Caveat: If you're looking for some actual research and proper addressing of the topic, this post will likely disappoint you. It's more polemic than serious thinky thoughts. You'd best skip to the video at the end.
From the beginning of time, there were guys who couldn't get laid in a whorehouse with a roll of hundreds. The difference is that they aren't/weren't committing mass murder or writing horrible things about or to women, either AFAB or trans*.
Who the fuck are these MRAs and MGTOW? From where did incels come? They're not just Elliot Roger and Paul Elam seeking the beautiful women they're convinced they deserve. It's not just Warren Farrell trying to convince you that feminists seek to humiliate, shame and enslave men. It's a large and loose collective of grab-asstic amphibian shit, rampantly misogynistic men who're pissed off that they didn't get their own way in interactions with other people.
My hypothesis, pulled totally out of my ass, is that for as long as Patriarchy has existed, bitter, disappointed and entitled men have always existed. It was only the spread of the Web, with its forums and antisocial media platforms, that they were given opportunity and space to form the hate group "communities" in which they gather.
Maybe the fact that in many parts of the world (particularly the west, it seems), women are no longer forced to be subjugated by men and have rights and agency, has heralded a change in attitude and behaviour that has shown just how rotten the system really is. Maybe a long-overdue process of natural selection is playing out with the individuals who can't/won't adapt fast enough. At any rate, the more feminist, leftist and progressive the general attitude of certain populations and groups of people becomes, the more intolerant and fearful right-wing groups seem to get.
"Understanding Trump voters and incels is a lot of the same things. There’s this sense of being robbed of an inheritance or something deserved."
— Natalie Wynn
Way back when, if you wanted a trophy, you earned the fucking thing. If you didn't win, no trophy. That changed when my generation, the much-maligned millennials, reached school-going age. Over-indulgent parents molly-coddled my contemporaries and along came entitlement mentality and "everyone deserves a trophy", just for participating. I'm thinking that incels are those people who were handed trophies just for showing up, but found out later that the real world doesn't hand you what you want just because you ask. Disappointed/frustrated with the disconnect from the lies they swallowed without question, some men internalised that negative feeling, let it boil and flung it outward at non-men.
Do you think that if, way back when, we didn't learn to think of our sexual partners as "trophies" (along with all the other highly problematic crap we took in), the whole downward spiral would never have begun? What if we hadn't learned all the toxic, mind-warping myths and lies of Patriarchy and how it encourages us to treat anyone outside the circle(s) of our particular demographic(s) like shit? It's no wonder so many men have such a tough time interacting with women (or other genders, for that matter). But to take that and turn it into active hatred with intent to do harm strikes me as extremely immature and deeply lacking in coping skills.
However they came about, Incels and MRA groups are definitely a problem (and a potentially dangerous one, in extreme cases) that's unlikely to be solved any time soon. (Efforts to educate these individuals and steer them onto and along different paths most often fail, since they are uninterested in anything that comes from outside their echo chambers of catastrophising and fatalistic thought. Incels don't want to learn to do better socially or find a way out of their self-enforced circles of hell. What they want to do is "lie down and rot", to use one of their phrases. They convince themselves that there is nothing that they can do or should do, since society owes them something; it's fate and out of their hands.)
Now, I'll leave it to Natalie Wynn from Contrapoints to provide some explanation/insight.
Thumbnail image copyright Parsons/GQ
