People who are good looking experience halo effect where others put a positive spin on everything they are doing. If a guy is good looking, but shy, women will find it cute. If a guy is ugly and shy, he will be seen as a creep.
Some people have done real dating experiments with profiles of good looking men who describe themselves as child rapists. Guess what? These men have no problem getting women, at least from online dating:
The term "incel" was originally coined in an online community founded by a Canadian woman (Alana B) who identifies as a queer feminist. It is rather ironic that a community founded by a queer feminist woman morphs into "raging misogynist". But maybe reminding people of that history can be helpful in winding back than transformation and bringing the term back to what it originally meant, a useful word to describe a predicament which has the potential to afflict people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.
As long as social skills matter, they will be the more serious barrier over things like exercise, grooming/hygiene and other self improvement fixes because those can be improved on your own while practicing social skills takes willing partners. If it's bad enough, you're in a chicken and egg situation. There are ways out of it like rejection challenges but that's really painful.
"we should be kinder and more sensitive to socially awkward men when they try to make friends, or ask women on dates" Again I agree, this would help so much. But I get that many women are not in a place where they feel comfortable doing this yet. "I do think people should make an effort to reject socially awkward folks without traumatizing them!" Saying no is a skill that many of us are very bad at, especially doing it gently and unambiguously.
Social skills is one area where society can help, by encouraging more in-person role models, mentors, and conversation partners (men AND women) to give young people these skills. Maybe better fictional role models too.
Thanks for sharing your insights.
This is a totally valid point, and I don't mean to make anyone feel bad if they have trouble finding the words to let someone down gently. All I ask is that people should be aware that social awkwardness can sometimes look similar to rudeness, and should make an effort to let socially awkward men down gently, to the extent that they can.
I was incel for a long time because I believed that personality matters with dating (it matters for finding a long term partner, but not for getting laid). The ,,game'' helped incels (including me) to go even more on the wrong path.
The term "incel" is used to mean two wildly different things:
- One meaning is "an incel is someone who's single and complains about it". Statistically, a few percent of 30-year-old men are virgins. Some of those are for religious reasons, but a lot of them are involuntary. So in this sense of the term "incel", I'd guess there are somewhere around a million male incels in the US today.
- The other meaning is "an incel is a misogynistic asshole who uses terms like Chad/Stacy/femoid". This is a _much_ smaller group; I doubt there are more than a few thousand people active on incel forums.
A lot of people conflate these two groups, and that's very unfair to the former group. There's been a lot of discussion of the latter group, because they're dramatic and highly visible. But the former group is actually much larger; they just aren't as visible, often because the sufferers try to hide it. We need to talk about the former type of "incel" -- people who are lonely and suffering, but haven't done anything wrong!
My theory for how people get into this situation, is that they get stuck in a vicious cycle of impaired social skills:
1. For some reason, they don't have age-appropriate social skills.
2. Because they lack social skills, their peers don't want to interact with them.
3. Because they don't interact with their peers, they don't develop social skills.
When the problem gets bad enough, social interactions become traumatic. The sufferer learns that every time they try to interact with other people (whether romantically or not) they'll receive cold stares and harsh rejection. So they become scared to even try to interact with people, which makes it even harder to escape the cycle.
Many different things can potentially trigger this cycle. Sometimes it starts with something like autism that biologically impairs their social skills. Other times there's nothing biologically wrong with them, but their peers shun them for some reason, and then it becomes self-reinforcing.
There are no easy solutions to this problem. In particular, there certainly aren't easy solutions that are accessible to the people suffering from the problem; if there was an easy way out, they would have done it already! Therapy can help, but it's slow, expensive, inconvenient, and not guaranteed to work; so it's a poor substitute for "not being traumatized in the first place". I think the real solution will have to involve changes in society's attitude towards socially awkward people:
- For one thing, we absolutely need to stop conflating the "raging misogynist" meaning of the word "incel" with the "man who's lonely" meaning of the word "incel". Lonely men should be able to talk about their suffering without people acting like they're misogynists.
- For another thing, we should be kinder and more sensitive to socially awkward men when they try to make friends, or ask women on dates. Socially awkward people are often unintentionally rude, or accidentally make other people uncomfortable. Some people assume the awkward person is being rude on purpose, and react harshly; this makes it much harder for awkward people to escape the cycle. (Of course, nobody's obligated to be friends with a socially awkward person if they don't want to -- and in particular, women certainly aren't obligated to go on dates when they don't want to -- but I do think people should make an effort to reject socially awkward folks without traumatizing them!)