“Jamie was an incel because he was a weak spoiled terminally online bullied outcast. If he were just better at sports or if sluts wanted to go out with him, he wouldn’t have been an incel.”
Welcome, dear reader, to the strange and warped online world of incels, where the fictional brutal murder of a girl is not a crime, but a punishment. Indeed, here is a society of boys and men where sexual failure is extolled as a virtue, sex is seen as contaminating and the real-life mass-killers of women are elevated to the status of martyrs.
Adolescence, Netflix’s much chewed-over drama is notionally about incels; Jamie, the disturbed boy at its centre certainly sounds like one and murders a female classmate who contemptuously calls him one. While the show obviously wasn’t intended for incels — its target audience was the parents of teenage boys and politicians — many have watched it and have been avidly discussing its merits and demerits. Jack Thorne, who co-wrote the show with Stephen Graham, ought to listen up and prepare himself for some critical feedback.
For my sins, I’ve spent more time than I’d care to admit lurking on incel online spaces, in part out of a morbid curiosity to see what I would find there, but mainly because I want to better understand their political and intellectual culture — and because conventional writing on incels tends to be so phenomenally bad, with its sensational alarmism and self-dramatising tone of moral shock (“I infiltrated the dark rabbit hole of incels and what I found there traumatised me to my core…”).
In some ways, they (“involuntary celibates”) are boringly familiar: yet another victim group that defines itself in relation to an enemy (women) which it blames for all its problems. But in other ways, incels occupy a world that is as strange as it is unsettling, with its own folklore and incomprehensible vocabulary. “Foid” for example, is a derogatory term for a woman, while “Stacy” and “Chad” are two sides of the same reviled coin: respectively, a sexually attractive woman and a sexually successful man. Tyrone, Chadpreet and Chaddam are all ethnic variations on Chad, while a “currycel” is an incel from India. “LDAR” denotes “Lay Down and Rot”, “AWALT” means “All Women Are Like That”, “roped” refers to suicide and “mogging” is when Chads act in ways that threaten or diminish the masculinity of other men. Although Adolescence contains a brief reference to the “80/20 rule”, according to which 80% of women select from just 20% of the male dating pool, the show barely scratches at the surface of this subculture.
From what I already knew about incels and their contempt for “normoids”, I had fully expected that they would unanimously loathe Adolescence, if only because of the wave of adulation it had received in the mainstream media. But I was wrong: some actually liked it.
On one incel forum I found multiple discussion threads on the show. Traviscel* noted that although Adolescence was “blatant anti-incel propaganda”, it was nevertheless “psychologically accurate” in its portrayal of the killer, Jamie. “I liked how the kid had extreme body dysmorphia, and constantly fluctuated between being a troll, being a simp, feeling worthless, and easily irritated in his desperation for power”, he explained. He particularly liked the third episode in which Jamie is interviewed by a female forensic psychologist played by Erin Doherty. “The actress was amazing and so was the incel killer,” Traviscel continued, praising Doherty for her “skilled” portrayal of “a manipulative little whore” who entraps Jamie into confessing. As for Jamie, he was like “OJ [Simpson] in that he constantly denied he killed that bitch, despite getting caught red handed on CCTV”. “I liked how it had simple answers,” Traviscel concluded, which he took to be that Jamie was an incel because he was bullied and because “sluts” had rejected him. If Adolescence was indeed “anti-incel propaganda”, as Traviscel put it, it clearly had no effect in penetrating his breastplate of incel righteousness and self-pity.
Many more, though, dismissed the show as unrealistic, “retarded”, fear-mongering and superficial. A recurring criticism centred on the casting of Jamie, played by the 15-year-old Owen Cooper. The broad consensus was that he was too good looking to convince as an incel. In a vote on “Would you let Jamie from Adolescence join the forum?”, over 80% said no, reasoning, as one commenter put it, “He’ll grow into a Chad.”
The other point of consensus, across all of the discussion threads on the show, was that the real victim wasn’t the murdered girl, Katie, but Jamie himself. Adamcel*, for example, confided that “I couldn’t see the perpetrator, a 13-year-old boy, as the villain in this, not even logically”, elaborating that Jamie’s violence was a morally intelligible, even excusable, reaction to being bullied.
Some incels were particularly scathing about how the show failed, in their view, to capture the complexities of the manosphere, ridiculing the scene in which one of the detectives working on the case speculates about the kind of mindset-material that might have radicalised Jamie. “It’s the involuntary celibate stuff,” Detective Sergeant Misha Frank says, adding: “It’s the Andrew Tate shite.” This, according to Dariuscel*, was to elide the “redpill”, which holds that women are superficial and only attracted to Chads, with the “blackpill”, which holds that incels, no matter what they do or how hard they try, will never find sexual intimacy or happiness with a woman. Tate, who is not only sexually successful with women but also potently shames other men who lack his confidence and “loverboy” skillset, is thus especially reviled among incels. “Andrew Tate,” Dariuscel clarified, “is a sex haver mogger masculinity coper that shouldn’t be associated with incels at all.” Tate, for his part, has distanced himself from incels, stating, via a spokesperson, that it is “unjust” for him to be made a “the scapegoat for complex problems like radicalization and violence”.
But what really got under their skin was how, as they saw it, the show had trivialised their ideological beliefs by suggesting that they had been brainwashed. Indeed, for incels, the idea that they have been tricked into their beliefs is intolerable, since it contains the fatal implication that those beliefs are untrue and can only be accepted through coercion. If incels believe that society is anti-male or that all women select men based on looks and status, it is because they really do believe this and because it captures their sense, however deranged it may seem to others, of how the world is.
In my brief trawl, I found that, unlike many other journalists who skirt around it, I didn’t want to cry or vomit or cringe in terror at what I saw and read. But I did feel an overwhelming sense of sadness at what a terrible dead end the subculture is, ensuring the self-damnation of so many of those who seek solace and connection in going there.
“I did feel an overwhelming sense of sadness at what a terrible deadend the incel subculture is.”
It also made me acutely aware of how fantastically naive Adolescence is in its exploration of how Jamie came to embrace incel beliefs and in its implicit assumption that if only Jamie’s parents had been more assiduous in protecting him from the manosphere he would have been okay. Spend any time lurking on incel forums and you come to acknowledge that many of these men and boys are there because they want to be there and not because they’ve watched some ridiculous piece of Andrew Tate content or because they’re the unsuspecting victims of a vast grooming operation. They are there because they find it cathartic to vent about their frustrations, because they want to be understood and because they can express outrageous thoughts and feelings that they would be unable to express anywhere else. And because they clearly take great pleasure in defiantly transgressing the civilised norms of a society that they feel has rejected them and because sacralising misogynistic killers like Elliot Roger is meant to enrage the normies.
Had the makers of Adolescence done their own bit of incel-trawling before writing the show they might have come up with a story that better captured the appeal of an oppositional subculture for boys and men who are unable to form sexual relationships with women and who have come to see their lives as hopeless. Instead, they contrived to make a clumsy and reductive drama that has served to fan the flames of a moral panic that shows no signs of abating.
Of course the smug and self-congratulatory makers of Adolescence would no doubt insist that if there’s a panic about the scourge of violent misogyny then clearly this is all to the good. But the thing about moral panics is they often take on a life of their own and materialise consequences that their instigators hadn’t intended or envisaged. One such consequence is the mass stigmatisation of young boys, which is all the more sinister for concealing itself in the benevolent language of vulnerability and safeguarding.
Another and perhaps more unsettling irony is that Adolescence, in trying to expose the dangers of online misogyny, has massively amplified the most extreme exponents of it, catapulting incels to the centre of a global conversation about boyhood, masculinity and violence. In doing so, it has brought the most fringe of subcultures to the attention of countless numbers of young boys who might previously not have heard it or had viewed it with indifference. For some incels, all this sudden fervent attention is unnerving, while for the more ideologically strident among them, it is to be welcomed. As one poster triumphantly put it, “Good, that means inceldom is spreading. They can’t ignore it anymore.”
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*Some names have been changed
