It thus seems all the more curious that today’s incels would suddenly elicit such shock and cultural soul-searching, and have their predicament treated as a bizarre and recent aberration in all corners of the media. In 2018, alarms began sounding about a “
sex recession,” with men reporting having had no sex in the past year at
nearly double the rate of their female peers. For incels, this was a vindication of their theory that female “
hypergamy,” unleashed by feminism and the sexual revolution, had created a situation where women unconstrained by social mores flock to a minority of wealthy or attractive men while leaving the rest in the dust. Others were quick to blame
dating apps for enabling women to be
selective like never before. But both of these narratives contain some rather inconvenient gaps. For one thing, no matter how many successful Tinder matches “Chad” gets, it’s hard to imagine him competing with the likes of
Moulay Ismail ibn Sharif, who fathered over a thousand children with over five hundred different women without the help of either dating apps or feminism. And for all that incels stew over lurid accounts of youthful promiscuity, the most common guarantor of sex for men throughout history has not been some more fairly regulated dating culture but the far less exciting reality of
marriage.
The picture becomes clearer if we recognize that both the incels and the journalists who puzzle over them are defining their expectations by the standards of a very particular period—the second half of the twentieth century. When incels talk about the “traditional norms” supposedly eroded by feminism, they are actually referring to a brief historical window in which a number of political and economic currents converged to create an incredible wave of stability and shared prosperity in much of the developed world, giving millions of relatively unskilled and unremarkable men the means to sustain a nuclear household on a single income and reap the rewards of patriarchy. That this was in fact an unprecedented social arrangement, or that people in preceding decades had actually attended
church less often, married
later, and done so in
lower numbers was quickly forgotten as the world of
Leave It to Beaver established itself as the perpetual “good old days” in our collective imaginary. This was also, incidentally, the same period in which “
dating” came to be seen as a quintessential stage of youth. And so powerful is the gravitational pull of this golden age that it still anchors the political imaginations of both Left and Right. As if to illustrate
Brink Lindsey’s quip that liberals want to work in the 1950s while conservatives want to go home there, Donald Trump promises to “make America great again” at the same time that Bernie Sanders waxes nostalgic about
marginal tax rates under Eisenhower.
But as an exasperated Marty retorts to his father-in-law in the first season of
True Detective, “if things were so great, they never would’ve changed.” The postwar paradise,
to the extent that it even existed, proved to be a blip on the historical radar, lasting no longer than a single generation—the
same generation that still refuses to release its stranglehold on the future. Its broadly shared prosperity was driven by the rebuilding of a world ravaged by precisely the kind of cataclysmic destruction of life and labor that has
generally been the primary means of reducing social conflict and inequality. Its generous concessions to workers had been made under a looming
threat of global communism that no longer exists. And now, as globalization and neoliberalism sweep away the last vestiges of economic security, marriage—which has always been men’s most reliable pathway out of celibacy—is
increasingly becoming an
upper-class luxury. Houellebecq had it wrong; neoliberal economic deregulation isn’t
analogous to sexual stratification—it’s the direct cause.
On its own, then, this rise in male sexlessness is nothing new. But it’s happening at precisely the same time that men everywhere are experiencing a “
purpose void.” In America, men accounted for nearly
80 percent of jobs lost in the wake of the last recession, and even in stereotypically male fields such as tech, automation is shifting emphasis away from
abstract number-crunching ability to the kinds of “
soft skills” for which women are far better socialized. Men now also consistently make up less than half of university students, and while this has had the ironic effect of creating
extremely favorable dating conditions for male graduates, it has only worsened the odds for those without a degree. The modern world may have been largely built on the backs of working-class men, but today it has ever less need of them. As
Hannah Rosin writes in
The End of Men, “The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly male. In fact, the opposite may be true.” With the factories and coal mines that chewed up past generations of working-class men giving way to call centers and cash registers, their female peers are, fairly or not, perceived as less threatening, more pleasant to customers, and more likely to show up sober and on time.
Moreover, in contrast to previous eras, today’s low-status men are not so easily disposed of. Although news headlines show a world torn apart by violent conflict, the truth is that war itself now has a much smaller impact on the social fabric. Two decades of war in the Middle East have claimed the lives of nearly six thousand American troops. But the Seven Years’ War alone saw nearly a million combatant casualties at a time when the world population was one-tenth its present size. Globally, armed conflict today accounts for only about
3 percent of annual deaths, and as traditional battlefields have given way to internal strife and irregular warfare, that body count has become largely
civilian and thus
less heavily male-skewed. Recently, an academic journal article titled “
Drone Disorientations” received a healthy heaping of
ridicule for its claim that drones are “genderqueer bodies” that “queer the experience of killing in war.” But buried beneath the self-parodying post-structuralist jargon is the more simple and obvious truth that technology has fundamentally transformed both the nature of war and the soldier’s role in it. The automation and professionalization of war have reduced its effectiveness as a meat grinder for processing vast quantities of surplus masculinity. So while feminism is not to blame for the exclusion of large numbers of men from family life, incels
can blame modernity for the fact that, unlike their ancient counterparts, they remain alive to stew in their discontent.
