Why do almost all 'incels' blame their situation on looks?

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I think people acting entitled to sex is a problem with the intel community. Dare I say that nobody comes into this world with the right to sexual intercourse, and their tendency towards reading porn and jerkin it to cartoon schoolgirls isn't helping them learn self-control?

Incel culture is evil, and they blame it on looks when all they really need is better culture and a little confidence, and a willingness to be in a proper relationship.

Girls don't like "Nice Guys." Girls like real men. And I don't mean alphas. I'm very much a beta male and there's a beautiful lady asking me out right now. Seems a bit backwards, but who am I to leave her hanging here? That would be most unmanly. Fortunately we're friends so I'm going to go spend some time. (I suspect she's also an Aspie, and she's very cute anyway.) Manliness is a complicated thing. We don't study it nearly enough, we don't nurture the positive sides fo it, all we do is complain when the Gillette company makes a commercial that really made some good points because we don't know what real manliness looks like if it bit us on the nose. But I think I'm one. She does too. That's good.

So if someone who's a voluntary celibate, hates the whole idea of dating, etc., can end up being asked out by the girls, I don't know what the incel crowd's problem is.

All I can say is she's smart and funny and religious at the same time. Very rare combination...especially in a girl that pretty!

That's cool----you are in a most fortuitous situation.

I would add to my original comment that most of them aren't beyond hope. Taking better care of their bodies and paying more attention to their style could likely increase some of them to average, or even above average in appearance.

As far as blame goes, it's not inconceivable that in some cases, parents, siblings, bullies at school and/or jerks at work have contributed to their problem. It's not an issue to acknowledge that. The issue is when they blame others entirely for their problems and absolve themselves of any responsibility or ownership for their own actions. If your father is an alcoholic, you grow up seeing him drink everyday, and then you become an alcoholic, it's not all the father's fault that you became an alcoholic. He has some responsibility in it, insofar as had you not grown up with an alcoholic father, you may not have become an alcoholic yourself, but ultimately, you're still the one making the choice to drink.

Monday finally giving a full hour to the topic. He typically aims for nuance and clarity so I tend to enjoy his analysis videos both on this and politics/sociology.

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Indeed, it's not what 30-somethings should be acting like! So, what led you to think that all groups of 30-something couples do act that way?

I'm sure there are lots of groups of couples who do act that way, but I've always sought out fellow oddballs and deep thinkers with other, more interesting things to obsess about than just status-seeking and fitting in. What led you to believe that you never would be able to find people with a different set of values?


I'm sorry to hear that you had such a traumatic experience with this group of people.

Regarding dating apps, I'll probably start a separate thread on that topic.

Once upon a time, a lot of women struggling in dating (and in weight) blamed men's obsession for slim women....

Blaming is an old game.

(But at least they didn't form a death cult)

Part 11:09 is true. When a woman finds me too short for her, nothing else matters. It's a dealbreaker.

The specific video you posted makes a lot of sensible observations and does not promote "black pill" ideology, at least for the most part. On the other hand, I poked around a bit on this guy's YouTube channel and found that, in some of his other videos, he does promote some rather nutty and offensive "black pill" stuff. But the video you posted doesn't, and contains what seems to me to be some worthwhile insights.

"Monday" talks about the typical life trajectory of many incels and how, in one way or another, they get thrown off the normal course of social development.

He talks about how most people find mates through their friendship networks. He notes that many incels, if they have social lives at all (which many of them don't), tend to hang out in subcultures with a very lopsided male-to-female ratio (e.g. "nerds"), greatly reducing their chances to get introduced to women.

(This leads me to wonder if various male-dominated subcultures could somehow try to find ways to make their pursuits overlap with those of various female-dominated subcultures, so they could sponsor joint social activities, perhaps?)

Another very interesting point "Monday" makes is about incels being an extreme manifestation of a larger longterm trend toward social atomization. He refers to the book Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam, published in 2000, about how Americans in general "have become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and our democratic structures."

"Monday" also makes a very important point involving Maslow's hierarchy of needs, explaining one thing seriously wrong with some of the advice commonly given to incels by "normies." Incels are often advised to pursue what Maslow called "self-actualization" goals without yet having met their needs for "belongingness" and "love and esteem," on the grounds that self-actualization makes people more attractive. Similar advice often gets given here on Wrong Planet to people, especially men, who haven't been able to find any romantic relationships. But this doesn't work, because, as "Monday" points out, "belongingness" and "love and esteem" are more urgent felt needs than "self-actualization."

"Monday" doesn't offer a solution to this problem, but my idea of a likely solution, for autistic people, is that we need to find good ways for autistic people to build up friendship networks, including the emotionally close platonic friendships that many autistic people don't even realize they need. These friendships can at least partially satisfy our needs for "belongingness" and "love and esteem," making it easier to pursue self-actualization.

This will be a challenge, given that the usual NT ways of making friends simply don't work well for many autistic people. We'll need to discover, on our own and with each other (and share our discoveries via forums like Wrong Planet), other ways of making friends and maintaining friendships that will work more naturally for us.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 06 Aug 2019, 1:20 am, edited 5 times in total.

I don't think any of us, men or women, really are biologically programmed to be so fussy about our mates' physical appearance -- although of course we have our physical preferences. I blame the mass media (along with today's dating apps) for making this kind of superficiality, on the part of both men and women, a lot worse than it would otherwise be. Another thing that makes it worse is the social atomization I mentioned in my previous post.

Not sure exactly what you mean by "Nice Guys," but I've always wanted my partners to be nice to me.


Whatever that means.... This is both vague and an overgeneralization, IMO.

Thanks for sharing. This video resonated with me a fair bit.

I think it is mostly an issue of the huge amount of pictures of good looking people available. This kind of biases our requirements. It's similar to how using a lot of porn will bias people's sex requirements with real people. None of us are adapted to having a huge number of potential partners, and especially NDs don't even need this anyway.

My best guess with him on the later is that being in an information void he can fall into the trap of over-extrapolating, and while from my own experience some degree of the black-pill observations about humanity are true I think taking them as absolutes often amounts to an internal curving of statistics, like for example the idea that you can be - in very subtle ways without any actual social failure - exiled for a few degrees of difference from total conformity, I've seen this in my own life and I can understand the temptation to think that it will be always, forever, and you fall down the tunnel of absolutes.

Another guy who makes worthwhile observarions but who I think falls down the tunnel of absolutes harder than Monday is ThinkingApe. As human beings unfortunately we're trying to frame our lives to have as much certainty in our paths forward as we can, it's part of why so many people tend toward either very strong theism or very strong atheism, and in this area when some people are sizing up the dating market and they see all of the carnage around them as well as a constant rinse and repeat they stop seeing people as individuals and something closer to things that are all reliably the same and in the case of black-pill thinking reliably broken machines that will reliably make bad choices or refuse to think about their own behavior as weighed against their own long-term good or that of society. From that standpoint the rare moral and decent person to be found here and there gets ignored for the Hieronymus Bosch painting that they're perceiving around them.

All of this really tells the story that you have to be very careful about swallowing statistics whole, ie. even if 95% of people were awful it would still mean 5% weren't. Similarly I think the black pill bin is just as often a mix of unfortunately real observations no one wants to touch as it is cognitive distortions of one form or another and I think our culture's eventually going to have to come to terms with the pain it inflicts on itself and sincerely ask the question whether or not it wants a better world to live and (and who knows - the answer may be no, that petty egotism is far more important, but even then it would still be far better for everyone not to do that blinkered).

Not to mention that all of these are based on NT needs, and not necessarily ND needs. Especially self-actualization is strongly tied to NT social preferences to identify with various "subcultures" and to build an identity based on social position. I strongly doubt this is natural for NDs.



So, you want a model based on NT friendships that would fix our cravings for a partner? Many NDs already go about finding a partner through friendship, but I think the evidence that this actually works is lacking. My guess is that it doesn't work because NT friendships are not natural for NDs, and friendships actually interfere with the natural bonding process through the extensive use of talking & conversation.



If there exists such a thing, I don't think it should be called "friendship". It's more likely to be related to group wandering than typical get-togethers that always are heavy on sitting at a table chatting. Actually, my impression always was that ideal "Aspie" get-togethers are not static with people sitting somewhere, rather dynamic as walking around somewhere.

One thing I'd add here - for self actualization in the spiritual, mystical, or religious sense, or reifying that - aiming for self-integration from something like the Jungian standpoint - IMHO it's as critical for anyone who wants to make it through life in one piece and who has and will be reliably going through hard times. It's wonderful that people like Sam Harris have been actually trying to proliferate such things for atheists as well, ie. everyone needs as healthy a relationship with their own mind as they can obtain if they want to have their best shot at getting through this with their sanity intact.

I think Peterson is quite right that nearly all human life is marred by tragedy in some particular way, for example one could have great relationships with friends and long-term partners, have kids, etc. but be struggling with severe diabetes and live with one foot in the hospital, or know that they're going to die young from some congenital ailment, or they could have one or even both parents wasting away from things like Alzheimers or other related issues.

From that perspective it seems like most people's pyramids are cut up, and when I think about current economic realities if one's an incel or FA with the bottom two rungs of their pyramid intact they're in a lot of ways luckier than many or even most people who can't secure the food, water, and shelter layer or people who can't keep jobs, or live in gang-ridden places where they'll live to see tomorrow based on all the gang activity around them is something like a daily lottery.

I don't know why your picture of "friendship" is so static.
All my social life is about doing things together. This includes work, sports, hobbies, philosophical discurses, studying, singing, watching movies, cooking, camping in wilderness, stargazing, making mechanical contraptions... this is how I meet people I over time begin to call my friends. This is how I met and got to know the man who is my husband now.
If you prefer to call it "group wandering" instead of "friendship", then all my friendships are actually group wanderings.