Inceldom

[Belacqua]

If I can be permitted to respond to your question to Moebius as well, I'll offer my own 2p on this point:

Is there a difference between modern incels and lonely guys from previous generations?  I'd say yes.  When I was a lonely, bullied-for-my-looks teen with no internet, I was alone and all my resentment and misery was directed inward.  I was the anomaly.  These days someone like myself would very quickly find themselves in contact with a range of people online, including various incel groups, black pill and red pill groups, and so on.  It is far more likely for a modern incel to now have a whole community and ideology and culture (history, heroes, and language) in their ears, and I think this makes it far more likely for them to direct their pain outwards and blame others (usually women).

Has the internet allowed them to find each other and give themselves a name?  Basically, yes.

Is there something else going on?  The internet is the biggest factor leading to the difference, I think.  But there's also some social changes which combined with the net led to the modern incel phenomena: the ever increasing value put on aesthetics, body and appearance; the hyper-sexualisation of society; young person's dating being massively influenced by dating app technology; the decline in social spaces and social interaction, esp with covid and economic austerity; the progress made by feminism and the lgbtq+ movement which has, to some degree, undermined the previous elevated status of cishet men and to some degree makes traditional masculinity a target of attack; somewhat paradoxically with the previous comment (but obviously interconnected) the limited revival of traditional masculine aesthetics and values ('alpha' males, the grind, gym bros, trad con rightwing masculinity, Vikings and John Wick etc).  Additionally, it might also be relevant to say that rates of neurodiversity and anxiety diagnosis are possibly increasing - and if this reflects a genuine increase in autistic and anxious people in society then that too should go in the mix.  As would the decreasing average family size, if such a thing is happening - more men without brothers and fathers I think could be a factor too.

All that seems to create a perfect storm: lonely, ugly, neurodiverse, fatherless, brotherless young men, massively socially isolated due to pandemics, economics and culture, in a highly visual society that places huge value on appearance and sex, where dating is often conducted through apps which massively favour women and where selection is based primarily on appearance, where half their peers seemingly subscribe to a hyper-masculine message and the other half decry men as toxic and dangerous, and giving them huge amounts of unmonitored freetime with access to an internet full of radicalising hate-filled voices that offer them community and sympathetic understanding and a scape-goat for their suffering.

Wow. Well done. You have great clarity on this.

I'm aware of these social changes of course, but you make a very persuasive case that they work together to make a perfect storm. 

The older I get, the more I feel lucky that I was born when I was. Though the Internet is a fantastic tool, I'm glad that my self-image and my ways of thinking were formed prior to its becoming ubiquitous.