I was there with the incel community in 2017. I wasn't an incel, but hung around there because I related to the alienation, outlier status, feeling inept. I put that self-destructive lot of mopes behind me a long time ago.
There was a self-identifying incel community. I don't know if it exists anymore the way it used to. r9k looks like bot activity these days, and it seems displacement has made 'incel individuals' today in place of an 'incel community'. But genes of the ideas were propagated in bastard offspring that have large stature in society today.
Incel is a buzzword now. It's actually a quite fascinating case study of how much terminology originated in the incel community that was adopted by the mainstream. Like the 'chad' meme; he was once a derogatory charicature of a man who is attractive, morally bankrupt, unintelligent, and despite this all is rewarded by society. Above all, he was a symbol for the misguided values of society, from an incel viewpoint. He was transplanted into the mainstream, and made into a figure without flaw. Good in all ways, he is nothing short of an exemplar of moral, intellectual, and physical qualities, or else the ideals of whoever uses his likeness. He is the same symbol, but the meaning was changed to be 'all things I deem good'.
There were a few other terms I've heard only in incel circles enter the public sphere, with near opposite meanings, and died out. It's been a while, it's hard to remember. A less specific example right now is 'rage bait', which is a popular term now. Of course we probably know the practice originated from imageboards, and we see it as having a specific meaning. On the train the other day I heard a teenage girl say to all her friends 'he won't message me back… so-and-so is actually ragebaiting me'. Makes me feel weird hearing this familiar term be appropiated for a conversation between friends.
The incel flavour of sexism has also spread in some pockets of society, think manosphere, 'right-wing' sects: characterized by being deeply fatalistic, often wields the fallacy of primitive society (when people describe how primitive society works to justify some a priori position, though usually have no interest nor background in anthropology, they invent the history to fit their worldview). There is a sure lineage here, perhaps an osmosis through Internet memes of these attitudes.
The word 'incel' itself has been battered to the state of being a general insult to a man, typi
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