Researchers Interviewed Former Self-Described Incels. Here’s What They Found

Just over ten years ago, the term “incel” went mainstream in the most heinous way imaginable. Twenty-two-year-old Elliot Rodger, a student at the University of California-Santa Barbara, murderously rampaged through the neighborhoods around campus. He stabbed to death his roommates, as well as one of their friends. He then gunned down two women outside the Alpha Phi sorority house. Afterwards, he barreled around in his BMW, running down pedestrians and firing wildly into shops. Rodger killed six and injured 14 before committing suicide.

What drove Elliot Rodger’s madness? In a 137-page manifesto, he detailed his soul-crushing frustration with being a virgin, his hatred for women who denied him love and pleasure, and his contempt for sexually successful men. Angry at being socially and romantically excluded despite being an “alpha male” and a “Supreme Gentleman”, he decided to violently lash out at his peers.

Elliot Rodger was a self-described “incel.” Short for “involuntary celibate”, the term has been used online by young, heterosexual men who feel that they have been unjustly denied relationships and sex because they fail to meet traditional norms of masculinity. Neither tall, emotionally tough, physically strong, nor good-looking, these incels see themselves as shunned by women who prize those primitive traits above all else despite professing not to. This perceived hypocrisy breeds hate, and in exceedingly rare cases like Rodger’s, extreme violence.

Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Calgary interviewed 21 individuals who once were active in these groups. They sought to understand what drove young men to seek incel communities and what kept these men locked within them.

“We learned that many participants became incels after they sought help online for some social or emotional challenge they faced and found that the incel community met or seemed to offer solutions to the challenges they faced,” the authors reported.

Interviewees broadly described struggling with sexual relationships, working in dead-end jobs, and frequently being “friend-zoned” by women they desired. These setbacks torpedoed their self-esteem.

“I saw people around me … being intimate with each other while I was stuck in a cycle of asking people out and getting made fun of, rejected,” one former incel told the researchers.

The young men feared sharing their concerns with people they knew.

“You feel shame… because you think that they’ll make fun of you,” another described.

When these men turned to online incel communities for help, they learned of the “black pill”, a reference to the truth-revealing “red pill” from the 1999 science-fiction movie The Matrix. According to this doctrine, women are the advantaged gender because they will always be valued for their sexuality. Conversely, men who are not conventionally desirable have no inherent value to society. It’s not difficult to see how this dynamic has permeated politics.

Though faced with this depressing reality, new incels also found a “legion” of support from men sharing their fate. Thus, they didn’t feel as alone. But the support was often self-destructive. They were told that their problems with women were not their fault. Thus, there was little they could do to improve their social standing. 

“None of [the incel forums] will say that we have to practice, you have to be uncomfortable, you have to go talk to anyone,” a 24-year-old subject told the researchers.

Incels also felt special for swallowing the “black pill”, granting true knowledge of the fundamental unfairness behind social society.

“It’s this false sense of like superiority. Like ‘Hey we are better than them, we know the truth. All these people are like normies,’” a 20-year-old former incel said.

Young men who have fallen down the Incel rabbit hole feel simultaneously stuck, yet superior, like they’re holed up in a luxury bunker feeling sorry for everyone else in the world above. At the same time, they secretly hate where they are, and resent women and high-status men for putting them there. Seething inside their cozy echo chamber, Incels find it hard to escape.

“Incel beliefs and associated feelings of having special knowledge offer an attractive compensatory strategy for young men coping with low self-esteem,” the researchers wrote. “These views allow them to bolster their self-image, while avoiding the challenges inherent to addressing their mental health and self-esteem struggles.”