Volcels
Men who are choosing to be alone — whether they realize it or not
You’ve heard of incels, I presume. I wish it wasn’t necessary to know such terms, but in this world you can’t really understand politics and society without knowing about the hoards of lonely men who say they’re involuntarily celibate. The use of the term has evolved from a pretty niche group of online losers to an ethos that encapsulates a significant chunk of men on the right, both those who truly never find partners and those who just act like it.
I’m going to be talking about these guys today, and how they completely misunderstand women, relationships, and men. I’m going to be talking about how a good chunk of them are actually causing their own voluntary celibacy, even though they probably don’t realize it. There is such a thing as healthy, voluntary celibacy — it’s even somewhat of a trend in a very different sort of cultural space, I’m told. But today we’re talking about the deeply unhealthy version of it all, the guys who could meet partners and get into relationships if they changed their behavior, but who are so deep in misogynist, far-right, manosphere bullshit that they can’t see straight.
Let’s get into it. A recent viral tweet sparked a little flurry of debate, and a spate of unintentionally revealing comments from the men who are the subject of today’s investigation. The tweet was commenting on an article about how Gen Z women are choosing slightly older men over guys their age, primarily because so many Gen Z men are conservative. Specifically, too many young men have bought into hyper-misogynistic and fascist politics. And the tweet that got my attention was simply a guy in his 20s responding to this by saying, “Being a Gen Z man with a well-paying job and who didn’t let the internet turn me into a misogynistic piece of shit is really paying dividends.” It has 12 million views.
P.B. Gomez, the tweeter, goes on to give a little advice like “Don’t listen to Joe Rogan or Andrew Tate” and “Stop being a cynical, condescending curmudgeon about astrology.” On the surface, it’s pretty straightforward. Don’t be a jackass. Don’t insult something tons of young women enjoy discussing. Don’t be a misogynist. Pretty simple, and you’d think that not having a worldview that devalues the people you apparently want to date wouldn’t be too controversial; you’d be wrong. Well over a thousand comments reveal that swathes of young men both disagree with Gomez’s advice and think he’s leaving out countless variables.
Of course there’s a little kernel of truth to what his skeptics are saying. Being in shape, how you look, being funny – there are other characteristics that a lot of women, and men, look for in a partner, characteristics we generally have less control over than not being an asshole. But, at the same time, “So many dudes are telling on themselves,” as Gomez later says. In response to his tweet and this article about the growing political divide among young men and women a bunch of guys railed against feminism, railed against women, and unintentionally revealed that they are, in fact, choosing to be the problem.
A lot of men, Gen Z guys in particular, have turned dating, and women in general, into unreachable objectives, unreachable objects. Of course, the first problem here is viewing women as objects. The second is that they’ve created a self-fulfilling prophecy, telling themselves that women are simply out of reach and then behaving in ways that make it true.
Feminism is an easy culprit. Blaming women’s empowerment allows men to say that “women have changed” and that if we just rewind the clock to the good old days they could date and have sex and get married and all that. But this is fundamentally delusional. It’s a refusal to interact with reality, a refusal to accept the fact that things have changed. Yeah, women have changed. Most notably, the vast majority of women believe they’re equal to men in every way and want to be treated accordingly.
The conservative movement has taken to jabbering about facts. Ben Shapiro and his ilk love to say that facts don’t care about your feelings. They also love personal accountability — conservatives have always loved talking about that one, even if living it is another story. But then you get this crop of influencers today, whose primary outputs are misogyny and other fascist talking points, and they sell young men something that deviates dramatically from these other beliefs they supposedly hold. They tell guys not to accept the facts, not to take responsibility for their behavior, to nurse feelings of resentment and victimhood and ignore the reality that women and gender norms have changed. They sell a delusion that's ultimately quite painful, but that a whole lot of men are unwilling or unable to snap out of.
Women have changed, society has changed. The simple, logical response to this reality is that men have to change as well. Rather than accepting this natural progression of the world, rather than accepting change (a hallmark of human affairs), a lot of men have chosen to adopt the isolating and painful view that they’re incompatible with women, when the simple truth is they’ve refused to become more compatible. There are structural, systemic reasons that society has grown more isolating, more alienating, more lonely, but then there’s this: a set of very rejectable beliefs that are cutting a whole lot of men off from women, queer folks, liberals, progressives and more.
A wide swath of the internet now jokes somewhat regularly about how the “manosphere” set of influencers that peddle sexism have a homoerotic undertone. And it’s a crude tool, a big double-edged sword attempting to dissuade young men from following these losers. But I do believe that many of the people making these jokes, often queer themselves, know the deeper truth, even if they can’t fit it into meme format. That is, they know that misogynistic influencers are selling a narrative of male domination to young men, selling the idea that boys should seek to dominate young women, while the influencers are really the ones doing the dominating, and profiting from it all.
To put it another way, the willingness and even eagerness to perform sexism in front of other men, to score points with other men by showing off your misogynist bona fides, is a centering and worshipping of male approval. An alarming number of young men go even further, reshaping their entire personalities for the male gaze, changing their priorities for other men, while utterly sidelining what women want and need. Then they turn around and complain that women are unattainable. Of course they’re unattainable, brother. They’re unreachable because you’ve moved so far out of their orbit. You’ve chosen to rotate around a series of men who hate women, who view them as lesser beings. Misogyny has become your center of gravity, you’ve forfeited your right to complain about what women like. You, thinking you’re an incel, have voluntarily and deliberately made yourself unfuckable.
But don’t worry, all is not lost. Well, young men should worry a little, especially those of you who’ve lost your way. But still, all is not lost. The good part about learning that your celibacy is voluntary, about learning that the choices you’ve made are what led you here, is that you can unmake those choices. You can face facts. You can see that women have changed, that the world has changed, and that you need to change with it. It’s not easy, I’m a millennial and dodged all the rightwing podcasters, but I still internalized ideas I wish I hadn’t and have a ton of learning to do. Every man I know has more learning and unlearning to do. That’s life. It’s not easy, it constantly changes, and we need an open mind and adaptability to keep up.
And we don’t need to do it alone. We don’t need to be cut off, fueled by resentment at self-imposed isolation. As bell hooks writes, “The truth we do not tell is that men are longing for love.” No matter what influencers say, men know that to be true. Just like everyone else we have that drive for connection and relationships that are fulfilling on a deeper level. We want and deserve love, just like women and everyone else is fundamentally deserving of love and care. It’s time to stop buying into the crap that keeps us apart, that makes us less likable, that tells us we have to dominate women and can’t have equal and loving relationships.
Once men stop buying into beliefs that keep us separate, distant from women, a new world opens up. The first step is seeing the choices, the beliefs, the variables you have control over that keep you isolated. Then comes the willingness to let go of that which has been hurting you, and hurting others. From that starting point, anything is possible. From that starting point, the incel life can fall away and connection and happiness can become a lot easier to reach. The key is to start, start taking ownership of your life, start taking it back from podcasts and streamers and men who don’t care about you or know you exist. Start there, start adapting to the world as it is, to the ways women have changed, to the way society has changed. Once you face reality and become willing to change, anything is possible.
For more on this topic I highly recommend Jeremy Mohler’s newsletter Make Men Emotional Again, as well as bells hooks’ book All About Love, Feminism for the 99% by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser, and this article by Keren Landman.
Great piece. I think what you said is spot on for the people that have been unfortunately captured by the "manosphere". However, I still think a big piece is missing from the general conversation. I live in a decently progressive area and know a lot of Gen Z moderate to progressive men who are similarly as lonely. I think its the next step into seeing that this is something that affects a lot of Gen Z people regardless of affiliation/gender, its become even harder to meet people since covid and i feel like 2020 stripped a lot of people from enjoying a prime time in their lives to socialize and were seeing the effects now.
As always, good work. You obviously put a lot of effort into the post.
We raised a Gen Z daughter in a relatively wealthy area, surrounded by a mix of both functional and monumentally dysfunctional families and/or single parents.
For the males raised by the divorced dad with the "Men's Rights" sticker on his poser Jeep, to the Dad who loudly asks his son where his "whore girlfriend" is at a Middle School parent gathering... one can see those train wrecks coming from early on. Both of those situations produced the males you would expect from that form of parental interface.
However, from one of the kids I used to talk with at the School Bus stop, who was occasionally surrounded by brown snow due to the hot chocolate leaking out of his poorly secured thermos, and who went through the standard fedora-every-day phase during the Jonas Bros era... whose father was nothing but average, focusing conversation on things such as the energy savings derived from insulating one's crawl space...
We now get this freak on Tate's sick podcast advocating the benefits of cocaine, steroids, gambling, etc. Same kid. Sister went on to be an accomplished scientist. Family was, so far as I can tell, entirely functional and charming, but generated this bizarre monstrosity barely recognizable from the small yet "normal" neighborhood kid we knew.
I assume some of it is the echo chambers established by social media, though the cultural shift can't simply be explained by the ability of any moron out there to get attention by aberrant behavior. Economics, what we value as a culture, sexuality issues, etc. all have a part in the dark road we've gone down.
This kid will, most likely, die before his time. The magic combo of roids and coke has a pretty established outcome. Every male that grew up on this block during our time here has already died. We're up to three dead, all in their twenties or before, so... Accidents, a possible suicide, whatever. It's all just bizarre for a community without poverty with all the opportunities in the world for it's children.
Thanks again for your post. Great work in fleshing out and humanizing issues. Best.