Involuntary celibacy

Involuntary celibacy or inceldom^[1] means being unable to get sex or a romantic partner. An incel or incelibate^[2][3] is a person who is in this situation. Female incels are sometimes called femcels.^[4] Homosexual incels are sometimes called gaycels.^[5] Transgender people going through inceldom are called transcels.^[6]

Overview

Discussions on the incelosphere (incel websites) are mostly by heterosexual men, but female incels and gay incels also exist.^[7] Incels are often accused of misogyny on the basis of having a "sense of entitlement to sex".^[8] However, some research found that their purported "violent sexism" was exaggerated by women over different reasons.^[9] Some women also made false accusations of rape over interpersonal conflict to take revenge on others,^[10] though the rate of occurrence is low.^[10]

Experts claimed that some incels supported violence against women, such as rape, and violence against "romantically successful" men (some of whom were called Chads).^[8] The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describes the subculture as "part of the online male supremacist ecosystem",^[11] alleging that self-described incels committed several cases of mass murder in North America.

History

1990s

The word incel was invented in 1993 by a college student 'Alana' from Toronto, Ontario. She made a website to discuss her sexual inactivity with others.^[12][13] The website, titled Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project,^[14] was used by people of all genders to share posts about the topic. During her college career and after, she realized she was queer, and became more comfortable with her identity.

2010s

She later gave the site to a stranger. After reading about the 2014 Isla Vista killings, she wrote, "Like a scientist who invented something that ended up being a weapon of war, I can't uninvent this word, nor restrict it to the nicer people who need it".^[15] Another notable incel was Christine Chubbuck. She committed suicide on live tv in 1974.^[16] /r/incels on Reddit was one of the biggest Incel forums. On November 7, 2017, Reddit decided to get rid of it because of their new site rules.

Subgroups

There are many subgroups of incels.

Lesbocels

For instance, lesbocels are a subgroup of gaycels meaning lesbian involuntary celibates. Some femcelish lesbians call themselves incelbians. Or for example disabledcels and mentalcels are subsets of inceldom whose involuntary celibacy is caused by them being disabled.^[17][18]

Femcels

Femcels who believe that their inceldom condition is permanent call themselves trufemcel or truefemcel.^[19] They call the state of being unable to get romance or a partner as femceldom.^[20] The largest inceldom-related forum at the turn of the 2020s decade was the subreddit trufemcels, a platform for femcels.^[21]

Some incels believe face shape and jaw size is very important to finding a mate. Some male incels may get surgery to make their jaws larger.^[22][23]

Beliefs

Many incels take views from fields like evolutionary psychology.^[24][25] Some incels believe that male incels have no chance against more attractive men, and women have things easier because of feminism and cosmetics.^[26] Incels may believe their lack of success is because of being shy, poor body image,^[27] penis size,^[28] or their appearance,^[29] and believe that having lots of money is the only chance to find an attractive partner.^[30]

Words used by incels

Word	Meaning
Chad	A sexually successful man.
Stacy	A sexually active woman who is considered attractive.
Roastie	A woman who had sex with many men.
Black pill	The real or perceived socially unspoken realizations that come from being a longtime incel.

Reception

Incels are criticized by left-wing scholars due to their disagreement with incels' opposition to certain progressive values,^[31] while many of those accused of being incels oppose such classification as an overgeneralization that ignores the cause and effect of incels' existence.^[32]

While some scholars warn of the danger of incels, some critics dismissed their warnings as "alarmist, inaccurate, and misrepresenting" the problem.^[32] Mass media have also been criticized for their coverage of what they see as the "incel problem",^[32] some of which directly compare the problem to Islamic terrorism regardless of context.^[32]

Media

In January 2023, The Times claimed that half of the persons referred to the Prevent,^[32][33] a British counter-extremism programme, were incels in the year ending March 2021.^[32][33] However, critics pointed out that there was no evidence to support such a claim.^[32]

Government

United Kingdom

The public data from the UK Home Office showed that only 22~25% of those referred to the Prevent were classified as having "mixed, unstable or unclear ideology" (MUU) – a category for anything other than right-wing or Islamist extremism.^[32][34] Among the small percentage of the referred, a small number of them were seen as potential terrorists,^[32] with some referrals dropped by specialists as they did not know the definition of incel.^[32]

Academia

Some scholars emphasized that most incels were lonely, depressed young men,^[32][35] many of whom were neurodivergent,^[32][35] of diverse ages, religions, ethnicities and sexual orientations.^[32][35] The social stigma is said to be refutable but repeatedly promoted by self-declared experts against the "lonely, depressed young men".^[32] The self-declared experts were also criticized for misusing dubious statistics (e.g. cherry-picking) to support their bias.^[32][36]