Incel Theory
This is a condensed script of my opening talk for the Incel Theory reading group at Mimbres School, which convened on June 4th, 2025. I attached the reading list at the bottom.
There is a delicate but imprecise intersection between incel culture and Alt-Right culture, and I don’t think it’s a reach to think of the history of the past 10 years of Anglophone Internet as a history of how these cultural movements, as a reaction to neoliberalism and postmodern Western culture, captured the political imagination of a generation of young men and got us to where we are at today. Looking back, it’s easy to recognize that the 2007 Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho was an incel; just as Elliot Rodger was an incel. Most people who participated in various sorts of online misogyny were incels, all the way from GamerGate to Andrew Tate.
If you’re on the Internet at all, even if you’re not an incel, chances are you’ve learned to think like one. by way of memes and the popularity of these chad/tradwife wojaks, the Anglophone Internet has altogether absorbed incel dialectics as mainstream: alpha/beta, chad/virgin, stacy/becky, cucking/mogging, based/cringe, the bluepill/redpill/blackpill, pepe, foid, looksmaxxing, neet, normie, simp, wagecucks, all of these terms either originated or first popularized within the manosphere, and having undergone various sorts of evolutions, as memetic signs tend to do. So incel culture is already silently universal; no matter how much credence you give to it, the incel paradigm is something that lives in the back of your head.
Certainly there have always been people who couldn't get laid. Yet something about incels as a coherent social identity feels particular to our time and place in the contemporary Western moment, to the epidemics of loneliness, to the alienation between oneself and one’s desires under the libidinal economy, to the increased emotional distances between one and one’s family of origin or increasingly, any unit of kinship at all. Incel culture is also reactionary in the sense that it seeks to return to something from post-industrial society. It is in this social context that large swaths of lonely young men now define themselves by the lack of sex and, to put it bluntly, gain some weird form of sexual ‘class consciousness’ whereby the lack of sex is felt as a genuine force of oppression to be avenged and revolted against. Not getting laid is a biological fate worse than death, and it’s so serious that it’s worth coming up with a whole misogynist social ontology to justify your undesirability to yourself.
It turns out that what Foucault identified as the “speciation of individuals on the basis of their sexualities,” how sexuality moved towards the center of one’s social identity in the Western world starting from the late 1800s, isn’t just cogent for queer theory alone. Inceldom is foremost a sexual identity insofar as it is a voluntary negation of one’s own personhood on the basis of an inability to exercise one’s sexuality, where the lack of sex, the condition of not being sexually desired by others, makes you literally subhuman. The underlying assumption here is that the “sexual marketplace” is real–sex is de facto an exchange-relation where your value is your desirability to others, much of what is already predetermined along axes of beauty standards.
What happens when you apply the male gaze to male bodies? That is, what happens when you take a female subject as constructed by the male gaze, take her imagined interiority, and look at male bodies with her fantasies? Quoting Andrea Long Chu, “Gender in every case expresses the desires of another.” And the male gender is not exempt from this process. Cue these incel terminologies: alphas, betas, sigmas, chads, virgins, chuds. Together they basically comprise a gendering of men based on how attractive they are to this imaginary woman.
These are genderings because incel culture operates from the assumption that these classes prescribe heterosexuality, and that desire is always directed towards the highest class in this taxonomy: everyone always wants alphas, stacys, and the rest are only incidental bodies that people settle for. Ironically, no queer theorist can dream of achieving as thorough a deconstruction of heterosexuality as incels have achieved. To the incel, the match between a chad and a stacy, and a beta and a becky, are two fundamentally different sexualities. The former is infinitely more desirable and a higher potential for pleasure and value.
I want to make a distinction here. Incel culture–which is this broad belief in hierarchies of desirability and this reification of an imagined caste system that governs human sexuality–is different from incel ideology, which is what is to be done to reverse this situation. There is a range of incel ideologies: MGTOW, PUA, MRA, where its participants are not necessarily sexless men, but they all broadly operate of the same sexual culture and share the same anxieties and fantasies.
But the rubicon we’ve crossed here is that incel terminology is the only language we have for masculinity. Incel terms are the only terms where many young, heterosexual men in the West use to gender themselves, jokingly or otherwise. These terms delicately reify incel culture by exploiting young men’s discontent with liberal feminism: of course feminism was a lie, because it was the woman who has oppressed the man all along by denying them sex. At the same time, podcasters like Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan are doing the very thing they accuse queer people of: grooming young boys by telling them that they should aspire to have as much sex as possible. If you don't have sex, you are no longer a man— simple as. And if you can’t get sex, if society is preventing you from having sex, then society is stopping you from becoming a man.
Incel culture tricks men into thinking that their true manhood is literally closeted by human sociality, by feminism and the current state of gender relations, because men are told over and over again they enjoy privileges over society but do not feel it because they are not getting laid. And so incel’s hierarchy of desirability is reified into a real regime of resentment, where hatred masks anxieties of emasculation and disenfranchisement as well as fears of masculine overproduction.
As a fictive natural order that governs sexuality, this hierarchy of desirability also readily absorbs other genuine axes of social marginalization like race and class. The Wesley Yang article, The Face of Seung-Hui Cho is the best example of someone who sees the world through that lens. Though the reading does not mention any incel terminology directly, we see how the narrator tries to place his body and the bodies of people he knows through this hierarchy of desirability and reason their behaviors accordingly to this hierarchy: desirability is the “code that abashes, and unmans you.”
To arrive at a theory of incel culture is to critique this mythical, toyish hierarchy of desirability in which incel imagines themselves as the underclass. As Amia Srinivasan rightly identifies, critiques of ‘rights to sex’ are necessarily critiques of desire, and we can’t really do that without using the methods of feminist theory, queer theory, and psychoanalysis. Yet while the article is a great authoritative gloss over the contemporary discourses on sex, its liberal feminist lens ultimately reads like a cop out: Srinivasan concludes with “May desire take us elsewhere,” which is really nothing more but a reinstatement of the liberal doctrine that “people should be allowed to do whatever they want as long as it doesn’t infringe on other people, and may we want better things.” How could you critique desire without talking about fantasy, while simultaneouly this really gross reductionist thing where you’re just bundling incels with fat and trans people as this same class of unfuckable people?
Let’s zoom in again and consider a more charitable reading: when Srinivasan says “may desire take us by surprise, cut against what politics has chosen for us and choose for itself,” what she actually meant was that fantasy is a site for this very work. After all, in psychoanalytic and queer traditions, quoting Lauren Berlant, “love is always deemed an outcome of fantasy.” Even Roland Barthes writes about the Other’s atopia, the inability of the lover to be classified. You become hot if enough people fantasize about you. Very well then; our problems are solved when misogynists find themselves turned on by femdoms, when racists desire colored people, when transphobes desire trans people, when colonial subjects desire their colonizers, when hot women desire ugly men–oh wait, they already do. As Lacan notes, desire itself is always the desire of the Other, and desire is inseparable from one’s fear or hatred of the Other. It’s not a contradiction or anomaly that our leaders are married to the exact immigrant women they want to deport: after all, sexual desire so blatantly involves dynamics of capture and subjugation. As Toscano quotes Deleuze: “We never desire against our interests, because interest always follows and finds itself where desire has placed it.”
It is in Albert Toscano's invocation of Foucault that we find a better formulation of Srinivasan’s plea: as Toscano quotes, “We must invent with the body, with its elements, surfaces, volumes, and thicknesses, a non-disciplinary eroticism: that of a body in a volatile and diffused state, with its chance encounters and unplanned pleasures.” Foucault wrote about how sources of power’s erotic charge in the political organization of fascist violence, in a manner that arguably moves beyond the dialectic of desire and interest and sheds light on “fascist freedom,” “the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits.” As Toscano writes, it is impossible to desire radically if we don't desire with this latent fascism within us in mind.
And here we see the crucial weakness in Srinivasan’s thesis: it was never really about what the subject desires, but rather the subject’s right to be desired. A right to be desired demands a place in other people’s fantasies, demands that certain minds reciprocate one’s fantasies about their bodies in kind. Therefore, a right to be desired has a corresponding obligation in other people to want you, it demands that other people fantasize about you. As Lauren Berlant so lucidly writes, “The power of any particular case of desire/love has to do with the ways it embodies or seems to transcend conscious and unconscious fantasies.” Interrogating fantasies as a method is to interrogate how subjects inhabit fantasy in the ordinary course of their actual lives.
Very unfortunately for us, incel culture engenders a very different type of fantasies than Srinivasan’s best case scenario. While you may think that a rightful reaction to alienation is that we have no choice but to imagine a world that has never existed before, incels inevitably dream of RETVRN with a V–a mythical past where patriarchy was so much of a thing that male sexuality triumphs above all. And so we are in a dire situation. Today’s incels are no longer the furious teenaged boys singing “the lack of sex is bringing me down” in Green Day’s Basket Case, nor are they imagining themselves as a buff fighter yelling at “the middle children of history” like in Fight Club. To make sense of their lack of sex, today’s incels identify themselves in relation to the Slut and the Chad–between them forms a neat triad, a little Challengers situation. This Other Man, the Chad, is tall, rich, has a big dick, is possibly Black or Foreign (we don’t have time to get into this here but Fanon discusses this at length), has good posture, and is desired universally by every woman. Mens forums are littered with comments like “She’s sending nudes to someone else,” “she’s fucked somebody else on a first date.”
The Chad is not an oppressor in incel ontology, but a necessary fantasy-object, through whose body the incel’s fantasies of fucking the slut can be actualized: the incel lives his life through the chad’s body. Women are the true oppressors because they are the allocator of the supreme resource of Sex and Desire, and the hierarchy is rigid insofar as incel ontology is disinterested in what women really want, but how the incel measures up to the Chad who the woman should want as a matter of course. Here machination of masculinity is not a real relationship of production or becoming, but as a felt failure to assume one’s role in the system, a failure to live up to Chadness, a sense of impotence.
Viewed in this light, this cuckold mindset is not only a side effect, but the only way the incel is freed from his body, the only way incel actualizes his sexuality. It does not matter if Elon Musk is virile, there is enough in his public life to plausibly affect the incel’s fantasies of having access to many women, impregnating many women. To an incel, the chad’s body is sexual insofar as it is a plausible actor in the incel’s fantasies: whether the chad has sex himself doesn't matter. It is in the moment of cuckoldry is attempts to reify the incel’s position as an underclass in the hierarchy of desirability, and the configuration of cuckoldry also makes real the incel’s gendering of men: here is the chad who fucks, the girl who gets fucked, and I cannot intervene.
No other media explores this better than Fight Club. In Fight Club, the alienated, disenfranchised self is literally fractured into the incel and the chad: the incel cannot realize he is the chad, and could not believe he is the chad. This is a marked departure of other popular masculine narratives of superhero alter-egos: the very ability for Tyler Durden to be a chad is having shed his inhibitions by imagining himself as someone else The self has become so dispossessed by the world that he literally has to invent a chad to live real life through the lens of fantasy. In both Fight Club and The Matrix the narrative gimmick is that of an inversion between the fantasy and the real, which jives well with is an original, correct psychosocial order of desirability that contemporary society masks. This impulse to return to this original order of desire is incel culture’s response to liberal feminism and queer theory, what Toscano calls an embattled loss of fantasy (and fantasy of loss) by “an increasingly fragile Western hypermasculinity”: male sexuality is literally what they’ve taken from you. Incel theory is where we can reconcile the conservative obsession with The Matrix and the fact that the Matrix is intended to be a closet allegory: contemporary society is literally a closet that men have to escape in order to become real men.
I think this is a good point to pause and speak a little bit about the readings, how through these readings I am hoping to tease out something of a cultural theory of incels, foregrounding fantasy of a method of critique, though I have no hope that it’s going to get us out of this mess. These readings were chosen to historicize not incels themselves, but to historicize incel culture and the social ontology I introduced earlier in past studies of fascism. Absorbing new methods from feminist and queer theory is useful here also because both incels and fascist social ontologies are defined by their “discontinuities”, their seemingly ahistorical character and their resistance to being situated, defined, and studied sociologically. And it is for this reason that studies of sexuality and fascism share fantasies as an especially cogent site of inquiry, where you can historicize things that previously are not traceable.
Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism came out in September 1933, just 9 months after Hitler was made Chancellor and Nazi Germany formally seized power. While he could sound like a crackpot at times with all that orgone stuff later on, I think there is a lot in Reich’s work if you read him less literally than he intended–people want fascism because they channel this sexual repression, people actually desired fascism all along because fascism is a movement of the wannabes. Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies came out in 1977, a year after Foucault’s History of Sexuality came out in French. The Toscano reading really synthesized Reich, Theweleit, Foucault within the 1970s intellectual preoccupation with “new forms of fascism, new forms of fascist consciousness”, and at the same time there are all these new methods to study sexuality that, when combined with Theweleit, helps us see loose direct lineage of first-person accounts between the Freikorps men’s diaries and inceldom. Here it was the first impetus for me to put together this syllabus because the fragments really did feel like proto-incel websites, in how they discussed their fear and loathing and desire of women and really filled the gaps in Srinivasan and Douthat’s discourse in 2018, which I really viewed as a sort of neo-Foucauldian discourse regurgitated through a liberal rights-and-obligations lens. Srinivasan’s article came out in 2018 and was a sensation, the first real writing on incels from a liberal feminist reckoning with how capital S sex and sexuality is actually going horribly wrong in this world. And Ross Douthat, being the idiot he is, wrote the Redistribution of Sex as a reaction to that discourse. Jacob Johanssen’s 2021 monograph is sort of a methodological gloss on applying Theweleit’s approaches to incel first-person texts, where Johanssen claims that “the fantasy of the fascist body provides the men with a toxic form of symbolic power through which they wish to move beyond apathy.”
Looking into fantasies help us bypass the discontinuities in conscious historical and social life. As we will learn from Johanssen, Reich, Theweleit, and Toscano, fantasies in the realm of sexuality are all too readily expropriated by political fantasies of fascism, supplanting the actuality of political life. Here we have a Benjamininan notion of aestheticization of politics by way of sexuality, facilitated by the Internet where people acquire an education in how to desire and what to desire through direct fantasy-objects like porn, memes, and short-form video. There is a clear psychosocial lineage between the incel and Theweleit’s Freikorpsmen, where we first see fantasies doing this work of worldmaking where masculinity first emerges as a political class defined by sexual access. direct continuity in how those men thought about masculinity and how incels thought about masculinity, even hating women in the exact same ways. Fantasies of escaping the closet of society acquire psychic lives of their own, that more often than not involve what Toscano calls “the gendering of the fascist libido”: the incel actualizes his freedom through the imagined sexuality of the chad’s body, which, as a fantasy, is inevitably bound up with visions of violence, apotheosis, and conquest.
I found the clearest way to understand these ‘latent forces’ that Reich floats around in his work is in the work of Paul Preciado, author of Testo Junkie and famous queer theorist. Preciado’s formulation potentia gaudendi: the body’s capacity for pleasure, physical or mental. Preciado argues that the libidinal industrial complex, at the intersection of pharmaceutical and pornographic industries, is geared towards the increase of the body’s potential to receive pleasure–which, surprise surprise, doesn’t make anybody freer. Whereas Theweleit’s Freikorps subjects could only write down their fantasies, today’s incels can readily see porn is where these latent contradictions in one’s desire for the Other becomes reified for the precise purpose of unleashing their potentia gaudendi. In Testo Junkie, Paul Preciado highlights how porn, as a fantasy-object, works by making the pleasured by his own process of desubjectification; he is the one who possesses the potentia gaudendi of the actors, while his body is absolutely disenfranchised from its own sexuality–or liberated from its own sexuality, reduced to this involuntary receiver of stimuli.
Toscano reaffirms that sexuality is where the latent energies of fascism are often the most cogent, and that there is a need to “theorize the vexed entanglements of fascism and eros” where, quote, “counterfeiting of sex and gender crises allows the geopolitical and civilisational to be mapped onto the body at its most material but also its most symbolic.” And if we think of these crises, very broadly, as encounters with the Other that unsettles the subject’s own social positioning, then Toscano argues that Fascism precisely exploits the latent, contradictory desires produced by these crises by encouraging reactionary fantasies towards a more “purist” state where these crises did not exist in the first place. Fascist myths construct a nonexistent, pure past where one never needed to encounter the Other–Olympus without Dionysus.
The core way in which incel culture intersects with alt-right fascist fantasies is that the political goals of fascism will reset the current hierarchy of desire to the way it should be: in the pure world, women will learn to desire correctly, women will want what they should want. If you do away with feminism, gender theory, sexual liberation, and supplant them with the incel’s mythologies, then the girls you want will want you back. You could say, isn’t this still a contradiction–say everyone is a submissive tradwife; wouldn’t they still all want the Chad anyways? Ah, but remember, the incel and the Chad is one in fantasy; remember Fight Club.
So the incel’s fantasies, in fact, have claim and jurisdiction over all bodies living or dead, past or present, as bodies to reterritorialize. This is why “your body, my choice” is such a cogent mask-off moment. For the incel, sexual relations are real only insofar as they reify some sexual fantasy. As we have seen in Theweleit, any fluidity signifies danger, potential to be engulfed, and unreadability: This also intersects neatly with the logics of current transphobia: young trans men “mutilating their bodies” precisely because they upset their original place as desirable teenage female bodies in male fantasies.
“How does human desire–the ceaseless motion of desiring production–lend itself to the production of death in fascism?” Theleweit answers this question with astonishing clarity, for he takes you through the same trains of thought as these ordinary, petit-bourgeoisie Freikorpsmen who are aimless, roams a dispossessed nation stuck between the great wars, and happened to find a gun in their hands. “You do not find out about how they felt about Jews but how they felt about women; and that was enough. They hated women, they hated women’s bodies and sexualities, and war was a means to an end to escape women–escape being swallowed, engulfed, overcome by the flood of desire. Freikorpsmen view women as archetypes: left-behind wives and fiances, the Madonnas the white nurses, upper class German women, and the Red woman. There are indirect analogs of these in wojaks: how incels imagine the tradwife, the goth e-girl, and the blue haired feminist; the dead-girlfriend montage.
You also see this in the popularity of anime women with incels as a memetic form. The anime woman is not only unreal, she never becomes real, she doesn't have a living counterpart: she is not a body. Anime women are seldom women–often young, underaged high school students, monsters, fairies, or mother figures, and they are classified into many archetypes based on personality and looks, each of which play a socially prescribed role in possible male desire: male desire is supposedly organized around choosing between these types. Incels, dispossessed of the chad’s body, can feel themselves desired in virtual spaces by virtual girls who address not the incel’s body, but the incel’s point of view alone. You see this a lot in dating sims, in Doki Doki literature club, which is a Western anime, the male main character, headless and voiceless, is loved and treated with recognition. Thanks to the Internet, which offer more avenues to access other people’s lives and interiorities than ever before, where you are offered more images, constructs, and languages to actualize your fantasy than ever before, the reification of the incel fantasies and incel social ontologies is happening in real time. Just a few years after the Tradwife wojak became a universal memetic language, we can now see an army of real tradwives homesteading movements began with women in white and floral dresses, who are, whether they know it consciously or not, literally becoming the tradwife wojak, a social identity first constructed within incel culture. The fantasy of the tradwives came true–it became a real, cognizant social identity.
So where does that leave us? To answer Foucault’s call to “render intolerable” the latent forms of fascism lurking just beneath the threshold of recognition, we have to attend to these “vexed entanglements of fascism and eros.” we have to historicize our unconscious investments in power, we arrive at new perspectives on the artificial battlegrounds that subsume our present. Toscano’s thesis is that men’s sexuality is a crucial element of far right’s master narratives on the view from the left, as crucial as “gender ideology” is to stonewall riots—while this is not exactly a sympathetic analogy, it is a useful one.
Reading List
- “Introduction: a psychoanalysis of the manosphere” (27 pages)
Jacob Johanssen, from Fantasy, Online Misogyny and the Manosphere
- “Does anyone have the right to sex?” (11 pages)
Amia Srinivasan, from London Review of Books
- Selections from The Mass Psychology of Fascism (23 pages)
William Reich - Selections from Male Fantasies, Vol. 1 (115 pages) (read highlighted sections in PDF)
Klaus Theweleit - “Cathedrals of Erotic Misery” (18 pages)
Alberto Toscano, from Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis - “The Redistribution of Sex” (4 pages)
Ross Douthat, from New York Times - “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho” (23 pages)
Wesley Yang, from n+1