No.12540
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, typically referring to any of those in the groups I mentioned up above. It's kind of sad because the original meaning wasn't even meant to be insulting, but a solemn self-identifier. There was a kind of split I saw in incels who were just sad and sought the company of men who felt rejected, seeking comfort and brotherhood. Naturally they were drowned out by those with poison in their hearts and mouths. The kind of people who looked up to someone like Elliot Rodgers (who would hate most incels by the way, he hates poor people; he describes being sent to public school for a single day as traumatizing because he had to be around poor kids) and talked up incel violence.
Sometimes one starts to wonder if there was something more behind the scenes. Was it all a natural phenomena? It was 2017 after all, after 2016 the possibilities for Internet memes to be an instrument to control the public was obvious if not already applied. I suspect all memes now and avoid them for this reason. I was in the thickets with incels and walked away from it all, but it feels like though I avoid the Internet a lot now, I get a whiff here and there. Someone I'm talking to in person uses a word I know from someplace else and I'm thrown off. I meet more people who carry on about women and dating, and I can see the contours of their underlying ideas are similar.
These kinds of things weird me out. It feels like everyone in the world became Internet addicts during the pandemic, and subsequently the overhwleming presence of digital life in everyones lives melted the barrier between the real and digital, mixing the two indiscriminately. Symbols and meanings, tied together by a hem of stringy deoxyribonucleic acid, germinate in suspension imbibed in a swirling laboratory mixture. We stand on the base of a flask, in the eye of the liquid storm.