>Thoughts on incels?
I'm tired tonight so this is going to be a stream of consciousness response. Hopefully, it makes sense.
Before I give you my thoughts on incels, I want to be clear on what we are talking about when I say "incel". The term as it is used to describe boys and men who cannot find members of the opposite sex (as the overwhelming majority of them are heterosexual) with whom to engage in sexual relations. So, they're usually horny teenage boys and sexually frustrated young adult males who don't have a lot of, or any, romantic prospects. There's a pretty wide spread between them in terms of their attitudes towards women, but they range from vaguely sexist to outrightly anti-woman, if not anti-human.
Overall, a person who self identifies as an incel is going to have problems, though; be it socially, romantically, interpersonally, economically, and any and all of the foregoing and other problems. In passing, I've joked before that the only boys who grow up to become incels are the ones who weren't spanked enough as children, because they grew up thinking that they were due something from the world in general and women in particular that they simply aren't owed. That's not good. More generally, there are a couple of different pathologies that tend to manifest with incels. They're usually highly self-absorbed, they usually were not properly or meaningfully socialized as young children or teenagers. They're usually socially outcast from their peers. Part of the problem with the internet is that it has enabled these similarly situated boys/men to connect with each other, and then develop something approximating a philosophy of what you might call "sexual entitlement", whereby they develop wildly idiotic ideas about what relationships ought to be, how women ought to be subservient to men, or any number of other stupid things.
Your typical incel at 16 is going to be the kid who goes to school, sits alone at lunch, has maybe three friends but rarely hangs out with them, plays a lot of online video games, has very little social engagement outside of school, is not meaningfully involved in extra curricular activities, does not play sports, and probably is going to get mediocre grades or worse. He's got serious self confidence issues, that underlie everything he does. This is the kind of kid who got started on a bad path from an early age, most likely. It could be that his mother was distant, or maybe his dad was abusive. Maybe his dad walked out and the mother's boyfriend hit him a few too many times, or it could be that the parents were never around and never involved themselves in his life; provided no direction, and generally no guidance. There are any number of factors, but their common denominator is "not good". By this point, however conceited or arrogant this kid may be, he's probably not beyond redemption, and he probably won't be beyond redemption until he's about 23-25.
Your typical incel at 23-25 is a much tougher nut to crack. This is the guy who either did not attend college, or attends college and has never been able to "score" with a girl; not even always because he's not physically attractive enough, but because more commonly than not he never had the self confidence to ask a girl out, he never formed a meaningful or committed relationship with a girl and now that he's an adult he is seriously emotionally and sexually less mature than most of his peers. He likely has the attitudes and mannerisms of what you'd expect from a fairly immature 17 year old, and by now he has a seriously negative view of all women. But, the reason he's got this anti-female bias is likely to be a lot less to do with women, generally, than with his own subconscious awareness of the fact that he wasn't "man" enough to even ask a girl out. So that sense of shame, being projected onto women in general, is how we get to your typical 23-25 year old incel. There is still some hope of unfucking a 23-25 year old incel, but not much.
After 25, there's almost no hope, because by then they've developed an ideology around their experiences and an identity to match it.
Now, there are more forces in play than just individual pathologies; the social and environmental conditions which in many respects cause those pathologies are very much a part of this picture as well, and ignoring them would be at the peril of anyone who wanted to understand who incels are and why it is that they are what they are. The emphasis on girls' achievement to the exclusion of any interest being placed on boys advancement, the emphsis on integrating girls into historically boys' activities, and the absence of similar efforts to integrate boys into girls activities, from elementary school through college all come into play. The reason is because when girls compete with boys on the same level, boys stop playing the game. Good or bad, when girls and boys are on the same playing field, boys stop showing up. That's why women outnumber men in colleges by 3:2 and why women outnumber men in grad school by 2:1.
If you conceptualize a scale of harms of the breakdown in gender roles, not all boys are equally harmed and so there's a scale from least harmed to most harmed. At the least harmed would be the boys who get socialized, who are meaningfully engaged, and who have good and committed parents. They can sort themselves out and navigate through the world. Closer to the pole of "most harmed", you find incels. That is not to imply that women's rights have caused incels. But it is to say that the reworking of gender roles in the society has changed how those most vulnerable to the effects of that change find their place in society.