hexbear

The linked thread does not include a single derogatory use of the word incel, every time it is brought up it comes from people who struggle with the common usage of the term and call out virgin shaming. I find this to be represenative of the site in general, from my experience on here incel is exclusively or almost exclusively used for the sect of ideologically committed online ultra-misogynists, not for "person who doesn't have sex". The virgin shaming, body shaming and ableism that are inextricably linked to reactionary, non-feminist callouts of incels are all against site policy and are, from what i see, removed reliably by mods. I fully stand behind that. As a queer person i do have criticisms of hexbear's site culture in regards to sex, but these are that the site can be both aggressively sex negative and still too lenient on purging misogynists.

Speaking of which, this thread leaves me with the clear impression that you are making up a problem that doesn't exist. It comes off as an attempt at tone-policing and silencing feminist critique, and of you placing a protection of fragile masculinity above the safety concerns of women. I exclusively call people incels when they are the ideologically committed kind, i do not use the term when i do not mean these particular online communities and i view that as the common usage of the term on this site. Nothing about that is problematic. There is no reason to protect the incel community, there is no reason to feel pity for misogynists, there is particularly no reason to make the self-descriptor of a very specific hate group a "no-no word". Doing so needlessly complicates accurate designation of some of my worst enemies, some of the biggest threats to my safety in my day to day life, one of the main reasons why i do not use most online spaces anymore and the flat-out main reason why i cannot be part of non-queer nerd communities any longer. Gamergate and its consequences would've been impossible without incels. 4chan would not have gone the way it did without them. Incel culture has poisoned most of my hobbies and made it impossible to engage in them without hand-picking and vetting the people i do that with. And even that seems like a trivial afterthought when i think about what incels have done to other women. These shitheads have killed people. There have been actual acts of terrorism motivated by their ideology. Where is your concern about that? Why should i assume good faith from you when you make a thread like this after your behavior in past struggle sessions? I see a clear pattern here and i'm not ok with it.

When evaluating a word, you have to look at its connotations and context rather than just the most literal definition. Here on Hexbear at least, the word's never used against people just for lacking in sexual experience. It only gets pulled on misogynist creeps who think they're entitled to women's bodies.

No

The only people who identify as incels are the people who associate with the misogynistic ideology. Normal people just say they’re virgins. The word “involuntary” is the misogynistic part, it implies that they are being wronged by women/society.

The problem is that they call themselves incels. It has become is term to describe misogynists because the reason they can't get sex is because they're misogynists.

In a similar way that we can't stop calling Nazis Nazis just because it includes the German word for socialist and being a socialist isn't a bad thing. The fact is that they've claimed the word and they're a specific brand of misogynist that can only be identified by that word now because of that.

I’m a virgin and I’ve never had a problem with incel, just like I’ve never had a problem with cracker, because while semantically it does mean everyone who is a virgin against their wishes, it practically is only applied to those who abuse women. We of course can have a discussion about the misuse of the term and how that affects virgins but the word per se is not a problem as far as I can see.

But just a disclaimer: I’m a volcel, not an incel, so that probably changes some things.

This suggestion is just running defense for incels - a group notable for their reactionary response to not having sex. A person is an incel when they decide misogyny is what explains their inability to have sex.

Making fun of people for not having sex, sure.
But the moniker incel is something this group of people have chosen for themselves.

You don't go around calling people incels just because they can't get laid.

People are incels when they are politically and socially reprehensible enough to the point that nobody wants to interact with them, let alone fuck them.

Their inceldom comes from a place of entitlement, where they think they deserve sex but refuse to work on their own shit personality so that people might actually want to have a relationship with them.

They openly call themselves incels, and the term adequately encapsulates the fact that their sexual frustration comes from being scum of the earth unwilling to self-crit.

Incel is more often used to refer to a political position not a virginity status.

Instead of blanket banning everything and making this place into an over modded hellhole (it's already a shadow of its former self) why not just take it on a case by case basis? Are the mods just lazy and don't want to do anything but start a monthly struggle session?

I don't see how turning the site into a hugbox is going to help the revolution

No opinion on the matter, but can I just say that calling famous and powerful men incels, or trying to redefine the meaning of "incel" as "generalised misogynist" is a foolish endeavour that makes us look like idiots to whom words have no meaning everytime we do it. The word incel has a meaning, it's literally shorthand for "involuntary celibate". Elon Musk, Andrew Tate, etc are definitely not incels. This is obvious to everyone. They are misogynists of course, but by definition they are not incels, which is/was a word that referred to a specific type of misogynist that blames society for their celibacy, which does not apply to rich and powerful men, obviously. It's just bad propaganda, and calling rich and powerful men incels honestly reads like cope at the state of a society that rewards the type of behaviour they engage in.

I agree with what you're getting at here but I think we also can't deprive ourselves of the ability to call a spade a spade on this one. I think the term incel should absolutely be fair game to disparage genuine self-identified incels or those who clearly fit the mold, but it shouldn't be a term to lob around against people for an individual questionable take - this has the potential to do severe damage to sensitive/vulnerable comrades, a lot of whom are probably neurodiverse and fight RSD.

Use incel to talk about how /r/braincel users deserve the wall. Don't use incel to disparage people for bad takes that are correctable with patient but firm dialogue.

Incels are, sadly, an actual thing and even a self-identity beyond just an insult towards virgins. They are a phenomenon worth discussing on a forum like this, mods should just remove posts that use the word inappropriately, like they probably are already doing.

I think that occasionally discussion about incels and incel adjacent things around here and elsewhere can veer into a sort of heavy handed dismissiveness of people who struggle to navigate sexual and/or romantic relationships, and it's important we do our best to make sure comrades aren't catching strays here for that sort of thing. But "Incel" used properly (ie not as a synonym for "virgin loser") is, I think, a term whose connotations are specific enough and broadly understood enough that I don't think we need to tiptoe around using it.

No

The word was invented by a queer woman, then appropriated by shithead reactionary men. It's now pretty much only a term used by misogynist men to describe themselves, and therefore anyone identifying as an incel today deserves to be mocked.

People call Andrew Tate an incel. Say what you want about him, but he's not lacking in the amount of sex had. The word just means sexist now

I get what people are saying re: "incel" as a literal term/contraction vs. the colloquial understanding of the term, but at least in my case that doesn't fully work out. In general, my first instinct is to process things very literally and rigidly, and I have to manually go back in my head to revise and find the "proper" meaning. I generally do find the proper meaning, it just takes a bit of legwork. Don't really know if this is a ND thing or if I'm just a little weird.

So when I see "Incels don't deserve compassion" or similar sentiments there's always friction in reminding myself that when the speaker says "involuntarily celibate person" (which I consider myself to be) through that contraction they (hopefully) don't actually mean that but a highly specific group of harmful people. And that's a more harmful experience than I'd like to admit for a variety of reasons, not least of which being gender stuff. But people don't seem like they'd be super receptive to that, and I guess it's because it's fairly low on the list of things to worry about in the grand scheme of things.

Look mom, I'm on TV!

A lot of the people here are explaining that they have not seen incel getting used in this way elsewhere on the site, or at all. I know from experience that incel is used quite often as a catch all for misogynists and people who don't have sex, so this surprised me quite a bit. Since I did not expect my comment to get this kind of response, I didn't look for any examples of this kind of usage, here or elsewhere.

In order to actually determine the usage of "incel" on hexbear, I used the search function to show only local comments sorted by new. I skipped past all the comments from this thread and the previous one, as they are not relevant to the common usage of the term. I only read comments containing the word "incel" in the past 2 months. Overall, I was actually surprised at how often "incel" was used as a descriptor for actual incels, I did not think there would be as much discussion there as there actually was. Because of the common usage of "incel" as a label for actual incels I don't believe it should be prohibited. However, there were also quite a few times where it got used as a general insult towards someone doing misogyny.

There are two main uses of incel on this site, the first is targeted towards Gamers^tm doing Gamer^tm things. And while I am sure many of these people are actual incels, most of the comments about them are really just playing into the sexless nerd trope in order to insult them that way. A gamer complaining that a women wearing clothes in a video game is woke could be an incel, but is probably just a reactionary doing misogyny. Many of these gamers are either in relationships with equally reactionary women, or are willing to lie to less reactionary women to have relationships with them. The other main target is yoon, while he may get a lot of support from incels, he has been married since 2012.

Just to be clear, I am not supporting anyone who people are calling an incel. However, "incel" is being used to insult people based on a perceived lack of sex had by the person being responded to, rather than just insulting their misogyny. A few people in this thread have mentioned that they don't see incel as an insult for people who don't have sex, and while I would like to believe that, "incel" is a shortened form of "involuntary celibate" which is obviously linked to a lack of sex. As said elsewhere, this is not something we should be insulting people for, as I said in the linked comment, I think this falls into the same trap as body shaming fascists, where the main people hit by the insult are not the target.

Overall, I think incel is fine to use in reference to actual incels, but not ok to refer to general misogynists. As an example, a person posting on the incel website could be called an incel, but elongated muskrat should not be called an incel. As I said in the previous comment, this would be annoying to moderate, and there are probably better ways for all of us to spend our time.

No, but we should ban using the -oid suffix since it originates from an ableist term and we've banned other suffixes with similar origins.

I think it is a misnomer insofar as incels are all volcels. If they were cool it would work out eventually. Given that incel is, I think their preferred nomenclature it would be weird to restrict it on those grounds.