An Interview With 'Incel Whisperer' Mike Crumplar
Some people laugh at incels. Some fear them. Few seek to understand them.
Most assume incels, or “involuntary celibates”—lifelong virgins and sexual failures—are how mass media portrays them: a united group of beta males filled with hatred for women and ready to take up arms. The reality, as usual, is more complex. Many incels are Asian or another minority, some are women, and while there are legitimate terrorists in their ranks - most notably Elliot Rodger, the 2014 Isla Vista killer - the majority are bitter but harmless.
The best writer studying the incels today is Mike Crumplar. Crumplar is an intellectual, writer, and editor in the vein of his clearest influence, philosopher Slavoj Žižek, effortlessly twinning rigorous theory with pop culture. He’s written several important treatises on incels, including “The Aeneid For Incels”, where he stunningly deconstructs Elliot Rodger and the memoir he left behind.
Crumplar’s vivisection of this shocking subculture is both intellectually thrilling and novel. Over email, Crumplar provided answers to some of the biggest questions about incels. The following interview, in my opinion, feels revolutionary in its understanding of “the incel issue.”
What drew you to “study the incels?”
I hadn’t heard about incels before the 2014 Isla Vista mass shooting—the Elliot Rodger event. At the time I was in my junior year of college. It was during my semester abroad in Muenster, Germany, so I heard about it through social media. It was a sensational event, not only because of how it targeted the college-age demographic that included myself and most of the people I knew, but because of who the shooter was and what he left behind.
“The Virgin Killer.” The rich son of a Hollywood producer, who left a sprawling novel of a manifesto as his testament and explanation for the violence—not to mention a series of strange, fascinating videos he also uploaded to the internet. From the beginning, the media presented the photos of Elliot Rodger with his father on the red carpet of the Hunger Games movie premiere. The contrast of Hollywood glamor with the sexless, brooding resentment of his manifesto and videos is the stuff of literature. And from Germany, the story of a Hollywood-heir-turned-virgin-mass-shooter signified the materialistic insanity of America all the more unmistakably—in other words, it reminded me of home.
His manifesto, called My Twisted World, is full of absurd but no less fascinating declarations that lend themselves to widespread quotation and ridicule—in particular, his sweeping, almost gnostic, denunciations of women and sexuality as the source of all evil and suffering in the world. This was what initially drew me to it. I have always been interested in “extreme” texts, and before I had taken an interest in the short plays that the 2007 Virginia Tech shooter, Cho Seung-hui had written. The Elliot Rodger text is far richer. For years I have spoken and written about and I still feel so far from expressing all its nuances. But I can sum up why I approached it as a “serious” text as soon as I began reading it. It reminded me of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.
To me, but one of the biggest misconceptions that the media has of incels is that they’re a unified group. In your opinion, what are some of the biggest misconceptions that “the mainstream” has of incels?
The idea of the incel means many different things to many different people. Even on the incel forums, where the various voices are, for the most part, in general agreement on the meanings of the terms they use, it’s clear that there are huge gaps in how everyone understands each other. Much of the most toxic and abhorrent stuff is written with an intent that is not exactly “serious.” It’s not exactly all a joke either, but there is not enough space here to get in to the semiotics of online trolling. In short, what animates the online incel community is basically a shared enjoyment of all this negativity. And some incels could even be said to have a quite refined and sophisticated enjoyment of it.
By contrast, Elliot Rodger himself, the “saint” of the incels, was an outsider even in the world of these internet forums. The way he wrote in his few forum posts—which weren’t exactly on “incel” forums per se but in related parts of the “manosphere”—would creep out the prolific incel forum posters because he wouldn’t have any sense for the sort of irony at play in their discourse. Even as they now exalt him and celebrate the latest story of a mass shooting or Daily Mail article about a girl who falls to her death while taking a selfie, most would still feel uncomfortable when faced with the bizarre and humorless immediacy of the genuine killer.
Someone like Elliot Rodger can’t “enjoy” being an incel. Perhaps a contemporary Dostoevsky might compare Elliot Rodger to Jesus in that, were Jesus to appear again in contemporary America, the ostensibly Christian and virtuous Americans would find him intolerable and crucify him just as the Romans did.
The other big misconception of the incels is that they are all just “angry white men.” For some reason Americans tend to have this idea that only white men, and not women or people of color, can harbor hateful resentments toward others. The incels do often speak very frankly about racial differences just as they do about sexual ones—but this is because of, and not in spite of, their own diversity. Elliot Rodger, the paradigmatic incel, was half-Asian, and this background has a lot to do with the frustrations he had about himself. He saw being Asian as something that made him less of a man, something that made him less like the English aristocratic gentleman he desired to be. I think the sort of racism he articulates is an expression of the unconscious hierarchies that our society operates according to but that “proper” people do not admit.
Elliot Rodger was not simply an angry white man that hated women and minorities in a vacuum—he was the literal byproduct of a racist and inegalitarian society. On the incel forums, there are incels of all races and nationalities, and they vent about the “intersectional” particularities of their situations. These discussions are often genuinely insightful, and more often than not they tend toward a sense of solidarity across racial and national boundaries. But this solidarity often ironically reinforces the hegemonic masculinity it critiques—and of course, it has to come at the expense of women.
Prisoner’s Round. Vincent Van Gogh.
Going further, are all incel blocs worthy of the “hate group” designation by the Southern Poverty Law Center?
The way that the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies incels is very imprecise. The institutional goal of the SPLC—to study extremist groups and advise policymakers on how to hinder their growth and prevent violence—leaves them with little incentive to portray incels with the requisite nuance. Still, when incels like Alek Minassian go on killing sprees citing the example of Elliot Rodger, it is far from unreasonable for “normie” outsiders to start asking for policy solutions. When people read the extreme things that the incels post, they understand it as actively hateful and malicious, as if these people are organizing clandestine networks to conduct terrorist attacks, when in fact these messages should be understood as simply the sad personal thoughts of passive young men. For many, maybe even most of them, it really is just a phase.
The incels are a community whose unifying characteristic is how they could generally fit a police profile of a potential lone-wolf terrorist or mass shooter. The SPLC’s imprecision in their “hate group” classification is indicative of a problem policymakers have in addressing “lone-wolf terrorism” generally. This issue is evident when isolated individuals in the West commit terrorist acts citing the guidance of the Islamic State—even if they had little if any connection with the Islamic State at all. Like the Islamic State, the incels represent an abstract extremity that offers retroactive justification to senseless violence.
It is very difficult for policymakers to address true “lone-wolf terrorism” because its real causes are, in the absence of any outside entity to assign responsibility, necessarily embedded in the fabric of their own society. Associating the violent act with a tangible group, however vague or decentralized that group may be, offers a more satisfying explanation. But what this looks like to the incels is that they are considered a hate group simply for being miserable and complaining about it on the internet. I think another reason the incels get so much blame is that there are so few people willing to speak publicly in their defense.
Can you explain a little about blackpill ideology?
Everyone knows of the metaphor of the red pill/blue pill from The Matrix, so I will not go over that here. The metaphor is adapted to online manosphere discourse so that the blue pill is identified with an understanding of sexual reality that takes the normative claims of modern liberal progressive consumer societies at face value, and the red pill with a “savage” understanding of a primordial antagonism inherent to sexuality that the blue pill must repress to retain its coherence. Being blue-pilled is to be a normal polite citizen that believes in the equality of the sexes; being red-pilled is to know the “truth” of how women desire to be dominated by men, and that men can unlock their innate power to “get women” if they follow the sage wisdom of masculine internet gurus.
(Language is never saying what the incels want it to say. They see the effortlessly red-pilled “Chads” and “pick-up artists” utter magical pick-up lines to get the erotic recognition of women—so the incels memorize these lines, but when they say the magic words, their speech becomes flaccid the moment the words leave their mouth. They are actors that are always messing up their lines, or comedians whose jokes are always falling flat. Language is always getting in the way.)
Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate). Vincent Van Gogh.
As the incels understand it, the black pill is the alternative to the two that shows the shortcomings of the red pill. Many incels have invested time and money in the advice of pick up artists only to have these techniques fail. Just as the red pill consists of the so-called lost “science” of how to seduce women, the black pill consists of the science of how and why an incel can never do so.
The result of this is the extensive taxonomy of all the different ways that one can be an incel, which is particularly documented on the “Incels Wiki.” A brief overview of some aspects: theories of the ideal geometric ratios of faces/bodies; classifications of the various species of incels, ie. the various ways in which one can be incel; "intersectional" studies of the incels, such as the condition of the mixed race asian-white “hapa” incel; studies of the “suppressed knowledge” of female hypergamy; and so on.
This result is fascinating and often full of micro-insights about how the ways people want to understand the world don’t line up with how they themselves think and act, but ultimately this form of knowledge seems to me little more than the nihilistic art of making elaborate excuses. This science always bends around to reinforce their own suffering—every bit of knowledge contains the pang of hopeless longing, always reminding them of what they do not have, that they will never fuck. It is a pornographic encyclopedia of sex by people who will never experience it.
Many of the incels’ insights are not actually that wrong in and of themselves. It is that they are pieced together in such a way that it always turns out wrong in the big picture. They often make fascinating, brilliant, truly literary insights into everyday life, insights that cut beyond the chatter of “normie” liberal bourgeois ideology. They catalogue the ways that people are always lying to themselves, that social norms are elaborate alienating systems of deceptions, and so on. They often seem so lucid, so close to understanding everything, before fading back into conspiratorial psychosis.
Incel discourse seems to be acutely aware of class struggle, but most incels seem to ultimately reject it, instead opting for a politics of rigid patriarchal authoritarianism. I do not believe they actually want “state-distributed girlfriends” so much as women's sexual freedom being suppressed to satisfy their passive spiteful enjoyment—a state-distributed girlfriend would simply be too much to handle.
The incels are interesting because they basically have access to the “perverse” nature of sex by virtue of it being completely denied to them personally. They do not have access to the naked body in front of them, but they have access to the whole world of culture, of language, the desire of the Other. They watch movies, they are bombarded by advertising, they listen to what people say. They know what things people think are “sexy”—but these ideas are fragmented, disjointed, they cannot come together coherently for the incel.
And so there are, for example, incels that lift weights and get strong muscles: the “gymcels”—but their hulking muscles look silly with their awkward demeanors and soft squishy faces. “It's over for gymcels,” they say, because their strong muscles, rather than making them sexy, accentuates just how lacking they are in all the other areas. They realize that it is impossible for them to ever become a “whole” desired person. (“It's over” is said for all varieties of incels—the possibilities of how one can be marked by a particular lack are endless, pointing to the impossibility of wholeness in itself).
In a broader sense, the black pill is a philosophical position of the fundamental impossibility of satisfying desire. I find the concept of the black pill more dignified and compelling when considered at this level. The black-pilled incel seems it could be the starting point for an “existentialist” philosophical system that seeks to make sense of the fundamental unease and uncanniness of the subject’s encounter with the “twisted” indifference of the world around them.
The Sadness Will Last Forever. Vincent Van Gogh.
Has this percentage of incels in society existed throughout history?
I think answering this question would require a depth of research comparable to Thomas Piketty’s analyses of inequality regimes throughout history. But unlike the tax records in France and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, no similar records for inceldom exist. There have always been and always will be “problematic bachelors” that may seem somewhat similar to the incels. But rather than being part of a cohesive trans-historical movement, they appear in multitudinous, disparate forms.
These “proto-incels” often appear in literature, as in the works of Dostoevsky. I believe that the contemporary idea of the incel, as a distinct identity that is conscious of itself as such, is inextricable from the internet. In this sense, perhaps the incel phenomenon has more in common with the many other internet subcultures, fandoms, and so on, than they do with their historical predecessors.
Are modern 2020 conditions predisposed to create more or less incels, and why?
I believe that there will be more incels the more our society focuses its social activity in increasingly-insular internet subcultures. There will not only be simply “incels” but also other varieties or offshoots that form communities around their shared misery. So-called “normal” subcultures will come to resemble the incels, adopting their language and other aspects of the culture—ironically, at first, but with then with ever-increasing sincerity. The changes to social interaction resulting from the Coronavirus quarantine may accelerate this process.
Do you foresee the incels unifying in any meaningful way (with concrete demands) in the future?
I think the lasting influence of the incels will be indirect. There won’t be any “Incel Party” comparable to, say, the Pirate Parties in Europe. What seems more likely to me is that, as their odd lingo becomes adopted by various online communities, there will be a gentrification of inceldom. I might be one of the early gentrifiers myself.
Gradually, a milder version of what could be called the incel ideology will become more socially acceptable, which will occur along with a decline of the excesses of so-called “woke SJW” culture and “consent discourse” (the neat-and-tidy ideology of naïve-egalitarian “social justice” haphazardly concealing the dark, discomforting, relentlessly cruel, traumatic realm of sexuality beneath it).
The incels are acutely aware of the savage and traumatic nature of Sex. They are compulsively talking, or at least writing about it. The incels’ deepest insight is that language fails to encapsulate the abyssal cruelty of sexual desire.
The incel will start to be seen as cool—maybe even sexy. I mean this in the sense that Žižek and Houellebecq are sexy. The incel could also be a sympathetic protagonist-type in movies and television. Something like this has already happened with “nerd culture” more generally, which is no longer seen as particularly fringe.
The gentrified and assimilated incel will ultimately have less to do with Elliot Rodger as a mass shooter than as a nihilistic consumer of luxury goods. It will represent the way that, under globalized neoliberal austerity technocapitalism, we all are conditioned to be like the spiteful and atomized incels. But I don’t think the incel will prove to have any latent “revolutionary subjectivity.” It will simply be a way for the bourgeoisie to aestheticize the discontent of the masses.
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