s sometimes served a purpose. Competition, aggression, violence were more relevant throughout human development and men’s biological advantages made them ripe for socialization into these roles. But it’s 2022, we don’t need to privilege that stuff and we certainly don’t need to exclusively socialize men into those roles. Masculinity is and will always be a part of the yin and Yang but today we can privilege feminine ideals – cooperation, nurture, justice *and* socialize both males and females into these roles to share in responsibility instead of dividing power.
We wonder why men are the way they are? They are shamed by their mothers and fathers for squealing at a spider because they sound like a little girl. They’re shamed by their friends and girlfriends for crying or getting emotional or being scared or being nervous. They’re shamed by their peers for caring about academic pursuits, for having ambitions. They’re pressured into jobs they don’t want to do and are physically demanding, because they have to be the master of their castle. They’re judged by friends and potential mates by their resources, their prospects, their job – even though these same people didn’t encourage them at all when it mattered. They’re judged for their height, their weight, their looks, their bodies; some of which is completely out of their control. They’re told as little boys that they’ll inherit the earth – you can be anything you want to be, do anything you want to do, as long as you put your mind to it. They’re socialized to expect that they’ll have a beautiful wife and beautiful kids and they’ll be protector and provider. Then they grow up with no emotional support, prevented from speaking about anything real, forced to engage in a social performance where they’re reduced to a couple of stock phrases, and end up in the same shitty job in the same shitty town as their father, and his father. They realize that they aren’t going to get anything else – that the promise they thought was their birthright was a lie, told to them and actively thwarted by the people closest to them. They get angry, confused, and are left completely unable to process their feelings, reconcile their disappointment and shame, and let go of the feeling that everyone thinks they’re a failure.
They end up obsessed with attachment, desperate for any amount of power and control over something, someone, and bitter and angry at a world they’ve been conditioned to think they’re entitled to rule.
The solution is going to be hard. It’s going to require a lot of people to check themselves. Think about the way you’re raising your kids. Think about the way your kids are treating others at school. Think about the way you engage with your friends, think about the ways you act in the dating pool. Think about the things you say in social groups that reinforce norms and ideals that your friends will emulate to keep up appearances and maintain their status, too afraid to go against the grain. Providing therapy isn’t going to be enough, some of them are already too far gone. It starts at home, it starts at school, it starts at work, in starts in bed, it starts online, it starts with mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, boyfriends and girlfriends, men and women. We’re all to blame.
There’s a danger here of presenting incels as a singular, unified group with a singular, unified goal and singular, unified methodology.
They’re not a singular group deciding to wage a way against women, they’re a group *defined* by their disregard for female self-actualisation/agency and general expectation that they’re owed partnership.
You can’t fight that group on ideological grounds, because you have defined that group by ideological boundaries.
If you want to fix this, you have to identify why people are meeting the criteria, not that they are in it; teaching emotional intelligence, empathy, etc, identifying radicalisation pathways, etc.
Evolution has a cunning plan for removing these people from the gene pool.
2A so many of the responses here are basically “It’s women’s fault.”
That’s part of the problem.
Entitlement and “main character syndrome”. Some men basically live in a fantasy world where they’re owed things simply for existing. Perfectly good jobs are dismissed as “shitty.” Women they would actually have a shot with aren’t good looking enough for them. They expect everything in the world to be handed to them but to have to put no effort in in return. This is why the incel-to-far-right pipeline is so effective. It’s all about grievance and blaming others (or blaming the wrong people) for taking from you what is rightfully yours, and that if only all these other people would fall in line with your ideology, or simply cease to exist even, you’d be living in your own personal Utopia. Unfortunately the world doesn’t work like that.
These communities intentionally or not use similar tactics to gangs, terrorists and other radicalisation groups. Give people somewhere to go to where they might feel welcome,
Convince them the entire world is against them, entrench deeply harmful beliefs and use any pushback from external parties about those beliefs as further evidence that everyone except the community is against them.
The incel rabbit hole is where all the dark thoughts a frustrated young man would have, are made real and tangible by that particular social media echo chamber. A dark thought is posted, people in the echo chamber agree and write back their own own dark thoughts and now your dark thought is a reinforced belief.
Stopping the echo chamber/safe place is a game of whack-a-mole where a new one always pops back up. It’s an important thing to tackle but it’s not the most important.
Much harder is giving hope to the frustrated young men so that they change their mind, arguably it’s impossible due to the scale of the problem, and because so many factors work against us, but if everyone did it then we would stand a chance.
21 comments
No mention of what plan is in place to help stop young men from going down this path
When I was young the peers not getting laid were just nerds or shy or ugly kids, but these days they’re literally terrorists. The youth these days eh.
Incels are a pretty worrying breed but I don’t trust the government to do anything about them. No doubt this study is just a pretext for more over the top surveillance and restrictions on internet usage
These disenfranchised and often alienated young men need help, not ridicule. It seems to be a growing problem no one ever seems to want to address, the more these young men are shunned from society, the further down the Incel path they’ll inevitability end up.
Gotta do more to prevent younger guys getting to that point in the first place. Gotta ask yourself why young men are open to the folk spreading this shit in the first place.
Social media algorithms have to shoulder a lot of the blame. They direct you to worse and worse shit from stuff that starts off quite innocent.
You also need to tackle social issues that leave men feeling left behind in the first place. People can list stats like men before the age of 55 are more likely to die by their own hand than any other cause of death yet very little is done about it.
im not sure anyone understands how easy it is to fall down the incel rabbit hole, i started to fall down it when i was 15 but found myself disagreeing with more and more until i realised that the pages i was on was promoting a completely toxic mindset
doesnt help that youtube promotes these ideas. before andrew tate ate his ban, he was everywhere and anywhere. search warhammer 40k, there he is. checked out overwatch 2? THERE HE IS.
shit has gotta better but now its replaced with fresh and fit and sneako clogging my shit up.
you can block this stuff on youtube with an add on for your computer but not for your phone sadly
I remember when I first joined Reddit I subscribed to the men’s rights sub thinking “oohh this’ll be all about issues that prominently impact men” only it turns out to be mostly hating women and feminists.
Every possibility of why these young men feel like they’re being treat like shit explored other than the fact that maybe they are treat like shit.
Lonely men with no hope could be a destructive force in society. How is this news?
As soon as I first heard of the Incel movement I was like “Yep, they are 100% gonna make it on to the terror watchlist in my lifetime”
Socially awkward boys, with low self esteem and no confidence get mislead.
For some good news, I recently did a lil project looking at what happened to Reddit incels.
The majority stepped away from incel spaces after being in them for nearly 2 years, many heading instead to places like /r/ForeverAlone, and their use of misogynistic language went back down close to what it was before they went incel.
I’m not gonna go around defending a toxic ideology that has been responsible for dozens of mass shootings, all whilst lauding the messed-up perpetrators as “heroes.” It’s outright impossible to defend a community that idolizes mass killers like the Isla Vista gunman. These people need psychological intervention before they endanger even more lives.
What I will say is that society isn’t helping things. Because the main culprit here is economic woes and extremists pushing the blame game on others. Said economic woes disproportionately affect men because social status and wealth is largely what makes a man an attractive suitor.
As economic hardship worsens, radical ideologies rise. We saw this with Russia during the First World War. We saw this with Germany during the Great Depression. America is on the verge of civil conflict with hundreds of mass shooting incidents annually, and Britain saw its worst mass shooting since Dunblane just last year.
The younger generations have been screwed by a decade of austerity, tax cuts, an ailing economy, and social media addiction to the point where people have become far more selective about sexual partners. [27% of American men between 18 and 30 being virgins should be an alarming statistic.](https://boingboing.net/2021/03/22/adult-male-virginity-soars.html) Yet it’s largely dismissed as BS.
Here’s the thing. The kind of teenage boys and grown men frequenting these forums aren’t the ones getting drunk at house parties, carrying their high school or collegiate football teams, owning homes, earning living wages and generally having a decent life. They’re an underclass that has been largely bullied and ostracized throughout school, college and their adult lives. Is it no surprise then that they’re turning towards these echo chambers?
Deplatforming won’t do anything to fix the problem. You’ll just be playing a game of whack-a-mole because for every community you purge from the clear web, another two will take their place. If you truly want to stamp out manosphere ideologies, you need to be asking yourself why people are turning to misogynistic self-proclaimed playboy knobs like Andrew bloody Tate in the first place, and then address these core problems.
Let’s start by making the cost-of-living more affordable, so that a single man wouldn’t have to live with their parents well into their twenties… That would be a good start.
The thing that gets me is people love to say “incels are terrible!” And then just stop. Generally calling people who don’t think they’re bad, bad doesn’t make them change, it just reinforces their beliefs and further drives them towards the only group they identify with.
This is our opportunity to “connect the dots” between these very real challenges and what the feminist movement has struggled (and often failed) to describe for decades.
Your ordinary man is every bit as much a victim of our society as your ordinary woman. Only a few people truly benefit from our system. I’m a through and through feminist but when we have a feminism that sees things as male vs female, we have a problem. When we have a feminism that doesn’t try to solve the issue of angry, forlorn, and depressed men, we have a problem. When we have a feminism that doesn’t acknowledge the ways that women enforce a system of gender expectations that hold men prisoner, there’s a big problem.
For me, feminism is about undoing the masculinism that has been privileged in society – across history, it’s sometimes served a purpose. Competition, aggression, violence were more relevant throughout human development and men’s biological advantages made them ripe for socialization into these roles. But it’s 2022, we don’t need to privilege that stuff and we certainly don’t need to exclusively socialize men into those roles. Masculinity is and will always be a part of the yin and Yang but today we can privilege feminine ideals – cooperation, nurture, justice *and* socialize both males and females into these roles to share in responsibility instead of dividing power.
We wonder why men are the way they are? They are shamed by their mothers and fathers for squealing at a spider because they sound like a little girl. They’re shamed by their friends and girlfriends for crying or getting emotional or being scared or being nervous. They’re shamed by their peers for caring about academic pursuits, for having ambitions. They’re pressured into jobs they don’t want to do and are physically demanding, because they have to be the master of their castle. They’re judged by friends and potential mates by their resources, their prospects, their job – even though these same people didn’t encourage them at all when it mattered. They’re judged for their height, their weight, their looks, their bodies; some of which is completely out of their control. They’re told as little boys that they’ll inherit the earth – you can be anything you want to be, do anything you want to do, as long as you put your mind to it. They’re socialized to expect that they’ll have a beautiful wife and beautiful kids and they’ll be protector and provider. Then they grow up with no emotional support, prevented from speaking about anything real, forced to engage in a social performance where they’re reduced to a couple of stock phrases, and end up in the same shitty job in the same shitty town as their father, and his father. They realize that they aren’t going to get anything else – that the promise they thought was their birthright was a lie, told to them and actively thwarted by the people closest to them. They get angry, confused, and are left completely unable to process their feelings, reconcile their disappointment and shame, and let go of the feeling that everyone thinks they’re a failure.
They end up obsessed with attachment, desperate for any amount of power and control over something, someone, and bitter and angry at a world they’ve been conditioned to think they’re entitled to rule.
The solution is going to be hard. It’s going to require a lot of people to check themselves. Think about the way you’re raising your kids. Think about the way your kids are treating others at school. Think about the way you engage with your friends, think about the ways you act in the dating pool. Think about the things you say in social groups that reinforce norms and ideals that your friends will emulate to keep up appearances and maintain their status, too afraid to go against the grain. Providing therapy isn’t going to be enough, some of them are already too far gone. It starts at home, it starts at school, it starts at work, in starts in bed, it starts online, it starts with mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, boyfriends and girlfriends, men and women. We’re all to blame.
There’s a danger here of presenting incels as a singular, unified group with a singular, unified goal and singular, unified methodology.
They’re not a singular group deciding to wage a way against women, they’re a group *defined* by their disregard for female self-actualisation/agency and general expectation that they’re owed partnership.
You can’t fight that group on ideological grounds, because you have defined that group by ideological boundaries.
If you want to fix this, you have to identify why people are meeting the criteria, not that they are in it; teaching emotional intelligence, empathy, etc, identifying radicalisation pathways, etc.
Evolution has a cunning plan for removing these people from the gene pool.
2A so many of the responses here are basically “It’s women’s fault.”
That’s part of the problem.
Entitlement and “main character syndrome”. Some men basically live in a fantasy world where they’re owed things simply for existing. Perfectly good jobs are dismissed as “shitty.” Women they would actually have a shot with aren’t good looking enough for them. They expect everything in the world to be handed to them but to have to put no effort in in return. This is why the incel-to-far-right pipeline is so effective. It’s all about grievance and blaming others (or blaming the wrong people) for taking from you what is rightfully yours, and that if only all these other people would fall in line with your ideology, or simply cease to exist even, you’d be living in your own personal Utopia. Unfortunately the world doesn’t work like that.
These communities intentionally or not use similar tactics to gangs, terrorists and other radicalisation groups. Give people somewhere to go to where they might feel welcome,
Convince them the entire world is against them, entrench deeply harmful beliefs and use any pushback from external parties about those beliefs as further evidence that everyone except the community is against them.
The incel rabbit hole is where all the dark thoughts a frustrated young man would have, are made real and tangible by that particular social media echo chamber. A dark thought is posted, people in the echo chamber agree and write back their own own dark thoughts and now your dark thought is a reinforced belief.
Stopping the echo chamber/safe place is a game of whack-a-mole where a new one always pops back up. It’s an important thing to tackle but it’s not the most important.
Much harder is giving hope to the frustrated young men so that they change their mind, arguably it’s impossible due to the scale of the problem, and because so many factors work against us, but if everyone did it then we would stand a chance.