Why The Patriarchy Wants You To Hate Incels

You can’t fight weaponized misogyny with weaponized misogyny

I didn’t date until I was 27 years old. My wife backed me into a corner at a party and became my first (and only) significant other not that long after. For which I remain grateful.

So, if you’re counting, that means I was an incel—involuntarily celibate—through my teens and twenties. Incels, it is generally agreed, are the broken, disgusting man children who, enraged at their inability to get women to have sex with them, powered Trump’s rise and (now second) victory.

Everybody likes to hate incels. And the people who claim the incel label right now are eminently hate-able. Incels have committed mass murders of women. That’s reason enough to despise them, to put it mildly

An additional reason to hate incels, though, is that they have convinced a lot of people that misogyny is a kind of failure of masculinity. Men become enraged when they are lonely and aren’t getting enough sex or aren’t getting the kind of sex they want. This is a narrative that incels themselves push. But it’s also a narrative that is often pushed by people who want to denigrate or delegitimize incels.

Whether you’re an incel or an anti-incel, though, the fact remains that misogyny is not restricted to men who are undesirable, nor to men who are celibate. And I think it’s important to make this clear. First, because we don’t want to erase the misogyny of men who are married or dating. And second, because patriarchy thrives on stoking hatred of men who are (supposedly) failing at being men.

Some violent misogynists are married

I think most people are aware that men who date women, or marry women, can be violent misogynists. As the most obvious example right now, Donald Trump, who was held liable for sexual assault of writer E. Jean Carroll, has been married numerous times.

Trump was not married to Carroll. But often men target their significant others for violence. A 2016 research summary found that 10-14% of women globally are raped by their husbands. This may well be an underestimation, since intimate partner sexual violence is often part of a pattern of control and coercion which survivors struggle to name, and which the justice system tends to ignore.

Again, most progressives and feminists are aware that men assault their intimate partners. And yet, in discussions of incels, people will commonly argue that incels are not dating because they are violent misogynists, and violent misogynists repulse women.

People like to make this argument because it suggests a certain justice; men who hate women are punished by not being able to date women, QED. There’s a pleasing symmetry there.

That symmetry is based on a lie though. We know for sure that women are not repulsed by violent misogynists because, again, women date and marry violent misogynists all the time.

This is not because women find violent misogynists especially attractive (as misogynist incels, who see themselves as “nice guys,” will sometimes argue.) Rather, it’s because misogyny is so commonplace, and so accepted, that women do not have a good way of weeding out misogynist men from the others in a consistent fashion.

The recent film Women of the Hour illustrates the dynamic with painful precision. The protagonist goes on a dating game show, and rejects two contestants who mouth clueless misogynist talking points. But the third guy, who is more socially ept, is, in this case, even more dangerous—in part because he knows how to take advantage of the subterranean bar set by his misogynist peers.

Incels claim that women are to be blamed for refusing to date them. Anti-incels, in a false dialectic, respond that women are to be praised for refusing to date incels—which unfortunately implies that women who do date violent misogynists are guilty because they’ve failed to read the warning signs. Which is a lie; you can’t necessarily tell which men are violent misogynists just based on whether or not they are attractive, or have sexual partners. Many attractive men who have had sex with women are also violent misogynists.

Incels are bad because they are misogynists, not because they aren’t having sex

The arguments deployed against incels are often, in this sense, implicitly misogynist. They also are unfair to men who don’t date. Which is a problem because it shores up the violent patriarchy that creates incels in the first place.

People (of any gender) who are good at dating can also be unpleasant and violent individuals. By the same token, people (of any gender) who don’t date are not necessarily broken or evil.

As I said, I did not date for many years. I did not blame my failures on women; I did not think that women were evil or scheming because they did not want to date me. I mostly thought there was something wrong with me. In retrospect, I was probably shy, neurodivergent, and unlucky. Dating is tricky; some people (of any gender) just are not very good at it. Stigmatizing those people (of any gender) is cruel.

It also buttresses patriarchy. Patriarchy is a system of male supremacy. But it’s also a hierarchical system of ranking men. Certain men—old, rich, white, cishet—are meant to rule. Other men—young, poor, nonwhite, queer—are framed as insufficiently manly and/or as a dangerous threat to order. They are policed, mocked, or attacked.

The relationship between (venerated) Fathers and (despised) Sons is defined by paranoia, jealousy, and a pervasive misogynist use of women as markers of power and symbols of disempowerment. Men uphold patriarchy, and wield abusive power, to demonstrate that they are in fact ruling men. If they fail at patriarchy, they are like women, and will be abused in turn.

These dynamics lead to large scale violence by men against men under patriarchy. Mass incarceration, which primarily and disproportionately targets Black men and Latino men, is one example. Another is the disproportionate number of male murder victims. A third is the disproportionate male workplace injuries and fatalities—in companies overwhelmingly run by men. A fourth is the systemic male violence against queer men. And so forth. Men target men for policing, for violence, for bullying, and for disgust. That’s how patriarchy is maintained.

The current violent incel communities frame themselves as despised sons, who have been denied the fruits of patriarchy. And anti-incels…frame incels as despised sons, who have been denied the fruits of patriarchy. Incels think they’ve been treated unfairly and anti incels think they’ve been treated fairly. But that’s a cosmetic difference. The core agreement is that men who aren’t racking up points in patriarchy by dating women are failing as men.

That core agreement is false. The problem with incels is that they are violent misogynists who have created an identity around violent misogyny. The problem with incels is not that they have failed as men.

Because, contra patriarchy, there is no way to fail at being a man. There are lots of ways of being a man, and none of them leave you being more or less of a man. You can fail at being a good person by trying to be patriarchy’s idea of a man—but that’s a significantly different issue.

For critics of incels, it can feel like it’s more damning, or more powerful to say that incels have failed as men because we are living under patriarchy, where failing as a man has a massive stigma—much more of a stigma than failing to be a good person.

But making the conversation about incels a conversation about which men should be despised for not being manly enough just puts you back into the same patriarchal logic which leads incels to claim the right to violence because they have not been granted (what they see as) the fruits of patriarchy. It’s a conversation about which men should be despised under patriarchy and which men should have access to women—a conversation which denigrates women, and (not coincidentally) men as well.