The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Saturday, May 24, 2025

Juxtapositions: It’s long been theorized and often proven that fanaticism and sexual repression are closely related. Many amateurs of mass killing, that American pastime, are “incels,” shorthand for “involuntary celibates,”  though Jia Tolentino in her 2018 New Yorker piece on “The Rage of the Incels” argues it’s not sex they’re really after. The “subset of straight men calling themselves ‘incels,’” she writes, “have constructed a violent political ideology around the injustice of young, beautiful women refusing to have sex with them. These men often subscribe to notions of white supremacy. They are, by their own judgment, mostly unattractive and socially inept. (They frequently call themselves “subhuman.”) They’re also diabolically misogynistic. ‘Society has become a place for worship of females and it’s so fucking wrong, they’re not Gods they are just a fucking cum-dumpster,’ a typical rant on an incel message board reads. The idea that this misogyny is the real root of their failures with women does not appear to have occurred to them.” She wrote, notably, as JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a salon version of that quote in a few parts, was being deified by liberals and conservatives, and many years after Martin Amis, among other things, had noted the connection between sexual frustration and Islamists who like to blow themselves up, taking innumerable victims down with them. “The more common pattern,” Amis had written of Islamist terrorists in The Second Plane (2008), “is to keep your sexual tension stopped, and work it off with religious rage,” a line I found almost identical to a reflection by Casanova, early in his memoirs: “rage took the place of lust.” (He was not referring to himself, though even at 15, we find in the same memoirs, Casanova is suggesting to an older man whose advances a woman was rejecting that he should simply rape her to bring her under control.) Robert Lacy in Inside the Kingdom, his 2009 study of Saudi Arabia, picked up on the theme: “Young Saudis were being taught to scorn what the West was giving them, while also being encouraged to blame the West for their ills. It was a prescription for trouble. Frustrated in their search for the support and self-respect of a decent living—which would also have enabled them to pay the high Saudi bride price to get married—these young men became easy targets for radicalization, sublimating sexual frustration into religious extremes.” But none of this is new. Nietzche’s hatred of women inspired many an incel, and the Crusades, that 200-year bacchanal of European barbarism over the Levant, started with that misnomer, the People’s Crusade, which was nothing more—and nothing less–than an orgy of rape and pillage across Europe by ragtag Catholic fanatics bent on massacring as many Jews and raping as many women and girls as they could before they in turn were cut to pieces in their first encounter with “Saracens” in Anatolia. The dozen crusades that followed may have been more organized and disciplined. They were no less of an organized gang rape, not just metaphorically, of the Levant, and the imposition of a template a millennium of western imperialism would follow, the 400-year Ottoman interregnum notwithstanding, and that Israel would replicate: an Arab’s life, man, woman or child, has never amounted to much more than an impediment to Western (and since Balfour, Zionist and Israeli) assumptions. It’s not always sexual frustrations that lead to rage. 

—P.T.

 

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If what incels wanted was sex, they might, for instance, value sex workers and wish to legalize sex work. But incels, being violent misogynists, often express extreme disgust at the idea of “whores.” Incels tend to direct hatred at things they think they desire; they are obsessed with female beauty but despise makeup as a form of fraud. Incel culture advises men to “looksmaxx” or “statusmaxx”—to improve their appearance, to make more money—in a way that presumes that women are not potential partners or worthy objects of possible affection but inconveniently sentient bodies that must be claimed through cold strategy. (They assume that men who treat women more respectfully are “white-knighting,” putting on a mockable façade of chivalry.) When these tactics fail, as they are bound to do, the rage intensifies. Incels dream of beheading the sluts who wear short shorts but don’t want to be groped by strangers; they draw up elaborate scenarios in which women are auctioned off at age eighteen to the highest bidder; they call Elliot Rodger their Lord and Savior and feminists the female K.K.K. “Women are the ultimate cause of our suffering,” one poster on incels.me wrote recently. “They are the ones who have UNJUSTLY made our lives living hell… We need to focus more on our hatred of women. Hatred is power.”

—–From Jila Tolentino’s “The Rage of the Incels,” The New Yorker, May 15, 2018.

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