Status: Incel — a Conversation with William Costello

The past and future of mating reflected in the black pill.

After discussing the tragic fate of really hot girls, the topic for this week was naturally going to be incels. As I looked through the dozens of notes I’ve collected on incels through the years (as one does), I noticed a pattern: all interesting ones were marked “WC”.

William Costello is the foremost authority on incels not just through his rigorous research, but because he’s actually curious what it’s like to be them. He talks to them, surveys them, and fights everyone trying to impose their political agendas on what is a very human condition. I shot William my half-baked theories about incels, status and identity, feminists with bad boyfriends, and the future of relationships. He responded with thoughtful scholarship and some great insights.

If you share our curiosity, you’ll enjoy this.

Jacob: My intuition has always been that inceldom isn’t fundamentally about women or sex, but about a man’s status among men.

We have to ask: what separates an incel from a guy who just happens to be single and/or a virgin? My take is that an incel has such precarious status among men generally that he can’t risk the status hit of being seen trying to find a girlfriend and failing. He may hate being celibate but he’s used to celibacy, it’s not scary. The fear of being an outcast is much more salient. If a guy has good friends, is respected at work, and has good relationships with his family he’s probably not going to share the stereotypical incel beliefs and behaviors.

This is also why incels don’t “just go see a prostitute”: paid sex doesn’t confer status or prestige on a man. But incel ideology does, somewhat: it gives its adherents the positive self-image of seeing the cruel reality of mating with no delusions, and respect within the community of men who share that worldview.

If I was to give a guy one piece of advice for escaping inceldom, it would be: find any community of men to belong to that isn’t incels. Even if it’s a video game guild — it won’t make a guy one iota more attractive to a girl, but it could turn him from an incel into a guy among guys who just happens to be celibate.

I don’t think actual incels will agree with me, since any talk of male hierarchies and communities is a red pill thing; the black pill rejects the importance of interpersonal things like friends or social status. How central do you think this is to inceldom?

William: We have a deep evolutionary history of some men being involuntarily celibate. What is novel is that they are finding each other and galvanizing into a victimhood group identity around their inceldom, and ostensibly “opting out” of mating.

The incel identity is also seductive because, like you say, it comes with a different kind of status. We even find in our data that incels score very high on the “moral elitism” facet of the victimhood mindset. Incel identity also comes with a lot of other incentives, e.g., a rich trolling lexicon that’s pretty comical, a victimhood identity, a sense of fraternity, a common enemy, and an excuse to leave behind the anxiety and humiliation of rejection.

I’m writing up a paper with experimental evidence about rejection anxiety now. Mating anxiety is an example of evolutionary mismatch in modern mating environments. Human mating psychology evolved in ancestral contexts of small, tightly connected social groups. Romantic rejection could carry severe reputational costs, convey probabilistic information about the initiator’s mate value or lack thereof, and reduce future mating opportunities. In the modern world, given large urban environments and the relative anonymity of online dating, rejection rarely threatens mating success. Potential partners are abundant, unlike 99% of human evolutionary history. Yet for some individuals, such as incels, dating anxiety is one of the primary reasons they cite for their singlehood.

Of course, inceldom and being sexually selected is entwined with status. One’s romantic partner functions as a status marker, and one’s inability to attract a partner lowers one’s status. It’s why AI sex robots and sex workers would only scratch a certain itch for incels. Maybe one’s ability to purchase the most elite sex worker carries some status in certain circles (San Francisco maybe haha), but not in mainstream society. For incels, “having to resort” to paying a sex worker so transactionally would likely emphasize their shame and feeling of inadequacy.

It is interesting how “incel” has come to function as an insult. Men use it to derogate other men’s masculinity and implicitly emphasize their own sexual prowess, while women use it to demean men as being unworthy of the ultimate “reward” of sexual selection. Sometimes “normies” will chastise incels for “caring so much about sex” but then in the same breath derogate men they don’t like using “incel” as the insult de jour, which solidifies its salience as being linked to status.

I think the whole “why don’t they simply care about other things” is a difficult one, because yes they should cultivate other interests and improve their lives, but by the same token it’s very hard for any of us to concern ourselves less with mating. It’s fundamental to humans. It’s the engine of evolution, we are all here today because an unbroken evolutionary chain of our ancestors found a mate for long enough to reproduce. We build billion-dollar industries around it, write poetry and songs about it, and we even go to war over it.

If I go to a party and tell people what I do for a living, they are all interested in it because they all live and breathe it every day. It permeates every feature of our psychology. My supervisor in the early 1990s decided to “take a break from studying human mating” and decided to study “murder”, and he found that mating motivations are often tributary to murder. All of this is to say, it’s a tall order to ask incels to simply care less about their mateless circumstance.

But I think your overarching point about incels needing to improve their lives in other domains (work, education, hobbies, friends, particularly opposite-sex friends) is a good one because it would have the downstream effects of helping them find relationships. For instance, a recent meta-analysis found that ~60% of relationships started as friends. Humans can also create multiple status hierarchies in all sorts of niches. I would never be considered a “catch” in a nightclub in Miami for example, but I might be at an academic conference.

Jacob: Of course, being an incel is about identity preservation, and being in a group of guys who reinforce that identity can be seen as just part of it. It’s a big theme of Second Person: the identities we maintain to interface with society at large get in the way of actual intimacy.

I’ve written on Ribbonfarm about identity preservation through the lens of predictive processing: we need a self-consistent worldview to make sense of anything that’s happening and to understand/predict our own actions. Without a self-model you can’t do anything. People can get their lives ruined even by “good” identities, like students suffering abuse and mental health breakdowns in grad school because of their attachment to the identity of “academic”.

Part of identity maintenance is self-verification theory: seeking out and shaping others to conform to how you see yourself. What are the core pillars of “incel identity”, aside from being unwanted by all womankind? And how do incels elicit confirmation of this self-image?

William: Inceldom for me is an identity and an internalized mindset and set of beliefs (e.g., the blackpill). One way to think about it could be “sufficient discomfort with your celibacy that you internalize it into an identity and set of accompanying beliefs, and maybe even “give up” on mating and lean into resentment. Women seem wicked when you’re unwanted, as Jim Morrison of The Doors sang.

I have become very interested in what happens to incels who “ascend”, and I think the mindset is much more of a pathology than I initially thought. Incels I engage with online have moved their rhetoric recently. Their original claim that physically unattractive men cannot get partners is just demonstrably false based on a cursory look around at society. So, incels now instead claim that such men may be able to get a partner, but he would never be able to cultivate “genuine desire” in her. This is an unfalsifiable claim that they have so far been unable to provide reasonable criteria for. If an average looking man’s wife has sex with him every night and has an orgasm each time? Incels would likely say that this is not genuine because “she is probably thinking of Chad”. Some of the criteria offered were ludicrous, e.g., one incel said the only evidence would be if you were able to cheat on her and she wouldn’t leave.

I have previously published data showing that incels do not have “overly high standards”, but I don’t give those findings as much weight anymore because there’s another sense in which “nothing is ever good enough” for incels. In my qualitative interviews with incels, I often ask them “how would you know you’re no longer incel, what would have to change?” and they invariably say, “I could always relapse”.

There’s even data to show that incels engage in self-verification. I called it “performative antagonism”. They engineer criticism from the world (which people are happy to give them) and use it as evidence that they are victimized. We recently published a paper showing that incels are “wrong” about how society sees them. Our data showed that people (with the exception of female feminists) have a lot more sympathy for incels than incels think.

But in that same paper, I felt it appropriate to highlight the genuine hostility incels do encounter. Here’s how I described it: One possible explanation for incels’ overestimation of societal blame and underestimation of sympathy may be their high levels of rejection sensitivity. Although it is important to recognize that incels do legitimately face some significant hostility, for example, 86 % of incels report experiences of bullying compared to 33 % of the general population. Some online spaces, like the r/IncelTears subreddit, promote ridicule of incels. Notably, the subreddit had to introduce a rule against encouraging incel suicide.

This combination of psychological predisposition, bullying, and real-world hostility may reinforce incels' distorted belief that society overwhelmingly rejects them. Ultimately, it becomes this cycle of antagonism-criticism-victimhood.

An external locus of control is also a key feature of incel psychology. The black pill is the ultimate in an external locus of control. The failures of cross-sex mindreading are key; they refuse to believe women are fundamentally different from men.

Jacob: I’ve written about the resentment that comes from blindness to sex differences, and also how each sex’s dating complaints are mirrored in the other sex, often in unexpected ways. Which leads to the obvious question, what’s the female mirror of inceldom?

If we stick with the frame of inceldom as being about a self-reinforcing identity trap, I think the parallel is the girl who consumes “men are trash” feminist content yet endlessly bounces from one abusive boyfriend to the next.

Sarah Constantin wrote a powerful essay about abuse-cycle-as-verification:

The abuse isn’t being read as wish-fulfillment, but as verisimilitude. I wouldn’t be surprised if the author and many of the fans have been in abusive relationships or grew up in abusive households. It feels realistic and relatable that the main character has the experiences and feelings that they did. The emotional punch of her suffering is cathartic. She’s sobbing herself to sleep? Yeah, I know that feel.

It’s a human desire to have your experiences validated — in the sense of getting confirmation that you really did experience what you did.

A classic and maybe even defining feature of abuse is that the abused person is made to feel that it is normal or even right for them to be harmed. And people who deeply believe that it is normal or right for them to be harmed may expose themselves to harm again, in order to confirm or validate their model of the world. This is what “self-harm” or “self-destructive behavior” is. It’s not that the harm makes them happy. It’s that it makes them right.

She’s saying: women don’t want to be treated like shit, but some of them expect it. The same way the incel expects to be rejected.

This has a social component, of course. There’s a “femisphere” talking about how all men are sex-obsessed, entitled and violent that mirrors the manosphere discourse about all women being superficial, fickle and cruel. These spheres select for and cultivate interpersonal victimhood, which your research found incels score very highly on: grievance, moral sneering, lack of empathy, external locus of control.

The incel says: what can you do, women will always reject and bully me. The men-are-trash girl says: what can you do, men will always treat me like shit. And then self-verification kicks in, where you’re eliciting the behavior that reinforces your self-image and the worldview of the community you rely on. And you become blind to any disconfirming evidence, like romantic interest from a kind and caring person of the opposite sex. You rationalize that away as being not real somehow.

The point here isn’t to victim-blame. It’s more to say why it’s useless to tell an incel to just ask girls or tell a girl in an abuse cycle to just stop saying “yes” to shitty men. These are tricky traps to get out of, especially when entire online forums exist to keep you in them.

William: I very much agree with you here. Except the female analogue doesn’t need to be hidden away in a fringe anonymous forum, it’s a mainstream view that she will be applauded for to say “where are all the good men”.

I suppose another related female analog of incels is the women who are “alpha-widowed”. This is likely a genuine artifact of higher mate value men being willing to both “mate down” for short term sex, and also deceive women about their intentions. So, it’s hard to blame women for having this happen to them. Where I deviate from incels and red pill gurus is that I don’t think there’s any strong evidence that such women are then irreparably damaged and unable to form genuine pair bonds thereafter.

It’s different from what you described with abusive boyfriends. Domestic abuse is actually more common as a cost-inflicting mate retention strategy of low mate value men. But an “alpha widow” who lacks the self-reflection to acknowledge that this has happened may also re-categorize the guy who used her as “trash” as opposed to someone who was truly out of her league.

Jacob: The “alpha widow” seems more like a mirror of the guy who takes a PUA class and manages to bang the one desperate girl hanging at the bar late and now thinks he’s a world-conquering Chad. It’s a failure of over-updating on optimism, which I think is much rarer than over-updating on despair and resignation.

But maybe female optimism is truly the mirror to male pessimism. There’s this common trope that women tell each other “you look great with short hair!” or “you’re beautiful at any size!” as a form of intrasexual competition. They also encourage other women to have crazy high standards, talking about icks and red flags and reacting with “dump him” to any post about the slightest male transgression. The theory is that over-inflating other women’s confidence sabotages them in the dating market.

Do men sabotage other men by lowering their confidence? Guys will keep posting the same old study about how hard it is for short guys on dating apps even though the methodology is garbage and the gap in response rate across male heights is pretty small. Maybe the same way the “body positivity” movement is spread by women (consciously or unconsciously) hoping to see other women get fat, some incel ideology is spread by non-incel men hoping to see other men lose hope. After all, self-confidence is a huge component of men’s attractiveness!

William: Very interesting. I spoke recently with Rob Henderson about what I see as a potential two-pronged type of intrasexual competition from incels.

On the one hand, their misogyny could be seen as coordinated condemnation to attack women’s self-esteem and thereby their self-perceived mate value and subsequently their standards. This happens within relationships whereby low mate value men choose the cost-infliction mate-retention strategy toward their partner. They say things like “who would have you except me”, etc. Incels may be doing this from outside the context of a relationship. Importantly this would only work if they can cultivate the sense of consensus in a woman that she thinks there’s broad agreement that she has too high standards.

It’s too easy to dismiss one person as just an asshole; it’s no coincidence that incels spend most of their time convincing other men to buy into the misogyny. Incels’ hostility towards women seems very much as if by design trying to function to make them lower their standards. They remind women they are going to hit the wall and even derogate their choices of sleeping with Chad saying that he is likely to cheat or alpha-widow them.

The second prong in this style of intrasexual competition is that incels (virtually all anons) are literally trying to motivate their intrasexual rivals to give up and stop trying. So, a Machiavellian incel could simultaneously benefit from the coordinated misogyny (without incurring any reputational costs) and motivate his competition to stop trying. A very effective strategy if you can pull it off.

Now, I do think most incels “buy their own bullshit” and really believe in the blackpill. But perhaps they are being self-deceptive, or perhaps this strategy is only pursued by a minority of them.

Jacob: There’s an old Russian joke: if you don’t have a girlfriend, it means that someone has two.

You’ve talked often about the fearmongering over “incel extremism”, that unattached young males would obviously be violent and socially disruptive. People often bring up socially-enforced monogamy as the solution to this “young male problem”.

But it actually seems like we have the opposite “young male problem” in the West. The criminal underclass seems to have an easier time getting laid than many law-abiding men. Porn, video games, online forums, secular testosterone decline — whatever the reason is, society isn’t being terrorized by incel gangs. You’ve spoken about how rare incel violence is outside of one or two celebrated cases. Incels aren’t so much threatening society as simply dropping out of it.

Orion Taraban calls monogamy “sexual socialism” that requires active enforcement. He predicts that the will for this enforcement will erode over time as people perceive themselves to be paying more and receiving fewer benefits from monogamous marriage. If so many men drop out from the bottom of the dating pool, and that’s before we even get to AI-powered sex bots, it seems that universal monogamy is a challenge from a pure numbers perspective.

Taraban predicts a “romantic gig economy” in which the most desirable people “optimize value across individuals”. I think that’s going to prove really unsatisfying for people, it’s missing the deep joy of self-transformation in a serious relationship. But I can’t really see any trends that point to monogamous marriage bouncing back strong anytime soon.

You study where we came from, the evolutionary history of mating. Where do you think we’re going?

William: Super fascinating! I think the stratified mating market you described is not crazy to imagine and is happening to a degree already. It is an uncontroversial fact from anthropology that one of the main cultural benefits of monogamy is the more egalitarian distribution of mates. In creating fewer troublesome incels, cultures that practiced monogamy flourished compared to those that didn’t.

Now, if you can find other ways of pacifying otherwise troublesome incels that buttress against their otherwise destabilizing nature, maybe you don’t “need” socially enforced monogamy as much.

One feature of this mating market you didn’t mention is the sex ratio effects on sociosexuality. Typically, whichever sex is in the minority in a given sex ratio is better positioned to “get what they want” on the mating market, so we see women turning more promiscuous (male-typical) when men are scarce, and men being more willing to commit to long term mating when women are scarce. If more and more men drop out of the mating market then the few men that stay in it will be well positioned to have a lot of short-term sex. So, in this future world that Taraban describes, the main benefactor will be Chad. Women are typically not as unrestricted and will not be satisfied with that style of mating market.

There’s actually a controversial theory about this being a partial reason why black men are so commitment averse. Many of them die or go to prison quite young, so there is a sex ratio effect of far more women than men. It’s actually quite anti-racist because it suggests that the sociosexuality we observe is not so much a result of any innate racial differences, but rather a second order sex ratio effect.

The key issue, I think, is status. As long as there is still status afforded to people who can be sexually selected, there will still be incentive to compete to try to achieve that.

Could monogamy make a comeback? I do think that women now have unprecedented levels of autonomy and are for the time being seemingly increasingly choosing singlehood and career rather than settling for men. But this level of autonomy is quite new, and many women may feel culturally compelled to avail of it. There’s a certain stigma towards women who do not fulfill their girlboss potential. In a few generations that may go away because their autonomy is not so shiny and new or juxtaposed with recent generations of women who didn’t have it. Even now it’s becoming a status symbol for some women to be able to attract a man who frees them up to be a stay at home mom. But most people aren’t that economically free, so are increasingly choosing the DINK (dual income no kids) life.

Jacob: I’m glad we circled back around to status. When I see DINK content it feels like slightly desperate status signaling. Look at me, I have money AND a spouse! I deserve respect! What’s nice about being married with kids isn’t that it grants me some unusual prestige, it’s that I don’t have to care as much about status signaling games.

Incels talk a lot about being “genetic failures” and “evolutionary dead-ends”, but perhaps there’s more hope for them than for the aging status-anxious DINK couple.