In 1881, President James Garfield was assassinated by Charles Guiteau. According to a recent piece in the New York Post, Guiteau, a man who failed to find love in the real world, was one of history’s first incels. Shortly after this interesting piece went live, the Post published another story discussing the Animaid Café in Manchester, England, describing the business as a “Hooters for incels,” a place for desperate men who are unable to attract women to come together and commiserate.
Although there is a dark fascination with incels (involuntary celibates) in our culture, the narratives surrounding these disenfranchised young men tend to fluctuate between the sensationalist and the downright stupid, with very little in the way of accurate reporting. Incels have been reduced to a caricature, a crude stereotype that distracts us from the rather complicated truth.
In the United States, the number of men who identify as incels is increasing. The same is true across the pond in the UK. This is a challenging phenomenon to understand. Some are eager to lay the blame at the feet of men like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, but this explanation ignores important facts. Incels are part of an online, sexless subculture. Contrary to popular belief, they are not an ideological monolith. These men are, for myriad reasons, unable to cultivate sexual or romantic intimacy. Some of these men are angry, and some of them even want to hurt women; however, very few act out their anger.
Naama Kates, a journalist dubbed the ‘incel expert,’ told me that there are a number of “dangerous and persistent” misconceptions about incels. For starters, she said, “the idea that they’re a ‘movement’ bound together by a prescriptive violent ideology” is completely wrong.
“Unlike other extremist groups,” she stressed, “incels have no political or cultural goals, and their only personal goals are to ‘ascend’ out of inceldom.” Most incels want nothing more than to extricate themselves from this pit of despair. Many are willing to take drastic measures, like paying to have their jaws broken and reshaped, all in the name of manliness. “They have no organization and no offline network.” In fact, she added, “when you begin to examine the attackers who’ve been associated with them, you often find that connection is quite flimsy.”
She’s right.
As I have shown elsewhere, since 2014, incels have killed just 60 people worldwide. A Canadian by the name of Alek Minassian is responsible for 11 of those deaths. Although Minassian identified as an incel, it’s important to remember that he drove his van into a group of pedestrians, a despicable act that killed a number of men and women.
Even if we are to believe the ‘violent extremist’ narrative, what do these supposed brutes look like? The incel is often painted as a white skinhead, sporting a ‘wife beater’ vest, and Third Reich tattoos. According to psychologist Andrew G. Thomas, an incel culture researcher, the amount of racial, ethnic, and political variety found in incel communities is, for lack of a better word, immense. White men don’t have a monopoly on hatred or loneliness. In one study conducted by Thomas and his colleagues, more than one-third of the incels interviewed identified as non-white. Interestingly, when it came to political views, the majority of incels leaned Left, not Right: less Alex Jones, more AOC. As Thomas noted, this “suggests that some of the stereotypes about the makeup of incels are inaccurate.” This is an understatement of truly epic proportions.
The Mental Health Link
There is a particularly interesting link between autism and inceldom. The researcher Anna Speckhard and her colleagues found that incels have “a much higher self-reported prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (including Asperger’s) than the general population.” In their comprehensive survey, almost 20% of respondents reported an official diagnosis, and about 44% reported experiencing symptoms of autism. “That,” noted Speckhard, “compares to a rate of only 1% in the general population.”
As people with autism struggle to initiate and maintain relationships, be they romantic or otherwise, it is entirely reasonable to view the disorder as a significant barrier to successfully engaging in romantic relationships. Speckhard and her team also found that incels appear to have considerably higher rates of depression and anxiety than men who don’t identify as incels. This, of course, presents us with the classic ‘chicken or egg’ conundrum. Do depressed men gravitate towards inceldom, or does inceldom create depressed men? In truth, it probably works both ways. However, more hard data is needed to answer these questions. What we do know is that the vast majority of incel-oriented narratives are false.
Brandon Sparks, a forensic psychologist who has researched incel culture in great detail, told me that due to a lack of adequate research, the gap in knowledge is regularly filled with assumptions and baseless judgements. Until we have more concrete information, he said, we would do well to remember that incels are individuals, not a one-dimensional, ideological block.
