Krytyka Polityczna is a Polish leftist journal. Radical enough not to be considered mainstream, but it's also not some obscure bulletin, it's quite well-known.
The article is all nihil novi for us and it's way too long imho, but it's probably the fairest (not perfect, obviously) look at incels from a non-incel perspective I've came across so far.
Linguistic note: the term "loser" ("przegryw") is how Polish incels often call themselves, it's not meant to be demeaning when used in this article.
krytykapolityczna.pl
When I announced on my social media that, after several years of advocating for women, I was going to lean into the problems of young men who identify as incels and losers, it proved controversial on both sides. Some feminists have accused me of siding with the enemy, normalizing misogyny and making deals with potential rapists. I've also read that just bringing up this topic is spitting in the face of victims of violence that I have supported in the past.
The incels, on the other hand, wondered what was going on. Am I a Trojan horse trying to inspire confidence and then ridicule their community or, in the footsteps of most journalists who have covered this topic so far, portray them as terrorists and psychopaths?
They are most often remembered by the media when, somewhere in the United States, where the incel community is at its most radicalised and also politicised, linked to Trump and the far right, they commit sexual assaults or murders, plan extended suicides, publish manifestos in which hatred of women is intertwined with a range of the most insane conspiracy theories.
Although extremists prepared to put words into practice make up only a tiny fraction of those who identify as incels, there is no denying that the forums where they meet are saturated with misogyny. I do not underestimate the danger this poses or the harm it causes. But I do believe that all negativity has very specific causes that need to be looked at and tools sought to help us minimize it in the future. Because it is the people who suffer - rarely by deed, often by word - who are hurt, but it is also the people themselves who suffer. Hatred is born out of frustration and a sense of injustice, and violence breeds violence. Even when the enemy is misidentified.
The Polish incel environment differs significantly from the American one. It gathers supporters of all political options, from fascists to communists, without pointing to any particular party (although Konfederacja certainly has a lot of support among them). Most - although to varying degrees - adhere to genetic determinism, that is, they believe that the traits that distinguish men and women have been shaped by evolution, and that cultural changes cannot alter our nature.
Like the American ones, they are divided into several factions, the so-called pills (it's Matrix-inspired). Recently, the media have become interested in so-called losers, i.e. those who believe they have failed in all spheres of life, not just the romantic/sexual sphere.
They are the ones behind the "experiment" of creating fake profiles on Tinder and insulting girls who are tempted by a handsome man's photo. They belong to different pills, but most identify as black - blackpill means there is no hope for them. It's a sad, rather nihilistic vision in which only the beautiful and rich have a chance at happiness, while physically unattractive men from the lower classes are doomed to eternal loneliness and rejection.
Why only men? Because it is women who, in their opinion, have too high demands and dream of handsome men, and handsome men are so indiscriminate (and virile) that - even being in the minority - they are able to satisfy them all. Blackpillers use interesting but often questionable research, usually in the field of evolutionary psychology - an interesting but controversial field whose methodological basis is disputed by a multitude of male and female scientists. However, it is an academic field whose development is worth watching.
Women's equality, the sexual revolution of the 1970s, the weakening of the institution of the patriarchal family and the popularization of dating apps have raised women's expectations of their potential partner - they are less and less dependent on men financially, they do not have to grab the first one who will provide for the family. Instead, they attach more and more importance to appearance, and apps allow them to compare men from all over the country, and even from beyond its borders.
We mainly compare photos, so ugly men are out of the running. Why not women who deviate from the beauty canon? Because men - although they pay attention to their appearance to the same degree - are more willing to make compromises (in other words: they are more willing to lower their standards just to get laid).
According to the losers, the blame for this situation lies not only with women, but also with chads and simps - the former are handsome men who go for quantity, not quality, in their choice of partners, sleeping with not only models, but also girls much less attractive than themselves, the latter are all those who feed women's egos, trying to live up to the still widespread belief that it is the man who should take the initiative, which in turn makes women aim ever higher. Standards can be raised overnight, but adjusting to them is more difficult.
There is no evidence that women are "naturally" hypergamous - evolutionary psychologists can only conclude that they tend to be hypergamous, but they do not have the tools to investigate to what extent this is an evolutionary adaptation and to what extent a product of patriarchal culture. Interestingly, studies show that in countries where the gender pay gap is smaller, women are less likely to seek partners with a status higher than their own. And the fact that young men are having less sex today than they did ten or twenty years ago is explained by the fact that they are marrying later - as a rule, people in formal relationships have sex more often.
Nor is there any evidence to support the theory that a small percentage of the most attractive men satisfy the needs of an increasing number of women - but US studies show that the most active 20% of men in this category account for 50-60% of all sexual contacts, a figure that has not changed over the years.
Although incels like to exaggerate, and in the selection of quoted studies choose those whose results fit a given thesis, often confuse correlation with causation and put too much trust in evolutionary psychology - their problems do not come out of nowhere. There is not enough data to look at them in detail, but we do know that there are more men than women born from generation to generation, that they leave villages and small towns less often than women, that they go to university less often, and that they live with their parents more often than women. And I think that these are issues worth looking at.
Many incels are immersed in nostalgia for times gone by, and feminists rightly accuse them of longing for the opportunity to wield power over women's bodies and believing that sex is simply their due, even though only American extremists came up with the idea of forced sex work camps. Most incels I spoke to don't even recognize the use of paid sex - they want desire from the other side, an affirmation of their worth, not a transaction.
While I condemn all measures aimed at restricting women's right to make choices about their own bodies, I am far from minimizing the problems of sexual frustration, unmet need for intimacy or loneliness.
My interest in incels divides feminists. Some claim that I have been manipulated, believe in neurosexism and harm women. It is no less controversial among incels - my aim has never been to reconcile these communities. But I do believe that it is always worth considering how to reduce the amount of suffering in the world, the source of which is too often a blindness to harm that is not ours and that is harder to imagine.
And a huge proportion of these guys are really suffering - nobody chooses an identity loses for fun. Unless it's the trolls, who - as many interviewees have told me - make up the majority of the most popular users on sites like Wykop, sowing ferment and manipulating the rest of us.
"I'm not going to bend over backwards for people who fantasize about murder and wonder what brought them to this point, because absolutely everything that happens to incels also happens to girls," - says in the new episode of her vlog Kasia Babis, artist and influencer, and recently also a youtuber, referring to the discussion that arose after my posts on the subject.
I do not force anyone to bend to incels. I don't remember urging Kasia Babis or anyone else to do so. Under the feminist umbrella there is, or at least should be, room for all those who will leave their contempt for women and minorities to soak in. I've tackled this topic because it interests me, and I don't think that being male protects you from experiencing systemic harm. I would also like to prevent the scenario in which larger and larger groups of Polish men reach the point Kasia mentions coming true.
I suspect that the girls were led to the conclusion that Polish incels dream of murder by articles describing this phenomenon in the USA and calques from them appearing in the Polish media. Meanwhile, on Polish incel forums, there are no plans for extended suicides, mass rapes, no adoration for Elliot Roger - the famous American incel assassin, no fantasies about pogroms. Instead, there are teenage boys who fantasize about their deaths because they consider themselves to be "genetic scum", worthless individuals.
Most incels realize that physical deviation from the beauty canon is not their only problem. They write about poverty, the inability to move away from parents, a problem that currently affects more than 40% of young men and - according to the incels - is one of the markers of a "life loser", as it makes it even more difficult to establish relationships.
They also talk about hard work at "Januszex", a private company of a Polish exploiter, rejection by peers, bullying at school, low self-esteem, loneliness, mental disorders - depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia are the most frequently mentioned. They talk about social phobia and the autism spectrum. They don't have money to see a psychotherapist, the queues at the National Health Fund are up to two years, and they hear from their parents that they should get a grip and "grow some balls". However, they can only count on media attention when they give a justifiably appalling display of misogyny.
The pressure to have a rich sex life, which is beginning to affect women, has been one of the markers of 'real' masculinity for centuries. This is why I believe that sexual frustration and, above all, the loneliness that incels talk about but that boys also feel, are problems that are not worth ignoring.
Belittling them with claims like "everyone falls unhappily in love sometimes and you have to cope" can provoke the righteous rage of a man who, with other incels, celebrates on Wykop a "wizard's impalement", i.e. a thirtieth birthday without experiencing sexual contact and often even a kiss or hand-holding.
Words hurt, especially when the person saying them is an attractive, popular girl and the recipient is a boy with a receding jaw, crooked bite and alopecia areata who reaches her shoulder and has no money for a dentist.
Babis and her colleague Marta Nowak rightly point out that it is hard to imagine women, convinced of their physical unattractiveness, taking revenge on random men by setting up fake profiles in dating apps, insulting them or staking them out. But already mocking short guys or small penises is an increasingly common phenomenon. "A man starts at 185 cm" - such claims are not uncommon in descriptions on Tinder or women's Facebook groups, and sometimes they go beyond that.
The lack of a sex life is increasingly being mocked, probably all of us from the left-wing bubble have heard jokes based on the belief that "ponies ["kuc", a slang for a long-haired guy, originally associated with metal fans and tech enthusiasts, nowadays mostly with supporters of Janusz Korwin-Mikke, a right-wing politician and the leader of the right-ring party Konfederacja] don't fuck". Not having sex is something particularly shameful, especially for men, because it strikes at the myth of the male conqueror.
Babis and Nowak put the incels' frustration down to the fact that beautiful women don't want to have sex with them - which ultimately proves that they know about them as much as they know about girls. The loser, meanwhile, does not dream of an Instagram model, does not barricade himself in his dark basement because someone has broken his heart once or twice, but experiences constant rejection and Tinder displays the message: "You don't have any likes! Check to see if there's anything wrong with your profile".
Often he doesn't even have friends, anyone with whom he can go out to people, and at work he can only meet a drinking buddy. Add to this introversion, extremely low self-esteem and mental disorders, and "getting out of the basement" can be beyond his strength.
It makes me wonder if an incel who, due to a genetic disease, is less than a metre tall and in a wheelchair, like one of my interlocutors, would also be told by youtubers to just "change his mentality" because he "condemns himself to being a basement-dweller".
Many actually do what they blame women for - they target partners from the "upper league", expecting a lot and offering little, and at the same time judging women's beauty very harshly, eagerly ridiculing being overweight or having a "too high" forehead. However, many dream of arousing desire in any girl and getting positive feedback at least once.
In a series entitled Harlequins for Losers, a Wykop user called Blackpill_RAW, until recently Poland's foremost theorist of "black pill" ideology and unofficial king of the incels, has described a number of injustices they face. These humorous, though undoubtedly misogynistic stories contain explicit criticism of social inequality, worker exploitation or junk employment.
Mirek, the main character and loser, looks with envy at Oskar the Developer, his privileged class position, an easier start, an expensive car, time and money to adjust his body to the current canon of attractiveness. The author recognizes the problem of class conflict, although he does not call it that.
The plot of all the stories is simple and repetitive: circumstances and even historical periods change, but the reader can be sure that the "alpha male", that is Oskar or Klaudiusz Deweloperski, will enjoy life's success, bathing in a sea of young female bodies, while Mirek will spend another evening in solitude, indulging in compulsive masturbation and dreams of a grey mouse who will love him selflessly.
And when Mirek, using an anonymous account, pours out his grief online, he hears that if he stopped hating women, he would have no problem getting into a relationship. Another solution often proposed is: "Incels should be sent to therapy". - yes, universal access to quality psychological and psychiatric care would improve the situation for some and, incidentally, the condition of society as a whole, but what about when mental disorders are the result, not the cause, of rejection, frustration and loneliness?
However, the most lacking in empathy and one of the most common pieces of advice given to losers is: "take a shower" or: "go to the hairdresser/gym". - because most of them apply the so-called lookmaxing, doing everything to bring their appearance as close as possible to the current canon of attractiveness. The possibilities are limited both for economic and genetic reasons - a boy who is 165 cm tall, has a backbite and a posterior mandible cannot do much about it. It is also significant that the most widely available ways to improve one's appearance without much effort, such as applying make-up or growing hair, are still culturally assigned to women.
As for the claim that all the problems that affect incels also affect women - it is questionable whether height discrimination or lack of means to go on a date are problems that affect us equally. There is still a widespread belief that it is the man who should take the initiative and even pay for the woman.
When a few years ago I wrote a report about people who come to organisations fighting for tenants' rights for help, they were almost exclusively women. Whenever I went to meetings where people with eviction orders could get free legal help, there were dozens of women waiting in line, men were rare. The activists told me that this is almost always the case, perhaps because men often feel that the inability to provide for their families is the ultimate stripping of their dignity. Asking for help is like admitting this.
This is why in crisis situations they break down more easily, endure loneliness less often, fall into alcoholism more often, and commit suicide - the latter seven times more often. I met many strong, brave women, victims of wild reprivatization and gentrification, who fought the tenement owners on their own because their husbands couldn't stand the psychological pressure.
The fact that it is generally more difficult to be a woman does not mean that there is not a larger or smaller group of men who are really screwed. It is easier for a man to make up for beauty deficits with self-confidence, a sense of humor, and social status, but when all through adolescence he has received feedback from the world that he is ugly or "different", and no one has ever shown him a shadow of sexual or romantic interest - self-confidence and a sharp wit can be hard to come by.
The incels I spoke to included people on the left and the right, those who denied and openly admitted to misogyny, people with disabilities and transgender people, differing in everything except their experience of loneliness, lack of acceptance and drastically low self-esteem. To reduce them all to potential murderers is simply wrong-headed, although it is tempting to brush the problem aside, to wash our hands of it.
I am a feminist, but I realize that I am far more privileged than the vast majority of people, if only by virtue of where I live, cultural capital, family support, beauty reasonably in the canon, lack of serious mental disorders and much more. They do not feel privileged, and the fields of exclusion are different, gender being only one of them.
I believe that systemic problems that also affect men are important and serious. However, I am not saying that it is the responsibility of feminists to address them, although I would like us to pay more attention to issues such as economic exclusion or mental health, which affect all genders.
I would also like to encourage, or at least not discourage, men from acting in their own interest, from dealing with problems which concern them more than they do us - such as the growing number of suicides or the threat of homelessness. Yet these are issues raised almost exclusively by conservative, anti-feminist movements and 'men's rights' organisations which blame women for their plight.
If a man calls himself a loser and a beta male, it probably means that there is real suffering behind it. Telling such a person that he should not complain because he belongs to the privileged sex seems to me an insensitive attitude. When someone says that they are excluded for some reason beyond their control, telling them that they are to blame, and pointing to isolated examples of people who have managed to overcome adversity, is not a strategy that is likely to be of long-term benefit, and certainly should not be a strategy of the left.
The article is all nihil novi for us and it's way too long imho, but it's probably the fairest (not perfect, obviously) look at incels from a non-incel perspective I've came across so far.
Linguistic note: the term "loser" ("przegryw") is how Polish incels often call themselves, it's not meant to be demeaning when used in this article.
Jak zdradziłam sprawę feministyczną i przeszłam na stronę inceli
Pisze Patrycja Wieczorkiewicz
krytykapolityczna.pl
How I betrayed the feminist cause and went over to the incel side
If a man calls himself a loser, it probably means that there is real suffering behind it. When someone is excluded for some reason, telling them that they have themselves to blame should certainly not be a strategy of the left.When I announced on my social media that, after several years of advocating for women, I was going to lean into the problems of young men who identify as incels and losers, it proved controversial on both sides. Some feminists have accused me of siding with the enemy, normalizing misogyny and making deals with potential rapists. I've also read that just bringing up this topic is spitting in the face of victims of violence that I have supported in the past.
The incels, on the other hand, wondered what was going on. Am I a Trojan horse trying to inspire confidence and then ridicule their community or, in the footsteps of most journalists who have covered this topic so far, portray them as terrorists and psychopaths?
The suffering of incels
Incels are men who live in involuntary celibacy - they would like to have sexual relations but face obstacles that prevent them from doing so. Most of them share the conviction that the main reason for their anguish is their physical unattractiveness. There are also those who see the source of the problem in their low social status or in their mental illness (the latter are called mentalcels).They are most often remembered by the media when, somewhere in the United States, where the incel community is at its most radicalised and also politicised, linked to Trump and the far right, they commit sexual assaults or murders, plan extended suicides, publish manifestos in which hatred of women is intertwined with a range of the most insane conspiracy theories.
Although extremists prepared to put words into practice make up only a tiny fraction of those who identify as incels, there is no denying that the forums where they meet are saturated with misogyny. I do not underestimate the danger this poses or the harm it causes. But I do believe that all negativity has very specific causes that need to be looked at and tools sought to help us minimize it in the future. Because it is the people who suffer - rarely by deed, often by word - who are hurt, but it is also the people themselves who suffer. Hatred is born out of frustration and a sense of injustice, and violence breeds violence. Even when the enemy is misidentified.
The Polish incel environment differs significantly from the American one. It gathers supporters of all political options, from fascists to communists, without pointing to any particular party (although Konfederacja certainly has a lot of support among them). Most - although to varying degrees - adhere to genetic determinism, that is, they believe that the traits that distinguish men and women have been shaped by evolution, and that cultural changes cannot alter our nature.
Like the American ones, they are divided into several factions, the so-called pills (it's Matrix-inspired). Recently, the media have become interested in so-called losers, i.e. those who believe they have failed in all spheres of life, not just the romantic/sexual sphere.
They are the ones behind the "experiment" of creating fake profiles on Tinder and insulting girls who are tempted by a handsome man's photo. They belong to different pills, but most identify as black - blackpill means there is no hope for them. It's a sad, rather nihilistic vision in which only the beautiful and rich have a chance at happiness, while physically unattractive men from the lower classes are doomed to eternal loneliness and rejection.
Why only men? Because it is women who, in their opinion, have too high demands and dream of handsome men, and handsome men are so indiscriminate (and virile) that - even being in the minority - they are able to satisfy them all. Blackpillers use interesting but often questionable research, usually in the field of evolutionary psychology - an interesting but controversial field whose methodological basis is disputed by a multitude of male and female scientists. However, it is an academic field whose development is worth watching.
Understanding a "loser"
The logic of the losers is more or less like this: women are hypergamous by nature and therefore seek a partner with a social status higher than their own, while men tend to do the opposite. Once upon a time, when the only acceptable model for romantic-sexual relationships was monogamous marriage, often entered into out of convenience, and women could choose from a small group of candidates from the surrounding countryside, everyone had a chance to form a relationship.Women's equality, the sexual revolution of the 1970s, the weakening of the institution of the patriarchal family and the popularization of dating apps have raised women's expectations of their potential partner - they are less and less dependent on men financially, they do not have to grab the first one who will provide for the family. Instead, they attach more and more importance to appearance, and apps allow them to compare men from all over the country, and even from beyond its borders.
We mainly compare photos, so ugly men are out of the running. Why not women who deviate from the beauty canon? Because men - although they pay attention to their appearance to the same degree - are more willing to make compromises (in other words: they are more willing to lower their standards just to get laid).
According to the losers, the blame for this situation lies not only with women, but also with chads and simps - the former are handsome men who go for quantity, not quality, in their choice of partners, sleeping with not only models, but also girls much less attractive than themselves, the latter are all those who feed women's egos, trying to live up to the still widespread belief that it is the man who should take the initiative, which in turn makes women aim ever higher. Standards can be raised overnight, but adjusting to them is more difficult.
There is no evidence that women are "naturally" hypergamous - evolutionary psychologists can only conclude that they tend to be hypergamous, but they do not have the tools to investigate to what extent this is an evolutionary adaptation and to what extent a product of patriarchal culture. Interestingly, studies show that in countries where the gender pay gap is smaller, women are less likely to seek partners with a status higher than their own. And the fact that young men are having less sex today than they did ten or twenty years ago is explained by the fact that they are marrying later - as a rule, people in formal relationships have sex more often.
Nor is there any evidence to support the theory that a small percentage of the most attractive men satisfy the needs of an increasing number of women - but US studies show that the most active 20% of men in this category account for 50-60% of all sexual contacts, a figure that has not changed over the years.
Although incels like to exaggerate, and in the selection of quoted studies choose those whose results fit a given thesis, often confuse correlation with causation and put too much trust in evolutionary psychology - their problems do not come out of nowhere. There is not enough data to look at them in detail, but we do know that there are more men than women born from generation to generation, that they leave villages and small towns less often than women, that they go to university less often, and that they live with their parents more often than women. And I think that these are issues worth looking at.
Many incels are immersed in nostalgia for times gone by, and feminists rightly accuse them of longing for the opportunity to wield power over women's bodies and believing that sex is simply their due, even though only American extremists came up with the idea of forced sex work camps. Most incels I spoke to don't even recognize the use of paid sex - they want desire from the other side, an affirmation of their worth, not a transaction.
While I condemn all measures aimed at restricting women's right to make choices about their own bodies, I am far from minimizing the problems of sexual frustration, unmet need for intimacy or loneliness.
My interest in incels divides feminists. Some claim that I have been manipulated, believe in neurosexism and harm women. It is no less controversial among incels - my aim has never been to reconcile these communities. But I do believe that it is always worth considering how to reduce the amount of suffering in the world, the source of which is too often a blindness to harm that is not ours and that is harder to imagine.
And a huge proportion of these guys are really suffering - nobody chooses an identity loses for fun. Unless it's the trolls, who - as many interviewees have told me - make up the majority of the most popular users on sites like Wykop, sowing ferment and manipulating the rest of us.
The limits of empathy
The empathy of feminists who give good advice to incels is equal to that of Bronislaw Komorowski suggesting young people change jobs and take a loan or Beata Pawlikowska recommending running and drinking orange juice for depression. Just get off your ass and stop being a loser, ok?"I'm not going to bend over backwards for people who fantasize about murder and wonder what brought them to this point, because absolutely everything that happens to incels also happens to girls," - says in the new episode of her vlog Kasia Babis, artist and influencer, and recently also a youtuber, referring to the discussion that arose after my posts on the subject.
I do not force anyone to bend to incels. I don't remember urging Kasia Babis or anyone else to do so. Under the feminist umbrella there is, or at least should be, room for all those who will leave their contempt for women and minorities to soak in. I've tackled this topic because it interests me, and I don't think that being male protects you from experiencing systemic harm. I would also like to prevent the scenario in which larger and larger groups of Polish men reach the point Kasia mentions coming true.
I suspect that the girls were led to the conclusion that Polish incels dream of murder by articles describing this phenomenon in the USA and calques from them appearing in the Polish media. Meanwhile, on Polish incel forums, there are no plans for extended suicides, mass rapes, no adoration for Elliot Roger - the famous American incel assassin, no fantasies about pogroms. Instead, there are teenage boys who fantasize about their deaths because they consider themselves to be "genetic scum", worthless individuals.
Most incels realize that physical deviation from the beauty canon is not their only problem. They write about poverty, the inability to move away from parents, a problem that currently affects more than 40% of young men and - according to the incels - is one of the markers of a "life loser", as it makes it even more difficult to establish relationships.
They also talk about hard work at "Januszex", a private company of a Polish exploiter, rejection by peers, bullying at school, low self-esteem, loneliness, mental disorders - depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia are the most frequently mentioned. They talk about social phobia and the autism spectrum. They don't have money to see a psychotherapist, the queues at the National Health Fund are up to two years, and they hear from their parents that they should get a grip and "grow some balls". However, they can only count on media attention when they give a justifiably appalling display of misogyny.
Love disappointment vs. pounding the wizard
The culture we live in tells us that sexual success is an indication of our worth. Sex sells everything, from TV series to roof tiles, and we increasingly and boldly share our conquests with friends and even online. A woman no longer has to wait until marriage to "throw off the garland" without being ostracized, and in Western societies the cult of "virginity" is - fortunately - consigned to history.The pressure to have a rich sex life, which is beginning to affect women, has been one of the markers of 'real' masculinity for centuries. This is why I believe that sexual frustration and, above all, the loneliness that incels talk about but that boys also feel, are problems that are not worth ignoring.
Belittling them with claims like "everyone falls unhappily in love sometimes and you have to cope" can provoke the righteous rage of a man who, with other incels, celebrates on Wykop a "wizard's impalement", i.e. a thirtieth birthday without experiencing sexual contact and often even a kiss or hand-holding.
Words hurt, especially when the person saying them is an attractive, popular girl and the recipient is a boy with a receding jaw, crooked bite and alopecia areata who reaches her shoulder and has no money for a dentist.
Babis and her colleague Marta Nowak rightly point out that it is hard to imagine women, convinced of their physical unattractiveness, taking revenge on random men by setting up fake profiles in dating apps, insulting them or staking them out. But already mocking short guys or small penises is an increasingly common phenomenon. "A man starts at 185 cm" - such claims are not uncommon in descriptions on Tinder or women's Facebook groups, and sometimes they go beyond that.
The lack of a sex life is increasingly being mocked, probably all of us from the left-wing bubble have heard jokes based on the belief that "ponies ["kuc", a slang for a long-haired guy, originally associated with metal fans and tech enthusiasts, nowadays mostly with supporters of Janusz Korwin-Mikke, a right-wing politician and the leader of the right-ring party Konfederacja] don't fuck". Not having sex is something particularly shameful, especially for men, because it strikes at the myth of the male conqueror.
Babis and Nowak put the incels' frustration down to the fact that beautiful women don't want to have sex with them - which ultimately proves that they know about them as much as they know about girls. The loser, meanwhile, does not dream of an Instagram model, does not barricade himself in his dark basement because someone has broken his heart once or twice, but experiences constant rejection and Tinder displays the message: "You don't have any likes! Check to see if there's anything wrong with your profile".
Often he doesn't even have friends, anyone with whom he can go out to people, and at work he can only meet a drinking buddy. Add to this introversion, extremely low self-esteem and mental disorders, and "getting out of the basement" can be beyond his strength.
It makes me wonder if an incel who, due to a genetic disease, is less than a metre tall and in a wheelchair, like one of my interlocutors, would also be told by youtubers to just "change his mentality" because he "condemns himself to being a basement-dweller".
Many actually do what they blame women for - they target partners from the "upper league", expecting a lot and offering little, and at the same time judging women's beauty very harshly, eagerly ridiculing being overweight or having a "too high" forehead. However, many dream of arousing desire in any girl and getting positive feedback at least once.
In a series entitled Harlequins for Losers, a Wykop user called Blackpill_RAW, until recently Poland's foremost theorist of "black pill" ideology and unofficial king of the incels, has described a number of injustices they face. These humorous, though undoubtedly misogynistic stories contain explicit criticism of social inequality, worker exploitation or junk employment.
Mirek, the main character and loser, looks with envy at Oskar the Developer, his privileged class position, an easier start, an expensive car, time and money to adjust his body to the current canon of attractiveness. The author recognizes the problem of class conflict, although he does not call it that.
The plot of all the stories is simple and repetitive: circumstances and even historical periods change, but the reader can be sure that the "alpha male", that is Oskar or Klaudiusz Deweloperski, will enjoy life's success, bathing in a sea of young female bodies, while Mirek will spend another evening in solitude, indulging in compulsive masturbation and dreams of a grey mouse who will love him selflessly.
And when Mirek, using an anonymous account, pours out his grief online, he hears that if he stopped hating women, he would have no problem getting into a relationship. Another solution often proposed is: "Incels should be sent to therapy". - yes, universal access to quality psychological and psychiatric care would improve the situation for some and, incidentally, the condition of society as a whole, but what about when mental disorders are the result, not the cause, of rejection, frustration and loneliness?
However, the most lacking in empathy and one of the most common pieces of advice given to losers is: "take a shower" or: "go to the hairdresser/gym". - because most of them apply the so-called lookmaxing, doing everything to bring their appearance as close as possible to the current canon of attractiveness. The possibilities are limited both for economic and genetic reasons - a boy who is 165 cm tall, has a backbite and a posterior mandible cannot do much about it. It is also significant that the most widely available ways to improve one's appearance without much effort, such as applying make-up or growing hair, are still culturally assigned to women.
As for the claim that all the problems that affect incels also affect women - it is questionable whether height discrimination or lack of means to go on a date are problems that affect us equally. There is still a widespread belief that it is the man who should take the initiative and even pay for the woman.
Downsides of having a penis (they exist)
Women are socialized to be polite and submissive, which is the basis of patriarchy, but a sensible feminist should not quarrel with the fact that men are under more pressure to prove themselves worthy of belonging to their gender, and the vulnerability they show is less likely to be met with understanding and compassion. It is more difficult for men to reach out for help or even to express and name emotions. It is more difficult for them to accept defeats, because defeat strips them of their masculinity, which in the popular image requires a thick skin, resourcefulness and independence.When a few years ago I wrote a report about people who come to organisations fighting for tenants' rights for help, they were almost exclusively women. Whenever I went to meetings where people with eviction orders could get free legal help, there were dozens of women waiting in line, men were rare. The activists told me that this is almost always the case, perhaps because men often feel that the inability to provide for their families is the ultimate stripping of their dignity. Asking for help is like admitting this.
This is why in crisis situations they break down more easily, endure loneliness less often, fall into alcoholism more often, and commit suicide - the latter seven times more often. I met many strong, brave women, victims of wild reprivatization and gentrification, who fought the tenement owners on their own because their husbands couldn't stand the psychological pressure.
The fact that it is generally more difficult to be a woman does not mean that there is not a larger or smaller group of men who are really screwed. It is easier for a man to make up for beauty deficits with self-confidence, a sense of humor, and social status, but when all through adolescence he has received feedback from the world that he is ugly or "different", and no one has ever shown him a shadow of sexual or romantic interest - self-confidence and a sharp wit can be hard to come by.
The incels I spoke to included people on the left and the right, those who denied and openly admitted to misogyny, people with disabilities and transgender people, differing in everything except their experience of loneliness, lack of acceptance and drastically low self-esteem. To reduce them all to potential murderers is simply wrong-headed, although it is tempting to brush the problem aside, to wash our hands of it.
Should they blame themselves?
The left should not shift responsibility for systemic problems onto individuals, regardless of their gender or views. The longer we ignore the real problems of incels, dismissing them as a group of dangerous, wannabe murderers of women, potential rapists, the more likely they are to become so. For now, they are venting their frustration, calling women "foids" [in the article they use "locha", meaning a pregnant pig, the term is used by Polish incels just like the term "foid"], making fun of "feminists' bollocks".I am a feminist, but I realize that I am far more privileged than the vast majority of people, if only by virtue of where I live, cultural capital, family support, beauty reasonably in the canon, lack of serious mental disorders and much more. They do not feel privileged, and the fields of exclusion are different, gender being only one of them.
I believe that systemic problems that also affect men are important and serious. However, I am not saying that it is the responsibility of feminists to address them, although I would like us to pay more attention to issues such as economic exclusion or mental health, which affect all genders.
I would also like to encourage, or at least not discourage, men from acting in their own interest, from dealing with problems which concern them more than they do us - such as the growing number of suicides or the threat of homelessness. Yet these are issues raised almost exclusively by conservative, anti-feminist movements and 'men's rights' organisations which blame women for their plight.
If a man calls himself a loser and a beta male, it probably means that there is real suffering behind it. Telling such a person that he should not complain because he belongs to the privileged sex seems to me an insensitive attitude. When someone says that they are excluded for some reason beyond their control, telling them that they are to blame, and pointing to isolated examples of people who have managed to overcome adversity, is not a strategy that is likely to be of long-term benefit, and certainly should not be a strategy of the left.
