I learned a new word the other day: incel. I’m not too proud to say that I had to look it up. Although I’m on the internet quite a bit, I’m not really part of “internet culture.” Incel is a shortened form of “involuntary celibate.” It refers to an internet culture of mainly white, heterosexual males who consider themselves unable to find (generally) female companionship. They often lash out at women, and sometimes at any sexually active person. In general it seems to be a self-pitying, hateful crowd. They tend towards misogyny and racism and, one suspects, conspiracy theories. They apparently suffer what a friend of mine called “DSB” (deadly sperm buildup). But the thing is, love would seem to be the cure.
Certainly women aren’t to blame. Look, if I managed to find a woman willing to marry me there must be hope for the rest of my gender. I’m no catch. And why is it frustrated men take it out on women? And underplay the achievements of women? The Women’s March in January 2017 was the largest single-day protest in history. Accurate numbers are difficult to attain, but it has always struck me that the U.S. Park service agents, with feet on the ground, estimated a million and a half in D.C. alone. So we were told. It’s almost as if nobody bothered to count because it was women. Why is this still an issue? How incelular are we? Is it so difficult to give credit where credit is due?
I wonder if anybody foresaw that the internet would develop such subcultures. Yes, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash gave us a metaverse where individuals lived virtually online, but did we fully realize then that sexually frustrated guys would eventually merit their own title and that some of them would perform acts of real life violence based on their own rhetoric? Rogue males have been part of human culture all along, but the internet has offered a place to band together and become radicalized. I, for one, had no idea that such subcultures existed. It took reading an academic work about female leadership to learn about them. And it makes the world a less comfortable place knowing they’re there. Learning love is our only hope. There are people who sublimate their frustration to hate. What if we tried to make the internet a place where love, with or without physical entanglements, became the dominant meme? Even those of us who work largely in isolation can see the hope in that.
