Currents

In 2019, the movie Joker sparked a rather remarkable moral panic. The film considers the origin of the Joker as a socially awkward young man named Arthur Fleck (played by Joaquin Phoenix) with neurological and mental health problems. He is unliked, ignored, and bullied by society. He hallucinates a relationship with a beautiful neighbor, being otherwise unsuccessful with women. Eventually, pushed to the limit, he becomes, well, the Joker. It’s a fascinating film that evokes a controversial modern archetype: the incel.

The term “incel”, short for involuntarily celibate, refers to people who are unable, for various reasons, to secure romantic partners despite wishing to. The term originated with a woman but has come in recent years to describe mainly young, heterosexual men unable to find girlfriends. In its most current form, “incel” invokes not merely a socially awkward dorkiness, but also a menacing misogyny — men who can’t get laid, and who hate women because of it. Thus, particularly among the chattering classes and elite journalism, incels are a target of both high-school-like scorn and deep worry.

That might help explain the oversized reaction to Joker. Many reviews of the film clutched at pearls over its potential impact on viewers. Some made the link with incels explicitly. In a review for Time that captured the varsity lunch table vibe, Stephanie Zacharek refers to Arthur Fleck as “the patron saint of incels.” Writing for Slate, Sam Adams fulminated, “The movie plays right into advance fears that it could act as a kind of incel manifesto, offering not just comfort or understanding to disaffected young men angry at the world, but a playbook for striking back at it.” He goes on to write, “It feels like a risk to feel too much for him, not knowing who might be sitting next to you in the theater using his resentments to justify their own.” That’s right, maybe the person one seat over in the theater might be a powder keg ready to explode after seeing the movie. The panic was significant enough that the FBI promised to monitor threats. The LAPD went on full alert, and even the US Army warned soldiers of an alleged threat at an army base.

The end result was that nothing happened. Not a peep. Nobody so much as stubbed a toe over a Joker-inspired incel. And as far as I could ascertain, the number of news media outlets that later admitted they had exaggerated the panic was precisely zero. Just as with the conniptions over Joker, the issue of incels more broadly is mostly a moral panic — one that is hindering our ability to help young men who are struggling.

Sexlessness appears to be on the rise. In 2021, the General Social Survey found that about 19–20% of both men and women under 35 had not had sex in the past year, compared to just 7–8% in 2008. Declines in sex have been found among high school students and middle-aged people. A lack of intimacy has become an increasing concern for men and women across the board. So why the fixation on young straight men?

First, the Internet is often a dark, ugly place, where the worst human thoughts are expressed unfiltered and amplified algorithmically. With anonymity removing any deterrence, people speak and behave in ways that would be unthinkable in real life. Sometimes, the most horrid sentiments encountered online are a poster’s sincere beliefs. In other cases, people say vile things simply to provoke a reaction from others for a laugh. If one goes looking for obnoxious, misogynistic comments by young, frustrated men, they are not hard to find. There are self-styled incel forums where women are routinely denigrated and degraded. Of course, if one goes looking for obnoxious misandrist (anti-men) comments by frustrated women, these are also not hard to find. Major newspapers run op-eds with titles like, “Why Can’t We Hate Men?” and journalists tweet New Year's resolutions to “Kill all men”, a social media hashtag which has trended off and on for over a decade.

Second, there are some justifiable theoretical reasons to be concerned about incels. “Surplus males” — unmarried, young males with few sexual prospects — are a known aggravating factor for societal violence. Examples range from the Nien Rebellion of 1851 in China, largely promulgated by unmarried male bandits, through violent crime in modern India, associated with sex ratios marked by surplus males. Criminologist Adam Lankford has observed that sexual frustration is a common factor in about a third of mass homicides. It’s important to note sexual frustration is not synonymous with being an incel and may occur in individuals with some sexual activity. Paradoxically, however, other research suggests that violence in society increases when males are scarce, which points to some complexities we still do not understand.

Third, some incels have, in fact, done terrible things. Perhaps most infamous is the mass murderer Elliot Rodger, who killed seven people (both men and women), motivated by his inability to get a girlfriend and his hatred of women. Yet, it’s important to note that, though mass homicide perpetrators are commonly consumed by pathological hate, misogyny in particular is not a common thread (in the US, over 78% of homicide victims are male). If we rely too much on anecdotes, we could make the argument that 45-year-old female biology professors or elderly Asian-American men are prone to mass homicides, simply because there are indeed a few examples we could point to.

It bears emphasizing that the vast majority of societal violence is committed by men against other men, typically related to gangs or bar fights, not World of Warcraft enthusiasts who one day can’t take it anymore and explode. The truth is, when women experience violence it is overwhelmingly committed by their romantic partners, not random incels furious at all womankind. Further complicating the narrative is that within romantic couples, women are just as likely to perpetrate domestic violence as men.

At present, there is little evidence of any form of mass movement of violent crimes perpetrated by incels. Even scholars who take the issue seriously concede that incidents are few and anecdotal. For cases such as Elliot Rodger, we can’t be sure that these perpetrators wouldn’t still have committed their crimes even if we waved a magic wand and made the incel “movement” vanish. This is a kind of “third cause fallacy” common to mass homicides. People tend to assume that if only society would get rid of their favorite bugaboo, these incidents would go away. Whether it’s incels, violent video games, pornography, or academic tenure (in the case of Amy Bishop), people regularly misappropriate mass homicides for their own personal moral agendas.

It’s useful to examine who is concerned about incels. My observation is that fear of incels is more common among high-status, college-educated females — precisely the demographic least likely to be a victim of a violent crime. It’s unclear how many working-class or low-income people of either sex have even heard of incels. On one hand, performative fear of incels may mesh well with the types of intersectional feminist theories that predominate on many college campuses, in which misandry has become socially acceptable and even lauded. Even as women achieve a degree of equality unparalleled in history and largely outperform males in modern society, rallying against the bogeyman of the patriarchy preserves the dialectic benefits of victim status. Those who are loudest about incel panics, whether journalists, academics, or elite students, use the issue as a luxury belief to lend a veneer of urgency to fashionable academic theories for their own status games while largely ignoring the far more common violence experienced by women in low-income communities. Needless to say, few among these critics seem interested in the serious problems many young men face in contemporary society.

The message I took from Joker was the missed opportunity inherent in society deciding to treat men who are struggling with scorn rather than seeking ways to reach out and help. This is apparent in the relatively thin selection of academic papers on the topic. With some notable exceptions, greater effort appears to be made toward the author signaling their allegiance to progressive goodthink, often embellished with considerable jargon to highlight their own true believer status, while comparably little care is given to understanding the psychology of frustrated males and how best to help them adapt. In one rare exception, researchers found that social support from friends and family tends to buffer men from the mental consequences of romantic rejection. Further, incels report dissatisfaction with therapy. This may be because psychology and therapy generally have become overtly political in the US, and its practice guidelines have become arguably anti-male. Over 80% of clinical psychologists are women, and a non-trivial number may be hostile to men who fit the incel description, despite the fact that incels fall slightly left-of-center, politically.

Rather than trying to understand these young men and look for constructive ways forward, it seems that society, including far too many affluent and well-connected people, have simply scorned them, whipping up a largely exaggerated threat. Instead, we should be examining ways to help these young men succeed and deal with their frustration. This means developing behavioral interventions that suit men’s needs, including those that target social skills deficits, rather than the recent trend to disparage men in therapy. Sex ed for boys could include tips on asking for dates, dating, and managing rejection. Fostering philosophies of stoicism may also be helpful for building emotional resilience. By contrast, obsessions with “toxic masculinity” and trying to convince men and boys to be more like women and girls are unlikely to help (and, it turns out, straight and bisexual women find such men less attractive).

Setting the vivid anecdotes aside, the entire incel narrative is largely a moral panic. Yes, there are some young men struggling with rejection and isolation, and yes, they often say ugly misogynistic things online. But there is little evidence that this causes much real-world violence in the US or any other society. Obsessing over the repulsiveness of incels distracts us both from examining ways to help these young men and also from very real causes of crime in low-income neighborhoods. It also reeks of middle school cruelty, which is repulsive in its own right. Just as with Joaquin Phoenix's antihero, society is failing to respond constructively and with empathy to many young men in need. And that’s no joke.

Published Feb 23, 2024