Is Incel New? Tinder, Orwell and the Scourge of Sexual Disenfranchisement

Truth? What is Truth?

In the wake of the Alek Minassian massacre in Canada, the lamestream media has just ‘discovered’ the incel (involuntary celibate) phenomenon.  One question that haunts me is: Is the incel phenomenon new?

There are two broad perspectives on this:

1. Younger men seem to think incel is fairly new and that earlier male generations generically experienced more sex because of socially-imposed monogamy. Also, looks-orientated social media such as Tinder have excluded uglies, manlets and ethnics from the mating market as never before, while boosting female hypergamy to insane levels.

2. Older men broadly think that incels have always existed and that the recent incel explosion is a myth created by social media. That is, that incels have only now been allowed to express their inceldom via social media, creating the illusion that inceldom is new.

A case can be made to support both perspectives. Writing as early as the late 1980s, British crime writer Colin Wilson coined the term 'sexual disenfranchisement' to describe an emergent male sexual underclass which was unduly represented in the ranks of sexual criminals, mass murderers and so forth. His argument was that social status is now stated not through wealth or social status but through sexual prowess, and that unfettered female hypergamy has created a male sexual underclass with nothing to lose. Similarly, Robert A Heinlein in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) described a lunar colony in which polyandrous line-marriages prevent the inevitable social chaos caused by a surplus of single men. The great George Orwell wrote extensively about male sexual disenfranchisement in Britain and other Western countries, especially in his bleak memoir Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). Some might call these writers fringe thinkers, yet it must be said that people have been pondering these issues since the 1930s; they are clearly not new.

Joe's Chadly efforts fall on stony ground...

On the other hand, there are several new factors which lend credence to the idea that inceldom is a recent phenomenon. Aside from the obvious looks-orientated social media apps like Tinder, some are unexpected.

One would be the rise of genuine multiculturalism (the real thing, not the largely rhetorical 60s upper-middle class variant). A disproportionately high number of modern incels seem to be non-caucasian ethnics, or of mixed race. Back in the day, before the advent of multiculturalism, people were forced to marry within their own ethnic group because of cultural pressures and white racism. Today, those boundaries have slipped and ethnics now have to complete in a wider sexual marketplace. One result of this is that ethnic males are suddenly bottom of the sexual heap, with women of their own race preferring black or Caucasian males over males of their own race. Hence the rise of angry Currycels and Ricecels, and the fact that incel shooters are overwhelmingly ethnics.

In the age of social media, looks clearly matter

Another factor would be the rise of genuine feminism (again, not the upper-middle class 1960s version). Western women now outperform males in education, and most simply do not need men for financial support. They can spawn a child with a handsome Chad or Tyrone and raise it quite happily without having a male around. Female emancipation is really the ultimate expression of female homosociality. Simply put, women no longer need omega nerds to maintain them once they breed.

Another consideration might be increased levels of autism in the population. This is surely not wholly the result of modern over-diagnosis. The fact that people now have children at ever older ages is boosting the number of autistics in the West, and many male incels clearly occupy the autistic spectrum. Many are also from the educated middle class, a trait closely linked to autism in much of the medical literature.

At a general level, older people seem most astonished by the incel phenomenon. This is what one might expect if mass inceldom were simply less common in earlier eras. However, this might be simply because incels from earlier times had no social media platforms to express their experiences (or lack of them). Whatever the truth, this aged pastor seems genuinely baffled by the incel phenomenon:

On the other side, what is the evidence that incels have always been with us?

As we have seen, writers like George Orwell showed that incel males were common in the 1930s. Works like Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) prefigured the Anglobitch anti-feminist thesis, showing that women used sex as a manipulative weapon long before the modern era. However, since males of low status typically formed the majority of incels back then, their experiences were largely omitted from books, journalism and academic discourse. While that is still true, today there are countless online platforms where modern incels can express their views and experiences. In other words, incels are not new at all; it just seems that way because earlier incels had no public venting platforms.

Certain criminals claimed incel status long before the Internet era. For example, the 'Son of Sam' David Berkowitz, who shot several courting couples in New York during the 1970s, claimed to be motivated by a desire for revenge against 'normie' society for his incel status. Other murderous 'old' incels include Edmund Kemper and British mass shooter Michael Ryan.

The mainstream Anglo media have gone into freefall since the rise of the Internet. Once, there was a clearly-defined youth culture which forcibly imposed a narrative of 'sexual bounty' on the masses via films, TV shows, magazines and rock music (also known as Sexual False Consciousness). With these restrictive artefacts gone, incel men are now free to discuss their arid sexual reality openly and without shame. 

Classic movies like Midnight Cowboy (1969) suggest that the 60s Anglo-American 'sexual revolution' was largely a myth, anyway. When Joe Buck moves from Texas to NYC to sell sex to the new breed of 'liberated' women, he finds only pink poodles and the sad caresses of lonely homosexuals. Revenge of the Nerds (1984) suggests that high status girls (indeed, all girls) have always shunned Omega nerds for handsome, high status males. In sum, the notion that monogamy forcibly collectivised male sexual access in the post-war era is probably an MRA myth. Equally, the modern incel assumption that a few 'Chads' are having sex with 80% of women is probably shaped by Internet porn and the mainstream media generally.

One Helluva Gorgeous Chick...

Anglo culture is and always has been defined by puritanism/homosociality and white Anglo-American women have always been sexually conservative. In Hollywood versus America (1992), Michael Medved showed that most Americans (over 90%) still aspire to a monogamous heterosexual marriage, for example. Despite the Anglosphere’s sacralisation of recreational sex in recent years, most incels are probably waiting for ‘the one’ in time-honoured fashion, and not unduly unhappy about their situation. And maybe Chad is not having quite as much polygamous sex as the incels imagine (if he even exists at all). 

The Incel crushed under Chad's prowess...