These are some notes and drafts of a post I was working on in 2025, but it just got out of hand. There’s a lot of stuff in here, but it isn’t all coherent. It’s also not that informed by readings about patriarchy. I decided to post this in March 2026. — jk
Theories of Why Some Men are Incels
Facebook has a way of sending notifications for comments on threads from years ago, and it found an old post about incels, where I got into the two different definitions of “incel”.
- An incel or “involuntary celibate” is someone who wants a relationship, but can’t seem to have sex, or get into a relationship.
- An incel is a misogynist, with a horrible, openly misogynist personalty, who can’t seem to have sex, because no woman would have sex with someone like that. I call them Blackpills.
There’s also two popular explanations of why they’re like that:
- They can’t have sex or a relationship, so they’re angry. This is usually what men think.
- They’re so angry at women and develop a bad personality, and that’s why women reject them. This is usually what women think.
While these two explanations conform to our “common sense” experiences, they are not comprehensive.
Some people have a lot of trouble having sex, or who have never had sex, who aren’t angry at women (or men).
Some people don’t have much sexual desire.
Some misogynists are married, often multiple times, with different women. Many women do not have a good “misogyny radar”: around 40% of women experience intimate partner violence.
Here are some examples of people who fit in each category:
| Misogynist | Not Misogynist | |
|---|---|---|
| Having Sex, or Have Had Sex | Donald Trump, Pick Up Artists | allegedly the norm |
| Not Having Sex, Involuntarily | Eliot Rodger, Incels/Blackpill | “Love Shy” people, People With Communication Issues like Autism |
Society, at least in the US, is patriarchal and misogynistic. We struggle to change society to be less patriarchal, and the patriarchy fights to maintain itself or increase itself.
Both explanations above do exactly what “incels” do online: they fixate on having sex as a “cure”, or regard a good personality as an indicator that someone isn’t misogynist.
Both explanations are describing the patriarchal status quo, and how individuals who are functional within it hope to navigate it:
- Men are hoping to have enough sex to “feel normal”.
- Women are hoping to be regarded as a full human being, by men.
Actual Studies of Incels
William Costello, an evolutionary psychology researcher, did an extensive survey of people in the online incel communities, and a second paper about how they think of women, and came to a several conclusions:
- Lots are having mental health issues.
- Autism is overrepresented, with 18% having a diagnosis. The national average is around 3%. (This is not self-diagnosis or suspicion of having autism.)
- They aren’t right-wing or especially racist, but individuals write a lot of racial self-hate speech, mocking their own ethnicity.
- They trend a little bit more white, around 70%, than their proportion in the US, but Asians are a little overrepresented, and Black and Latino men are underrepresented. (Latest info says it’s over 40% POC.)
- Likely to be NEETs.
- Likely to think about suicide.
- They have a “tendency to interpersonal victimhood“.
While I don’t really agree with his overall outlook, which, I gather from his interviews with conservatives (where he lets his political perspectives out more) is about accommodating to the patriarchy, his research helps to deconstruct how we are projecting a lot of inaccurate ideas onto people who fail to have sex.
Brian G. Gilmartin created a term, “love shy”, to research and describe men who can’t seem to get into romantic relationships. His book, Shyness and Love, is pretty hard to get, but it’s on Ebay. A PDF is attached. The psychology fandom site has a good summary of what love-shyness is.
The Manosphere
Lily O’Farrel has the best series of cartoons that best explain “incels”, “redpills” and other terms and ideas in the online cloud of “the manosphere”. They’re the fastest way to get an overview of this corner of the online world. Just go to her Instagram, @vulgadrawings, and read everything.
This report also describes the manosphere and incels. Misogynist Incels and Male Supremacism: Overview and Recommendations for Addressing the Threat of Male Supremacist Violence
By: Megan Kelly, Alex DiBranco, Dr. Julia R. DeCook
Redpill and Incel Ideology
I don’t know the mechanics of it, but the popular understanding is that “redpill influencers” like Andrew Tate or Jordan Petersen appeal to the men who have trouble with relationships, by giving self-improvement advice, with a heavy dose of misogyny.
These online communities where they teach each other mainstream misogyny, and mainstream patriarchy (the “redpill” and “blackpill”), and bully each other with insults, if they dare to consider alternatives based in feminism (the “bluepill”).
Both the redpill and blackpill are anti-feminist.
The redpill is an individualistic, neoliberal position advocating self-improvment (this is Andrew Tate).
The blackpill criticizes society, but can be biologically determinist (this is somewhat like William Costello, because evolutionary psychology regards psychology as biological), or unintentionally social constructivist but with defeatism (this is Jordan Petersen and the general idea of “going back to a more conservative society” arguing that it has a biological basis), or nihilist (Eliot Rodger the mass murderer, or the fact of incels thinking about suicide).
Radicalization
Costello’s work is partly about arguing that most incels are not radicals, and he’s correct. The mass murderers who have been associated with incels are outliers.
However, the online community has created a kind of narrative or philosophy that mass murders are willing to adopt; after the terrorism, the incel community seems to be willing to adopt some parts of the logic of the murderer.
The Manosphre and the Alt-Right Pipeline with Ome
This is a good analysis from someone who has observed the Manosphere from the 4chan days.
The Asian Redpill
I’m writing this in 2025, and it’s a brief update and summary of the MRAsians article below.
Reforms
After the Slate piece on MRAsians, Aznidentity was “cleaning up” and removing adversaries of the Asian women writers like Celeste Ng and Eileen Huang. Aznidentity had been partially blacklisted by Reddit, and put on a list of problematic subreddits. By 2025, people on the other main redpill Asian group, r/AsianMasculinity, were saying Aznidentity was “bluepilled” or taken over by “woke” administrators. The admins at AI hadn’t changed, but were exerting more control, and pushing a more center-left position, and censoring criticism.
2024 Elections
By the 2024 elections, the redditors there were raising the old statistic, that Asian voters differ from other voters, because Asian men vote more for the progressive women candidates (Clinton and Harris) running against Trump, than Asian women do.
So, with that stat, these men could simultaneously claim to be progressive, and also attack Asian women.
Some polls show this trend. The most notable was the Pew exit poll that showed Trump and Harris equally popular between Asian men and Asian women. Some say the CNN exit poll also shows this, but there’s no graph. You need to dig through reports.
Other polls do not show the trend. A pre-election Tufts poll, among young Asian Americans, women overwhelmingly supported Harris more, by a large margin. Women were 80% for Harris vs. 15% for Trump, and men were 64% vs. 32%. That’s a 14 point gap. However, that is a smaller gap than the overall youth vote, which had a 17 point gap, with support for Harris at 58% among women, and 42% among men.
The data shows an unusual trend in the Asian vote compared to other races, where Asian women and men don’t have the typical “gender gap” where men vote more conservatively than women. However, this isn’t a sufficient reason to attack Asian women, as a group, for being conservative – because they, along with Asian men, did vote more for Harris than for Trump.
MRAsians and a Political Split
An older related article I drafted in October 2021.
Trigger: sexual language and content.
Self Analysis – Why I Keep Looking at Incels
I troll. Recently, I trolled to criticize a few people who were criticizing a misogynist holding a slut-shaming, anti-abortion sign. While he deserved criticism, the specifics of their attacks were to say he must be ugly, can’t have sex, is a virgin, and has a short dick. I was triggered to respond. I said it’s OK to be a virgin, body shaming is wrong, etc. It reminded me of “blaming the incels”.
On and off, I’ve been reading about “incels”, after the Eliot Rodger massacre in 2014. This mass murder rampage hit close to home for a few reasons:
- It happened in Isla Vista, the college town for UCSB. I have a family connection to the area.
- The murderer was half-Asian, and harbored intense self-hatred for being Asian, and specifically murdered some of his victims for being Asian. I’m Asian, and have experienced self-hatred. (It’s not uncommon for POC to experience self-hatred.)
- I knew an adult virgin person, and have known some guys who were virgins well into their 20s.
- He developed his ideas online. That’s my “workplace”, and also where I develop my ideas.
- He lived in Los Angeles. I live in Los Angeles. I had an interest in reading about this city.
So, in 2014, I read everything about him. Years later, when “incels” and “pick up artists” were being exposed on social media, and said they idolized Eliot Rodger, I visited a couple forums, and read them. What I found was a space with a lot of misogynistic material, but also a lot of relatively young men who seemed to have anxiety about talking to women, a distorted image of themselves, and depression. It seemed to be a lot of problems shy people have, but more extreme. Also, it looked like the misogynists were grooming new misogynists.
I haven’t had a sustained exposure to this material, because reading it depresses me, so I avoid it. However, I have some social anxiety, so I find that aspect relatable.
I went back into reading about incels after the Alek Minassian murders in 2018. Evidently, he wasn’t an “incel” community member, but used the term to get notoriety.
I went back into reading about incels after the Atlanta Spa murders in March 2021, because many people were calling the killer an “incel”. He was not an incel. He wasn’t celibate. He had a relationship, and lived with his girlfriend. He had paid for sex in addition to any sex he had with his girlfriend. I thought the main reasons why he killed were racism, Christian guilt, and patriarchal views. He was not discussed in the incel forums. (The incel community use of the term, and the public use of the term diverged.)
Also, around then, I learned about “redpill“. I’d read the term before in the incel forums, but didn’t understand what it was. I first viewed an explanation about “redpill” in the Aba and Preach podcast. Aba had been a “redpill” in the past, and was no longer one. The A&P show is mostly about relationships, and the video was about how Aba had been young and clueless, and then in his early 20s got “redpilled”. (link to video)
The redpill is partly men advising other men, mainly bluepilled virgins, to “man up”, but it’s a message that comes with a lot of sexism, reinforcement of male gender norms, and patriarchy. They encourage guys to work out, to make money. They also teach “pick up artist” tricks of emotional deception and abuse. Ideologically, they say men are oppressed by women, and feminism. It’s reactionary and harmful. (more info)
(I had also subscribed to all the Asian subreddits on Reddit, including aznidentity.)
I also learned about the “bluepill” and “blackpill” in the forums. What I noticed was that misogyny had taken over, and there was a push to have a strict misogynist line, and the goal was to “blackpill” everyone. Also, the forum now allowed people who were not virgins, but were simply not having as much sex as they wanted, and hated women.
More generally, “incel” was becoming a synonym for “misogynist”.
Maybe around July 2021 I wrote a post about gender identification experiences. It was inspired by recent support for trans women at a counterprotest against Proud Boys. It was a one-off post I was using to figure out why this issue meant a lot to me. (find post)
In August, I found an explanatory meme by @vulgadrawings that connected incels, bluepills, redpills, blackpills, pickup artists, MGTOW, MRA, chads, stacys, and a bunch of other stuff. All this stuff is called the “manosphere”. From the meme:
The Men’s Rights overlaps with the organization Proud Boys on the alt-right.
In September 2021, I read the MRAsians article in Slate, where “Mens Rights” and other manosphere ideas are applied to Asian people. This also dug into the aznidentity subreddit.
(Sometime between April and September, I unsubscribed to all the Asian subreddits I was in. I vaguely recall lacking interest in the posts, which were mostly about media. I recall reading the aznidentity platform, and probably disagreed with some parts of it, and agreed with other parts.)
As far as I can tell, I’m around 2 to 5 years behind on understanding this stuff. The ideas from the manosphere have become diffused across the web.
References
Preprint paper referenced in the Slate article: Curating the Future …
More research. Videos.
Possible points of contact with ideas and positions with MRAsians
Henry Zee support of deplatforming Eileen Huang, on facebook. He’s a progressive but this is a troubling thing he did. I don’t understand how this fits together.
Reference material: Eileen Huang’s article. A local copy. I don’t entirely agree with it, but wouldn’t bother to make a big deal about it.
Proud Boys as enemies at WiSpa protests. Trans activists that we showed up to support.