And is their entitlement better than the exploitative Darwinism praised by modern dating’s defenders?
Self-identified, “incels”, short for, “involuntary celibates”, aka men who can’t get laid and talk about it online, often appear narcissistic. However, incels are different than what self-identified incels call, “normies”. “Normies”, are internet slang for, “normal or average people”, who have sex regularly and also rate high in narcissism. Are incels more narcissistic than the average American? Is the political project incels have for increased sexual entitlement better than the conscious and aggressive social exploitativeness, “normies”, have institutionalized into dating?
top left: Pick up artist Tucker Max talks about how his book on becoming an asshole to get women became a bestseller, top-right: three pickup-artists casually discuss ‘social game’ an confidence, bottom left: Neil Strauss tries to seduce Jessica Alba with social manipulation, bottom right: episodes from the reality dating competition: The Pickup Artist
Most Americans rank as moderately narcissistic (as opposed to not narcissistic), and this is rising every decade, with the average American currently ranking around a fairly high, “16”, on the NPI facets test, which isn’t a clinical tool, but a good estimator. Source Study. Source Summary.
Most people’s exposure to incels probably comes from Wikipedia which often shows up as the first Google search result for, “incel”. Currently, the Wikipedia admin who owns the Wikipedia page for incels against Wikipedia conduct policy included a citation that says incels are narcissistic in a way that suggests they are more so than average. However, the citation doesn’t contain any reasoning. The wikipedia page is also usually very focused on Elliot Rodger who killed 6 people in 2014 because women wouldn’t approach him. In his vlogs, Rodger displayed extremely high degrees of narcissism, showing entitlement, exhibitionism, authority, superiority, self-sufficiency and vanity.
Elliot Rodger
Usually when people say those with autism are “narcissistic”, the mental health community is quick to come in and say, “this isn’t the word we use for those with autism, as narcissistic-like traits are very often part of the package of being autistic”. The mental health community though doesn’t rush to tone-police inaccurate statements about autistic patients who become infamous like Elliot Rodger.
From polling I’ve done in the incel forum I run and others, while there is a high number of autistic people relative to the general population, it’s not high relative to other mental health diagnoses in the forums. Most have extreme shyness instead. It’s just the autistic incels have a greater likelihood of becoming infamous than the non-autistic incels as they sometimes use violence to express anger they don’t have the tools to express verbally and constructively political (source). A large majority of incel shooters had autism (source1, source2, source3), but a minority of incels polled in incel forums have autism.
poll from incelistan
As alluded to before, narcissism is often measured along the following traits: authority, exhibitionism, superiority, entitlement, exploitativeness, self-sufficiency, and vanity.
Incels generally don’t feel superior to other people, otherwise they wouldn’t constantly label themselves as ‘subhuman’ in forums dedicated to incels. Even if they feel like they deserve a partner that doesn’t mean they also feel that others don’t deserve a partner. They also are generally averse to showing their face, or just their general body anywhere making them low in exhibitionism.
Which brings us to entitlement. Most self-identified incels don’t feel that they are entitled to a partner, but rather that they should be entitled through changing the social contract or law. In other words, they don’t feel inherently entitled, but rather see sex as not-scarce. They see sex with proper birth control as not-unsafe. And they see sex with a woman who will settle for something enjoyable (just less enjoyable than with a muscle-bound wealthy man), as enjoyable for both parties. For the incels who are defined by their dis-ablity to find sex and usually are diagnosed with a mental or physical disability, they are engaging in the same political project that a disabled man in 1992 set off when he made sex as a human right in the Netherlands for 25 years. This after being awarded a monthly stipend of 65 gilders from the Raad van State, the Netherland’s top government agency, after suffering mental anguish from the absence of sexual contact (source). This entitlement was then awarded to anyone disabled claiming reimbursment for hookers in the Netherlands until 2017 (source). And although self-identified incels focus on piecemeal social contract reform through calls for more, “culturally enforced monogamy”, we see that a much more radical proposal had been enacted into law in recent years without much press or major outcry about entitlement. In fact, the only notable campainer on the issue, for or against: porn actress Ivey Passion, is working to maintain the entitlement for the mentally and physically ill.
Ivey Passion on sexual entitlement for people with disabilities
As far as exploitativeness, most male incels reject ‘social game’, and ‘game’ entirely as they see online dating, which removes a lot of sociability from the dating equation, as exposing how women are just as physically shallow on inherited physical traits as men are, something they feel PUAs never took enough into account. Therefore, the social exploitation techniques touted for men to use in bars and clubs are at best uninteresting to incels, many of whom never bothered to try pick-up-artistry in the age of the always-online-millenial. For the forum-savvy incels who did try to engage in social exploitative techniques or at least with the ideas, they found them lacking and created the anti-pickup-artist site PUAhate.com which eventually morphed into pseudo-incel forums as more research on the subject of the power of your inherited looks got passed around.
Most incels would rank lower than the average man on exploitativeness, as pick-up-artistry has been mainstreamed into general dating practices and advice more-so than any theory of how dating works or should work. PUA, which arguably started in 1992 after the first well-known pick-up-artist: Ross Jeffries published his first book, has always argued against men ‘being their kind selves’ and instead for men to exploit women’s perceptions by faking confidence and exploiting other men through being generally unpleasant, escalating their status in women’s eyes to ‘win’ a date.
PUAs argue that to become sexually successful, you must become a dating, ‘winner’ through personality-altering to women’s evolutionary needs, righteously leaving the, ‘nice guy losers’, in the literal reproductive dust. Faking confidence, not being a nice guy, not complaining etc… This attitude towards dating is now being argued very similarly by the modern, online millennial feminist movement as it defined itself in opposition to the claims of self-identified incels and therefore accidentally allied itself with the now mainstream PUA movement it used to criticize.
But not just feminist, really any mainstream movement that ever gives dating advice to men now borrows heavily from the PUA dog-eat-dog value system. Books from PUAs such as Tucker Max become best-sellers arguing for men to be more like an, ‘asshole’, to men and women. If sex were was a right in a way that doesn’t oppress women and men more than the current system, surely this axis of narcissism: entitlement would be preferable to the more familiar axis of narcissism in dating: the ruthless sexual exploitation ‘game’ men play to win a mating competition.
Going to skip self-sufficiency and authority as this is getting long and moving onto vanity. Incels sometimes self-obsess over their appearance as most dating is moving online, and online men who are average or ugly get almost no luck on these sites. It is a brutal form of lookism that keeps them from getting matches.
https://qz.com/241479/okcupid-experimented-on-users-and-proved-everyone-just-looks-at-the-pictures/
In this increasingly dominant dating paradigm, the only way to succeed is through vanity. So you could see incels as being forced in a way to become vain to attract a partner in modern dating.
