I think I first heard the phrase "involuntary celibate" on USENET around 1994 or so.
People are pretty self-centered and prone to sensationalism so I think most people didn't hear the contraction "incel" until there were some high-profile killings a few years ago.
That article tells a story very similar to what some incels tell, which is that men who are at the top of desirability have more access to a range of partners than they ever did while men who are average and below frequently get nothing. People blame dating sites like Tinder for this as women now get to be choosier in the short term, but in the long term they find they can't get men to commit to them because the men that they choose on Tinder don't have any reason to commit to them, a situation written up in
(I would love to get Eva Illouz in a conversation with a blackpiller like Wheat Waffles as the situations they describe look like two sides of the same coin to me.)
In general people make policy based on looking in the rear view mirror and nowhere is this more pernicious than in gender issues where the fact that boys are dropping out of education and men dropping out of work are only barely starting to get attention after having been worsening trends for 30 years. The "standard model" of intersectionality really gets things wrong because the assumptions that "Men do better than women" and "Whites do better than blacks" don't compose to make black women particularly wretched, instead you find black women don't do nearly as bad as black men because it is black men who seem to be on a conveyor belt from the cradle to prison.
Yeah, but there is a vocal subset who have made it into a hate group and they drive anyone sane away because they don't want to be associated with the hate. There's also the basic flaw of humanity that most people will look very hard indeed for others to blame before accepting that the problem is internal or just the luck of the draw and unfixable. And once someone is seduced by this they'll never address the real issue and thus the belief becomes self-perpetuating.
For a long time the response of men in suffering has been to be quiet, turn anger inward and suffer from suicide, heart disease, drug addiction and other deadly forms of despair.
I'd agree that inceldom is toxic (one of my son's friends fell under the spell of an incel Youtuber and dumped my son as a friend because my son is taller than him and could possibly "heightmog" him.) but the average man has never had a social movement that cares about his plight.
Reading early feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan and such I get the impression that their basic rhetorical strategy is to compare the top 0.1% man to the median woman but then implicitly comparing the agency of the average woman to a man who might not have a lot (there is a war on... time to go to war and die)
This conflation of power and gender is structural to discussions of "sexual harassment" which seems to almost always be up and down power hierarchies. Hypothetically it could so sideways and sometimes it must, but you hear about it so little that I think there is some mechanism that suppresses it from being talked about. In this old book
The tragic thing about incels and the broader online men's rights movements is that the pain is real, but they've rejected the most useful lens for understanding where it comes from and how to address it.
Third wave feminism prominently addresses the origins and dangers of certain aspects of masculinity, diagnoses how they harm men, and proposes well thought out mitigations and alternatives. Bell hooks for example wrote several entire books on exactly this subject, and she's not the only one.
Of course they rejected it. Accepting feminism didn't result in them being accepted in return. Feminists can write a million books about toxic masculinity and it won't matter because those are the men that women actually have sex with.
The sexual liberation of women is a major theme of feminism. Does that imply even so called "incels" will get some of that? No. On the contrary, they're even more marginalized now.
People are really negative towards outsiders with explanations. When I was in grad school, a friend and I tried to unify all the progressive organizations on campus. One thing we found was that black organizations reacted negatively to any hint of vanguardism or anything that sounded like some white people think they know better than black people.
It is one reason why I reject How to be an anti-racist because it is not for white people to take a leadership role in solving black people’s problems, in particular blacks “own the problem” and get to decide what is an acceptable solution or not.
That's one-sided view. Obviously the sexual market disposition is PROBLEMATIC to some(majority?) of men. Then minority of men will create PROBLEMATIC situation for the rest of society.
