Incels

Have you made your “date-me doc” yet? “Date-me docs” are, per an article in the New York Times last week, “long, résumé-like dating bios” — think of them as the antidote to terse, image-reliant dating apps.  They're thus far confined to the digital outposts of startup, Rationalist and Post-Rationalist communities; at this point it would be more accurate to describe them as a specific cultural phenomenon than a reaction to dating apps. Whereas dating apps such as Hinge and Tinder are made for “normies,” websites such as OkCupid — where the term “sapiosexual” was originally popularized — or even Craigslist tended to attract a more eccentric caliber of dater.

Young men are giving up. They are the losers of the endless beauty pageant that is online life, dating in particular. Their failure to attract women or find rewarding employment is the stuff of jokes: they are “incels” (involuntary celibates), basement-dwellers, forty-year-old virgins. Meanwhile, they sink into a digital swamp of gloom and isolation that leads to resentment, radicalization, murder and suicide. In their internet forums, they call this “taking the blackpill.” The blackpill had yet to be named in 2014, when twenty-two-year-old Elliot Rodger rampaged through Isla Vista, California, killing six people and injuring fourteen more before his suicide, but he was fueled by its spirit of nihilism.

The Texas Department of Public Safety has designated incels, or ‘involuntary celibates’, as an ‘emerging domestic terror threat’. What began online with what the Department’s report calls a ‘a personal grievance due to perceived rejection by women’ may already, the report claims, have morphed into ‘allegiance to, and attempts to further, an Incel Rebellion’.Incels have quickly become one of the few groups whose mockery and derision is deemed universally acceptable. The term has become a go-to insult for men who are merely undesirable or unpopular. The idea that some men are misogynists, embittered because they can’t get women’s attention, is now used to explain all manner of male behavior.