The Truth About Incel Forums

“Men age like wine while women age like milk,” the anonymous comment sneered. 

It was lockdown, and I’d become obsessed with consuming incel content on Reddit. “Incel,” of course, is an amalgamation of the words “involuntary” and “celibate”, and despite being neither, I still got sucked in. 

I was turning 30, which has always had deeper connotations for women. Read the (often-quoted and often-outdated) stats online, and you might end up like me, convinced your fertility, looks, and love life were about to drop off a cliff.

The posters had a word for that: the wall – the point in time when we’d no longer be deemed fuckable. There was, naturally, no wall for men.

“The wall is real, the wall takes no prisoners, and the wall always wins!” one gloated. 

While people suffered and died in the pandemic, I selfishly grieved the last of my “hot years” lost to lockdown. It felt like a crucial time to be stuck indoors. I wasn’t sure I wanted a family, but suddenly, everyone had miraculously produced a partner and a baby just in time to turn 30. 

As I dove deeper into the manosphere, I noticed an intense preoccupation with women’s fertility. Women who chose the “career and cock carousel” over a loving relationship would pay for it. And here were the unfavorable egg-freezing stats to prove it! Artificial wombs would make women obsolete! 

My insecurities around aging were at war with my belief that women should be celebrated at every age. For these guys, it wasn’t up for debate. Cooped up and endlessly curious, I couldn’t stop reading. For a while, I watched them like animals in a zoo. 

My anxiety escalated as 30 crept closer. The doctor prescribed pills. 

In the run-up to her 30th, Taylor Swift told Elle, “Society is constantly sending very loud messages to women that exhibiting the physical signs of aging is the worst thing that can happen to us. We’re supposed to defy gravity, time, and everything natural in order to achieve this bizarre goal of everlasting youth that isn’t even remotely required of men.” 

On TikTok, Gen Z beauty influencers preach about preventative Botox. In TV and film, women in their thirties are cast as mothers to adult men they couldn’t possibly have birthed. From there, they almost disappear entirely, and before you @ me, Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, and Meryl Streep are the exception, not the rule. While the J.Lo’s of the world may seem to have opted out of aging entirely, in reality, they have the time, money and teams to throw at maintaining the appearance of youth. 

In a society that values women’s youth above all else, incel content became a way to validate my feelings of helplessness.

Eventually, I began posting my own comments. I love debates, and I carefully worded my anonymous questions. From women-only gyms to “false” rape allegations, I was here for it all. “What am I missing?” I’d say. “Help me understand.”

I asked: If women left the workforce to raise a family, would men be happy paying alimony if the relationship ended in divorce? Women wanted to “have their cake and eat it too”, they responded, and they imagined the divorce came about because she cheated. Men were never the cause.

My stress spiraled as I spent hours online each day. Reality became skewed as I came to believe all men think this way. Hooked on this form of digital self-harm, I made peace with the fact that no one would want me now. 

I finally turned 30 and hit the dreaded wall. 

Then… nothing. We emerged from the third and final lockdown; I was shocked, peeping at a mirror, to realize I looked the same. There was no palpable decline in my “sexual market value”. 

Still, I wasn’t ready to look away. 

I continued using the forums and noticed the “wall” age drop from 30 to 25. Then it dropped to 22. A “female” of 22, they gloated, didn’t have the “emotional baggage” of one with a higher “body count.” My kind was “for the streets”.

Then Andrew Tate piped up with, “The reason 18 and 19-year-olds are more attractive than 25-year-olds is because they’ve been through less dick.” 

That’s when it hit me: It was never about women’s value, it was about scaring us into settling. It enraged them that we’d rather take our chances than endure subpar partners. 

I quit Reddit cold turkey, and, quelle surprise, my anxiety drastically improved. I could look at myself objectively and think: You look good. I stopped dwelling on people who were coupled up and cherished my ability to live only for myself. I went backpacking for several months and met the love of my life on a bus to Albania. 

Today, I have a more charitable view of the manosphere. These men need their echo chamber. They have to believe that 80 percent of women are competing for just 10 percent of “chads”—otherwise, they’d have to acknowledge that their own toxic personality comes into play. They insist that men come into their prime in middle age because it makes today tolerable. While incel extremism has on occasion resulted in mass murder, the majority who assemble online are lonely, dejected, and harmless. 

I spoke via Zoom with Andrew Thomas, a senior lecturer at Swansea University and co-author of a study on the dating psychology of incels. While he hasn’t encountered a case like mine, he says, “People search for domains which echo their thoughts and feelings so they feel that sense of validation.” 

As Thomas explains, the incel community assumes that all women rate themselves 10/10, thanks to an inflated sense of self-worth. “It’s common in manosphere rhetoric that feminism has caused narcissism to come over women,” he says. The posters’ goal, in his view, is to give women a reality check. “This idea of highlighting for women that their reproductive value is diminishing seems like an attempt to change something. ‘Average’ women who’ve had their egos inflated to such an extent that they’re only interested in ‘Chad’ are being knocked down a peg.” As a result, hypothetically, there should be more dating options for less attractive men.

Now that I’ve emerged from the other side, I see the world doesn’t reflect the twisted reality of incels. Dare I say it? Over 30, my self-worth has actually increased—it turns out a pandemic was the least of my problems, and I’d already wasted a decade low-key worrying that I should have thrown in the towel the day I exited my teens. 

Oh, and FYI, moldy milk eventually becomes cheese, which pairs beautifully with wine.