Entitled to a Happy Ending Fairy-Tale Logic from “Beauty and the Beast” to the Incel Movement
Dr. Shannan Palma Agnes Scott College
From Geeks to IncelsDr. Shannan Palma Agnes Scott College
The incel movement has strong ties to the gamer/geek subset of the manosphere, which is a confederation of misogynistic blogs, Web sites, and online forums, most of which accept some version of red-pill philosophy (Ging 2–3). Referencing a scene in the 1999 film The Matrix, swallowing the red pill leads to an understanding of the so-called reality of men’s social oppression at the hands of out-of-control feminists (Schmitz and Kazyak 6; Van Valkenburgh 2). One might narrate the young incel’s journey to enlightenment thusly: he desires sex but does not know how to go about finding a partner—“one member of a family either lacks something or desires to have something” (Propp 35). He ventures into the topsy-turvy world of the Internet— “the hero is allowed to depart from home” (37). He finds his way to the manosphere and takes the magical red pill—“the hero acquires the use of a magical agent” (43)—which exposes women, particularly feminist women, as monsters—“the false hero or villain is exposed” (62).
A key source often cited as required reading for new denizens of the manosphere is F. Roger Devlin’s essay “Sexual Utopia in Power.” Devlin invokes pseudoscientific rhetoric and reifies traditional sex roles in order to argue that women, biologically driven to desire and mate above their stations, pursue the most sexually attractive men available, the alphas, whereas men, naturally driven towards sexual variety, strive to become as sexually attractive as possible in order to attract women. Mate choice and sexual power, in Devlin’s view, belong entirely to women. Beauty and the Geek and, to an extent, the mythified “Beauty and the Beast” are structured with this power dynamic implicit at their core.
Devlin warns repeatedly that lower-status men’s anger at their mistreatment is building and will come to a head, at which point women should beware (21, 30). While the pervasiveness of his claims varies across the manosphere, they are particularly relevant to the incel community. As previously noted, incels frame themselves within the lowest tier of sexual desirability. They argue that their own thinner bodies and larger heads evolutionarily predispose them to lose out in females’ mate selection. To them, the Joes and Richards of the world, shorter and more slightly built, will inevitably lose out so long as the Brads and Chucks exist.8 It does not matter that Brad and Chuck would both be considered beta. Alpha males have it easy as women pursue them. Beta males may still be able to leverage economic power or learn seduction techniques to gain sexual access. Many incels go a step further, saying they have taken the black pill and identifying themselves as omegas.
The term incel originated in the 1990s on a Web site founded by a queer woman. “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project” was a pre-Web 2.0 forum for men and women to discuss their loneliness and difficulty forming romantic connections (Alana). In 1998, a member of an “online discussion group for involuntary celibates” e-mailed sociologist Denise Donnelly “to ask about current research on involuntary celibacy” (Donnelly et al. 161). Finding little on the topic, members of the discussion group volunteered to be part of a research sample. The resulting study, developed after discussion with the initial volunteers, notes that respondents expressed their unhappiness with their celibacy in language that suggested they were “off time in making normative sexual transitions” (159): “As a group, all involuntary celibates appear to have difficulty with the timing and maintenance of culturally sanctioned age-based norms of sexuality” (167). In other words, their stories were not progressing apace.
Alana’s group shortened involuntary celibate to invcel and then to incel (Taylor) before she disengaged and handed her content over to a stranger in the early 2000s. Tracing the evolution of the community from there becomes complicated, but the code of conduct on the site that succeeded Alana’s makes no mention of her inclusive queer-feminist lens (“The Incel List, Forum, Chat and Meet”). The only advice article on the new site addressed specifically to women unproblematically narrates a male incel’s first experience receiving a lap dance in a gentlemen’s club. The author advises female incels who want to approach men to model their attitudes on the dancers who “genuinely seemed to be enjoying themselves” (“Attitude”). However, another article on the site explicitly addresses and deconstructs some of the misogynist claims that would later come to dominate incel culture (“Nice Guys v Jerks”). Alana’s inclusive definitions of who may be an incel remain on the site, and of the twelve personal stories referenced as representative of incel identity, one is by a gay man and three are by women (“Am I Incel?”). Overall, the site portrays a community wrestling with the line between unintended social awkwardness and offensive behavior. Though the site is nominally still queer-inclusive, explicitly feminist perspectives appear not to have made the transition.
In 2019, presumably, a similar range of people to those who identified with Alana’s original project may still be drawn to the concept at the core of incel identity–connecting with others around a common struggle with unfulfilled desire for sexual and romantic connection; however, in the intervening fifteen years, incel rhetoric has become dominated by virulently antifeminist misogyny. The (male) incel who is not turned off by this misogyny takes the journey outlined at the beginning of this section, using fairy-tale logic to tell the story of the problem that is involuntary celibacy. As previously noted, some in today’s incel community go beyond red-pill philosophy to theorize a black pill. The sidebar on the 3.7-k subscriber subreddit BlackPillScience proffers the following definition:
[M]ate preferences in [Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD)] societies are primarily guided by lookism, tribalism and, for heterosexual women, heightism.… For some individuals, the relationship between the amount of goal-directed effort expended in order to attract and court preferred mates … and one’s success rate may be so poorly correlated that, for these individuals, such narrowly targeted effort is naive at best.
Incels who have taken the black pill are thus those who have resigned themselves to a reality in which they will never be able to attract a willing mate of the conventionally attractive type they desire, no matter what they do, and in which trying to change this ineluctable fact makes them fools. Black-pill incels would read Bernard’s version of “Riquet with the Tuft” unironically as confirmation, arguing that of course a beautiful, intelligent woman will choose a beautiful man over an ugly one, no matter what promises she might have made or what value her unattractive husband provides her. While there is no way to know how often the threats of violence prefigured in Devlin’s essay have been manifested by denizens of the manosphere, at least three mass murders have been connected to these communities (Nagle; Tolentino). The addition of nihilist claims that lifelong rejection is inevitable and unavoidable does nothing to de-escalate the rhetoric.
The incel who remains committed to the revelations of the red pill may loop back, repeating certain functions as he engages in pickup artistry,9 attempting to trick women into bed as if it were a step in his hero’s quest, or he may choose this time to take the black pill and advance along a darker path. The canary in the coal mine for violence is the moment when the would-be hero finally believes that, counter to the concept in Stallings’ poem, he has nothing impossible up his sleeve. The only avenue left for the incel who has taken the black pill to advance his story as a hero is to expose the villainy of the woman, any woman, all women—this is not about individual women, after all, but about the function of women—and to punish her (Propp 63).
Conclusion
At the core of all the incels’ elaborate narratives for why women will not have sex with them— and to be clear, this rejection is most often presupposed and reacted to in the absence of any actual reported interactions with women—is frustrated misogyny, which is a deeply personal reaction to women walking through the world as if they are autonomous agents, out of sync with their function (Manne 57–58). Referencing the ubiquity of Propp’s morphology in Western storytelling, Dorothy Noyes writes, “[T]he fairy tale is our touchstone for articulating the normative life course of the individual” (4). Donnelly’s study concludes that involuntary celibates consider their life courses off time, out of sync. As Manne has theorized, in a patriarchal social order, women owe their care to men. When a woman walks through the world as an autonomous being, careless of her function, she becomes a living, breathing offense to those still bound by the strictures of that order. Sexism judges her. Misogyny demands she be punished.
In 2014, the Isla Vista killer, a self-described incel, attempted to break into a sorority to slaughter the women there as representatives of all who were denying him sex. He recorded a video explaining how he had been “forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection, and unfulfilled desires, all because girls have never been attracted to me. Girls gave their affection and sex and love to other men but never to me … I will punish you for it.… You will finally see that I am, in truth, the superior one—the true alpha male” (qtd. in Manne 35). Foiled, he still murdered six and wounded fourteen before killing himself. In 2015, another involuntarily celibate man, known to valorize the Isla Vista killer, murdered nine and injured six in Oregon (Nagle; Tolentino). In 2017, British reporter Amelia Tait warned that the Isla Vista killer continued to be venerated online by other involuntary celibates (“Why We Should Stop Using the Phrase ‘Lone Wolf’”). That same year, Reddit shut down the 40,000-member incels forum, banning it due to a “violation of our content policy, specifically, our sitewide rules regarding violent content” (“Incels”). In 2018, another admirer of the Isla Vista killer drove a van into a crowd and killed ten people in Toronto (Tait, “Digital Native”).
Both “Beauty and the Beast” and Beauty and the Geek presuppose that men are owed women’s moral support as a right and that the ability to claim that right is what transforms them into desirable mates and gives them their happily-ever-afters, whether that manifests as marriage or money. That is the normative happiness script around gender in a patriarchal social order. The incels want that same ending to their story but believe they are barred from achieving it by women’s autonomy—that is, women’s refusal to enable the rest of the story by playing their proper role.
And so, we return to this idea of fairy-tale logic and consider what it offers as a framework for understanding entitlement and as a warning sign for violence. Entitlement may be conceptualized as a belief in one’s inherent right to have one’s story turn out the way it is supposed to for people like you. Notably, this prescription is desirable only when one operates from a vantage point of privilege. Lurking in the background of Beauty and the Geek are all the geeks for whom performing hegemonic masculinity changes nothing. According to black-pill reasoning, these men will never triumph by following the traditional gendered happiness script. It is useless for them to try. Women will not allow them to succeed. The potential for violence crystallizes in fairy-tale logic when the only way to move one’s story forward is to punish the villain. Unable to conceptualize happiness outside of how privilege tells them their story should go, and unable to prioritize their actual interests above their frustrated entitlement, some incels will continue to turn to violence. On April 12 2019, days prior to this writing, a man who was “angry over being rejected by women he attempted to talk to at the mall” approached a stranger and threw her five-year-old over the side of the balcony (“Man Accused of Throwing Boy”). The criminal complaint filed against him states he told police “he had been coming to the Mall for several years and had made efforts to talk to women in the Mall, but had been rejected, and the rejection caused him to lash out and be aggressive” (4th Judicial District Court 2). Though this man does not identify as an incel, he came to the mall with the intention of killing someone because of a violent frustration with women who had not behaved as they should, who had not fulfilled their function in his story. There is a common justificatory narrative thread of revenge against or because of women in his case and in the incel cases that cannot be explained by individual mental health issues. The commonalities in these stories suggest the potential for a wider applicability of fairy-tale logic.
