The secret world of Incels

 

I recently watched two documentaries about Incels, Benjamin Zand´s “The Secret World of Incels” and the Swedish “Svenska Incels”, shown on TV4. The latter is probably a copycat of the former. Finnish Hufvudstadsbladet apparently wrote in a critical review that Zand comes across almost as a parody of an uninterested and moralizing BBC reporter. I thought he was just regular. TV4 mostly follows Zand´s lead. I don´t claim to be an expert on the Incel subculture, so I can´t really judge the docus from that angle. At least the productions tell us what establishment media wants us to think about Incels.

It´s a somewhat contradictory picture. On the one hand, the Incel forums are filled with extreme misogyny, calls for violence, fascination with “gore”, and eulogization of Elliot Rodger, a disturbed young man who identified as an Incel and killed six people in California in 2014. On the other hand, the Incels are portrayed as tragic and lonely, in need of a helping hand from society or good Samaritans. TV4 also put some emphasis on the autistic aspect and shows statistics suggesting that more young men than women feel lonely, never had sex, and so on. This “nice” aspect surprised me, since it must be very easy to run with the “dangerous extremist” angle.

According to Zand, the “ideology” of the Incels is called “the black pill”. But surely, that´s just one term, albeit a fairly central one? One thing that struck me was that the Incels interviewed had a kind of “inverted” version of the PUA worldview. One even references Vox Day´s SSH, albeit without mentioning it explicitly. The Incels are self-conscious “Beta males” or “Omegas” who consider themselves genetically inferior to “Chads” or Alpha males. Weirdly, the Chad is described in a very stereotypical way, almost as if taken from an ironic Chad meme on Twitter. He has pronounced jaws, blue eyes, and what not. It´s difficult to avoid the impression that the autists have been trolled by somebody! The “black pill” is presumably the realization that everything really is shit, and there are even forums with tips for how to commit suicide…

One thing never explained in the documentaries is why incels are becoming more common – that is, why *really*. Autism is obviously a factor. So why have the number of autists increased? Or virgins, or lonely young people in general? What about changing dating patterns? The people interviewed (one of Zand´s interviewees is a young woman or “Femcel”) have either broken with the toxic subculture, or are on the way out, presumably one of the reasons why they agreed to talk to reporters in the first place. Frankly, their face masks make them seem quaint rather than dangerous. But what about all the rest? Or society in general?

Those questions are left hanging in the air…