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How to Fix an Incel
Social scientists are starting to study incels, the most broken men online. Fixing them is another question.
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Who goes incel? William Costello has as good an idea as anyone. An evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, Costello has become one of the world’s foremost experts on incels—short for involuntary celibates, a term that now describes a male group identity forged online, built upon a sense of victimization over their lack of sex and a grievance toward women, whom they blame for their condition.
Alongside a small but growing cohort of researchers, Costello is on the bleeding edge of what we might call the new science of lost boys. Incel studies is a nascent field that seeks to understand a subculture of men best known for vicious misogyny, online harassment, nihilistic memes, and spree killings as a complicated, vulnerable population experiencing “real social pain,” who are worthy of sober and dispassionate study.
Last year, Costello was part of a team that conducted the largest academic survey of self-identified incels to date, based on a sample of more than 500 men in the United States and the United Kingdom. The study was commissioned by the U.K. government, and Costello and his coauthors went on to present their findings at the House of Commons. From his survey, Costello knows that an incel tends to be a straight man. Tends to be childless. Tends to be in his 20s. Average height. He knows that incels are more racially diverse than you might think: Almost half the incels in the survey, who were recruited online and presented with a detailed questionnaire, were not white. He knows some disconcerting numbers too. Like that 30 percent of the incels in the study met the criteria for an autism screening. Or that half still live with their parents, which might be related to the fact that half do not have a full-time job. Or that nearly 20 percent of them simply have nothing going for them: no job, no degree, and definitely no girlfriend. Social scientists call this NEET: Not in Education, Employment, or Training. Incels call it LDAR: Lay Down and Rot.
The study also found markedly high levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness. One in five of the incels surveyed had considered killing himself every day for the previous two weeks.
Costello divides incels into two personality types. The first is Psychosocial Vulnerability Trajectory. This is a guy with a high likelihood of autism and a history of being bullied. The second is Dispositional Extremism. This is a guy who is, for lack of a better word, an entitled asshole with latent or active right-wing politics. He is the incel of the public imagination, the troll incarnate, gaming, gooning, tinkering in the basement on new ways to terrorize women on the internet.
While he notes there is overlap between the two, in Costello’s view, the distinction is crucial. “Depending on which incel you meet, you could come away with a sense of ‘Oh my God. These guys are really suffering. They’re going through a lot, and genuinely they deserve help.’ Whereas the other side, they’re just so aggressive and hostile that it’s hard to have any sympathy for them.”
Costello values primary research because most studies rely on forum posts—often misogynistic and racist, but research has shown that the majority of the content one sees on those forums is produced by a small percentage of the participants. “That’s not to say that there isn’t tacit agreement among the lurkers, but you’re basically judging the whole community by the extreme words of the most extreme minority, and that’s not really that useful,” Costello says.
One may be tempted to say that incels are total fucking losers. Incels would agree. Over the course of the last 50 years, women have been empowered to decide what they want their lives to be, including whom they want to date, sleep with, live with, and marry. This freedom, some incels argue, has turned dating into a ruthless competitive marketplace determined solely by the hierarchy of appearance. The so-called Chads are on top. The incels are at the bottom. By dint of genetic misfortune, whether it’s their height or their jawline, incels believe they face a life sentence of sexlessness. In the taxonomy of the manosphere, their fatalism separates them from Andrew Tate red-pill types. Incels say, “We give up.” Their pill is black.
Here is where Costello seeks to intervene. He is committed to “wrestling evolutionary psychology away from the manosphere.” He points to the “Scientific Black Pill” page on an incel website, chock-full of misappropriated academic studies, mostly from his discipline, that assure incels there is no hope. Their unfuckability is unfalsifiable. “There is nothing they’ll accept as disproving of their worldview,” Costello says. Central to that worldview is the 80/20 rule of “female hypergamy,” a folk theory that’s practically the iron law of inceldom. In their view, it is a biological fact that 80 percent of women want to sleep and partner up with just 20 percent of men. That means that even if you get a girlfriend, she’ll leave you for the first guy hotter than you who shows interest. This supersize version of male insecurity leads to a sense of nihilism, which surely contributes to what Costello calls “performative antagonism”—what anyone else would call trolling.
While there is real value in drawing out a fuller portrait of what an incel is, whether Costello and some of his colleagues in incel studies have the right answers to the larger question underpinning their work—what do we do about these lost boys and the world that made them?—is another matter altogether. There is also the ever-present risk of appearing too sympathetic or soft-pedaling abhorrent ideas. “I never want to be seen as a mouthpiece for the incel movement, and I don’t think I am,” Costello says. “I try to just let the data do the speaking and make sense of the data as evenhanded as I can.”
To that end, Costello maintains that the threat of incel violence is overstated and that the fears of such violence, like those leading up to the 2019 premiere of The Joker, have the trappings of a moral panic. But in the age of the mass shooter, it’s hard to know what is a credible threat and what is “for the lulz.” The most infamous incel, after all, was Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in one night in Isla Vista, California, in 2014, an act of retribution for a lifetime of romantic rejection.
Men lashing out after they are unable to have the kinds of romantic and sexual relationships they desire is nothing new. Part of what makes incels so thoroughly of this moment is the internet. It is online where they have found each other, shared Wojak memes, and fashioned their misery into a collective identity as victims mourning the end of the era when women had no choice but to settle with guys like them.
Costello argues somewhat provocatively that there are positives to this identity that often go unnoticed. Inceldom provides fraternity, a common enemy, shared language and symbols, and a powerful story that explains to a vulnerable population why they are the way they are. But one can hardly call these positives if they turn a harmless loser into a hardened sexist.
“If you’re the lonely guy in the basement, then it’s a bit of fun compared to the anxiety of self development and going through the hard work,” Costello says. “But if your goal is to get them to reengage with reality and to reengage with society?” On that question, the literature is clear. “It’s really important that incels get offline and cultivate real-world friendship groups, because that’s the way most people actually form relationships,” he says.
The evolution of incel as a descriptor into an identity with an accompanying ideology presents a vexing question for researchers like Costello. What would need to change for an incel to no longer be an incel? “They all talk about it like they could relapse; they say, ‘I could always go back to being an incel,’” Costello says. “That makes it fundamentally a mindset problem.” Overcoming that mindset is easier said than done when the fraternal institutions and social scaffolding available to yesterday’s men have been crushed, but it could start with a simple mantra: Log off.
I thought Costello was sort of an incel ally, but he's just spouting the usual normie platitudes kek
