Men need more mental health help, to avoid getting to the point of identifying as an incel, a point before which are many milestones from “casual” misogyny, to toxic and fragile masculinity, to full on gendered violence (from stalking to rape to murder, most of which perpetrated by “normal” men, not self identifying incels), that our society would rather frame as “boys being boys” or whatever, than address.

Looking at the end result and saying “oh, well, now we need to intervene” is one of the most pathetic and useless ways I can imagine to tackle this problem - because they’re looking at incels being demonised as the problem, rather than the system that created them and the impact it, and they, have on those who aren’t cis men (needless to say, an impact much worse than well earned demonisation).

Misogyny isn’t a mental illness, it’s a systemic part of our society, and while those who have gone through the pipeline and come out idealistically violent and toxic undoubtedly need help, ignoring the environment that creates them is the opposite of helping.

Yup this makes sense.

I was on the path to becoming an incel before I met my ex gf. I was in my early twenties, overweight and hopeless with women. I am also autistic.

I was kinda stuck where I was with no idea of what I wanted in life or where I should focus my efforts.

The feeling I most often associated with my life from 18 to 21 was intense loneliness. Being told I’m a good looking guy that any girl would be lucky to have, yet being touch-starved to the point that I cried uncontrollably for for an hour when my ex held me for the first time.

To clarify, I never had any ill sentiments towards women, but I have seen how intense loneliness can absolutely fuck with ones mind. I was lucky that I met someone and was in a relationship for some time to actually properly learn all this about myself. But I can totally see how others would not be so lucky.

If you take a young adult male, who’s lonely, touch starved even and doesn’t know what they want from life, and then label them with a term like ‘incel’ that will only make them feel worse and push them further towards doing something terrible to themselves or others.

Unpopular and all as it might be, these men are people who deserve compassion and understanding. Not hatred and vitriol.

This is a bit of a raw spot for me.

I was an incel in the mid eighties to early nineties, before we had the term. It was conspicuous that a) as a teen I had a raging, compulsive libido (which was not uncommon) and b) society gave zero fucks about my overwhelming frustration and expected me even to learn trig and grammar. This drove me to become a frustrated, bitter, antisocial, misanthrope, much of which carries on to this day, though now my acerbic vitriol is finely distilled and crafted before it is slung at penetration velocities.

This is to say my sexual frustration as a teen and young adult figures into my own (well diagnosed) madness, though in full disclosure, I’m pretty sure compound neglect did the heavy lifting.

I lost my virginity became sexually active at twenty-six, and was able to enjoy many relationships both fulfilling and disastrous, but it did mean realizing the misogynistic bubble in which my young adulthood was spent did not have an accurate view of what women, or heck, the whole of the human species, was about. And the paths I forged were not clear, easy to find roads, rather rabbit-trails and deer tracks.

Our society does very, very little to recognize our teens navigating their developing sexual drives. (Parents, teachers, ministers and politicians alike seem to resent that our kids are horny, except when they are athletic superstars.) Much of the US still teaches abstinence-only sex ed (often seasoned with large doses of right-wing Christian ideology, such as women have only value as an untouched virgin, and men are obligated to go into a relationship blind, then committing to be a provider). Even our more comprehensive sex-ed omits ideas like opt-in consent.

Our society really dislikes and disregards our teens, and the consequences of this have always been stark. Sexual frustration consistently figures into our history of spree killers and rampage killers, our domestic terrorists like Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh. It was a common driving factor for the rise of the alt-right in 2016, and is useful in both the transnational white power movement and the Christian nationalist movement. When you need an army of V8-worshiping warboys eager to ride eternal, shiny and chrome, chastity commandments are your friend.

I hypothesize that young people getting laid don’t turn into terrorists, but both here in the states, and across the middle east, young people sexually frustrated are easily radicalized.

I don’t know how to fix this problem, and it’s only gotten worse with the advancement of faith-based initiatives and most recently the Dobbs ruling. I have little hope and though my embitterment has gone political, it persists with sympathy for the newer generations being driven into fascist militarism

Findings revealed that incels have a lower sense of self-perceived mate-value and a greater external locus of control regarding their singlehood

He added they had also observed a “bidirectional relationship between mental health and incel ideology”.

“So the worse an incel’s mental health is, the more they seem to then buy into ideology,” he said.

IMO this is all because the whole ideology is cope. Someone believes their problems are caused by an external adversary and there’s nothing they can do about it because that’s the most comfortable path of least resistance emotionally.

Though honestly I think a bitter and depressed person is going to have a pretty tough time becoming genuinely kinder and funnier, even if they can bring themselves to accept this as closer to a realistic solution than something based on a presumption of women being shallow gold diggers.

There are people that don’t need more mental health help?

I know people are going to hate this take …

These people are victims, and to do anything other than try to support them is victim blaming. They are literally perpetuating a cycle of abuse.

They feel left out of society, a society that judges them based on whether or not they are a provider. Then makes it impossible to be a provider. They have been told they are worthless and undeserving of real emotional connections.

Wouldn’t you be angry if that was you? I don’t know why people are so surprised that people that are left out create insular groups. It is these groups that the sadness and anger they feel is magnified into what we see expressed in the world by them.

They can be helped the younger they are the easier it will be. Everybody who laughs at this and says they deserve it is perpetuating the abuse and victim blaming.

Amazing, laughed out loud at this title.