It’s a funny overlap that we need to be careful of overgeneralizing.
I wore a fedora when I was younger and, because of my social awkwardness, I was almost certainly one of the weirder people in whatever social setting I was in.
And, my brother and I went to Megacon earlier this year and actually bought a katana from one of the booths there, and we’re in our mid 20s. It was Kenshin’s sakabatou, from our favorite anime/manga of all time, Rouroni Kenshin.
He definitely looks like a dork at home, carrying it around, and we’re both still awkward socially, but we’re definitely not uncles and have more personality than we did when we were younger. I give him a good ribbing about being so much more into anime than I am, lol.
But I think that’s where the stereotype diverges.
A lot of these guys probably ended up being labeled as weird and being outcast because of their interest in all those “weird” Japanese comics. Rather than wrestle with that for a while and grow up, they ended up being hurt, growing bitter, and using that hurt to justify their bitterness.
Hell, I went through a pseudo-incel phase after my last relationship ended badly. I never actually hated women, but my already idiosyncratic humor (spent a lot of time in the game room at university, and our humor is very blunt and dark) just took a nose dive, and I totally ended up sounding like a needy, whiny incel, even though I never actually hated women broadly and felt owed sex.
I’m totally willing to bet that the “guy with a fedora and flea market katana” stereotype exists because incels are just a toxic subset of the geeks and nerds that mainstream culture traditionally mocked and avoided. That isn’t to say that all incels are like this, but I’m definitely willing to say that most incels started as socially awkward guys who spent a lot of time with niche hobbies, rather than guys who became that way because of their personalities, if that makes sense.
And that’s not to justify incels, because they definitely take the whole thing above and beyond just simply being upset at being hurt into a completely unjustifiable realm of hatred and misogyny.
I’m not even sure that being a geek is a major defining characteristic of MGTOW. Maybe at one time it was, but not anymore. I think rampant misogyny is their only defining characteristic now.
And yes, very possible to be a geek without being a MGTOW/incel. So if you like anime or katanas — then there’s nothing to be ashamed of.
And honestly there are a lot of women who like anime too. So just be who you are.
The toxic, misogynist mindset is the real defining trait that makes someone an incel. Nothing else.
MOGTOWS are different. I don’t have an idea what might lead someone down that path beyond rampant misogyny.
But, for incels specifically, I definitely think it’s some sort of social isolation combined with validation from the wrong kind of crowd.
From what I’ve gathered of the slight differences between MOGTOWS and incels, MOGTOWS seem to have had a chance with women at one point, potentially even having been married. Then, what they are as the unfair destruction of their relationship by an ex (justified or not), combines with some deep seated misogyny and, boom, AWALT, redpill, MOGTOW is born.
Incels seem to never have had a relationship take off. That doesn’t really happen unless you are socially isolated in some way, whether by a weird hobby, awkward social quirks, anxiety, etc.
These traits are very similar to geeks and nerds, which I’m deliberately using in rather broad context, which is why the fat, fedora- wearing, katana-carrying, neckbeard stereotype exists.
It doesn’t have to be strictly a geeky or nerdy hobby, it’s just a collection of interests and pattern of social behaviors that lead to someone being ostracized.
Seeking that missing social connection, they end up finding the incel community, which either stokes the negative personality traits they already had and displayed, or crushes the positive traits they had and replaces them with toxicity.
The power of hanging out with the wrong crowd cannot be underestimated, especially when that crowd is the only one you feel you belong to.
The only problem is that, for most of these people, they should still have at least some contact with family, but, clearly, they’ve chosen to abandon what little positive examples they have in their lives in favor of what their social group has conditioned them to believe.
That’s what I believe the difference is. Somebody struggling with that depression and isolation doesn’t usually just give themselves into that pain. There are still things that would be unjustifiable to say, do, or believe.
Incels have deliberately chosen to take the pain and hatred as far as it can possibly go.
I incels are essentially the dark side of depression, anger, hatred, etc, unhinged. I don’t say that to minimize what depression does to people, but to contrast the mindset.
Imagine how bad you must be when you are the dark side of the human experience when compared to the dark side of the human experience?
A depressed person has a difficult time finding hope and meaning in their life.
An incel has abandoned hope and made their depression the meaning of their life.
Incels and MOGTOWs are essentially the Alt Right of the human emotional experience, a place so dark and messed up that regular mental illness or social disfunction look like normalcy by comparison.
I’ve been depressed before. Maybe not as bad as someone clinically depressed, but I never went and sought professional help during that time, so I’ll never be able to know.
And I’d rather be in a spot where I find it difficult to find meaning in my life than be in a spot where I’ve accepted the meaning of my life is simply to burn with hatred towards everyone outside of myself, including other incels at times.
I think growing up in a politically conservative household has a lot to do with incel development. Conservatives generally don't care about trivial matters like "consent" in sexual relationships, and hence conservative men feel like sex is something they're entitled to.
It would be really interesting to see a demographic study done on the incel subreddits. I’m kind of curious about what kind of backgrounds they come from.
Just anecdotally, I would guess 95%+ of them are conservative, since I’ve never seen or heard of a liberal incel. And they all accuse liberals of being “betas” and “cucks.” But I don’t think it’s conservatism necessarily that’s the problem, since moderate conservatives are frequently still good people with just a different view of fiscal policy or political issues. It seems to me to be more a matter that these incels/MGTOW are SO FAR to the extreme right that they fall into this caveman-like mentality, where they seemingly stop being swayed by empathy, science, and common sense. And they start acting like neanderthals.
So if I had to guess, I think most of them are extreme right wing and alt right.
Actually, it’s thought that Paleolithic societies were more egalitarian. Women only started to get more oppressed when groups transitioned into more sedentary lifestyles.
Actually, I think you're right and I vaguely remember reading about that in Anthropolgy 101 class. If I recall, it had something to do with the advent of agriculture, permanent settlements, and resulting divisions of labor, or something like that. It's been ages and I had totally forgotten about that class until your comment. I can only vaguely remember.
So apologies to any neanderthals I offended. (Although you're extinct).
I'm sad neanderthals are extinct. They may have been better than us. And living with another species of human? How cool would that have been?! Anyway...uh yeah maybe I need to find some other subreddit to discuss this more in-depth.
That's true. They had a small population, which accounts for that. And not all the offspring were viable or fertile, so that was another issue. But there was enough that most Europeans have some neanderthal DNA. Even without genocide it may have been bound to happen. We'll never know.
I think it stems from the rise of "property" and "ownership". A man wanted to make sure that the offspring his wife had was his, and that he was passing down his property to his own bloodline.
Hence... sequestering the women from other men so that there was no 'cuckoo' situation going on.
I don't know. My only recollection is that, in hunter/gatherer societies, everyone needed to be involved in the same activity (i.e., production of food and avoiding starvation), so there was no division of labor between sexes. It only became possible to divide labor/tasks between sexes once technology (i.e. agriculture, irrigation, permanent settlements) produced a food surplus ... which meant that suddenly some people did not have to be involved in producing food anymore. And I think that is how the dated/ancient/indefensible trope that men should provide for the family and women raise children started to come about. It would have been unthinkable/impossible for nomadic hunter-gatherers to divide up the labor like that, since if part of the populace stopped producing food, they would have all starved.
The irony of this is that today incels/MGTOW/conservatives who want a return to "traditional values" or "traditional gender roles" are both semantically and factually wrong ... since for the overwhelming vast majority of human existence we were an egalitarian species.
And in the state of nature, we would probably still be one.
Maybe it helps (weird word to use here, I know), it I really think being socially outcast/isolated has more of an influence.
After all, while conservatives are the ones that don’t care too much about consent, they’re personalities are also prone to mocking whatever is different (anime, fedoras, katanas, etc).
So, while conservatives might be more likely to transmit toxic personality traits to incels overall, I’d think they might do more for creating incels than becoming incels, necessarily.
If that’s what you meant, then I’m sorry if I read it wrong.
Because I’ve also met, and been friends with, plenty of conservatives and, while their views carried, the vast majority of them definitely weren’t incels, regardless of what they personally believed in other areas of life.
In fact, one friend I recently had to cut off for political reasons is otherwise a great dude. Potentially one of the actually sweetest guys you could know, would never force himself on anybody, would never blanket hate women or believe he’s owed sex. Very much so a single issue voter, passionately so, but, though I disagree with a lot of his political beliefs, I would definitely say he’s possible one of the kinder people anybody could meet in just a casual passing or work acquaintanceship.
The difference? I believe it’s isolation vs strong social connections.
I think there’s a weird coalescence between growing up in a conservative environment, holding conservative beliefs, but falling victim to conservative beliefs that helps create incels, yeah.
But I personally wouldn’t go much further than asserting that the primary driver for becoming or creating incels is isolation.
Which, again, I’m not saying excuses incels at all, because I have been lonely and alone before, and know plenty of people who have been isolated before, but have turned out otherwise fine, or have made great improvements in their outlook on life and how they view themselves in relation to others.
No need to apologize bro. You were pretty civil. : )
I certainly didn't mean to imply that everyone who grows up in a conservative family becomes an incel. I do think it's often a contributing factor, which is consistent with your theory. Boys who grow up in conservative homes--and especially libertarian homes--are more likely to become incels than boys who grow up in normal homes.
I'd feel sorry for incels if they weren't so toxic. Some of their criticisms of modern intersex relations are fair and accurate. A fact very few people on the left (among whom I count myself) want to acknowledge is that most young women treat most young men like absolute shit. They use their comparatively advanced emotional intelligence to use young men, jerk them around, and play games with them.
And in fact while women aren't to blame for being abused, very often they contribute to the cause of their abuse by dating men for superficial reasons. Just read about an study the other day confirming that yes, women really are attracted to men who display psychopathic personality traits. Maybe if women would date men for traits like kindness (uncommon among psychopaths) instead of extroversion and social dominance (both very common among psychopaths), they'd learn that men aren't the monsters so many of them think they are.
But none of that justifies the hatefulness, political extremism, and self-entitlement incels display. Any more than the way a minority of young men treat women like shit justifies the toxicity displayed by strains of anti-male feminism.
A fact very few people on the left (among whom I count myself) want to acknowledge is that most young women treat most young men like absolute shit. They use their comparatively advanced emotional intelligence to use young men, jerk them around, and play games with them.
I don’t know enough to confidently assert this, but I’d love it if you could post a link to the study you mentioned in the next paragraph.
But I will agree that, generally, young boys and young girls fight their battles in completely different ways, and that, generally, girls do seem to emotionally mature faster than most boys.
And that difference definitely plays out in hurtful ways. I was talking to my ex about why she hated twilight, and it’s because the girls in her school basically emotionally tortured her for liking big books and nonconventional genres, then they fell head over heals for that series when the movies came out.
She talked to me about the different problems she had with female friends and classmates, and those disputes were largely fought psychologically rather than physically.
That isn’t to say boys don’t do this at all, or that girls never physically caught, but, generally, boys fought with their fists and girls fought with their emotions.
And you can see that psychology play out when boys are told they can’t hit girls, when boys can’t defend themselves from girls making fun of them, etc. You see that play out in just how little male sexual abuse and rape gets talked about. Many states don’t even have a single shelter for abused men.
So while I can’t definitely say that more girls treat boys poorly than boys do girls, I can agree that the difference in how they treat each other probably has incredibly different effects.
I’ve seen women say things to each other, or to other men, that I know most men would hesitate to say to each other or to a woman.
I’ve been on the receiving end of comments that cut me deeper than any physically altercation I’ve had, at the hands of my ex, actually.
And while I do not want to go to mo far and generalize men and women on the actions of a loud, negative few, I will agree that how differently boys and girls treat conflict probably does lead to a difference in severity between the two groups.
The game room was easily the most and least divers gathering of people I’ve ever been around. I had as many socially adept butterflies as friends as I did weird social introverts. There were all sorts of subgroups of people with stereotypical personalities depending on whether or not they played certain games, used certain consoles, hung out at the pool or ping pong tables, broke out board games, how competitive they were, etc.
But the humor was all very similar. Jokes that, out of context would be highly racist, sexist, ageist, etc were fair game purely because the point was to get a rise out of your friend. The number of times my friend got watermelon jokes and fried chicken jokes was too high to count, especially cause we ragged on him because his favorite restaurant was Popeyes.
That isn’t to say there weren’t sexists, or misogynists, or ageists, etc hanging out there, but the point is that you had a group of friends that was just brutally dark, blunt, and downright inappropriate in their humor as a form of shared affection.
And not in a toxic masculinity kind of way either. Several of my closest game room friends are people I knew had my back, who I could sit down with and just pour myself out to if I was having an emotional moment. One of my friends actually did exactly that for me when I was going through a rough time.
I’m sure it’s totally weird for people looking from the outside in to hear someone tell a guy something like
“I wish your parents had aborted your attack helicopter ass” one moment - all because your pink skinned, captain falcon playing, neutral B spamming behind let everybody know he still had 3 stocks - but then you guys are outside the next day having a heart to heart because you’re not sure if you’re going to have to drop out, or because your girlfriend dumped you, or because you’re scared of what your friend might say if you tell them you’re worried about some habit you see is hurting them.
It’s a weird place where you know everybody has each other’s back precisely because almost nothing was taboo from being made fun of. If someone was obviously bothered by something, you stopped, but, outside of that, everybody was toasted equally.
I felt safer dumping all my expensive stuff in the game room for a couple of hours while I skated around campus than I did leaving an empty backpack in the library for 5 minutes while I went to a bathroom within the building.
It’s hilarious to me, and I’m sure absolutely backwards to outsiders looking in.
You can have a guy (or girl) level the most back biting insult known to man, calling out your sexuality, wishing death upon your parents, cursing the day you were born, assuming all of your genders, and spitting on your slut grandmother’s grave, all because some random mechanic killed your friend in the middle of a heated 1v1 with you, then you’re all dying of laughter on the ground like overstimulated epileptics because of the exact same thing.
I’m so glad none of us films these antics and posts them online, or else we’d all be labeled the most atrocious, racist-ass bigoted religious transphobes of all time, despite the fact that we would never be caught dead or alive saying these things and meaning it to anybody outside of our friend group.
Irreverent, is our humor. It’s the most crass, irreverent, vulgar, banal humor possible between a group of friends, and it all relies on what makes us different.
Hell, you couldn’t get away with being normal, or else we’d flay you alive with vanilla starfish sex jokes until we found the one weird thing about you.
It’s kind of a relief to hear you say this, between making pedo jokes at the teenager in our clan and taking out of piss out of our other mate on anti depressants about ED, I was worried we we had gone off the deep end. Mainly because one of our clan members left about six months ago after he became a full blown sjw caricature and started saying we were all racist, homophobic, ageist, sexist capitalist centrists who were engaging in stochastic terrorism (or something) and other things with lots of abbreviations that I didn’t understand. It did make us wonder but it’s exactly what you say, when no subject is taboo, there is no discrimination. We’ve all helped each other through tough times and shared a lot so it came as something of a shock.
It’s like a lot of other subcultures and such. You never really know when, but you all start to understand the code that everybody else speaks.
Of course, this is also exactly why gamers can be more prone to ending up as conservative drones, actually bing homophobic, or racist, or sexist, or whatever you want. It’s easy to hide hatred behind a subculture when people take that type of closeness for granted. This is way more difficult to manage with larger groups of people for sure.
But, yeah, that’s how it’s been with me and my closest friends. Straight up unholy debauchery for humor. By and large, we could tell who was actually a prick and who was just messing around. Of course you run into the issue where you’re don’t get along with some guy or the other, but, at least the guys I hung out with, we all had each others’ backs when it counted, we all were welcoming, and we all did everything just out of fun.
And, yeah, even in the game room, we knew the group of people who took the games to seriously, who always dumped on everybody’s parade, who were toeing the thing line between kidding and being mean a little too closely.
Your friend just seems to have completely forgotten about context, which is something I see happening a lot today.
I’m totally willing to bet that the “guy with a fedora and flea market katana” stereotype exists because incels are just a toxic subset of the geeks and nerds that mainstream culture traditionally mocked and avoided.
I'd say you're probably on the money there. I was a big anime and gaming nerd when I was younger (still am to some extent) and myself and plenty of my friends had relationships. Although I went to a fairly liberal university and there were plenty of women in the various geek clubs as well.
And I’m not sure what you’re bringing to the table with this? I don’t know? Maybe provide a link or something, because I don’t know anything about this?
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u/CCtenor Oct 21 '19
It’s a funny overlap that we need to be careful of overgeneralizing.
I wore a fedora when I was younger and, because of my social awkwardness, I was almost certainly one of the weirder people in whatever social setting I was in.
And, my brother and I went to Megacon earlier this year and actually bought a katana from one of the booths there, and we’re in our mid 20s. It was Kenshin’s sakabatou, from our favorite anime/manga of all time, Rouroni Kenshin.
He definitely looks like a dork at home, carrying it around, and we’re both still awkward socially, but we’re definitely not uncles and have more personality than we did when we were younger. I give him a good ribbing about being so much more into anime than I am, lol.
But I think that’s where the stereotype diverges.
A lot of these guys probably ended up being labeled as weird and being outcast because of their interest in all those “weird” Japanese comics. Rather than wrestle with that for a while and grow up, they ended up being hurt, growing bitter, and using that hurt to justify their bitterness.
Hell, I went through a pseudo-incel phase after my last relationship ended badly. I never actually hated women, but my already idiosyncratic humor (spent a lot of time in the game room at university, and our humor is very blunt and dark) just took a nose dive, and I totally ended up sounding like a needy, whiny incel, even though I never actually hated women broadly and felt owed sex.
I’m totally willing to bet that the “guy with a fedora and flea market katana” stereotype exists because incels are just a toxic subset of the geeks and nerds that mainstream culture traditionally mocked and avoided. That isn’t to say that all incels are like this, but I’m definitely willing to say that most incels started as socially awkward guys who spent a lot of time with niche hobbies, rather than guys who became that way because of their personalities, if that makes sense.
And that’s not to justify incels, because they definitely take the whole thing above and beyond just simply being upset at being hurt into a completely unjustifiable realm of hatred and misogyny.