The 12 Traits of Incels

[RedToothBrush]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14782697/core-traits-INCELS-Scientists-identify.html

A new study has shed light on incels - and exactly why some men are more likely to become women-hating recluses.
Researchers from Swansea University and the University of Texas at Austin surveyed 561 incels from the UK and the US.

Some of these are no surprise. Others are for me. They are worth reflecting on, especially here on MN.

The 12 traits of incels

1. Mental health - More than a third have depression or anxiety while 37% have daily suicidal thoughts
2. Bullying - Many have a history of abuse while 86% have been bullied
3. Autistic traits - Over a third meet the threshold to be referred for clinical autism assessment
4. Loneliness - 48% select highest possible option when asked to rate their loneliness
5. Living alone - 45% live with parents or grandparents while 25% live alone
6. Age - Average age of 26
7. Belief in 'black pill' ideology - Two third believe in 80/20 rule - 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men
8. Fear of feminism - Belief that feminists are the biggest threat to their community
9. Political beliefs - Most are politically 'centre-left' and share left-wing views on homosexuality, corporate profits, and social benefits
10. Employment - 42% in full-time employment, 16% in education
11. Middle-class background - 40% are middle-class, 21% are lower-middle class
12. Ethnically diverse - 58% are white

Oh yes, the idea that women aren't humans but a natural resource meant to be shared equally among all the men.

I think this is probably true HOWEVER I also think there's a real possibility that there's a more left wing element in terms of thinking the state should provide because they are economically not well off.

Someone posted the figures about employment levels. The figure that struck me was how many were under employed - as opposed to unemployed.

It’s not a random sample of incels so can’t be extrapolated to all incels and then compared to the population in general.

It’s also a mix of US and UK incels and is predominantly young with a mean age of 26. In the US, that age group is under 53% white non-Hispanic (Hispanic was categorized separate to white in the study). A quick google tells me UK population at that age range is ~75% white. A bit over a third of participants were from the UK. Giving a (rough!) weighted average of ~61% white in the two populations. So the group may be fairly ethnically similar to the larger population it was drawn from.

But the purpose of the study wasn’t to find out the ethnicity of incels, it collected that data so its findings could be put into context and potential problems with missing sections of society identified. The study was trying to develop models for how men might come be incels, i.e. what experiences and cultural memes seemed to lead them to that position, with an eye to how to disrupt those pathways. Hence the need for a random sample was not so great.

If you read the study they didn’t just sneak it in. The group, on average, leaned slightly left. However, that’s in keeping with both US and UK male populations of that age range.

And the Mail left out a major outcome of the study - that right wing ideology plays a significant role in one of the pathways to becoming incel that the study described.

I am related to a few left wing men who are very misogynistic in their views. They genuinely believe that male jobs are more important than female ones, they don’t like female managers and one of them is a union rep. They also like their wives and daughters to run the house and carry all of the emotional labour. They are man children and massive sulks when called out on their behaviour.

I can see how the lack of a clear, generally achievable pathway into a living wage job is a problem that might well increase tendencies towards incel and other radical mindsets.

I don’t think those employment figures are much different from the figures for all young men, though, so there’s something else going on too.

Yes exactly, you do hear them talk about women in terms of a commodity. The transmaxxing doctrine is very similar.

Authoritarianism is a separate trait to political leanings, so that may be confusing the issue - AFAIK they didn't test for the trait.
Here's a link for people don't like the Daily Mail;

Independent report
''Predicting harm among incels (involuntary celibates): the roles of mental health, ideological belief and social networking.''

www.gov.uk/government/publications/predicting-harm-among-incels-involuntary-celibates/predicting-harm-among-incels-involuntary-celibates-the-roles-of-mental-health-ideological-belief-and-social-networking-accessible

While I have no wish to derail the ops thread. There is a similarly fucked up movement for women called Female Dating Strategy. Perhaps not as dangerous but every bit as toxic.

I think there's a lot of that, but I'd also add:

A lot of young men who get heavily into left wing politics and especially activist circles have ASD traits or just lack social skills. If you've met a few of them you would know exactly what I mean.

Then they get into the activist space, which is heavily female, highly feminised in its behavioural norms (including a Mean Girls culture where covert undermining is preferred to confrontation), they try to conform to this culture... and they still can't pull.

I have my reservations about Jordan Peterson, but they'd do a lot better listening to Peterson telling them to tidy their rooms, get a job, improve themselves as a person and they'll make themselves a more attractive proposition.

Instead they fall into this very male trap where they assume everything is rigged against them and they marinade in resentment.

And perhaps a big part of why they're heavily into left wing politics in the first place is a hope that, after the revolution, when the rigged Chad system is abolished, women will start recognising their true hotness.

It makes me wonder what their parents are like. So many of them have a vile hatred of single mothers. When you ask why, they say things like "I shouldn't have to take care of another's man child."

I guess when you feel like the government should be equally distributing wealth (which I'm not against per se, I'm a socialist Democrat but not a communist) and that women should basically be assigned to you to be your wife, of course you are going to resent even the idea of lifting a finger for an unrelated child. Even if the father is paying child support.

I think that's why they think the 50's were so great because women couldn't get good jobs, education, keep a job after getting pregnant, have their own credit cards or take out mortgages. They long for the day when women were forced to settle for whoever came along because they don't think they should have to do anything at all to improve themselves, their lives, their health, or their looks. But back then women weren't going to marry a man with no job, living in his mom's basement with no goals and no money who just expects everything to be handed to him.

They also see single mothers as being complete "whores" as in the madonna/whore complex. I guess they think abortion is the solution? Idk.

The other thing is I wonder how many of them have single mothers and were basically abandoned by their fathers. That would be a great thing to research.

I also think the Chad 80/20 thing is part of being porn sick.

Lots of things to unpack here. Porn, absolutely. Absent fathers, for sure.

I think one thing is, most men and boys have a deeply ingrained sense of fairness. This is why sports has been such an Achilles heel for the trans movement, because men see a TW athlete towering over much smaller female athletese, and they have a visceral sense that this isn't fair, and they flash back to that boy at school who used to cheat at games and how much they hated that boy.

But I think there's a related male thing at play, that if they feel the game is rigged against them, so they can't win no matter how much effort they put in, they'll just drop out. It's very easy for a discouraged man to hit a downward spiral.

Yes, the 80/20 thing has some basis in reality. The dating scene can be incredibly harsh on the man who isn't rich or good looking. I know lots of men who are long term single and don't have anything actually wrong with them, and lots of women wondering where all the decent men have gone and why they only meet creeps. I think a lot of those decent men, who I wouldn't call incel even if they technically are, have just given up on women and are spending all their time on hobbies.

I think what I see in incel-ish spaces is some of that, and a lot of adolescent narcissistic rage. Even with those who are technically past adolescence. They don't want to improve themselves, they think the world owes them something better than what they're getting.

Maybe a 50 year old man who can't get laid will find a certain level of contentment by spending his evenings making model planes. While a 20 year old man who can't get laid might join the SWP, where he'll be surrounded by bitchy women who still won't give him the time of day.

I hope model plane guy finds someone. What the young incel probably needs is generic dad advice, and he's never had anyone to give him that.

I always say, if there's an ur-text for understanding men today, it's Fight Club.

Not sure what the dating single mothers thing has to do with Incels really, as the Incels are typically teenagers/early twenties so shouldn't really be coming across many single mothers.

A man not wanting to be a step-father doesn't making him an Incel.

I know someone whose son is an incel. She's a perfectly level-headed good mum as far as I can see. I've never met her husband but nothing she's said suggests he's not a good dad.

Son is autistic, he dropped out of school and has spent the last two years sitting in his room writing some frightful magnum opus on the meaning of life, which seems to be based on manosphere insurance influencers and ChatGPT. All the parents can really do is play the long game. I feel that the son's circumstances meant he never got a good chance to start at life. It's very sad

@SionnachRuadh I listened to a BBC podcast recently that made reference to the 80/20 thing being based in stats from dating apps: the theory put forward was that women are choosier than men and as society has become more equal they don't have to settle, but can go for what was termed 'economically attractive men'.

My suspicion, however, is that this this statistic only applies to online dating, which probably affects people's dating behaviour and isn't necessarily general, and 'economically attractive' seems narrow.

Another programme I heard was by a Harvard academic who said wellness through life was traditionally U-shaped (ie young people and old people were happy, mid-life people weren't) but recently the left hand part of the U had got flattened. Incel culture will be part of this and it's as least as much a wellness issue as a moral issue.

@TomPinch This could lead me down a rabbit hole, because there are all sorts of things that aren't functional in today's dating market.

I was interested in Jordan Peterson's thing about enforced monogamy, because it had that usual Peterson element of people being outraged about his provocative framing, and missing the valid point he made. Which was that, if society has a strong bias towards monogamy, then statistically speaking everyone will have a decent chance of finding a partner. If it doesn't, you get a lot of superfluous males, and that's not good for society.

I don't know how valid the 80/20 statistic is, but I suspect that in a society where the bias towards monogamy has broken down, you get quite a small percentage of men who are extremely successful with women, and a dispossessed majority. Which, I don't think, is good for women either in the long term. Because those few hyper-successful men are not going to be very interested in monogamy.

That's why I think the Female Dating Strategy scene is just as toxic as incel spaces, though less likely to produce spree shooters.

I'm really interested in what someone like Hayley Quinn brings to this, because she's a dating coach who works with both sexes, but she got her start infiltrating the manosphere to try to expose creepy men, and found that she was mostly dealing with shy or sad or unconfident men who didn't know how to interact with women. I've heard her say that the dating scene today is like the Cold War, with two sides speaking different languages.

It's very easy to make incels the butt of a joke, but if we assume that at least 90% of women are heterosexual and will want to find some man to have a relationship with, I think there are some important parts of the dating and relationships scene that are broken; not that I know how to fix them, but acknowledging they're broken would be useful.

Of course not. But spend enough time in an incel forum/sub and you see hateful memes and comments over and over again about how horrible single mothers are. But nothing about how horrible single fathers are.

Since they are fairly young and probably don't have a lot of single mothers in their potential social groups, I have no idea where this hatred comes from or what it has to do with them. Its bizarre and seems out of context but is so full of a lot of their Stacey/Chad stuff that you can see that the memes were created by incels.

I should mention I'm a single mom. I don't think parents are to blame for incel thinking and behaviors, it seems to be unrelated.

@SionnachRuadh I will look up Hayley Quinn.

I remember plenty of misogyny at school, 30 years ago but it was bound up with machismo, being good at sport and fighting. Not the bullied boys for whom dating was just something that happened to other people. I was one of the latter boys. I would never have been taken in by incel culture anyway, because I found girls easy to get on with, always had friends among them, and would have known perfectly well that they were nothing like those stereotypes. But these days, with the reclusiveness that the Internet can cause, a boy doesn't necessarily have that salvation.

I don't think it's easy to say whether there's a 'right' way for society to organise itself regarding monogamy or otherwise, though I agree with the points you make. What I don't think is that the 80/20 thing is in any way inevitable- the only proof of it is how people behave on dating apps, which I think are a very artificial environment. But the effect is that there's less expectation that people will meet potential partners at work or through old fashioned social networks - in fact that's become frowned on. I didn't have any sort of relationship until I was 20 and I'll never forget how it brought me to life. I now have a daughter the same age - she's nowhere near dating and there seems to be hardly any of it going on among her friends. Dating seems to have become harder, and as you say, that means some young men spiral.

No one is owed a relationship but that doesn't negate the fact that they do (in general) make people happier.

The other thing is I wonder how many of them have single mothers and were basically abandoned by their fathers. That would be a great thing to research.

I wonder about this aspect. Of my teen DC’s friends the ones that seem most
red pill-ish are all boys of single mothers without significant input from their fathers. I saw some of this 40 years ago when growing up in a single parent family with a mostly absent father- my brother admired our father more than our mother and had little sympathy for the struggles of single parents (though when he divorced 25 years later his attitudes were different and he went 50/50 care with his kids). But that’s just anecdotal. I didn’t see any stats on this in the report.

My child is also a young adult and they really aren't dating much in her age group. I'm thinking eventually that urge to reproduce is going to kick in and they are going to catch up but who knows. I do think they are blaming themselves for a societal trend away from dating and making it a personal issue.

They didn't cover this at all in the report. It is sad that they seem to be blaming the parent who stayed and supported them. I wonder if the incel thing is like when youth join gangs or cults to get some kind of feeling of male validation that they are missing. Its an "us against the world" kind of mindset. They belong to the group because they think they don't belong in society.

Someone above mentioned Fight Club, and it's absolutely appropriate.

And really if a lot of them are on the spectrum as this study shows, society isn't kind in general to ND people. I get it. There has to be a way to help people sooner in life.

People were surprised that so many of them are men of color. I just realized that there is a phenomenon in the US at least where it is very difficult for POCs to get an autism diagnosis. There are few resources for children and the gate keepers are definitely gate keeping those resources for white kids. I've seen it first hand and there are a lot of studies on it.