I intensely dislike the neologism “incel,” a portmanteau term for involuntary celibate. It seems to me an entirely unnecessary synonym for what has always been called a “bachelor,” or unmarried man. Growing up in a vestigially Christian society, I learned the faith’s traditional teaching about sexual morality: one could either get married or remain celibate, with either being a legitimate choice. Most men and women, of course, prefer to get married. English-speaking peoples of past generations liked to quote a saying of Dr. Samuel Johnson: “Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.” A twenty-first century reader may need to have it pointed out that Johnson was not primarily thinking of sexual pleasure, although that may have been included in his meaning. Mainly he was thinking of the joys of domestic life, companionship between husband and wife, and the satisfactions of parenthood.

If you ask the two sexes about the relative merits of celibacy and marriage, you will not find many young women who do not wish to get married. Young men are sometimes not so sure about the matter, despite men’s sexual desires (in the straightforward sense of desire for the act of coitus) being stronger than women’s. Why aren’t all young men happy to declare at once their desire for marriage the same way women are?

Because men know marriage involves responsibility. It places heavy demands on them to provide for their families. They must hustle to get and hold down a job they may not even like, work hard at it, and always stay a step ahead of the competition from other men who might wish to take it from them. And their wives may not even appreciate their efforts. Perhaps it is understandable for a young man to hesitate before strapping himself into this harness. Perhaps he has doubts about whether the woman will be faithful to him, especially in an age with a very high divorce rate driven overwhelmingly by the fickleness of the supposedly “naturally monogamous” sex. Indeed, in view of this last circumstance, a better question might be to ask why there are any men left who will commit. At the moment, some men are still willing to risk marriage, although I am not sure for how much longer this is going to continue.

Obviously, despite grooms getting “cold feet” just before the wedding (once a popular subject for jokes), most men and women over the course of history have eventually gotten married. Voluntary celibacy is real, and the Church has always considered it a legitimate choice, but it is only suitable for a minority of men and women. The Catholic Church describes it as a special calling.

Now let us get back to incels. Within the terms of traditional Christian sexual morality just described, an incel is simply a man who would like to find a woman, but who has not yet done so. As noted above, he is what used to be called a bachelor. Some woman might still choose him, but so far none has. So why did this seemingly pointless neologism suddenly appear a few years ago?

It emerged among young adult men observing the American sexual scene around them and commenting upon it mainly in online chat forums. These men were too young to remember what I have called the “more sex hoax” of the 1970s, when the amount of sex available to men was falsely reported and widely believed to have dramatically increased. These younger men do not get their ideas about what is happening around them from decades-old rumors, but from what they actually see. And what they see is young women competing over a minority of highly attractive men.

As I have explained repeatedly and at length elsewhere, this is what always happens when monogamy breaks down. It is essentially identical to what naturalists observe in wild primate packs in which the males compete to ascend the dominance hierarchy while females compete to mate at the top of that hierarchy—except that female monkeys, being without the faculty of speech, cannot complain about how unfair the whole process is to them. (“Why won’t that alpha baboon ‘commit?’ Why does he turn right around and mate with another female the same way he mated with me? Alpha baboons are just no damned good!”)

Women, you see, are the complaining sex. This is because women frequently find others—often men, but sometimes other women—glad to help them. Men may get away with very specific complaints in easily corrected situations (e.g., “could you please turn that music down?”), but any man who complains broadly and frequently is soon perceived as weak or needy, perhaps even effeminate. And of all the things men do not complain about, what they do not complain about the most is their lack of success with women. That is how the “more sex hoax” of the 1970s was able to spread so widely and persist so long: no man dared to contradict it.

But time moves on. The 1970s fade in people’s minds, and new generations are born that do not remember the period. Inevitably the realization is going to start dawning on people that there is not more sex than before the hippie era of the late 1960s. Less attractive young men in particular can no longer be taken in by that stale hype because they see women frantically competing to catch one of a handful of “hot” guys while ignoring other available men like themselves. They start talking to other young men who have observed the same thing.

If one of these unattractive men should consult with a “hot” guy, he may be surprised to hear concerns of another sort: women are too damned aggressive these days. Mr. Hot may even be forced to ask certain chicks for their phone number just to get rid of them! (Being a healthy young fellow, however, he may occasionally indulge in hookups with female admirers: see my “Hooking Up.”)

As described in a recent essay, while watching the terror phase of the sexual revolution unfold in the 1990s—with grim feminist campaigns against harassers, stalkers, and date rapists in full swing—I wondered to myself what the targeted young men thought about it all. As always in such cases, they were far quieter than the women, and complained either very little or not at all about what amounted to a broad-based hate campaign against them. I suppose they must have been busy doing what young men always do: looking for a girl, but now with the additional worry of having to avoid being accused of various newly invented crimes.

Then toward the turn of the millennium the internet came along and men could post their concerns anonymously in online chat forums. Lo and behold, they had been observing all the same things I had. They had been attempting to court those same young women who were being encouraged to view and report them as harassers, stalkers, and rapists. And it turns out this had not been a pleasant experience. Many had in fact been reported and punished for violating new and extremely vague rules, and were not happy campers. Gee whiz, who could have foreseen this!

These young men were experiencing everything anyone with common sense would expect young men in such an unprecedented situation to experience: they felt humiliated and lonely, and they could not understand why they were being treated as criminals simply for trying to find a girlfriend. Many were hurt. Many were angry. Some were angry at the women who despised them, but some saw the influence of the feminist harridans on those women and placed most of the blame there.

These men coined that silly new term I dislike so much to describe themselves, viz., incels, or involuntary celibates. This was not a good marketing strategy. While the young men’s concerns were legitimate, people sympathize only with plain Janes who cannot find husbands. No one sympathizes with plain Joes who cannot get wives. Such men are mocked, often cruelly. And that is exactly what happened in this case. “Incel” promptly became a fashionable insult. Anyone who wants to taunt a man nowadays simply calls him an incel. Many degrading details can be added, of course: a pathetic basement-dwelling incel living with mommy, spending all day masturbating to pornography, out of shape, unable to hold down a job…Need I go on?

Let us return to women. Whereas some young men may be hesitant to “commit” to marriage, as I said, nearly all women will tell you that they hope to get married. Let’s stop right there. The definition of incel, as we noted, was a man who does not have a woman but would like to find one. Doesn’t that mean that the young woman who would like to get married is herself an incel? Apart from being a woman rather than a man, she would appear to fit the definition perfectly: she would like to obtain a mate but hasn’t (at least not yet). No one ridicules her over this for one reason and one reason only. She is a woman.

Now let us ask about what is required in a young man for him to become a husband. If you ask a young woman, you may be treated to a long list of desirable qualities, including but hardly limited to: at least six feet tall, making $100,000 a year, athletic and with a charming personality, sensitive and respectful, a good sense of humor, etc., etc. These female wish lists can get quite extensive and complicated, and often exclude ninety-nine percent of the male population by the time one arrives at the third or fourth item.

But that is not what I mean when I ask what is required in a husband. I am thinking in far more modest terms. In fact, I will limit my own list of necessary qualities to just two which I think readers will agree are quite reasonable. First, the man must not already be married. You cannot marry an already-married man. You can, of course, become a side-chick, or “homebreaker” (as they used to be known). But this is not recommended, especially for a young woman who wants marriage rather than single motherhood. Second, the man must want to marry you. You cannot marry a man against his will. You cannot, and should not try, to marry a Catholic priest or monk who has taken a vow of lifelong celibacy. You cannot marry a contented bachelor who is simply uninterested in marriage. You cannot even marry a man who might like to marry some girl at some time if that girl does not happen to be you.

Now, the upshot of these two very modest husbandly requirements is that a woman can only marry a man—if he is an incel. If he already has a woman, he is no longer celibate. If he does not wish to take a woman, his celibacy is not involuntary.

I invite any female readers to reread and reflect upon the above two sentences for as long as they need in order to grasp the point. I’ll be happy to wait. Please note that they are not mere empirical generalizations, but logically necessary truths.

Yet “incel” is now widely employed as an insult, and not only by men; I have also heard women delightedly mocking men with the term. And these incels they despise so much constitute their entire pool of potential husbands. How does the reader think a man is going to react when he gets called a pathetic, basement-dwelling, porn-addicted incel to whom no woman would ever give the time of day? Should we expect a wedding ring to be promptly forthcoming?

My female readers may respond they do not care that the particular incel they are delightedly mocking is not going to offer them a ring. That may in part be because they are still waiting for that other fellow we alluded to above who is over six feet tall, makes $100,000 per annum, and has all those other wonderful qualities they would insist upon if only husbands could be custom designed instead of being real men who must be taken or left as is. The point remains that they will never marry any man who is not both unmarried and willing to get married, i.e., who is an incel. They must finally decide upon some incel if they are serious about getting married at all, so if I were a woman, I would not go around happily pouring scorn upon every incel I came across.

Here is another point to consider: when I was growing up, my parents taught me never to mock the unfortunate. There are plenty of plain Janes out there who have difficulty finding a husband, but I have never ridiculed such a girl. Mocking others may make you feel better about yourself: that, after all, is why so many people do it. But it is not very classy behavior. It does not make a woman sound like a lady. And some of us men refrain from mocking even the unfortunate of our own sex.

Yes, there are lonely men out there. Some are quite unattractive. Some still live with their parents, not only because of their own shortcomings but due to economic forces over which they have no control. Some may literally live in a basement room, although most probably do not. Some no doubt watch porn, are out of shape, have not yet found full-time work, and perhaps face many other problems and challenges you cannot even imagine. If you enjoy taunting such men, I am not your father and am not going to make you stop. I merely wish to point out that you will never find a husband unless from among the class of men now called incels, taking that term in its most precise and literal sense of men who do not yet have a woman but would like to.

And I must mention one other point before closing. We all know that divorce is now extremely common. Most divorces are decided upon by wives, not husbands, and what happens to husbands at the hands of divorce courts and child support collection agencies can be hair-raising even to read about. Young men are gradually finding this out; it isn’t easy to keep such matters a secret, after all. Word on the street is that a growing number of men are finally ready to commit…to remaining single for the rest of their lives. If I were a young woman operating in this market, I would be happy if I managed to catch the ugliest, puniest, most indebted, porn-addled, inbred misfit in town who still had a working set of male reproductive organs.

https://counter-currents.com/2025/07/some-thoughts-on-incels