Men who identify as incels have “fundamental thinking errors” about what women want, research shows.
A study at Swansea University found incels - or involuntary celibates - overestimated physical attractiveness and finances, while underestimating kindness, humour and loyalty.
The study’s co-author Andrew Thomas said “thinking errors” could “lead us down some quite troubling paths”.
He said mental health support was crucial, as opposed to “demonisation”.
The term refers to a community, largely online, of mainly heterosexual men frustrated by their inability to form romantic or sexual relationships.
The idea dates back more than 30 years and was popularised by a website offering support for lonely people who felt left behind.
Study: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00224499.2023.2248096
I know people are going to hate this take …
These people are victims, and to do anything other than try to support them is victim blaming. They are literally perpetuating a cycle of abuse.
They feel left out of society, a society that judges them based on whether or not they are a provider. Then makes it impossible to be a provider. They have been told they are worthless and undeserving of real emotional connections.
Wouldn’t you be angry if that was you? I don’t know why people are so surprised that people that are left out create insular groups. It is these groups that the sadness and anger they feel is magnified into what we see expressed in the world by them.
They can be helped the younger they are the easier it will be. Everybody who laughs at this and says they deserve it is perpetuating the abuse and victim blaming.
Lots of people are left out of society, that’s no excuse for violent hatred. There are plenty of men who don’t turn into disgusting abusive trolls; the ones who do don’t get a pass because life is hard.
It’s obscene to suggest that they don’t have a choice or bear responsibility for their actions. It insults and directly harms both them and their victims.
I never said it was. Not everyone turns to violence, but you find that in any group that has felt left out of society some members will turn to violence. Tell them they shouldn’t be violent while at the same time not being willing to work toward a society where people don’t need violence to feel heard will never make things better.
what is an excuse for violent hatred?
im seeing a lot of it all around me right now being justified by progessives.
What do we gain by judging them?
Asking honestly and to whoever cares to reply.
This is wildly known but it is always good being backed by science. The only problem I see is incels being beyond disgusting at times. When you get bombarded by animal porn and rape threats, you stop caring about their well being.
But maybe others have higher tolerances and can handle them.
Also the whole extreme violent misogyny thing. It’s really hard to give half a shit when they celebrate things like state mandated marriage, Eliot Rogers, and the Polytechnique shooter.
I hope they get better, but even if I was into guys it’d be a hard sell for me to date a former incel because I see the shit they pull.
It’s an embracement of the things they feel don’t cost them anything anymore, they just have nothing left to lose in that dept, in their own minds. They could try, just like any other person, but rather than trying to be good and risking failure and rejection, it can feel preferable to embrace the darkness and be able to have confidence in their own control of their path forward. They’d rather be rejected for being vitriolic scum, than trying to be funny and charming and failing at that.
Imo anyway, I’ve never been one and can’t speak from personal experience, simply been around in some seedy internet spaces before, and I understand toxic masculinity well.
Yeah maybe it’s just being a woman and a gay one at that, but I’ve been desperately lonely and confused why I couldn’t succeed romantically, but the thought of hating those who don’t love me back never made sense to me. I didn’t want revenge I wanted to know what I was doing wrong. And that really hits to the situation here. I’d never want to date someone who’d rather be rejected for being a cruel asshole than for being socially inept or ugly. Maybe they can change and I get that but it’s like dating someone who used to be really racist, it’ll take a lot for me to believe you’ve changed enough and then you add in that their bigotry was towards you and that it had impacts.
There are people that don’t need more mental health help?
Findings revealed that incels have a lower sense of self-perceived mate-value and a greater external locus of control regarding their singlehood
He added they had also observed a “bidirectional relationship between mental health and incel ideology”.
“So the worse an incel’s mental health is, the more they seem to then buy into ideology,” he said.
IMO this is all because the whole ideology is cope. Someone believes their problems are caused by an external adversary and there’s nothing they can do about it because that’s the most comfortable path of least resistance emotionally.
Though honestly I think a bitter and depressed person is going to have a pretty tough time becoming genuinely kinder and funnier, even if they can bring themselves to accept this as closer to a realistic solution than something based on a presumption of women being shallow gold diggers.
Yup this makes sense.
I was on the path to becoming an incel before I met my ex gf. I was in my early twenties, overweight and hopeless with women. I am also autistic.
I was kinda stuck where I was with no idea of what I wanted in life or where I should focus my efforts.
The feeling I most often associated with my life from 18 to 21 was intense loneliness. Being told I’m a good looking guy that any girl would be lucky to have, yet being touch-starved to the point that I cried uncontrollably for for an hour when my ex held me for the first time.
To clarify, I never had any ill sentiments towards women, but I have seen how intense loneliness can absolutely fuck with ones mind. I was lucky that I met someone and was in a relationship for some time to actually properly learn all this about myself. But I can totally see how others would not be so lucky.
If you take a young adult male, who’s lonely, touch starved even and doesn’t know what they want from life, and then label them with a term like ‘incel’ that will only make them feel worse and push them further towards doing something terrible to themselves or others.
Unpopular and all as it might be, these men are people who deserve compassion and understanding. Not hatred and vitriol.
Amazing, laughed out loud at this title.
