This Psychotherapist May Have an Antidote for Incels

Recent research published in Personality & Individual Differences found that involuntary celibates, or “incels,” are wrong about how others view them—and some might even benefit from dating coaching.

According to the study authors, “Incels are an online subculture of men who form their identity around their perceived inability to form sexual or romantic relationships. Many incels have a nihilistic perspective of the self, strong misogynistic beliefs about women, and importantly share the view that society hates them.”

“Further analysis revealed that only incels’ perception of societal blame was predicted by loneliness, which suggests that incel identity itself exerts a more pervasive influence on their distorted beliefs about society than individual differences in loneliness,” the study continued.

After scouring Reddit, I realized a lot of these individuals believe that women deem them unworthy of their love and affection for superficial reasons. Some complained about balding in their 20s, while others vented about their short height. They blamed their loneliness and lack of sex lives on such factors.

Let me say this first: yes, there are many superficial people out there, regardless of their gender. However, just because someone isn’t attracted to another person does not make them superficial.

Also, no one owes anyone sex, and no one is entitled to another person’s body or even attention.

Sure, plenty of women wouldn’t date men based on certain physical characteristics, like height. But on the other hand, plenty of men would also prefer shorter women over taller women, or those who meet X, Y, Z beauty standards. It goes both ways. The key is to find someone you can build a genuine, authentic connection and relationship with, something many people are afraid or unwilling to do.

Anyway.

This Psychotherapist Believes Some Incels Might Benefit From a Dating Coach

Incels tend to hold some harmful attitudes toward both themselves and women. In a recent article by The Times, Andrew Thomas, a senior lecturer at the University of Swansea and the author of the linked study above, said that incels might actually benefit from relationship coaching that addresses their misogynistic ideologies.

“My perspective is that for a lot of these guys, there’s a huge deficit in knowing how to have any sort of social relationship at all,” he told the outlet. “And helping them with that puts them in a social position where it’s harder to hold the views that they have. It’s very easy to walk around hating 50% of the population if you’re never subjected to that half of the population.”

Of course, there are some exceptions to Thomas’s proposal. He noted that many incels follow more extreme ideologies and likely suffer from personality disorders or traits like psychopathy and narcissism. 

Some might even hold views more aligned with a different Andrew T…

But according to Thomas, who has worked as a psychotherapist with incels, some of these men just simply feel isolated and insecure, sharing a history of bullying or struggling with different types of social disbailities. A lot of their misogynistic assumptions are fear-based, and those are the individuals he believes might benefit from coaching.

“The moment you encourage these guys to go out and start re-engaging with family members, re-engaging with female friends, that can give them counterexamples of real women who are not one-dimensional, but three-dimensional,” Thomas told The Times. “And then what happens is they end up having more female friends. They build the skills that you need, like the social skills for having friends, and then having a relationship becomes a lot less of a hopeless prospect for them.”