Member-only story
An Open Letter to Incels
We’ve all felt the anger you are feeling
A self identified Incel tweeted that not getting sex creates anger, and since women generally control access to sex, it creates general anger toward women. Given the wide proliferation of this challenging narrative, I want to respond. What I want to address is our culture’s ongoing validation, if not open encouragement of male anger. Why this validation exists and what it is doing to us.
To the boys and men who identify as incels:
First and foremost, understand you have been raised in man box culture. This dominant culture of masculinity is hierarchical, bullying based, and its number one rule is “don’t show your emotions, except for anger.” From birth, whenever you showed emotions, you were bullied and shamed for it. Sadness, fear, pain, giddy joy, need for friendship, love, all of this was shamed. And it was shamed via the denigration of the feminine. IE: “What are you, a girl? What are you a sissy?”
The ability to express emotionally in nuanced ways is a key component for connecting in authentic relationships with others, friends, co-workers, romantic partners, everyone. Because of the bullying enforcement of man box culture, you were blocked from growing the capacity for nuanced emotional expression and the authentic connection that creates. We all were.
Instead of having the years of trial and error work required to grow our emotional self regulation/expression, boys in man box culture are blocked from doing this work. Fundamental human capacities for relational connection are wrongly gendered as female, shamed and blocked. And BECAUSE our bullying man box culture polices boy’s emotional expression by denigrating the feminine daily if not hourly, we get bombarded with messages that both strip us of crucial human capacities for connection and condition us to see women and the feminine as less.
The emotional volatility you feel as part of the incel movement is a direct result of being raised in man box culture, which encourages anger as the only acceptable emotional response for men. An emotional response created, not coincidentally, by a lifetime of being bullied and blocked emotionally in man box culture. It’s an anger generating closed loop and it is a killer.
