The Incel's Veto and Other Observations

why have those with the least exposure to sex and romance become so influential in our public debates about them?

I would estimate that in 20 years of writing for a public audience, I’ve maybe made reference to any kind of sexual or romantic activity of my own, I don’t know, a dozen times? This, as someone who has published somewhere on the order of 4000 blog posts and essays in his career. There’s usually little cause to get personal in that way, but occasionally these things come up, usually in discussions of modern romance, sometimes as a matter of personal disclosure in biographical essays. And what I have found, over those twenty years, is that over time making any such reference has become more and more of a pain in the ass. Simply acknowledging that I am a more-or-less heterosexual man who has had sex with a non-zero number of woman now provokes a kind of resentful reaction that I find annoying, strange, and honestly kind of anti-human.

So consider this old essay about losing my virginity. As I said in this retrospective on that essay, a lot of people have expressed love for it and a few people have hated it. That bifurcation of response is never surprising to me. What definitely has surprised me has been the number of people who have responded to that piece by acting as though it was straightforwardly a matter of sexual braggadocio - that the purpose of writing about losing my virginity, as a 40 year old, was to peacock about my sexual desirability, to make myself out to be a real big hit with the ladies, to strut. To pick one example of many that have popped up over the years, “Yes Freddie, you fuck, congratulations,” is a (paraphrased) reaction I saw on Reddit that really baffled me. To be clear, this is in response to a 2022 essay in which I discussed the relationship I had with the individual woman to whom I had lost my virginity as an 18-year-old in the 1990s. If that’s bragging about your sexual prowess, Jesus, what does a basic and uncomplicated level of confidence in oneself as an at least minimally-attractive human being look like? It’s enough to put someone off of writing about sex at all, which is probably why women (who face entirely different pressures in this domain) dominate shortform nonfiction writing about sex and romance.

This is what I’ve come to think of as the incel’s veto. The incel’s veto is the specific prohibition against men ever frankly discussing sex in any positive way that directly reflects the fact that they have sexual experience and thus have earned the consent of women. The incel’s veto weaponizes the natural and healthy inclination to stigmatize actual male bragging about sexual promiscuity (“I get so many girls, bro”) by spreading that stigma to any admission by any man that they have a sexual and romantic life. It’s also, more generally, the idea that in the 2020s we live in a weird discursive space where our perceptions of romantic and sexual behavior are constantly being filtered through the lens of the people who have experienced very little of either. The incel’s veto helps spread the ubiquitous online assumption that nobody is getting laid, anywhere, ever, and that it’s inherently pathological to treat sex and romance as not just healthy aspects of human life but as mundane and achievable.

“Incels,” for lack of a better term (and trust me, I’d love to use a better term) have been an internet obsession since the mid-2010s, when Elliot Rodger’s pathetic murder spree, the rise of the “alt right,” and the election of Donald Trump convinced people that this unfortunate slice of humanity was large, growing, and influential. This obsession has never been warranted in objective terms; there’s no reason to believe that any of that - that incels were a large group, that they were a growing group, and that they were playing a meaningful role in electoral politics - was ever true. The number of disaffected young men who were posting Pepes on 4chan, we can be sure, was always numerically tiny and electorally insignificant, and the alt right narrative was advance in large part because it helped blindsided liberals imagine that Trump’s ascendence was a reflection of weird conspiratorial forces rather than voter disgust with the party and its candidate Hillary Clinton. The notion that the country could experience two terms of Barack Obama and then reject his party in favor of a disgraced and barely-coherent reality show celebrity was too challenging. The idea that there was this weird online army on the dark web that was leveraging male rage to illegitimately influence elections, well. That was catnip for our media class.

And yet I can’t deny that, culturally and socially, we are now living in an incel world. Sexually and romantically frustrated men who have based their online personas on that frustration have long played a grotesquely outsized role in setting the emotional temperature of contemporary conversations about sex and love. A relative handful of alienated, internet-addled men, marinating in grievance and pseudo-Darwinian fatalism, have managed to inject into the bloodstream of our culture a bleak, hyper-strategized, market-based understanding of intimacy that treats human connection as a ruthless auction and desire as a rigged algorithm. They have achieved this influence not because their expression of those ideas are compelling (in fact those ideas are, if you ask me, trite, repetitive, and transparently self-serving) but because “the platforms” reward extremity, because journalists mistake virality for significance, and because the broader culture is already primed to understand romance through metrics: swipes, likes, body counts, status hierarchies. And of course the incel narrative is convenient for anyone struggling to find love. Like the recently divorced who insist that everyone is getting divorced these days, despite the fact that the opposite is true, the incel narrative gives the lonely and rejected somewhere to hide.

For the record: I’m not unsympathetic. Not entirely. But I am frustrated.

For one thing, incel culture has this maddening habit of valorizing the dehumanized, dehumanizing market vision of human romance that hurts the incels most of all. The incel worldview flatters our worst technocratic instincts by pretending that desire can be graphed, that rejection is a matter of discrete data points, that loneliness is an engineering problem with a specific villain. (Women. No matter what, the villain is always women.) Also, one of the basic realities of internet discourse is that the more cynical narrative will always eventually win. And so incel language (“the sexual marketplace,” “high-value males,” that whole lugubrious lexicon) seeps outward, colonizing mainstream discourse, until ordinary frustrations about dating are refracted through a lens of structural doom. The tragedy is that what the sexually frustrated should want is to expand the moral imagination, while incel discourse narrows our imaginative range. It discourages vulnerability, obscures the deeply contingent and social nature of attraction, and transforms the ordinary pain of being unwanted into a totalizing identity. That a subculture defined by its isolation should have so much influence tells you less about its ubiquity than about our media ecosystem’s perverse incentives and our collective hunger for simple, brutal stories about why love fails.

Let’s look at this absurd Clavicular character, who has recently become the focus of obsessive media interest for all of the usual old reasons - because he’s a literal grotesque, because he represents a false archetype that’s easily exploited for clicks, because he makes it easy to complain about Kids These Days in a way that’s both judgmental and envious. (I could write a book, honestly.) Peep the roiling Freudian hellscape of this young man’s inner life, via the NYT’s Christine Emba:

In one filmed rant, Clavicular described his life as “hell” but said he had to looksmaxx in order to “deal with the burden that women in today’s hypergamous dating market” had put on him. More recently, he confessed to The Times that knowing he could have sex with a woman was perhaps better than the deed itself. “It’s a big time saver,” he said. You could be forgiven for wondering whether looksmaxxers are obsessed with the opposite sex or scared of them.

Sounds like a guy who really loves pussy!

That whole thing here, where what this guy craves is not actually sex with women but with the abstract sense of validation that sex with women conveys, is both ages old and very modern. Men have always used conquest as a mirror, less interested in the person across from them (or, I guess, underneath them) than in the reflection they hope to catch in her eyes, a reflection that shows them to be a desirable human, one worthy of love. But something has sharpened this tendency in recent decades, and you can see why incel philosophy has become so mainstreamed; no one knows the difference between an experience and being seen having that experience, anymore, everything is mediated through other people's eyes, and we all live with the gamification of desire, even if we never frequent the forums that traffic in the scorecards and body-count arithmetic that transforms intimacy into a leaderboard. What this sad Clavicular fellow wants, at bottom, is proof: proof that he’s wanted, that he ranks, that the social order has stamped his forehead with some invisible approval. But I’m afraid the sad truth is that this kind of validation, even when it arrives, dissolves almost instantly. Because it was never really about her, which means it was never really about anything real at all. If he actually got laid as much as he claims he would already understand this, and perhaps have moved on from sex as validation.

Of course, pussy has a certain corporeal reality, right, and generations of poets have sung hymns to that reality rather than to the validation that attends it because (for heterosexual men) that reality is transcendently pleasurable, completely aside from said validation. The fact that this dude feels comfortable straight up telling the goddamn New York Times that he far prefers the validation that comes from fucking women to the act itself…. Well, I’m not saying that this guy who obsesses over his physical appearance, pursues beauty standards dreamed up by fashion executives, is really into skincare products, looks like this, and disdains actual human vagina is a deeply closeted homosexual whose pathological pursuit of perfection in the eyes of women is in fact a transparent gambit to ward off his own feelings about his lack of sexual and romantic desire for said women. I’m not saying that such a man is almost certainly a deeply confused and self-hating gay guy desperately trying to convince others and himself that he just loves girls, mind you. I’m not saying that.

Moving on.

One of the points I’ve made in this domain before is that having sex is, in fact, a fundamentally ordinary thing, that it happens all the time to entirely unexceptional people, and part of the problem young men face is that they’ve so thoroughly absorbed the notion that pussy is like unobtanium from Avatar that they become weird freaks around girls and don’t know how to treat sex as something ordinary, that sex is available to fundamentally normal men. But you can see the trap I’m dealing with: by suggesting that sex is obtainable, that women are sexual creatures that have their own desires, that we are all the products of evolution driven by sexual reproduction and that we have an inherent drive to reproduce that makes sex a central part of the human condition - by speaking that way, I am (the theory goes) by some complicated bank-shot logic bragging about my own capacity to get women to have sex with me. It’s all very strange. What if I just genuinely think that, as needlessly complex and unhappy as modern dating has become, human beings are still animals and as animals are genetically programmed to pursue sex? That this is all so much easier if you’re just normal about it all, and that dudes should just join coed activities like dodgeball teams and pottery classes and try to be goofy and sweet, a strategy that has gotten ordinary guys laid since the days of ancient Babylon?

Though it opens me up to criticism, I still believe that men getting women to engage in consensual and enthusiastic sex is not the moon landing. It’s not a feat of engineering requiring years of specialized training and a jaw that could cut glass. It is, in fact, one of the most democratically distributed activities in the entire history of our species, something that nervous people, ugly people, broke people, awkward people, people with bad teeth and worse haircuts and zero social media presence have been managing to do, successfully and repeatedly, for roughly three hundred and fifty thousand years of anatomically modern human existence. The woman across from you at the coffee shop may be someone who will never ever want to fuck you - that is often the case - but she’s also not a jewel locked in a vault that only a six-foot-three hedge fund manager with a Greek statue’s bone structure can crack. Rather, she’s a human being with free will and a body that wants things, a mind that gets lonely sometimes, a heart that may like very much to find someone else to press against in the dark… a person, in other words. Just like you, you absolute disaster, with your anxieties and your weird hobbies and your fridge that only has condiments in it! Just like you. Just like you.

The whole “lookmaxxing” epistemology of desire is the invention of sad self-hating men, a kind of collective self-harm that takes the ordinary and terrifying and wonderful business of human connection and reframes it as a competition most people are disqualified from before they even show up, thereby ensuring that they don’t show up, thereby proving their theory!, in a perfect miserable loop. Of course we’re all buffeted by factors we can’t control, in the realm of love and sex; of course there are no self-made men, nowhere, in any arena. And physical attractiveness is both fundamentally beyond our control and very important. Still, what actually gets people laid (that is to say, momentarily loved, briefly touched, and yes, seen) is often enough a willingness to be present and genuine and a little bit brave in the face of possible rejection, which absolutely happens but is eminently survivable and has in fact been survived by every single one of your ancestors going back to the Pleistocene. We’ve handed the sexual imagination of an entire generation of young men over to people who are profoundly and perhaps deliberately wrong about the nature of women and desire and human worthiness, and the cost isn't just that those men are lonely. It’s that we’ve made sex and love feel like a rigid and robotic hierarchy when they are, at their best and most real, the most radical available argument against hierarchy altogether.

T.M. Brown recently wrote a piece for the NYT on the notion of sexual market value, a concept and term that gives me hives. As is usual with Brown’s work, his approach is thorough and empathetic. Reflecting on his essay on Substack, he writes “Reporting this story out was depressing: there are so many sad young men out there who feel as they’re not good enough, that they need to climb some sort of ladder to be worth of love. It’s a topic I’m going to keep exploring as a writer, although one that is unfathomably sad.” Despite what you might think based on this piece, I am sympathetic to these lonely men too. I may write a piece about that subject someday. And I’m of course always open to the possibility that smartphones have just fundamentally ruined Gen Z, that they’re a lost generation broken by the tech companies, and that the only way to save “Gen Alpha” - to save my son - is to engage in Butlerian jihad and burn the data centers to the ground, and we’ll all look back at the Zoomers as the sad children in the basement in our own personal Omelas who were sacrificed for shareholder value so that Mark Zuckerberg could buy more friends in a futile effort to heal the bottomless pit inside himself. That all may be true. And also, these incels, these sad young dudes, they are their own worst enemies, they have impossible standards because they think Instagram is real life, they refuse to chase real lived-in human pleasures and instead fixate on appearing enviable to other people online, they have absolutely zero chill and are afraid of everything, and their barely-sublimated hatred for women is part of the overall larger self-fulfilling prophecy they live in. All of that can be and is true at the same time.

These days I’m a happy, fattening, rapidly-aging dad with a wife and a baby and a life, and as such I derive the deep pleasures of no longer having to care about certain things. This is all fundamentally ordinary. And as a fundamentally ordinary man, a normal man, I have in fact over the course of my life been considered sufficiently attractive by some number of women. I have no regrets. The question is whether these terribly lonely and unloved men are willing to accept ordinary, are willing to accept normal - and to harness being normal long enough to engage in the very normal acts of conversation, flirtation, sex, love.