INSPIN (INvoluntary SPINster).

As a curmudgeon who got a “worthless” degree in the humanities (that has paid for itself dozens of times over, thanks for asking), I notice sloppy uses of language all the time, especially in the age of the internet. I try to hold the line for myself most of the time, but even I slip up occasionally. Still… words matter, and there’s a certain beauty in a well-turned phrase that’s sadly lacking in internet-age mudslinging and SJW language-policing. It has become fashionable to call things by their wrong names and to refrain from calling things by their right names, and don’t even get me started on assigning implications to words that have no bearing on their definition. I remember that titan of radio Barry Farber and one of his common phrases to dense callers to his show, “You are inferring what I did not imply.

For a more recent example, when Bruce Jenner changed his name to Caitlin I was content to call him Caitlin, as that is his legal name. What I was not (and am not) willing to do, is to call him her. Although he subsequently had his “lopitoffame” procedure (when women undergo the reverse procedure it’s called an “addadictome”), he still didn’t become a “she.” In fact, there is a perfectly good word for what he became… a word that has been around for thousands of years. He didn’t become a she - he became a eunuch. There was and is no need to coin some new PC-approved phrase. That said, times change and language changes with it, but language should clarify rather than obscure. Words matter.

That brings me to the word incel. It is often used as an insult, and usually with no regard for what the word actually means: INvoluntary CELibate. An incel is a guy who doesn’t have whatever it takes to get a woman to voluntarily have sex with him without paying her to do it. The word has nothing to do with how “bitter” he is, or how “misogynistic” he is, or how “beta/gamma/omega/whatever” he is: it just means that none of the women within his range of availability is willing to have sex with him. Some incels (can’t get sex) are voluntarily celibate (don’t want it anyway) – the two conditions are not mutually exclusive.

I went to high school with a guy. Let’s call him Dennis (not his real name). Dennis was a good dude and a friend, but he was just a dull guy… the kind of guy that exemplifies the term milquetoast. He wasn’t horrible in any way, but in every way that a guy could be appealing he just wasn’t… quite… there: just a bit below average in everything. Intelligence? He struggled in class but got by. Athletic? He didn’t go out for any sports but made it through Phys Ed. Hobbies? He watched television. Looks? You’d walk right by him without noticing him at all (maybe a four on the ten scale). Funny? He’d laugh at a good joke but never tell one. You get the idea. There was nothing wrong with Dennis, there just wasn’t anything about him that would make a girl say, “Back off, Becky… I gotta’ get me some of that.” We haven’t seen each other since we went our separate ways during the Carter Administration, but out of curiosity I googled his name and found that he’s still living not far from where we grew up, working at a middling job with no family in evidence. Guys like Dennis are what I think of when I hear the term incel. They’re not monsters and they don’t hate women. I doubt guys like that can muster the passion to hate, well… anything. Just a solid guy who wasn’t born with sex appeal and never figured out how to get it.

But now when we hear (and sometimes use) the term incel, the usual implication is that the guy is a jerk whose personality/hygiene/attitude is so toxic that most women run away: the fat, unkempt guys in the high school Atheist Society complaining about “normies” and “idiots” and looking down their bulbous noses at everybody. Even though the term only applies to people who can’t get sex, we’ve all seen it applied to people who are in ongoing sexual relationships. The term has evolved to mean a guy who exhibits “neckbeard” traits, or, more broadly, any guy who’s not 100% on board with whatever radical feminist idea is under discussion. (In those latter cases the word incel joins words like racist, sexist, homophobe, Nazi, and bigot as words that no longer have any meaning other than, “I disagree with you and I want you to stop talking.”)

But that’s all prologue: the reason all that is important is because there’s no corresponding term for incel that applies to women, and I think we need one. The “incel community” has done more than enough “black pill” experiments creating fake dating profiles to prove that even a woman who has everything going against her can have sex any time she wants to. It doesn’t matter if she’s obese, filthy, diseased, vile, hideous, etc.: any woman under 70 with access to a computer or a smart phone can have sex. Period. What many women cannot get is commitment from any man they would want it from.

And that makes a lot of them ROYALLY PISSED OFF. They keep inserting sex tokens and aren’t getting the commitment they thought was their just reward.

Those women – and this is starting to constitute an epidemic – find themselves asking, “Where are all the good men?” as they try to settle down as they crash into the Walltm after aging out of the carousel. As a group they have a lot in common with the prototypical incel (the neckbeard guys who don’t shower and complain because some QT3.14 won’t date them, not guys like Dennis). Both are bitter about their situation and both place the blame on the opposite sex for not seeing their “hidden” Relationship Market Value (RMV).

It turns out that, like eunuch, we have an old word that fairly describes this “new” phenomenon. In times past a women who was not in a permanent relationship (which was usually defined as a marriage), was simply known as a spinster once she passed her prime marriage window. It didn’t matter whether she chose that life for herself or not – the word applied regardless. Since marriage rates are declining (for reasons not germane here), and there are marriage-like arrangements all around us, I think it’s fair to apply the term to any woman who is not permanently paired off as she nears her 30s and beyond.

Since many of those women – and society itself – generally laments the fact that so many women are involuntary spinsters, and heaps blame and vitriol on men for their plight with no regard as to why these paragons of femininity can’t land a husband, I think a new term is in order: which brings me back to INSPIN. Inspin and incel are two sides of the same sad coin. Just as an incel is a guy who can’t generate enough female attraction to get sex, an inspin is a woman who can’t generate enough male attraction to get commitment.

True inspins, like true incels, deserve pity rather than scorn if their plight is not of their own making (guys like Dennis come to mind, as well as a pretty-nice woman I know who wanted to marry but ended up becoming a nun). The problem is that incels get far too little pity and far too much scorn because of the attitude the most vocal of them display. I see no reason why inspin cannot be applied to women who complain about men not offering commitment the same way incels supposedly complain about women not offering sex.

As an aside to justify this post being in this sub, I'll note that there are good men like Dennis who are probably available for those women whose desire for commitment, stability, and children is greater than their hypergamy and desire for tingles... but I fear the outcome for those guys in the age of "no fault" divorce and imputed income.