Virgins and Incels
Growing up, if you wanted to insult someone who was awkward, unattractive and hopeless you’d call them a virgin. Unless you were a Catholic saving yourself for your husband or wife, “virgin” almost invariably had a negative connotation. Unless the non-sex-haver publicly took a vow of celibacy, not unlike Josh Hartnett in the motion picture 40 Days and 40 Nights, it was assumed that the virgin in question did not want to be a virgin but for whatever reason had never gotten laid.
You don’t hear much about virgins these days but you hear an awful lot about incels. Incels is a portmanteau combining involuntary and celibate. Incel is an even more pejorative phrase for someone who hungers for someone else’s loving caress yet is doomed to remain alone and unloved.
Incel is a popular insult in an online world where toxic men who hate women come together to amplify that virulent contempt.
The ubiquity of incel as an insult and a categorization can’t help but make me think about the differences between old school virgins and modern day incels.
On the surface, the two groups have a lot in common and there is undoubtedly a fair amount of overlap between the two demographics.
The key difference is that incels have weaponized their inability to convince even a single woman to have sex with them in a way that virgins did not.
Growing up, it seemed like virgins were socially awkward geeks who were depressed and frustrated by their inability to have girlfriends or sex lives or lose their virginity. But it felt like these virgins understood that if they did not have the vigorous sex life they craved it was overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, their fault.
Virgins didn’t get laid because they lacked social skills and self-esteem and saw themselves as fundamentally unlovable and unfuckable. I didn’t lose my virginity until I was nineteen and didn’t blame anyone or anything beyond my own awkwardness and inability to talk to girls without having a panic attack.
The big difference between virgins and incels, consequently, is that virgins took accountability for their actions while incels blame everyone else for their problems.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. Incels don’t hold everyone responsible for their misery or inability to enter the exciting, terrifying world of sex. They specifically hold women who won’t have sex with them (which, by definition is literally every woman in the world) and men who do have sex responsible for their celibacy.
The old school virgin was consequently a figure of pity as well as mockery but he was fundamentally harmless because he took responsibility for his problems and his shortcomings.
Incels, in sharp contrast, have transformed their vicious, deeply personal hatred and resentment into what they have deluded themselves into thinking is a coherent philosophy that puts all of the blame for their shortcomings on cute girls who will not give them the time of day.
Virgins saw their inability to get laid as their own unfortunate but understandable problem. Incels want to make their inability to get laid EVERYONE’s problem, but primarily people who are sexually active, particularly women.
Put it this way: The 40 Year Old Virgin was a cute title for a nice movie about an adorable man’s surprising entryway into the world of sex and love. The 40 Year Old Incel, however, sounds more like the title for a horror movie, or, at the very least, a disturbing psychodrama.
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