The masochistic Darwinian theology of Incel-ism

My oldest friend is back in town this week. Yesterday we met for a drink in London Bridge. ‘I have a treat for you’, he said.

The treat turned out to be a bundle of emails I’d sent him in 2000, the year after we left university, when I was living in Seville, trying to write a novel.

I remember that as one of the hardest times of my life.

The novel was rubbish. Seville was hot and lonely. Plus the trauma of difficult drug experiences was beginning to bubble up and drown me.

But you wouldn’t guess that from the emails. No, they’re full of jaunty zingers and comic anecdotes. 22-year-old me was quite the performer.

And they are absolutely obsessed with sex. All I emailed my friend about, really, was fancying this girl, or that girl, or did I really fancy that girl, or did this girl fancy me.

Very occasionally, I mention my writing, or observations of Seville, or my budding interest in spirituality. But then, very quickly, the hormones kick in, and the horny adolescent takes over.

I even had a nickname for him — ‘Goat Boy’, one of Bill Hicks’ Dionysian personae.

My friend found these Woody Allen-esque tales of horniness, neurosis and sexual frustration hilarious.

‘You were so uninhibited back then!’ he said, spluttering out his chicken burger as he read another passage.

So that’s what I was like 20 years ago. A total clown in my teens, who loved making people laugh, and then, in my late teens and early 20s, an increasingly desperate clown, tap-dancing while a trap-door opened beneath him.

And very, very sex obsessed.

There’s one email where I actually pulled. I am so excited about it I practically do a song-and-dance.

‘I pulled! I pulled! I pulled!’

Not ‘I met a woman and we made love’. No. ‘I pulled’.

This in a group email to about ten friends, when I’m aged 22. Again, my friend thought the email was ‘genius’, I thought it was utterly cringeworthy.

I barely describe the woman or the sex act itself. It’s the self-validation that is clearly so important to me. And the chance to tell others and turn it into another hilarious anecdote.

I found it pretty awful to listen to — the horniness, the neuroticism, the casual objectification of women and focus on their physical characteristics rather than their character. The manic need to make others laugh.

‘It’s real’, my friend said. ‘That’s what 22-year-old guys are like.’

But aren’t most 22-year-olds actually having lots of sex? Maybe they’re not.

‘You were an incel before there were incels’, my friend said laughing.

Now there’s a thought.

My 20s were perhaps my horniest decade, and the one where I had the least dating success.

I was OK-looking, for a five foot seven redhead, but I had bad social anxiety.

There was a tragi-comic mismatch between my hormones, my expectations, and how much sex I actually had.

And that’s how I thought about it: ‘getting sex’. Not ‘did I meet someone and have a fulfilling relationship’, but did I get ‘sex’. Not even principally the sensual pleasure of sex. But the validation of it. The evolutionary proof of my fitness. Look, I pulled! I’m OK!

I was a drummer back then, and after university I joined a casual band called The Husbands. I wrote a song for our first album, called Janine, which I’m still proud of — it has a good tune and funny lyrics.

But it’s incel funk.

Can’t got no loving

Got no release

Got no religion

I am deceased

Can’t get no action

Can’t get no luck

No satisfaction

I ain’t got fuck.

Can’t get no slap

Can’t get no tickle

No rumpy pumpy

No hide the pickle

No how’s your father

No poke the knickers

I might as well be

A fucking vicar

On it goes, for five minutes!

The universe likes to hold up a mirror occasionally, and arrange little synchronicities as teaching points.

As it happens, yesterday I was also writing a piece about nihilism, and looking at the phenomenon of ‘incels’ being ‘black pilled’.

You probably know the term ‘incel’. It means ‘involuntary celibate’, and refers to a group of young men on the internet who gather together on 4Chan and Reddit to complain about the shitty hand evolution has dealt them, whereby they never get laid and never will, because ‘Staceys’ (stereotypically beautiful women) always go for ‘Chads’ (stereotypically beautiful men).

Sometimes self-labelled incels try and up their ‘game’ — by getting ripped in the gym, or learning seduction techniques from the world of ‘pick up artists’.

Other times, self-labelled incels give up and go ‘black pilled’ — they decide that nature has played a cosmic joke on them, they will never get laid, life will always be lonely and terrible, they will always be at the bottom of the evolutionary fitness pyramid.

Sometimes, their despair turns into anger and violence. Incels tell themselves to LDAR — lie down and rot — or follow the example of ‘Saint Elliot’ — Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old who shot six people in California, after posting a manifesto complaining about the rottenness of the world as proven by his inability to lose his virginity.

Rodger became a cult figure to other incels, inspiring 28-year-old software developer Alek Minassian to drive a van onto a pavement in Toronto in 2014, killing 10 people. He sent this tweet before the attack.

Last month, 22-year-old Jake Davidson became the latest copycat incel killer, shooting five people dead in Plymouth after posting videos about being ‘black pilled’.

I watched this 2015 video, one of the first where the term ‘black pilled’ emerges, where incel blogger Omega Virgin Revolt tells his fellow incels to give up and accept their fate.

Watching it, I felt very sad for this young man. And I saw an ugly and wounded part of myself in him.

Omega and other incels invent a rigid dogmatic ideology where they are fated to lose.

They embrace a narrow form of Darwinism and Evolutionary Determinism, where the only point in life, for men, is to get laid. Not find love or raise a family. Just get laid with the ‘hottest’ woman you can find.

But in their worldview, women only choose to sleep with men with alpha physical characteristics — tall, square-jawed, big penised.

I’m serious, this is the weird Darwinism incels believe in, as if women check your penis size before going to bed with you. Check out this 2015 video, another early reference to ‘the black pill’.

The vlogger, Vav, says:

Let’s begin with tribal times. Back in those times men were chosen as mates based on their physical fitness, muscular strength, height, jaw line, penis size etc, because these are indicators of high testosterone. These indicators told women that men were high genetic value, and could be used as protectors, hunters and builders. Women in current times are drawn to these characteristics for these reasons. The female brain doesn’t want you to reproduce with a weak-jawed, short, fat guy because those are all indicators of low testosterone and poor genetic quality…Essentially [he says over a picture of Chris Hemsworth] only attractive highly masculine men reproduce based on societal needs.

In tribal times, Vav goes on, a handful of super-masculine men reproduced a lot while most men couldn’t. Then, for a while, the labour market gave men an advantage, so women married ugly men for economic security. But now women are financially independent and have access to online dating, the evolutionary field has shifted again. Women choose men purely for their physical characteristics, and men of low genetic fitness are condemned to never get laid.

The incels deem themselves evolutionarily unfit, because they don’t fit the ‘Chad’ requirements. And so they condemn themselves to eternal hell. Evolution is, for them, the most cruel and pitiless deity, and it has allocated them a life of misery, loneliness and frustration at the bottom of the status hierarchy. They are self-condemning eugenicists.

Black-pilled incels claim to be nihilist, but of course, this is not really nihilism. Nihilists don’t care about anything, while incels really care about sex and status, and they are really angry at what they perceive is the cosmic injustice of the hand life has dealt them. Hence the despair and violence.

In CBT terms, incels suffer from certain cognitive biases which cause them suffering.

One is the Fortune Teller’s Error. Because you are miserable and unable to meet a partner at 22, you think you will never meet one and will always be miserable and single.

They’re 22, for God’s sake. Lots of people are horny, socially awkward and sexually frustrated at 22. I was. But incels essentialize and eternalize this temporary state.

They deem themselves essentially unattractive, low status, worthless etc. They label themselves ‘incels’ as if this identity is branded onto them forever.

They also suffer from self-rating and comparing. They say ‘I am only a worthwhile and acceptable human being if I persuade a physically perfect woman to have sex with me’.

They compare themselves unfavourably to men who do persuade women to have sex with them, and stew in feelings of low self-esteem, inadequacy, envy and hatred.

They also suffer from what philosophers called ‘alienation’ — they take a certain idea and deify it, and then grovel beneath it. For them, the idea they deify is ‘Evolution’, but a particularly narrow definition of it: Natural Selection through Physical Characteristics.

They set up ‘Natural Selection through Physical Characteristics’ as an all-powerful, terrible, merciless God, and then imagine this God condemning them to eternal hell forever, without reprieve or mercy.

Any calm reflection on human relationships would show there are all kinds of men who find romantic love and successful partnerships — short, fat, weak-jawed, small penised, funny-looking men still find love, and many date stereotypically-beautiful women, if that’s your ultimate criteria of cosmic value. Look at Woody Allen.

They find a partner who is into them because they have other things going for them, like a good sense of humour, talent, intelligence, money, kindness and empathy, or mental strength and resilience. Sometimes they didn’t have these characteristics at 22. They developed themselves.

The existence of incels is proof that evolution does not work like they think it does. Otherwise we would all be Chads. All kinds of characteristics are evolutionarily-advantageous, and women have all kinds of weird tastes in men.

What may also be going on with incels is that they are watching a lot of porn, which is feeding into their narrowly physicalist and Darwinian view of reality, where life is all about looks.

Before online porn, young people would muddle along and find someone to spend their life with. They and their partner might not be Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, but it sort of worked. Their needs were more or less met, they got married, had kids, and fit into civilization.

Now, young men are being made even more horny and sex obsessed by porn, and perhaps it is inflating their expectations of what is required physically, from them and from their partner. Either you’re a cartoon porn star, or you’re a loser.

Above all, incels are ignoring the fact that it’s not Evolution that is condemning them to hell. They’re doing it.

Evolution is a glove-puppet god — they’re the ones doing the judging. And it is their own vicious self-condemnation, this vicious labelling of themselves as fundamentally unloveable for ever, which is making them so miserable and so unloveable.

Because if that’s your inner world — a world of rank desperation, simmering resentment, self-loathing, anger and violence — of course you’re not going to meet someone. The vibes coming off you must be terrifying!

Things change. Nothing is permanent.

What happened to the desperate, horny, neurotic young man I was at 22?

I gradually found some meaning and purpose in my work. That helped my self-esteem to grow.

I gradually learned to put my own inner values and self-acceptance before the acceptance of some imaginary audience.

I stopped thinking that pulling someone was the ultimate validation of my identity, thank God.

I got help for my social anxiety.

Perhaps my hormones calmed down too.

As I cared about sex less, and cared about other things more, it became easier to meet women.

I needed less validation from them and could meet them as equals, as human beings, rather than as the proof of either my evolutionary fitness or unfitness.

I grew out of that view of ‘the game’. It came to seem a pretty shit game, just ‘pulling’ women not to develop anything meaningful with them, but to prove something about myself to some imaginary audience.

But a new challenge emerged — trying to stick around.

The new game — trying to make a relationship work, trying to grow, trying to build something together, trying to face my flaws, trying to stick around and listen when your partner is hurting, rather than bouncing off to another shallow escapade — that’s a lot more interesting, and a lot harder.

It has nothing to do with the shape of your jaw or the size of your penis.

Maybe that desperate incel 22-year-old is still there in me. Eyeing other women, fantasizing about strangers, wanting more sex, because that’s the game, right?

Well, thank you universe for this week’s teaching point. Thank you for showing me that shadow part of me.

And if any self-labelled ‘incels’ are reading this, give yourself a break. That label is just a label, not a life sentence. Everyone has gone through phases of loneliness and sexual frustration. Women do not just go for ‘Chads’, that’s obvious bullshit. You have invented a bizarrely masochistic theology.

Learn to accept your own imperfections and the imperfections of women. Learn to see yourself as a rounded human being, not just your physical characteristics, and give women the same courtesy.

You may eventually pull someone incredibly hot on the surface, and then discover you don’t have much in common on the inside. How long do you think you will be satisfied in that situation? Do you definitely want what you think you desperately want? What are you trying to prove? To who?

Things change, but your inner world tends to change first, and then slowly the outer world changes to reflect your inner state.

Right now, your inner state is hell. And that is largely of your own making. Your own beliefs are making your life hell. Take responsibility for your beliefs and stop projecting them onto a made-up glove-puppet deity called Evolution.

Let go of the Incel ideology, let go of the philosophy that is causing you so much pain, like a kettle that is burning your hand. Leave the Incel forums, they are not your friends, they are dragging you down into hell.

The truth is, you are not nihilist enough.

You don’t care too little, you care far too much, about the wrong things.

You care far too much about sexual validation and social status. You are desperate for it, and that is ruining your life. That’s not entirely your fault, that’s your hormones and the dumb values of your culture, but you need to learn to shrug and think for yourself.

Learn wisdom. Wisdom does not care about your jaw line. Seek Sophia. Sophia does not care how tall you are.

Learn to care less about conventional values like status and physical beauty. You don’t have to play that game.

Learn to accept and like yourself even if you are not getting laid. Lots of people don’t get laid, sometimes for years. Things change.

Cultivate your inner garden. Make your interior beautiful. And gradually the external world will recognize the inner changes, and life will open up. People will be drawn to you and want to spend time in your garden. Yes, even women.

Hopefully by that point you won’t see them as physical ‘eights’ or ‘tens’ who in turn define your genetic score, but as rounded human beings with feelings, trying to make sense of this confusing existence.

Finally, there is no Absolute All-Powerful God called ‘Natural Selection According to Physical Characteristics’. You invented Him. Life is more complex and mysterious than that.

Some people do choose their partners purely according to physical characteristics. But most don’t.

Kill that fake cruel merciless God. You raised Him above you. You can pull Him down, and choose to accept and like yourself.

Cultivate your garden. Gradually, eventually, others will follow your lead and like you too.

********

Further reading:

Here’s a Vice article, ‘how to stop being an incel’ including a link to the reddit group IncelExit

Here’s an article about Albert Ellis, the inventor of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (which he called REBT), on how he taught himself to overcome his social anxiety around women. I recommend his book, A Guide to Rational Living.

And if you suffer from social anxiety, I recommend Dr Thomas Richards’ online course, Overcoming Social Anxiety Step-by-step, which helped me a lot when I was 23.