A lot of contradictory thoughts here trying to unify on a very narrow path

The problem incels have isn't sex. No amount of sex workers will cure their issues.

They're angry because they're socially rejected - you can't buy your way out of that with infinity sex workers. They're especially angry because it seems so arbitrary: There are guys just as ugly who get laid. There are guys just as poor who get laid. There are guys who are bigger jerks that get laid. How do you explain to these guys why they aren't getting the validation they want when it seems like people doing the same things are getting validated? The anger is fueled by that; it's only barely about sex at all, and certainly not really about sex workers. Plenty of well-sexed men have gone on killing sprees.

This discussion is probably going to boil down to "do these guys deserve to be treated like shit or not". To me the better question is what are the mechanisms that create these guys in the first place? You can generally determine who's going to grow up to be an undatable dork well before kids are at an age where they're having sex to be angry about being denied in the first place. There's one in every classroom in America.

Some people are making the point not to say that sex workers should throw themselves on the grenade that is a rage-filled incel, of course I think any sex worker should be filtering out people who seem unsafe, and a lot of these incels would set off multiple red flags.

But incels identify themselves based on the fact that they're not getting any sex. But if it were just that, why wouldn't they just pay for it? It is, as you say, because it's not about their blue balls, it's about their entitlement and toxic behavior.

There is r/braincels which is the new area for these folks to post. But, if you just want to read the good stuff, look up r/inceltears. I learned about these people just a month ago and it's absolutely fascinating. It completely answers at least a third of Trump's support.

I think Sportlandia is correct here, though he skips over the fact that these men blame this on women & people of color (b/c there's crossover with these groups & white supremacists). It's bigger than just lacking social skills- it's the combo of that with entitlement & misogyny, etc. But otherwise I agree with Sportlandia.

What I disagree with is the idea that they are destined to be this way or that the rest of society needs to do something about it. They need to do what everyone else does- self-reflect, get hobbies, learn to talk to people (and listen), join social groups- generally they need to work on making themselves nicer and more interesting people.

And they need to approach people who are more likely to date them - there are plenty of lonely women out there, socially awkward women, nerdy women, etc - instead of obsessing over the Chads and Stacys of the world. Their heads are full of movies about the nerds getting the popular girl when they just stay pushy enough. They think they are entitled to whatever they want for no reason/effort. Also if you've spent some time on these forums, you'll find that they are obsessed over a pre-feminist patriarchal type society and yet they want the perks of this one. They want to fuck women who are sexually liberated, they don't want to be responsible for staying with one woman forever and having to be a breadwinner for the inevitable large family- it makes no sense. Dan is barking up the wrong tree here with the focus on sex work though he makes a lot of good points- what's going on here is fundamentalism. It's online radicalization from resentments - it's basically what ISIL does, etc- and we should've been taking it seriously for a long time.

And it isn't just sex, there's a strong pedophile presence in their community. There's a worship of female virginity, while hating male virginity, and a disdain for women past the age of 30. It would be unfair to not point out that a large sum of these people come from religious ideologies; the very same that lead to Dan's Pastor Watch, child rape in India, and the arranged marriages of Islam. For example, they have a similar few of sex as religious folks in that they believe that sex with multiple partners wears down the vagina. Mind you, if the woman only has sex with them, the vagina will remain virginal (aka that of a small child's).

Their jealousy goes full wacko when they begin to start rambling about how raising a daughter as a man means that you are the ultimate "cuck" and that father/daughter sexual relationships may be the most pure.

And we shouldn't assume that they're all white, there seems to be a very large Indian and East Asian population in their community.

@6 Yes it's a big segment of the alt right- at least the younger ones- as well as other parts of the manosphere. There's a crossover here between white supremacists, the resentful misogynists of all stripes (PUAs and MRAs and Red Pillers) and the Pepe types. I think it really got started around the GamerGate time.

"work on making themselves nicer"

Unfortunately, this just turns them into Nice Guys(TM) who go insane when a woman they've treated well doesn't automatically fuck the shit out of them. I would also argue there's probably a lot of overlap between the two.

"They want to fuck women who are sexually liberated"

While this is contradictory to what I stated just a sentence ago (sorry, these people ARE contradictory), I disagree with this. A sexually liberated woman is one who has already been ruined by Chad and, therefore, completely useless to them outside of orgasm. Hell, these are people who argue that a non-virgin woman is worthy of rape, and should be used so whenever an incel feels like having sex, because they obviously don't value losing their precious virginity with one of those poor incels.

They want to fuck other virgins, preferably those that are still in their teens. They're pedophiles who are too awkward to become pastors or priests.

Honestly, it's just entitlement at its most extreme.

"I think it really got started around the GamerGate time."

I'd argue to got started with the advent of 4chan (2003), honestly. You get the sense there's a lot of alt-right men in their late 30's/early 40's who grew up looking at the child porn that propagated /b/ and the dark web. That sense of freedom without consequences I think really created the narcissism we see on the alt-right. They want a world where they can consume child porn, drugs, and rape without the big bad ol' guvmint going after them. While, of course, harming those that don't abide by their moral-less society.

Also insert Ayn Rand somewhere in here.

No Bloated, I mean actually work on themselves. Awkward boring unsociable people can learn to be kind and interesting. It requires an actual period of honest self-reflection instead of blaming others. People can do this.

As for sexual liberation, I'm sorry I didn't explain myself clearly. I'll try again.

I don't want to name certain manosphere websites here, but there are plenty that glorify an era that (in their minds) was patriarchal and romanticised- when men had a stronger role in their communities, all had wives, etc. In the traditional and prefeminist cultures that they idealize, it is true that nearly everyone gets married- often it's arranged. And it is also true that traditional societies have a role for people that does not require such individualization- which can be alienating for a lot of people. So they romanticise this, and yes their feelings about virgin women and wives, etc fit in with this.

At the same time, they do not want the actual work that comes from that sort of society. They don't discuss how much they want to be a sole breadwinner for a huge family, for example, or how feminism came out of birth control and women's control of their bodies. They want the benefits modern liberation of sex from procreation/family so that they have a woman to fuck- but they want her to be the woman from a pre-feminist day- a virgin assigned to them. This is contradictory.

@3. My guess would be poorly modeled relationships/socialization skills from parents or a parent. Who else do you learn how to treat the opposite sex from?

I think Dan is right about the rage coming from an assumption of dominion over women’s bodies and the rejection involved in facing societal rules concerning that separation from reality. But the cause? Who knows. You’re right in that similar circumstances are common with varying results. I know hideous schleps who are crushing the tang and good looking men and women who can’t land a date to save their lives.

Probably part availability of a new fucked up forum, part garbage parental modeling, and part good old fashioned natural selection.

At any effect, you can’t predict this attitude and you probably can’t stop it by making sex work less stigmatized. If things continue on the current trajectory they will hopefully by swiftly forgotten by nature’s dipshit equalizing selection process.

I remember this handsome guy from SoCal in my freshman class. Tan, tall, gorgeous, but he asked a girl out, she said no, and he punched a hole in the wall. Right then and there. Word got out (fast!) and none of the frosh girls would have anything to do with him. I can hardly blame them. I don't know what made this otherwise smart (very competitive school) handsome guy so toxic, but the women were right to steer clear, because it was not the last time there was trouble.

I largely agree with your sentiment, Emma, in that they want a patriarchal society but I do feel that at least a subset of them do want to be the breadwinners. Many of these guys are techies, and religiously affiliated individuals, who already have enough wealth or a strong enough ideology to raise a nuclear family. Right now their money goes nowhere whereas a family would be something that would consume some of the emptiness in their lives. I'll also make it clear that I believe there is a good sized population of Mormons and Muslims who define themselves as incels; both religions that lean heavily on "virginity".

That said, I disagree that most of these individuals could actually change in a substantial manner, particularly those already in their 20's/30's. These are lost souls with innate perversions (again, pedophiles) who simply won't be able to find the kind of companionship they're looking for no matter how much effort they put in themselves.

Thanks for this, Dan. EmmaLiz also makes great points: Neither sex workers nor ANYbody owes these men, or anyone, their bodies, or sex, or their time, or a smile, even. If these guys are socially awkward, maladapted, or whatever the issue, they, like all of us, need to work on themselves to make themselves more interesting, more worldly, and therefore more appealing people overall. Take a fucking class, or 12. Learn an interesting hobby or sport. Learn to cook. Hike the Appalachian Trail. Learn another language. Learn to listen, and not just bloviate or preach. Stretch yourself as a human being for fuck's sake. Get out in the world and expose yourself to others different from you - other cultures, other people. There is also counseling to be more relaxed around others for social anxiety. There are drugs for this as well.

There is no guarantee in doing any of this that a supermodel will be on your arm at the other end, which is what these guys seem to believe they are entitled to, regardless of how far from models they are themselves. Regardless of how uninteresting or broke they are. Regardless of how much they instantly make women feel uncomfortable and I'm guessing unsafe, in their presence - the virulently misogynistic mask repeatedly slipping.

As Dan says, not everybody ends up coupled up. I know people who have been alone most of their adults lives who ended up alone and who died that way. It happens. These same people got involved in the world - took piano lessons, painting lessons, traveled, volunteered on political campaigns, volunteered at animal shelters, and at a hospital, met other people, and filled their lives with work and interests and adventure where they could find it.

One friend volunteered in the children's ward at a hospital. Wanna quit feeling bad for yourself? Want some perspective on how fucking lucky you are? Hang out with kids with terminal cancer. Check out what the nurses in these wards see and deal with every fucking day of their lives. Let alone the parents.

Everybody wants "The One" (and yes, I know Dan doesn't believe in The One and that we all must "round up"), but not everybody gets it. If that is unbearable to you, if the fact that you live in a rich, beautiful and healthy country like Canada or the US, such as the last two murderous "incel" guys did, instead of, say, Syria right now, is lost on your, then go ahead and kill yourself. Just do it. Or ... you can explore the world and enrich your life and yourself in other ways.

@3, I once heard from a straight man that "the goal of sex is not orgasm, it's validation from a woman," so I think you're onto something here. These men want someone to make them feel valued and desired emotionally, but are incapable of either doing that for themselves or for anyone else, and therefore always stymied.

Granted, these guys are probably largely too forgone to be redeemed - the very last people you'd want around sick kids - the last people willing to take something as "girly" as a painting lesson - but some of them maybe aren't. The sad thing is that the internet is undoubtedly aggravating the situation and keeping them stuck. These guys find each other and that's it - they are each other's true loves - total echo chamber in which confirmation bias rules their tiny worlds - not that they've ever heard of the concept - they spend all day reinforcing each other's entitlement tantrums and egging each other on. Fucking tragic. And completely needless.

Here's a question I have: Why is there no equivalent to this in the reverse circumstance? Why are there no series of women out there who are unsuccessful with men, who then use that as an excuse to go on a murderous rampage, after declaring that men are now going to have to pay?

Anyone? What is the answer to this? And what can be done to prevent it?

@12 it's before either. It's been around for a LONG time. Long enough that we all understood who 'Comic Book Guy' in the Simpsons was and that debuted in 1991, no explanation necessary: it was a trope everyone was familiar with; and has been with us since before any of us were born (see The Nutty Professor, the Jerry Lewis version; for a much earlier rendition of the same idea).

@20 The simple and short answer is that socially nobody really cares about men, at least to the extent that people care about women. Nobody wants the socially inept loser man or "creep" hanging around, especially the men who are successful with women.

As to what can be done to prevent it, again the short answer is nothing. And again the reason is that nobody really cares. Sadly I think there will be more situations like what happened in Canada; I also think this might explain classroom shootings.

I think Dan has done a good job threading together some seemingly contradictory thoughts that have been swirling around in my head.

No one is irredeemable, but you can only redeem yourself. If you've decided you're unlovable, no one can prove you wrong.

Unrelatedly, sex work should be immediately decriminalized and destigmatized everywhere.

I think part of the problem is that these men believe they're more intelligent, more good looking, and more interesting than they're actually are. They go after women who are beautiful and intelligent, and get resentful when they get turned down - Rodgers wrote on and on about how great he was, and how women were so stupid and vile for turning down dates with him, yet go out and have sex with "lesser" men. And instead of looking honestly themselves to see if they're doing anything wrong and creeping people out, decided that those women deserved to die for rejecting such great catches as they were. It's horribly twisted thinking. We need to find out how these men came to feel such entitlement, and to have such overblown valuations of themselves. I'm not sure the ones living in the incels pits can change. They don't believe that the problem is them. It's going to get worse, there's a recent article in the Post about how there will be 70 million more men than women in India and China within the next decade. Lots of lonely, angry, resentful and desperate men who can have no mates at all, ever. Even now there are millions of men in their twenties and thirties who've never had a date, who are desperate to marry. It's going to be very bad, violence against women will increase.

I appreciate your efforts to really grapple with the tensions in your commitments here. This is an intellectually honest and searching article. Coming from someone who often exhibits very high levels of moral confidence (sometimes well-earned, sometimes rather less so), it's refreshing to see.

Men believe they deserve access to women's bodies and that women exist only to serve their needs (smile! be pretty! suck my cock! feed my ego! make me feel good! take care of me!). Until we move beyond that and women are not just recognized as autonomous beings who owe men nothing, but are treated as such in every single way, will this bullshit end. I have zero sympathy for these males. And before I get lectured about how I need to understand them and sympathize with their plight, NO, actually I do not. Every single day girls and women are sexually, physically, and psychologically abused by men. Every single day girls and women are murdered by men who believe they have a right to women's bodies and souls and any female denying them deserves the violence they bring upon them. Enough bullshit. I am 1000% over men (and I am heterosexual). I have found peace and happiness living without them in my life (other than the male friends in my life who have been there forever and with whom there is no sexual element). I am sick of reading about the violence against girls and women on a daily basis, just as much as I am sick of reading about the violence against black people and other non-white people (children, men, and women) on a daily basis. #ENOUGH

@15: Other than a sore fist, it's no different than Scarlett throwing a vase across the room upon Ashley's rejection.

The issue with incels isn't that they can't have any sex. If it were, they'd just go to a prostitute once in a while. No, their complaint is that they can't have sex with whoever they want. They believe that sex is owed to them by Women (writ large), and paying for it (or making basic efforts to make themselves a more appealing date) would be a tacit admission that they aren't actually owed it. (After all, you wouldn't need to earn what is already yours.)

They're the other side of the coin from "pick-up artists", honestly. Incels never dip their wicks and pick-up artists sleep around constantly, but they're both miserable because they've been seduced by an ideology that ties their worth to how many women fuck them. Incels despair that they haven't scored yet, while pick-up artists (having tasted "success") constantly fear that they're not scoring high enough.

@27 While at the end of the day you have to redeem yourself, that doesn't also mean that there are those of us who need a lot of help along that road. I have severe major depression: there are times when I think I'm the shit of the earth, that I'm am justifiably unlovable because I have "hurt" everyone in my life. I'm on meds for it, have the support of friends and family, and do a shit ton of therapy. I'm very lucky in my circumstances that I'm able to do all that. Without that support, I might collapse utterly.

Now that doesn't mean I would become violent (most mentally ill people don't). Or that most of the MRA, Incel, Alt-Right, etc men suffer from mental illness. But certainly some do and some find the support they need in incredibly toxic places. As a society, we need to offer healthy supportive options (which would *also* help many more disadvantaged folk). Pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps doesn't work for everyone.

Why does this appear to be a syndrome that affects men only? Eventually, one has to blame most societies that still bring up little girls to be princesses and little boys to be ... emperor-kings - with inherent divine right to have everything, whether they have the money or skills or power or not. Girls learn to listen, to develop empathy, and to blame themselves if they're not successful ... while boys learn to love the sound of their own voices.

If a man has charisma (actor, musician, sports celeb), women flock to him. If a man has power and wealth but no charm (Weinstein, et al), he will coerce women to bend to his will (while deluding himself that women are naturally attracted to him).

I don't know whether to shrug or weep that I'd never heard the term "incel" until Monday. Or that there was such a large segment of disconnected male youth, rabidly eager to wage war against everyone they blame for depriving them of female companionship they deserve to have, because they're so much better than women - as they've been led to believe from the day they were born. But, deep down, they feel inferior and can only explode in rage resulting in murder and suicide.

I have to echo Kevin_BGFH @25, to say that I am really surprised at how well Dan connects all of this. And I'm downright shocked at the polite, further-illuminating discourse in the comments.

My faith in humanity is just a little bit renewed.

Good article, Dan. It's such a giant problem, what has happened to some western men. Then you look at how capitalism objectifies the female body, presents women as available, and it's just pervasive.
Our child rearing practices need to take the male child energy into account. I've had male children, they zoom and crash a lot. What of the emotional stunting that goes on. Unless they are gay, do boys share their vulnerable feelings with other males, like girls do with each other. Some of them are so straight jacketed by all these male rules, they get twisted. As we see.

Pigs are flying: I agree 100% with sportlandia @3

These guys don't just want sex; they want to be found attractive to women who aren't being paid to do so.
They want to be told in myriad ways that they're the boss. They want to be wanted; they want tp be loved.
This is much less about sex than it is about validation--about being wanted as a romantic and sexual partner.

Why don't lonely women do the same? There are plenty of them. Of us, I might say, though I have had lots of sex and some amount of love. I don't know, but I believe it is because women are socialized to turn anger inward where it turns into self-loathing, but also into depression and men are socialized to project that anger outward--to punish the ones who don't give the men what they want--what they believe they deserve.
Plus, depression in men often presents as anger or rage, not as weepiness as it does in women. But rage is incompatible with 'depression' which suggests sadness, so when a man goes on a rage-based tear, it seldom registers as depression.

For this reason, de-stigmatizing sex workers is unlikely to do much good with the angry "incel" community of rage-filled, entitled misogynists.

Though, for completely different reasons, I'm in favor of de-stigmatizing sex workers and of recognizing the good that they do. The disabled, the erectile dysfunctional, the socially awkward, and those who don't want emotional entanglements and who don't then look down on the sex workers that provide them such an important and intimate a service are who should be patronizing sex workers.
Guys like this need lots and lots of help beyond that which a sex worker can provide.

Strong case for keeping sex workers away from the wrong people.

While correct in its way, "we all pay" misses the mark. The point is that one's unique personal currency is being ranked as, say, the lire, against the francs and rands and marks and guilders and pounds and dollars of everyone else. Almost anyone (except perhaps Boy Mulcaster in Brideshead Revisited) can buy one's way out of a traffic ticket; the mark of value is to be able to talk one's way out.

It's everywhere around the world. This assumption within patriarchies that women be available to men. These guys have taken this core principle and run with it, down dark alleys.

I'd also like to point out that there was a self-proclaimed incel and libertarian running for office in Virginia who has pushed for lowering the age of marriage, promoted father/daughter incest, was arrested for threatening GWB, and is a convicted pedophile.

reddit com/r/IncelTears/comments/85h00e/hes_a_congressional_candidate_in_virginia/

Joseph James DeAngelo= the original incel

This isn't limited to straight guys. Remember the Pulse shooter?

My son is a kinda lonely, underemployed, white guy who spends a lot of time on the internet, gaming, in the sci fi community.

So one of the thing he has to put up with is these assholes thinking he's one of them - they reach out to him a lot. As Dan points out, not everyone who is involuntarily celibate is an incel, just as not every white guy who isn't doing as well financially as he'd like to be doing is a resentful racist.

I don't know what makes the difference - what makes some people become incels and some just kinda lonely and sad. But my gut feeling is that growing up in a suburban shopping mall chain store culture is in there, somewhere. That it's somehow borne of a life spent consuming only cheap pop culture and cheap fast food. I've got no data to base this on, but it feels like a phenomena of people who have never had anything in their lives that was authentic and good.

Endemic problems require endemic solutions. It's easy to blame these men, and in each instance they should be held accountable. But the solution does not lie with individual men changing. Our society produces these men in large quantities. The problem is in our culture (entitlement plus lack of opportunity = kaboom). If there is a solution, it needs to happen there at the root, not way down the line blaming individual men, good though that may make so many feel.

I don't agree with the idea that incel = violence. If this were the case, we'd have mass murders being committed by scads of 14- and 15-year-old boys. Few humans are as sexually-charged as boys at this age and most aren't getting much action.

Rather, I think men like Sodini and Rodgers killed because they were seriously mentally ill -- and their "incel" status came out of their disposition. Most people don't feel comfortable being intimate with someone who is "off" -- as these men appeared to be -- so the mentally disabled become as lonely as the physically disabled.

A lot of manosphere concepts are interesting as ideas, but don't quite hold up when you step back and look at the world a bit. "Incels" is one.

Chiming in with the others that say women "incels" don't go on shooting sprees, because it's not the lack of sex that's the issue. The issue is male entitlement and rage at being told you don't get what you feel entitled to. Some men are raised to believe that they should be granted a personal "woman unit," as a basic right (in their preferred model and with their preferred accessories) and so get furious when it turns out their choice of 'woman unit' actually has the right to say no.

Women aren't raised to believe they're entitled to have a man of their choice. On the contrary, if you don't have a man, something's wrong with you - you need to lose weight, be nicer, lower your standards, spend more on clothes/hair/makeup, wax your pussy, and suck better dick (but not too well or too soon, or he'll think you're a slut and dump you). Accordingly, there's no rage at being denied something they feel entitled to. The female version of MGTOW is just peace-ing out to live on a farm with your lady friends and raise goats.

Raindrop @31:
1. No, a skinny bitch in a corset throwing a vase is way less threatening than "I'm big enough to easily injure you and I get very punch-y when denied."

2. Scarlett is a terrible person. Well, she's a complicated person, but she's undeniably a terrible wife - to all 3 of her husbands (doesn't she get one killed?) and you'd be well advised to steer clear of her as well.

3. She's fictional. Like, that's not comparable to a real-live person.

Learning a lot of new words today.

That being said, socially rejected men lashing out violently is nothing new, and any attempt to blame internet culture or 4chan is just laughable. New communication methods merely spawn new vocabularies: the underlying issue remains the same.

At the root of it, you just have a lot of untreated and likely unrecognized mental illness/depression. I would bet if you looked at the number of these types of men who commit suicide versus those who commit violence, you would see a bit of a "tip of the iceberg" effect.

These men think that no one cares about them, and they are right.

I'm a woman. When I was trying to find a date and men were declining, I decided they were much more picky than advertised. The thing of men being willing to fuck any woman, no matter how ugly, who made herself available must be a lie. I wasn't offended by this. If anything, it was sort of reaffirming of my faith in humanity that they were as discriminating as any other gender.

My response to this wasn't to get angry at men or society. It was to advertise myself harder, go to more events, talk to the women who had male companions about how they got them, and get bolder and faster about asking men out. I never felt entitled to male attention. I figured I was 40, ugly, overweight, nerdy, short, not very emotive/hard for people to read, intimidating, had two kids, was recently divorced, and a bunch of other reasons why guys passed. They had reasons. I cast my net wider. The simple bait of no-strings-attached pussy was not going to get me action.

Contrast that to incel attitude and activity. It's anecdotal, but I doubt my approach is all that different from other women. It never occurred to me to try pickup artist techniques, negging, stalking, or aggressively confronting men to try to corner them into sex. Nor ranting about how much men sucked or how 'the good old days' were better and men today were a bunch of degenerates not worthy of my pussy.

Great article, Dan, thanks. I'm very happy that sex work is legal where I live and that I know some wonderful sex workers because without them I don't know if I would have any sex at all.

Dan, your article was fantastic. I am one of those people who had never heard of “incels” before the tragedy in Toronto, and I kind of wish I never had. But as an attractive heterosexual woman with plenty of experience with men, I wish to point out that a LOT of men get upset/violent/mean when they are rejected. And not just “incels”- I mean seemingly normal men who had wives, girlfriends and plenty of sexual partners. Even still, there’s probably a 25% chance that when I go out with a guy once or twice and decide not to pursue things further, or even when I don’t date them in the first place for some reason even though they seem “normal, the guy will get mad/ say something mean, become psycho/stalkerish or otherwise be shockingly aggressive and horrible. None of this has risen to the level of assault or murder vis a vis my rejected suitors, but the rage is so close to the surface, it’s scary. And I’m in DC, dating educated men with center to left political leanings. Even those guys feel entitled! It’s a big problem.

I think another issue is that some of these men see women who have casual sex as slighting them when they choose to have sex with others ("Chads") rather than them. They put this down to a formula (women only want guys who are 6'+ tall with strong jaws and a certain size dick and lots of money and who treat them like shit, etc.) and therefore they can never win because they lack one or more of those things in the winning formula. They don't think of women as complex beings who most often don't enjoy sex unless they are attracted to and aroused by a specific guy for whatever set of influences. They can understand that their dicks don't get hard for every woman on the planet but they consider women more like receptacles who can more consciously choose their partners with no regard to attraction or arousal.

There's also the issue of boys and girls from a very young age being trained to empathize with men through books and other media. Women's stories are seen as chick flicks. Men's stories are seen as human stories, appealing to both genders. Women are then seen as supporting characters or mysterious "others" and can be resented or misunderstood for having their own needs.

As Dan and others here have rightly pointed out, the first thing is that you cannot lay the blame for this on Feminism. Woman getting ahead, women pulling equal, women who wish to completely smash the current social and cultural system and rebuild it closer to their own vision are not in any way responsible for this. Do men sometimes lose something in those bargains? Yes; that's the way it goes in a society. Instead, this is a public mental health issue that only appears to some to have a political dimension.

When Dan uses the analogy of physical handicaps to describe the sometimes hellish psychological and emotional lives of some of these guys, he's right on target. We stigmatize mental health and disability issues so much, that few people take full account of BPD or Aspergers or schizophrenia or severe depression or any number of other problems for the debilitating conditions that they are. There are people in my family who suffer from these things, and believe me they can no more smile or grit their way out of it than a quadriplegic can magically arise from a wheelchair. To them, normal social interaction is what a two-foot-high curb can be to a physically disabled person. The overwhelming majority (99.999...%) of these guys will never turn violent and hurt anyone – except themselves sometimes – but the ones who do are an issue for society.

What can we do? Unfortunately, sometimes therapy can go only so far. Rodger was getting therapy and had worked with a life coach before his rampage, and clearly it stopped nothing. There are psychiatrists who will tell you there are no real treatments for autism spectrum. Other disorders are sometimes hit or miss as far as improvements. It is an utterly heartbreaking thing to watch and sadly, like other mental health problems, it sometimes spills over into the wider world and hurts others.

Those who have pointed out that sex is only a partial component of this are correct, I think. Yes, some of these guys hate women. But some of these guys hate their bosses or colleagues, some of them hate their families, some of them hate politicians or celebrities, some of them hate their classmates, and those groups of people also get harmed by random acts of violence when young men lash out driven by mental health troubles.

Somehow it just feels or seems worse in those cases when women are targeted, but I think it all stems from a similar molten frustration and anger that works through whatever cracks it finds first. It may be that the incel movement and the misogyny that fuels it is just one head of a hydra that slithers through the entire cultural landscape with seemingly no real explanation and no true cure.

Oh hey. It's not often that my experience is relevant to anything. 39 years old man attracted to women, have not kissed one yet never mind anything closer than that.

So, as Dan says it's hard to compare this problem to anything else. I don't have any experience outside living this way so even describing how things are different is difficult, but I'll do my best.

It's true that I'm not very happy most of the time. I wish that I didn't have any such desire, it's very distracting and interferes with my ability to concentrate on other things some times. Especially when I'm dealing with women face to face, it takes effort to put that aside and stay friendly or professional or whatever else is needed at the moment instead of just shutting down. I understand that's sometimes a problem for people not in my position, people who are happily married or whatever else. So I can't say whether this issue is any more severe than normal.

I think nocutename is right, the idea that haunts me is that of a woman who wants to have sex with me solely because it would make her happy. Nothing else appeals to me, hence I'm not inclined to hire anyone.

Getting through daily life requires spending my time on more basic problems. I have trouble interacting with people in general, it's exhausting and terrifying. As long as I'm taking steps to work on things from that viewpoint i'm pretty much okay. Therapy helps, medicine helps, being distracted helps. Apparently that's why I'm reading an advice column like this. Ah well. Can't help being curious.

I think that's about it. It's not on anyone else to fix or cope with these problems. The only reason I'm sharing this is to try and explain that it is indeed No Fun but it's still possible to go through life without taking it out on other people. There's no need for that.

@51 CosmicPrincess Thank you for putting into words what I was thinking too. I'm also an attractive woman on the east coast and I've had similar, scary experiences like what you're describing. Many men take out stress on women and although I've also been fortunate that it never escalated to physical violence, there have been some scary men in my life. I feel like the problem isn't at all isolated to sex workers. Violence against women is an issue that doesn't discriminate, although I understand that sex workers are probably at a higher risk.

Also I would like to add that most of those supposed incels could probably find sex online without that much difficulty, either with sex workers or regular women, but would be unwilling to make an effort. Guys like that (who hate women) feel as if they deserve to date women who are way out of their league. Rather than improve themselves at the gym or at school, they blame society. They don't want to date the women that are on their level and would probably reject some suitable partners due to age, weight, looks or other superficial reasons. The reason a guy like that gets repeatedly sexually rejected is he's not interested in the types of women that would respond positively to him. Even the shlubbiest men with foul hygiene, poor manners and bad social skills believe they deserve to be with a bikini model.

n/m

I'm an old lady who hasn't had sex since my husband died 5 years ago. So that makes me an "incel" and I get to drive my car into a bunch of nubile young men to make myself feel better? Wow, that's not quite how I envisioned "dealing with it" but guys make it look so ... nah, they don't.

2nd thought: nature is rife with incels: males not strong or determined enough to kick the shit out of other males to gain access to the breeding females. So buck up, incels, you're just nature's losers. Join the club.

#55, bingo. You nailed it.

@girliegams and CosmicPrincess: No doubt you're experiencing a common enough phenomenon, but I don't think that all rage-filled "incels" who go on killing sprees or talk about the best way to rape or kill on 4Chan are overweight shlubs with greasy hair and bad breath who think they should be able to date a bikini model.

Look at Elliot Rodger: The guy was young, pretty good-looking, wealthy. He had access to things that would make him attractive to people. But for some reason, he was unable to find a girl or woman to want him. Maybe he suffered from crippling insecurity and/or shyness. There are plenty of lonely men (and women) for whom that is the reason they're alone. But from what I've read, it was something else.

And, as others have noted, not everyone who is lonely and lacks sexual experience is going to be attracted to the misogyny and rage that characterize the incel movement. There's something else there. Regdren @54 shared his struggles and made it clear that he doesn't want to rape and kill the women who would prefer "Chad" over him.

Yes, there's male entitlement. And the fact that depression frequently manifests as anger in males. And a sort of sour grapes cum rationalization about why they lose out to all the "Chads" of the world. But there's also something extra that makes these men fantasize about acts of violence. There's something in them that presents itself in such a way that women steer clear of them, even if they are young and nice-enough looking and rich. Rodger should have been an "Alpha," but from childhood, there was something noticeably wrong with him; he'd been in therapy much of his young life.

It's like Nikolas Cruz--the kid that killed all those people at Stoneman high school in Florida: people could see he had problems. He'd been identified as a risk for years beforehand: he was violent and erratic and seemingly motivated by hate. It's just that his hatred was more broadly directed than that of "incels" and not motivated by or blamed (solely) on sexual rejection.

I think someday we'll be able to find out what is going on in the brain chemistry that leads to this behavior, but it seems to me that a far greater problem is that thanks to the unregulated Internet and various social platforms, people like this have the opportunity to find others who will stoke and fuel their anger and rage. They form communities who glorify murderous rampages and the murderers. They invent jargon to give them an identity and a sense of group identification. They exchange ideas for killing. They get support for their murderous fantasies.

In the same way that some angry kids have turned Eric Harris and Dylan Kelbold into heroes to be emulated, others have turned Elliot Rodger into their martyr and role model. It's a difference of degree perhaps, but not necessarily a difference of kind. In any case, I think that the copycat nature of these crimes and the sense of shared identity should be examined and the forums for such would-be killers dismantled. We need vigilant watchdogs to address this problem.

I feel like we're talking about two closely-related but separate groups of people:

There are the lonely lovers; and the angry haters; with the former being fertile recruitment grounds for the later.

I think there is something in male biology (ed: its seems overwhelmingly obvious) that makes us more prone to using violence. On the other hand, humans are one of very few known species that uses any alternative to violence.

In addition, we should stop using virginity as an insult.

@10 - I would suggest you're using "capitalism" in two different senses of the word. The first part, you rightly point out that systemic capitalism thrives on alienation and commodification. But I also think that capitalism is a way that we as organisms behave* - we exchange what we can offer for what we get for it. Many, perhaps most, of us are (at least sometimes) fortunate enough to experience intimacy and relationships in a way that isn't strictly transactional, but even then, there are transactions and exchanges within our friendships, marriages, acquaintanceships, one-night stands, professional associations, artistic collaborations, etc. I don't think it's inherently ignoble for a party to voluntarily enter into a formal or informal contractual agreement to exchange intimacy for currency; it's not something I would do on either end (at least, I've never had to, and can imagine few situations wherein I would), but I don't see how it's fundamentally different than when I accept money to work out with a client or perform in a play for an audience. It's when we tie human value (to say nothing of one's ability to access food, shelter, health care) to one's ability to navigate or succeed within markets, when we make these exchanges the center of our ecosystem, that we create alienation - that capitalism becomes violence.

* - The same is true for socialism, of course; taking care of the members of one's tribe is as intrinsic a part of our social existence as the exchange of goods, services, favors, or niceties.

"and they're not human shields".
Sorry Dan, gotta correct you on that small point. I was a sex worker for twenty years and I must inform you and your friends, HUMAN SHIELDS IS PRECISELY WHAT WE ARE. Yes, we DO exist solely for the purpose of absorbing mens' hatred and frustration. Any sex worker who doesn't see that is a tragically deluded piece of meat who thinks she's an invited guest to the fancy dinner party, when she's actually the main course. It's as pathetic as the men who refer to themselves as "gentlemen" while they're purchasing cheap pu$$y from mentally ill women.
I really really appreciate all the effort to pretend there's some kind of dignity possible within that business, but as an outsider, you're only seeing the way your friends delude themselves about their work, not the day-to-day psycholological manipulation and degradation they endure from their clients. Take it from a sexworker who survived it for twenty years and can now see it clearly for what it is; there is NOTHING human or dignified about the sex industry, and if your friends who are sex workers pretend there is, they're just feeding you the same line of bullshit they feed their "clients". Believe it.

That might be the best column you've ever written, Dan. Chiming in with those who are unhappily single. I'm a 40 year old New Zealander, who currently lives in the UK. I haven't had a relationship in ten years. One of the reasons I moved to London was I thought I might have more luck in a country with a bigger population. Nope, just more men that weren't interested. Do I take this out on the world, with a gun? No, I'm just going to keep getting out there and meeting people, and hopefully I'll meet someone eventually. I think of myself as a female version of the narrator of Michael Buble's 'I Just Haven't Met You Yet'. I think those who point out women are not brought up with the sense of entitlement towards men have hit the nail on the head.

This is a gross article for a lot of reasons, but particularly this analysis:

"One way to de-stigmatize sex work: the rest of us, those of us who don't "have to" pay for sex, could acknowledge this awkward truth: we all pay for it. We don’t all pay cash but we all pay. All sexual and romantic relationships involve an exchange. In most cases the goods (sexual and/or emotional) exchanged for services (sexual and/or emotional) are intangible or physical and the exchange is roughly value. (Or we convince ourselves it is.) It's a barter system. I give my husband emotional, social, and sexual support and attention in exchange for the same from him. If we weren’t both "paying in" emotionally, socially, and sexually, our relationship would collapse."

Honest question for Dan: if your husband withdrew all emotional, social, and sexual "payment", and instead just started paying you cash for you to fuck him and listen to him talk about his day, would you really consider that to be an equivalent healthy relationship to your current marriage? No? Then maybe love, friendship, and mutual respect aren't simply commodifiable stand-ins for cash as this article would seem to imply.

Western child rearing practices are not about creating healthy adults, otherwise those first most important five years of everyone's life would be focused on with vigour. Capitalism feeds the individual to look after no one, not the group. Families of old are broken, and we have everywhere isolated nuclear families or single parent families, where some mighty weird behaviours can go on under the pressure of modern life.
You can't look at how these sorts of men are formed without looking closely at how they were reared. How much of this hatred is misplaced rage with their mothers?

Also, this debate is stupid and shows how little most of you, including Dan, actually know about incel culture. The fact is, these so-called "incels" DO visit sex workers with great frequency. They just don't consider it to be "real" sex because they don't believe sex workers are "real" human beings.
Many men who call themseves "incel" are actually men who many women find acceptable as partners; the "incels" are simply so mentally ill and consumed with misogyny that they think any woman who is not a perfect 13 year old virgin "doesn't count" as a viable partner for them. Most men who call themselves "incel" are, in fact, NOT EVEN REALLY CELIBATE. They just hate women so much that they insist that the sex they have with women who are less than perfect "doesn't count."
They are mostly self-hating homosexuals-in-denial who hate themselves so much for being gay that they can only function socially through their projection of that self-hate onto women.
Perusal of their chatrooms will quickly inform you that these men literally believe that the only people on the planet worth having sex are MEN (because women are all subhuman filth).
These are just frustrated homosexuals who are struggling with coming out

@33. Help helps. I'm getting help right now. Everyone should get help without stigma or financial hardship. Help is often necessary. But help is never sufficient.

Actually, cash is a perfectly acceptable substitute for all the creepy emotional gobbledygook you just mentioned.
At the end of a long day of dealing with mens' petty stupid bullshit, it feels MUCH better to be alone & rewarded with a big pile of cash that you can spend freely by yourself, as opposed to the lingering presence of your fat husband, who only ever rewards your patience with more of his smelly feet, bad breath, and piles of skidmarked underwear for you to wash.

Prostitution may be nauseating, but only a needy idiot would find marriage preferable. Yuck.

@68 I'm in basic agreement, but be careful. If you follow the path, you'll come to the conclusion that industrial society is the fundamental problem, and that humans shouldn't be living in large social groups. From there, you're a hop-skip-and-jump away from some Khmer Rouge Year 0 Ideology. History is replete with attempts to purge the wickedness from humanity. After all these years, they're still batting .000!

My last comment was @67,, I thought that would show up as a "reply" and not have to be entered manually, but whatever.

Maybe RBF, homosexuality is a factor. Lots of forces creating these monster men.
I read somewhere that a woman made up the term incel to express how she was feeling, and these creeps have co oped it.

Also, Dan: "destigmatizing sex work" and "telling men who pay for sex that they aren't monsters" will not help the situation one iota.
Because the men who patronize the sex industry ARE monsters, and they were monsters long before it ever occurred to them to purchase sex. They are all monsters whose favorite game is trying to convince everyone that they're "nice guys" (the memetic definition of "nice guy" applies here). Bottom line, there are no nice guys purchasing sex because nice guys don't do that to women; only "nice guys" do that to women. Trust me, I lived the delusion that you're promoting, of the "dignified sex worker" for twenty years; now that I'm no longer financially dependent on it I am free to admit, it's a complete LIE. There is no such thing as a dignified sex worker who services nice guys, because there are no nice guys who participate in that industry, and dignity is not allowed.

@73,
Yes, many factors, but the primary one being that these men's social ineptitude did not cause their mental illness. It was their pre-existing mental illness which caused their social isolation, not the social isolation which caused their mental illness. Most men in online online incel forums are legally/medically mentally disabled due to autism and other various personality/character disorders,and I'm just gonna go ahead and say it, PSYCHOPATHS.
A person who is even halfway mentally or emotionally healthy does not respond to loneliness with hatred, or murder. And Dan's column is just a thinly-veiled misogynistic attempt to make women responsible for these mens' mental illness by implying that if men just had more sexual access to women, maybe they wouldn't be so hateful. IT'S TOTAL BS.
Dan has been a self-proclaimed "expert" on human sexuality for so long that he now believes his own BS.

@75 therapy

@75 therapy only works for people who want to get better. Incels and men who patronize the sex industry have already decided that the only way to "help" their situation is by killing and degrading women, so any attempt they make at therapy is just a deceptive effort to perfect their ability to manipulate others.

Sorry, comment 77 was actually @ 76 for Sportlandia.

@62 you are correct that men have a physiological predisposition toward hatred and violence. Men are full of testosterone, which will overload their system and make them insane if it isn't tempered by a corresponding hormonal neurotransmitter, oxytocin. And mere sex does not produce enough oxytocin to compensate for the overage of testosterone; sex *without love* produces almost no oxytocin, which is why banging hookers does not make men feel better, it only produces more frustrated testosterone and makes them hate women even more.
So, again, more sex is not the answer for these guys. And love is just a temporary delusion induced by the presence of oxytocin, so it only controls their behavior temporarily. Eventually their mental illness reasserts itself and merely distorts the influence of the oxytocin into its most negative manifestations of jealousy and territorialism.
I spent twenty years trying to convince myself that men would be nicer people if they just had safe ways to ease their sexual frustration; but in twenty years of providing men with a safe release for their sexual frustration, I never met one guy who was actually a nicer person because of it. It only makes them feel even more entitled, and their behavior even more monstrous.

@69
I would bang your brains out right now if I really thought it would help you feel better.
But it wouldn't.
And I'm done with that gig. I'm done trying to help.

@66
Your post breaks my heart, because you're pining for something that would only eventually make you miserable if you had it. Do you want to end up in a relationship with a man who seems loving and kind and docile and caring most of the time, but who calls up and pays a woman like me for kinky sex the minute your back is turned? A man who is in my apartment , paying my bills with your household funds, telling me I'm beautiful while he tells you he's at work, or at the dentist? Because that's what you're gonna end up with if you ever get the relationship you're pining away for. Don't fall for the lie that society promotes just to keep people stupidly breeding; focus on loving yourself, because it's the only love that any human ever gives honestly. If you want a broken heart, keep looking for a man. If you just need a cuddlebuddy, get a cat.

@54 You sound like a genuinely emotionally intelligent person who has a very strong understanding of a very difficult situation. I wish you the best of luck in your future and deeply wish the "incels" we speak of had the same wisdom as you.

@55
Yup. Warthogs think they deseve to be with unicorns.
Also BDD is a huge factor. 90% of men I've met who think of themselves as incels are actually average-to-good looking and don't really have trouble getting laid at all, their self-perception is just genuinely so distorted that any time a woman likes them, they project their own self-hatred onto her and tell themselves she only likes him for his money (they're usually broke and not generous at all btw) or because she's stupid, slutty, etc.
Also just pure dishonesty is a huge factor in all this "boo hoo no women want me!" BS; guys can actually pull a ton of sex from naive, well-meaning women by pretending to mope and feel sorry for themselves. Never throw a cute, mopey, self-pitying guy a mercyf@ck because you genuinely like him and want to make him feel better; the truth is he's using that same ploy with every woman in town and getting more @ss than a toilet seat. Guys who cry the most about how they never get laid are usually the ones getting the most sex because they've figured out that crying and seeming pathetic will make women give them the pitysex (I used to be the queen of the naive pitysex, it was pathetic).

@68 I've seen many an incel wish their mother would fuck them and get it over with.

@77 I think they meant therapy for you. You're just about as insanely deranged as the incels themselves, casting aspersions on other sex workers and severely disabled men who require sex work (as described in the article). Hell, your hatred of men seems to be on par with incels' hatred towards women.

Seriously seek therapy, you severely need it.

@85
I'm so sorry that knowledge kindly bestowed on you about the reality of a situation you have no understanding of was a waste.
I envy you your ignorance, little one. It must be so blissful for you. Enjoy it.

Oh, just saw this:

i. redd .it/51dmklukv8u01.jpg

This screed is the basic value system for incels.

@87 Oh, I assure you that I prefer to listen to the countless other opinions from sex workers who don't seem nearly as in need of help as you.

@32 Have to disagree, the reason those who can't find romantic/sexual partners don't 'just go to prostitutes' is that they are not missing sex (or even principally missing sex), but rather romantic intimacy and validation, the feeling of being wanted or desired. Paying for it doesn't really help with that any more than masturbation.

@82
Pansack, I adore your posts, so I really hope you're not a man, or my love for you may thwart Bloated Jesus' attempts to label me a "man-hater", and I'm really trying to be worthy of my new title. Hugs!

@89
You mean the sex workers who are still financially obligated to pretend they enjoy their piggish clients' monstrous attention, else they risk losing their income?

LOL, Ok John.

@92 Browsing r/inceltears I found this post:

i. redd .it/zrq73gqhe9u01.png

I find it aligns very well to your own posts in sentiment.

In addition, if not taking the opinion of an admitted naive idiot above others' experiences, both in the business and retired, makes me a "John" does that mean Dan is a "John" or all the other people on the Stranger, with far longer posting histories, "Johns" as well?

But let's be honest, you're either a bitter, lonely old woman or an incel committing some very convincing trolling.

This is worth reading:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/26/opinion/when-misogynists-become-terrorists.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

At first glance, nocutename, I feel a lot of these fucks enjoy being called mysoginist (he'll, conservatives in general, I think only a centrist or liberal would consider that title a negative) so I feel "mysoginist terrorist" is a little too... lacking in impact. I think turning around the terms they throw and using it against them is, while likely deemed less credible, more substantial to the overall view of these people. Manlet terrorism, incel terrorism, alt-right terrorism, or something similar. Using things the right have decided to embrace (Nazi, racist, KKK, mysoginist homophobe, transphobe) instead of directly pointing out that this is a movement of the inferior is a problem.

I think the lack of proper syntax and, therefore, ability to understand complex and contextual constructs places pansack outside of logical or discerning discourse.

Of course, if you're a meth head, the points of a well aged white man or woman would make sense. How else would you assume someone like myself, a person who posted info showing incels being pedos...

They're the same person, aren't they?

Love

I think there is no solution for Incels because it's not one problem it's many. Some of these guys are severely mentally ill. Some might well be burned out after years of abuse and rejection. Some might be kids being taken advantage of, some might be trolls.

Destigmatizing sex work will help a lot of problems, but fixing the Incel community isn't one of them. We need things like comprehensive medical care, and acceptance of women as people for that happen.

[People who can't get sex are often told that sex and intimacy aren't like air or water—a person deprived of air isn't going to live for very long but no one has ever dropped dead as a result of being deprived of sex.]

I get Dan's point. You won't die without sex but doing without it can make life a lot less fun, but I wonder if there is some truth to this. That were not always going to get what we want and we have to make peace with that. And that society put so much pressure to have sex and then punishes them for having the 'wrong' kind of sex.

The woman who likes sex is a slut, the woman who doesn't like sex is frigid. The man who wants a monogamous romantic relationship is a wimp, the man who wants to screw as many women as possible is a jerk. Even the Incels who visit sex workers don't believe that the sex had 'counts'.

Maybe that's what we have to fix. The warped view on sex and the eternally moving goalposts we expect people to chase.

Legitimization of sex work is a good idea.

The phrase "socially disabled" needs to be placed in a deep hole, and then lit on fire. That community already likes to use the language of disability to describe its "situation" and justify its unreasonable demands and opinions. People should not buy into that perspective or play into it either.

If there are things that *are* disabilities that cause someone to be awkward (like severe anxiety, etc.), then the focus should be on assisting the entire population, in the context of the actual issue, not pandering to the subset of that population that is murderously angry because it can't get it wet.

(And I guarantee that minus the overt, hostile misogyny--most of those dudes have a better chance at a sound dating life than I do, for reasons that are a lot less amenable to personal modification. Amateurs.)

@97 - I think you're on to something there. I had the same thought when pan popped up outta nowhere. I don't usually see him on Dan's posts, so I thought it a little odd. The only quibble is that he may come in and drop one or two cryptic little notes, so the unhinged post after post after post that RBF is doing is a bit uncharacteristic.

Dan, maybe a lot of readers expect pithiness and directness from professional writers, but as a lover of mental gymnastics, the exquisite agony of trying to say precisely what you meant to say, this was *beautifully* done.

Also, as a human factors professional, when it comes to people becoming hateful in a patterned way at a rate of, say, higher than half a percent, or doing harm in a patterned way at a rate over 1 in 100,000 harms done, ranting "people need to suck less" or any variant thereof *just isn't gonna work*. System fixes, sensitively identified and addressed, at least have a chance. Your gorgeous column makes clear you understand that.

Hmmm this incel shit's nothing new and honestly I remember the days when the internet was populated by pretty much only people like that. Personally I think this issue has nothing to do with sex workers. Sex work should be legal and destigmatized but it's really got nothing to do with this incel crap. These people are totally socially fucked. They don't view women as people. They're not much different than pedophiles and honestly I don't think they could really even learn differently at all without really changing the entire way they look at the world. They've dehumanized women to the point of being less than objects. That's not an easy thing to change. Once you've dehumanized someone it's not easy to see them as people again. They don't mind killing or hurting because to them who they're killing and hurting aren't even people.

Just look at soldiers who've fought in wars, most of them never really see the 'enemy' as people again. These dudes have turned women and even some other men into 'the enemy' and most of them won't be changing that point of view any time soon.

Hey, I know, lets shit on autistic people, because even though we're not to blame for you norms being mean to one another, that's no reason not to crap on us, right? Autists are powerful. Don't expect our help any time soon.