Sympathy for the Incel
Responding to the wicked actions of Jake Davison by even further disparaging and marginalising such men does not seem like much of a solution.
For once, The Guardian used the word misogyny accurately. At 11 minutes past six last Thursday, Jake Davison, a 22 year-old resident of Plymouth, shot to death his mother with a pump-action shotgun. He then left his home, murdered a man and his three year-old daughter on the street, entered another house, where he killed a woman and her adult son, before shooting dead a 59 year-old man in a nearby park and a 66 year-old woman shortly after. Finally, he turned the gun on himself and committed suicide.
It is clear that a man who was capable of murdering his mother, a toddler and an old aged pensioner before committing suicide had psychological problems. In Mr Davison’s case, however, such issues appear to have been well known. They read like the pen-portrait of a mass shooter. He spent long periods on the Shetland Isles with his mother’s relatives, where concerns were first raised about his mental state. Neighbours interviewed in the aftermath of the shootings said that he was a loner. A former teacher of Mr Davison’s revealed that he had a history of obsessive compulsive behaviour and anger management issues. His father had also asked the NHS for help dealing with Mr Davison’s worsening psychological state.
Nevertheless, much of the coverage of the mass murder has focussed on Mr Davison’s association with online ‘Incel’ groups. Incel is a portmanteau of ‘involuntarily celibate’, the term the members of such groups use to describe their inability to secure female companionship within a relationship or ‘casually’. Incels believe that sexual relations have been rigged in favour of women and a thin sliver of men, leaving the majority of males scrambling to attract female attention, and many unable to find it at all. For this reason, Incels do indeed hate women. The left of centre media were therefore correct to assert that Incels, including Mr Davison, are misogynists.
Sadly, just as the appalling kidnapping and murder of Sarah Everard in London was cynically used to push for policies that were already desired by feminist groups and the broader left, so Mr Davison’s murder spree is being exploited to attack the entire ‘manosphere’, covering areas such as ‘Men’s Rights’, ‘The Red Pill’ and ‘PUAs’. However, much of the media coverage of Mr Davison ignores that Incels hate PUAs (I’ll come to this shortly) and Red Pill advocates (and this) as much as they do women. To understand why, we must review the history of these movements.
In the beginning, men and women married young, often as virgins. Sex before marriage was frowned upon – especially for women – and divorce was legally difficult and socially taboo. Marriage was expected and commonplace, so most young people were able to find a spouse. Furthermore, because marriage was a lifelong commitment, mate selection had to prioritise the traits that would indicate a good husband or wife: whether they were morally upstanding, whether a man had decent career prospects, whether a woman was likely to be a good homemaker, and whether they would both make suitable parents. The rules of dating – with sex off the menu – were well understood by both men and women.
Medical, societal and legal developments in the 1960s transformed this arrangement. The contraceptive pill uncoupled the act of sex from pregnancy, while the weakening of Christianity eroded the taboos surrounding sex outside marriage. In the late 1960s, governments across the Anglo-Saxon world changed divorce laws to make breaking the contract of marriage significantly easier. They also legalised abortion. Extra-marital cohabitation, divorce and casual sex all exploded from this period, which came to be known as ‘the sexual revolution’. People also started marrying later, as their sexual appetites could be sated without the lifelong commitment previously required, and social pressure to marry young subsided.
By the 1980s, with sexual relations increasingly resembling a transactional marketplace, a few men asked an entirely predictable question – how can we get more women to have sex with us? – and in a stereotypically masculine way, set about their search for an answer as though it was an engineering puzzle. By approaching women and applying trial and error methods to understand what worked, a few started to sleep with a great many women indeed. They became known as ‘Pickup Artists’, or PUAs for short. Eventually, the internet allowed these PUAs to share their techniques and stories with other men as unedited and field-tested equivalents of the How to Snag the Man of Your Dreams and Five Signs He Loves You type of article that littered women’s magazines.
By the late 2000s, the PUAs had incorporated insights from evolutionary biology, psychology and anthropology into their theories, forming a broader field known as The Red Pill. This name refers to the scene in the Matrix in which Morpheus offers Neo a red or a blue pill. Just as Neo takes the red pill and ‘unplugs from the Matrix’ to see reality for the first time, those men who have been ‘red-pilled’ believe they now see female sexuality as it is, rather than the way modern society (which such men regard as female-centric) presents it.
Tens of millions of men who have struggled to find companionship with women have turned to Red Pill and PUA communities, books and courses to help them. Incels are a subset of the men who fail even after that. A typical Incel might have an Autism Spectrum Disorder (as Mr Davison claimed to have had), while others might have particularly unattractive physical characteristics. Most Incels, though, probably just suffer a severe dearth of confidence or extreme social awkwardness, and perhaps lack the determination to complete the long road to making themselves more attractive to women. Many appear to have viewed Red Pill ideas and PUA techniques as a get-rich-quick scheme that would rapidly transform them, if not into Lotharios, at least into men who could hope find a girlfriend.
When they fail, they descend into resentment and self-pity. They come to loathe women as vapid creatures who can get sex whenever they want, but are only willing to offer it to men with money or good looks. They start to hate sexually successful men (‘chads’) as glib and arrogant charlatans who exploit their fortunate possession of financial wealth or attractive physical traits. Finally, Incels appear to view society as a sort of Gomorrah in which they have no hope of winning the affection of a woman. A few of those with existing psychological problems, like Mr Davison (or Elliot Rodger, an Incel who shot and stabbed to death six people in California, or Alek Minassian, an Incel who killed ten people in Toronto by driving his van into them), are tipped over the edge.
Jordan Peterson, a Professor of Psychology and clinical psychologist, suggested in an interview with The New York Times that Mr Minassian was “angry with God because women were rejecting him”. In the story of Cain and Able, when Able offers God the first fledglings of his flock, and Cain offers the fruits of his garden, “the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering; But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect”. Seeing Cain’s disappointment, God asks him: “Why art thou wroth? And why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door.” Seething with resentment and envy, Cain murders Able. During a lecture on the Biblical story, Professor Peterson said that Cain “was rejected despite his efforts… his work – his sacrifice – has been pointless. Under such conditions, the world darkens, and the soul rebels”.
In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher liberalised Britain’s economy. The consequences of this included mass deindustrialisation, community dislocation and widespread unemployment. Entire towns that had previously offered productive employment were consigned to a state of dilapidated hopelessness. Similarly, the liberalisation of intersex relationships has left many men who would have once found wives in their early twenties alone, sexually frustrated and confused. The social pressure to be a good husband – something to which even awkward or physically unattractive men could aspire – has been replaced by a ruthlessly Darwinian selection by sexual fitness. Most men who have difficulties finding female companionship eventually overcome their problems, often as age furnishes them the experience, social standing, charisma, confidence and financial security women tend to prioritise when choosing men. A small number, like Cain in the Bible, appear to react to women’s rejection of their offering by turning to sinful and self-destructive behaviour – mostly self-pity and envy, but in a tiny handful, murder.
Although Thatcherite economic reforms created unprecedented levels of unemployment, Britain had a welfare state to stop people falling into destitution. The National Health Service meant that when they were sick, they would still receive treatment, despite having no money. To say that there is no equivalent safety net for the losers in the modern sexual marketplace does not quite describe the problem: many of those who try to offer such men help, like Professor Peterson, are criticised for doing so – and those who are sympathetic to his efforts are shamed by association.
We are not even honest with young men. Although Red Pill advice might often be rough around the edges (and come with political baggage) much of its insight into the dating marketplace contains at least a kernel of truth. Popular science books such as The Red Queen by Matt Ridley and Sperm Wars by Robin Baker, suggest female mate selection is far closer to PUA or Red Pill views than it is to the received wisdom of ‘being yourself’, ‘being kind’, and ‘trying to be friends first’. Meanwhile, the popular dating app Hinge found that the sexual marketplace was massively biased in favour of women. Examining the data it collects, it applied the Gini Coefficient used by economists to judge inequality within economies, and found that if the dating marketplace for women was a country, it would be the 75th most unequal – the equivalent of Western European nations. However, the male dating economy would be “the eighth most unequal (kleptocracy, apartheid, perpetual civil war – think South Africa)”. Tinder and OK Cupid have made similar discoveries. It appears that, as evolutionary biology teaches us, 80 per cent of women are competing for 20 per cent of men, leaving the other 80 per cent of men chasing only 20 per cent of women.
Adding to the confusion is the disconnect between our official narrative and the reality. Even as our society continues its assault on the institution of marriage, encourages hook up culture, and celebrates female hypersexuality, we are placing ever-greater social and legal restraints on men who approach women with a view to charming or seducing them. In a largely critical review of Professor Peterson’s book, 12 Rules for Life, Peter Hitchens, the author and Mail on Sunday columnist, wrote: “Young men cannot work out how to behave correctly towards modern young women. These young women’s minds have been trained to mistrust masculinity. But in their hearts they still despise feeble, feminised men. The outcome is that men are trapped in a minefield, in the midst of a quicksand. Whether you stand still or move, it will still destroy you. I do not know how anyone copes with it, or ever could.”
Incels are men who have fallen through the cracks of the sexual revolution. Yet we have scornfully shunted them toward ever darker, nastier corners of the internet by discrediting the individuals and ideas that might help them. Responding to the wicked actions of Jake Davison by even further disparaging and marginalising such men does not seem like much of a solution.
