Back in the summer of 2014 I wrote two essays outlining the minds of Incels. The first was The Severing and the second was Owed Sex. I wrote these essays in the wake of the Eliot Rodger shooting and the sudden emergence of the term ‘red pill’ into the popular lexicon. Eliot had a lot of manifesto style youtube videos as well as a fairly detailed written manifesto he published online just prior to his shooting. His frustration was palpable in these videos. Here was a kid who fit the profile of an AFC, an average frustrated chump. AFC is an old school PUA term used to describe average guys who were confused by intersexual dynamics, usually as a result of their life long Blue Pill conditioning. I used to unironically use AFC to describe a guy who I’d probably refer to as a Blue Pill Beta in my work today, but in light of the most recent “Incel attack” in Toronto last month I’m wondering if AFC isn’t a better descriptor for these guys.
I’m doing a bit of review here because I want to put the perspective on time in these incidents. Alek Minnasian, the Toronto truck driving killer, another AFC, reportedly idolized Eliot Rodger. In and of itself this is probably to be expected from a self-avowed Incel, but what motivates these guys. That’s what the mainstream media wants to know, right? And literally hundreds of bloggers and social pundits seem to all have an expert knowledge about the motives of Incels. Weeks after the Toronto killings there are people I’ve never read before who are convinced that they know all about these “losers”. For the most part, the mainstream media (and I include online pundits in this category now) want ‘crazy’. Even the guys who are ostensibly part of the manosphere know that crazy gets eyeballs on the screen, and nothing is crazier than a ‘killer Incell’.
Incels are the low hanging fruit for pretty much anyone on either side of the ideological spectrum. I can read any number of feminists wanting to link Incels to ‘red pill radicalization’ and how they are ‘gender terrorists’ (this is genuinely laughable considering the natures of most of these kids), to the Red Pill guys who want to carve out their own trad-con niche in the ‘sphere using Incles as a negative example to prove their version of whatever qualifies as masculinity. Lets face it, Incels are easy targets. They’re universally described as “the losers you used to know in high school who couldn’t get laid”. This makes them easy to dismiss most of the time, until one of them shoots up a university or mows down random women with a panel truck.
Incel is short for involuntary celibate, but there’s a lot more contributing to these guy’s condition than just an inability to get laid. Back in 2014 the term Incel wasn’t used to define Eliot Rodger. He was an Incel for sure, but very few people trying to analyze him made this connection. Again, they wanted crazy, and what’s better than crazy? More crazy. So all the efforts used to pick Eliot apart back then were really pointing to bigger motives, nefarious groups of ‘misogynists’ and more craziness.
Back then, Eliot belonged to an online forum called PUA Hate; literally a group formed by these guys’ collective dislike of the Pick Up Artist set that virtually all of them had once been hopeful would end their involuntary celibacy. For whatever reason the promised magic formula that would end their loneliness and sexlessness didn’t work for them. They were all understandably mad. Ironically, Rational Male articles I had written got link-backs to various posts on the forum and most of them were appreciative of them, however, that may’ve also been part of the problem. Fast forward four years and today the deleted PUA Hate forum is replaced by incel.me, another forum with a similar charter (and also one I get good link-backs to).
I think one of the most pressing problems in Red Pill awareness today is that awareness itself. Not every guy is ready to be unplugged. One of the inherent risks I take in writing what I do is presuming every man I make aware has the presence of mind to accept it and work it out for himself. If you look at the profiles of the past 6 school shooters, include Eliot Rodger and Alek Minassian, you find a lot of similarities. Most were the products of a fatherless home, most were diagnosed with autism or Asperger’s syndrome, and all of them were the ‘Forever Alone’ types triggered by the rejection of a girl. These young men are the product of a generation that has removed the man from their upbringing and taught them to emote before they think.
Today we’re just starting to acknowledge this generation of ‘lost boys‘; the young men who drift rudderless in life, are socially retarded to varying degrees and a demographic that is looking outside themselves for solutions to problems that are the result of the social order that created them. Is it any surprise we have such a rise in popularity of any speaker or organization that might be able provide them some direction?
Many of these guys are simply not ready to be made Red Pill aware. It is a risk to their egos, but also, it’s often a crushing disillusionment of the Blue Pill ideals they’d hoped would be a reality for them if they could just play the Blue Pill’s game correctly. For a lot of them it was their Blue Pill hopes that formed the basis of their existence. Now add the harsh truths of the Red Pill to a lost boy, one who is socially maladapted or has a genuine psychological disorder, and take that (misguided) ‘hope’ away from him. What does that kid do when the Red Pill shows him the reality of the game he’s involved in?
There is no ‘Black Pill’
I’ve heard Roosh and a few other commenters in the ‘sphere describe the “Black Pill” – the idea that the social order of the Blue Pill, the Feminine Imperative, or the ‘gynocracy’ if you like, is so rigged against men that they accept their role in it and give up on trying to make themselves or their circumstance better. What these guys are describing is what I’ve referred to in the past as the Abyss. This Abyss is the psychological / existential gulf a man needs to cross when he becomes Red Pill aware. He realizes that the person he carved himself out to be in a Blue Pill conditioned ideal was based on a the same falsehoods. This stage of unplugging has difficulties unique to men at various stages of their lives and according to the decisions they made for themselves throughout their lives in accordance with those Blue Pill ideals. It’s one thing for a young man of 25 to unplug and turn his life around in a Red Pill aware paradigm, but it’s quite another for a man of 70 to become aware and look back on his life, marriage(s), family dysfunction and the long term impact his blindness to the Blue Pill game he was a part of for so long.
There is a necessary state of nihilism, or at the very least a prolonged doubt, that occurs when men realize that they’re cut away from that Blue Pill conditioned life. This is why I compare it to mourning in The Five Stages of Unplugging, men are literally mourning the loss of their investments in that paradigm; they’re morning the loss of Killing the Beta they used to be.
Understand this, there is no Black Pill – there is only the Abyss of accepting the truth that comes with Red Pill awareness and a man’s capacity to make this awareness work in his best interests.
Incels, if nothing else, want to find ways to make this awareness work for them, but most are too damaged to deal with the realities that Red Pill awareness reveals to them. They’re not ready for the truth, but it’s unavoidable today.
A lot of femosphere critics want to lay the blame for Incels at the feet of the Red Pill. They think there’s some nefarious plot to radicalize young men to be killers in some misogyny fueled gender-jihad against women. This presumption also comes on the heels of the #MeToo / Future is Female movement so it fits in perfectly with the ‘resistance’ narrative. As I said, it’s easy to hate on Incels. They fit another profile too; that of the basement dwelling 30 year old who refuses to leave his parents house. For the Man Up crowd Incels are easy to AMOG, for the lathered up militant feminist they’re the perfect foil needed to legitimize their own ego investments in gender dystopia.
The truth of the matter is Incels have always been with us. They were the losers, the nerds (before they were told they were cool) and the guys who were Darwin’s dead ends. I knew dozens of them when I was growing up. I know many now, all of them building a life-theme around their life long confusion and misery of not figuring out women. I know a lot of married men today who are technically Incels in their marriages. We like to say they’re ‘unlucky’ in love or we’ll say “Don’t worry, you’re a great guy. Any girl would be lucky to have you. You’re just meeting the wrong kind of girls, just be yourself and it’ll happen for you.” Then we hope they don’t fixate on one of our girlfriend’s girlfriends and they go off to figure out how the real world works.
AFCs in 2018
So what’s different now? Well, to start, we have a generation of lost boys who’ve been acculturated to think that even asking a girl out is a form of sexual misconduct. The Village has raised boys as if they’re defective girls, devoid of any of the masculine discipline necessary to teach these young men how to cope with real rejection from a girl, how to deal with defeat or how to come back stronger as a result. As we’ve feminized these boys so to have we embedded the same feminine victimhood narrative that women rely on into their collective psyche. Except these boys are still beholden to the old social contract that women believe incumbent upon men. This puts these boy-men into a very precarious position: they are educated like defective girls and as such adopt the same frail sensibilities and are subject to the same entitlement narrative as most women are, but they are also male and therefore are expected to suck it up, take it on the chin and carry on. They are told to express their feelings and in the next moment are told to check their male privilege.
Most of the lost boys generation are not ready for the disillusionment that the Red Pill brings to them, but it’s not the manosphere that’s opening their eyes so much as they are having it thrust in front of them by a communication age steeped in the Feminine Imperative. Today, Red Pill truths are harder and harder to get away from as Open Hypergamy and all of the unflattering truths about the female nature are triumphantly lauded by women themselves. Every swipe left on Tinder is one more confirmation of exactly the harsh truths that push Incels to their limit.
Of every article I’ve read on Incels since the Toronto killings not one author has analyzed the problem correctly, but also none have any actionable idea about how to solve the problem of Incels snapping. There are no longer the same outlets that ‘losers’ had back in my day to channel that sexual frustration to more productive ends. Many a frustrated high school boy became his generation’s iconic artist or musician. I think it’s the height of irony that Mark Zuckerberg essentially created Facebook to stalk his ex girlfriend. There are no longer the creative ways to deal with the discontent that comes from sexual rejection. Some will say to me there are, it’s just these guys are too unmotivated to apply themselves. And while that may be true, there are much easier outlets that further stunt that boys development. Rather than redirecting that sexual angst to something creative, it’s much easier to lose themselves in online porn or immersive escapisms facilitated by this age’s technology.
Or they can seek out a forum of similarly disaffected young men and commiserate about the truth of a world that has no place for them. I read that Dr. Jordan Peterson suggested that a social order based on ‘enforced monogamy’ might be a cure for Incels. I get what he was trying to say, but it’s just one more flippant redirection away from the real causes of this rise in Incels. I can remember reading a post that Roissy had made about a knife wielding man in China who had gone to a day care center to specifically kill women and children. As horrifying as that is what had prompted the guy was the understanding that he’d essentially been selected out of the reproductive game because there was a huge imbalance in the ratio of men to women in China as a result of their one-child policy for so long. Roissy went on to suggest that as more and more men are disaffected by a feminine-primary social order, one that bases all its legislation and social doctrine on optimizing Hypergamy, the men disenfranchised by it will become either more violent (in their effort or angst to reproduce) or more suicidal – which we also see in men killing themselves at 5 times the rate of women.
Incels are the canary in the coal mine that is a gynocentric social order. They are what results when a society prioritizes and incentivizes Alpha Fucks (enthusiastic consent) while Beta Bucks is more or less assured by direct and indirect resource transfer to women. When 80%+ of men are evaluated as ‘unattractive’ to women fed on a steady diet of ego inflating social media, you get Incels. I made a case for this in Dangerous Times, but Incels are a byproduct of a feminine-primary form of polyandry. Incels are a result of shifting from a social contract based on marriage to one based on a sustained child support. The old social order was founded on giving a guy a decent shot at marriage and reproduction by way of being a good provider, this contract is gone today. When a woman’s primary incentive is no longer provisioning all that’s left is a socio-sexual contract based on the most available Alpha seed to meet a need that a woman cannot provide for herself.
As we move into the next decade I believe we will see even more narrowing of this socio-sexual contract. This is why some countries are legislating that anything less than an enduring enthusiastic consent for a woman is rape. This is an effort in insuring a woman is never again inconvenienced by having transactional sex for resources, nor should she be bothered by men who will know not to approach her. Incels are the natural expression of the frustration that comes from this truth becoming more and more blatant and accepted in society. Incels have it right; they more than any guy understand the brutal truths of a social order founded on mandating Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks. Where they go wrong is in their way (or non way) of coping with that truth. They accept their Black Pill and never cross the Abyss to a better life because they don’t know how to evolve with it.
