00:00:00.000Another really dark finding is that a recent study of 21,000 women in 27 European countries
00:00:08.100found consistently that women who are higher educated or earning more than their partners
00:00:13.420were much more likely to report all types of intimate partner violence.
00:00:17.980And from an evolutionary psychology perspective, yeah, it's not good, right?
00:00:21.860You know, and that's maybe an unintended consequence.
00:00:25.060And the way that works is if you're a man with a higher status mate who's spending a lot of her time around other high status males while you're away from her, that gives you a cue that you might be inclined to lose her and you actually might.
00:00:45.000Welcome to episode 159 of the Michaela Peterson podcast.
00:00:50.400This episode is everything you need to know about incels.
00:00:53.820In this episode, I spoke with William Costello about incels.
00:00:57.560You might be asking yourself why I decided to dedicate an entire episode to incels.
00:01:02.520Well, recently, William wrote the first academic paper discussing the psychology of incels,
00:01:09.520and he's incredibly well-informed about the topic.
00:01:12.000And a few days ago, as you guys probably know,
00:01:14.680dad was dubbed king and god of the incels thanks to actress Olivia Wilde.
00:01:19.600Olivia said the villain played by Chris Pine in her new movie,
00:01:22.720Don't Worry Darling, is based on my dad, who she described as a pseudo-intellectual hero to the
00:01:27.420incel community. So why not take this opportunity to learn a bit about what incels really are?
00:01:33.540Are they really evil right-wing misogynists or something else entirely? William is also part of
00:01:40.280Dr. David Buss's evolutionary psychology lab, which is really cool. In this episode, we discuss
00:01:46.220the characteristics of the average incel, the black pill worldview, hypergamy, mutual mate choice in
00:01:52.100men and women, socially enforced monogamy, and much more. This episode is brought to you by
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00:04:05.960William Costello welcome to my podcast thanks for having me on happy to be here this should be this
00:04:15.680should be fun before we get started can you give a brief background about who you are and what it
00:04:19.960is you do okay so last year in 2021 I graduated from Brunel University in London with a master's
00:04:29.840in psychology, culture, and evolution. And my dissertation focused on investigating the
00:04:36.160underlying psychology of incels or involuntary celibates. It was one of the first studies
00:04:41.460to include primary responses from self-identified incels. I'm currently here in Austin, Texas as a
00:04:49.300PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin, where I'm in David Buss's evolutionary psychology
00:04:55.520lab. And yeah, that's what my area of expertise so far is incel psychology. So hopefully that
00:05:03.140will help with the conversation. That should help with the conversation a lot. And you work
00:05:07.580with David Buss. That's fun. That's very cool. Okay. So there's a bunch to cover, but we should
00:05:13.340probably first start off with what exactly is an incel? Right. So incel stands for involuntary
00:05:21.140celibate and it's become kind of an online subculture of primarily men who kind of form
00:05:28.100their sense of identity around their perceived inability to form sexual or romantic relationships
00:05:34.540they're involuntarily celibate. A significant minority of incels are very misogynistic and
00:05:42.260online they're very hostile online but one study not my own study found that just 10% of incel
00:05:49.640accounts are responsible for the vast majority of online hostility. And an even more rare
00:05:56.440amount of incels still actually lash out at society in violent rage. And there's some high
00:06:03.460profile cases where individual incels have even gone on to kill people. Most notorious is perhaps
00:06:09.940Elliot Rodger, who wrote a 49 page manifesto talking about how he would have a day of retribution
00:06:17.740where he would kill chads and stacies who the sexually successful men and women that he was
00:06:24.400envious of and so he's kind of held up as the prototypical example poster boy incel whenever
00:06:31.700the media reports on them but even globally worldwide there's only ever been approximately
00:06:37.68060 deaths attributable directly to incel violence and i don't mean to demean any of the victims at
00:06:45.100all but but that's relatively low when incel violence is talked about as the new terrorist
00:06:49.960threat in the media sometimes and so if we put that figure of 60 into more context 10 of those
00:06:56.840alone can be accounted for by a guy called alec manazian and he's the guy who drove his van into
00:07:03.280a crowd of people in toronto yeah i remember that that was scary yeah yeah and he he's often held
00:07:09.820up as front and center as poster boy of the incel movement as well in the media and because
00:07:15.040he had a facebook post before he did what he did talking about how he wanted to start an incel
00:07:21.240rebellion and all hail the supreme gentleman elliot roger and uh you know the beta uprising
00:07:28.420has begun that that was his kind of rhetoric but you don't often hear what's reported
00:07:33.840what's less often reported is the judge's verdict in the case when they analyzed all the evidence
00:07:40.340the judge said that basically they considered that Alec Manazian was completely piggybacking
00:07:46.580on the incel movement to ratchet up his own notoriety he deliberately told lies to depict
00:07:53.360the killings as being connected to the incel movement to get more media attention and his
00:07:58.580story to the police about the attack being an incel rebellion was a lie so that's directly from
00:08:04.300the judge in the Alec Manazian case you don't really hear that talked about that often in the
00:08:09.080media. No. So was he, was he an incel or? Well, it's difficult to kind of know. He certainly
00:08:16.140seemed to use a lot of incel kind of rhetoric in that post, but that was the verdict of the judge
00:08:23.760and the lawyers closest to the case. Interesting. Okay. So what made you decide to kind of base
00:08:31.880your education around this particular subject? Right. So when I came to look into the topic,
00:08:38.180which I think is a very interesting one, because the incel culture, for me, kind of describes where
00:08:45.140our evolved mate preferences, our evolutionary psychology, meets cultural psychology and cultural
00:08:50.620kind of advances. So it was very interesting for me on that front. And also, when I came to do my
00:08:56.740literature review for the topic, I found that at the time, almost no studies included primary
00:09:02.900responses from incels themselves all the studies were based on and analyzing the online misogyny
00:09:09.440or the online rhetoric of incels and being quite familiar just in the online world of the
00:09:16.360incelosphere i kind of had an inkling that a lot of what incels say online is deliberately
00:09:22.440antagonistic and just kind of performatively antagonistic that they kind of say anything
00:09:27.800they feel will subvert the norm and will annoy people and just you know they're very steeped in
00:09:34.340dark gallows humor meme culture and so you know it although analyzing the online misogyny is
00:09:42.520somewhat useful and it i don't i don't i think you actually need to engage with the community
00:09:48.280one-to-one or directly to form any kind of psychological opinion i'm also interested in
00:09:54.620incels because this demographic of young men traditionally in evolutionary psychology we have
00:10:00.840something called young male syndrome and basically young male syndrome is the consistent cross-cultural
00:10:06.700cross-historical finding that in any population when you have a surplus population of unpartnered
00:10:14.280young men of sexless young men they cause a lot of crime and they disrupt society a lot this is
00:10:20.660they usually have like elevated status-seeking behaviors and risk-taking so it's actually quite
00:10:27.520dangerous and historically there's been lots of kind of institutions developed to even deal with
00:10:33.900individual nations surplus population of young men so for example the Portuguese who when they
00:10:40.860maybe went sailing to discover new worlds there are some theories that that was basically a
00:10:47.120a device to cope with your surplus population of young men you could just send them off
00:10:51.940on a mission and uh vikings would be another example we we tend to think of vikings as perhaps
00:10:57.440a very sexy kind of rugged maybe the hollywood kind of viking isn't probably really typical of
00:11:03.460what a viking was like uh in reality they were more likely your surplus population of unmarried
00:11:08.680yeah there's a really cool article in the online magazine called uh unheard and by mary harrington
00:11:16.060she wrote an article talking about how incels could become the new vikings so you know we have
00:11:21.760a good lot of reason to worry about this population this kind of surplus population
00:11:26.220of unpartnered young men who are galvanizing around this idea and seem to have a lot of
00:11:30.440resentment but you would actually expect them to be a lot more destructive than they actually
00:11:35.360currently are being um you know i mentioned earlier that 60 deaths worldwide 10 of which
00:11:41.960can be attributed to one man alone who may or may not even have been that very much linked to the
00:11:47.060incel movement so the idea behind why they're not more disruptive uh we maybe think that they
00:11:53.600might just have their status striving psychology mechanisms hijacked by online worlds pornography
00:12:00.600the forums just oh shit posting online yeah so there's a lot going on with this community i
00:12:07.480think they're and i also think that the mainstream media narrative about incels is very insufficient
00:12:12.880and culturally i think we kind of sneer at the incel problem a little bit and it's my opinion
00:12:19.680that the incel problem is just a symptom of what i would call a wider mating crisis that hurts
00:12:25.700everybody not just disenfranchised young men how large is this crisis like when i hear incel i kind
00:12:33.680of think of like a very very small part of the population i don't think of that as a lot of
00:12:40.160people and i hope it's not a lot of people because it is kind of sad and unfortunate uh so how many
00:12:46.620people are we talking about here or what percentage of the population actually identify as incels
00:12:50.500so it really depends on i sound a little bit like your father jordan peterson there saying it depends
00:12:56.820on what you mean it does depend on what you mean by incel so a smaller significant minority of the
00:13:05.160population but we're talking less than a hundred thousand i would say i would estimate and someone
00:13:10.900would probably correct me if i'm wrong there would actually identify online in the online
00:13:15.840subculture but then if you define incel as you know just a man who's struggling to to get sex
00:13:22.840Those are rising all the time. And there's a figure that the share of U.S. men younger than 30 reporting having no sex within the last year rose from 8% in 2008 to 28% in 2018.
00:13:42.020Yeah. And actually, there's some evidence that that might be reversing a little bit, probably due to COVID because men would actually be like risk taking.
00:13:50.440so that the percentage of men is kind of they would actually risk breaking covid lockdown to
00:13:55.840have sex but yeah that's a that's kind of a worrying trend of sexlessness but a figure to
00:14:00.980kind of put with that is that it's not all men that are getting more sexless there's a small
00:14:07.300minority of men at the top that are doing very well so to put that into context compared to 2002
00:14:12.720men overall had the same number of sex partners in 2013 but the top 20 percent of men had a 25
00:14:20.740percent increase in sexual partners and the top five percent of men had an even more dramatic 38
00:14:27.260percent increase so you can kind of see this skew happening whereby a lot of men are being left out
00:14:34.300some men are being very very successful and it kind of maybe points that incels are maybe partially
00:14:40.240accurate in their assessment of some aspects of the mating market that there may be well a handful
00:14:46.640of chads who are reluctant to commit um long term who are just um really enjoying the short-term
00:14:53.760mating market huh um okay wow that's really interesting why would there be that increase
00:15:01.040is that social media like how are these like top market men getting so many more women than they
00:15:07.760they were before well i think that uh there is like online dating apps give them kind of a device
00:15:13.740to maybe access uh you know and without incurring the reputational costs of being a short-term
00:15:20.040mater you might have in our ancestral environment certainly or even just before online dating you
00:15:25.640can kind of move city quite quickly or easily in an online dating app context and there's also
00:15:31.880going to have been a somewhat of a cultural drive towards singlehood and you know like even big
00:15:38.260companies are kind of maybe encouraging women in particular to kind of remain single and with
00:15:43.920chris williamson we were talking about a recent article whereby it was highlighting how single
00:15:48.920women can earn a lot more money and you know they're doing a lot better than single men
00:15:54.080in their career and it's kind of this maybe cultural drive to prioritize the male default of
00:16:00.820uh ceo boardroom badass type feminism that that's seen as priority over the uh the kind of
00:16:08.320the polar opposite of the trad wife uh family-oriented woman it's it's kind of maybe
00:16:13.920an acknowledgement that the gender pay gap was never really real uh insofar as it's more like
00:16:19.720a motherhood penalty and that is where women do get punished is women actually certainly in the
00:16:25.320UK earn just as much or even more than men up until the age of 29, I believe. And then the
00:16:31.520motherhood penalty maybe kicks in. But it's only describing it as a penalty if you consider the
00:16:35.800woman's own income herself. Married women, actually, their income would be more than the
00:16:42.300single women. Okay. So looking at this from a more female perspective, are women also suffering
00:16:49.980from this kind of sexlessness or is this mostly male focused uh so i'm always asked whether
00:16:56.880there's such a thing as a fem cell a female incel and uh initially i could i maybe would
00:17:04.440i could only find nine female incels from my study so i kind of didn't focus on them yeah
00:17:10.340and incels would kind of say to you there's no such thing as a female incel because uh most women
00:17:17.600um no matter how low mate value they might be they could probably go out and get sex or a
00:17:23.220relationship if they wanted they just might need to lower their standards and initially i kind of
00:17:28.180thought yeah that that maybe makes intuitive sense yeah that's probably true and a lot of
00:17:32.100my female friends would probably agree with that but uh it i think that's a real failure of cross
00:17:39.120sex mind reading on the behalf of incels because they see a woman's ability to get something rather
00:17:45.120than nothing they always see that as better whereas for a woman getting the sex or relationship
00:17:50.780that you don't want is actually worse than nothing it's cost inflicting and I think incels really
00:17:57.120underestimate how much women don't want to have sex with men they don't want to have sex with
00:18:02.380that's that's really bad for women so they'd rather stay single and you know I think about
00:18:08.080my female friends and I wouldn't advise them to settle for a man that they didn't want or a
00:18:13.080relationship they didn't want and it's kind of an artifact of maybe women's liberation into the
00:18:17.940workplace and their socioeconomic success that they don't have to perhaps settle for men that
00:18:22.520they don't want and it might be a dark or a kind of uncomfortable truth for us to acknowledge that
00:18:28.560maybe for the last number of decades women had been perhaps doing that out of strict
00:18:33.260socially enforced monogamy which is a phrase that your dad got in trouble for using yeah we can talk
00:18:39.380about that a little bit later yeah or um just uh out of strict economic necessity so now women
00:18:45.340don't really need to so they're not but what what happens then women's interest then is aimed kind
00:18:53.020of hypergamously so that women tend to mate across or up in status hierarchies and um you know if
00:19:01.500there's with any sex ratios there's only a small amount of men that are in women are interested in
00:19:07.500then they call the shots and uh you know women kind of those small minority of men that women
00:19:14.240are interested in are reluctant to commit to long-term mating because they're in the minority
00:19:19.220they're the scarcity so they're not they kind of create the rules of the of the mating market
00:19:24.460so to speak now there is some evidence that hypergamy so women tendency to mate up in status
00:19:30.720hierarchies is declining a little bit in recent years really i think i think that's inevitable
00:20:05.660who are higher educated or earning more than their partners were much more likely to report
00:20:10.440all types of intimate partner violence and from an evolutionary psychology perspective yeah it's
00:20:16.040not not good right you know and that's maybe an unintended consequence and the way that works is
00:20:21.180if you're a man with a higher status mate who's spending a lot of her time around other high
00:20:27.720status males while you're away from her that that gives you a cue that you might be inclined to lose
00:20:34.480and you actually might um so uh some men choose the strategy of cost inflicting mate retention
00:20:41.820strategies and that's what the violence is the intimate partner violence it's trying to
00:20:46.220inflict so much cost on your partner that it makes costly for them to leave as to their self-esteem
00:20:52.680is lowered their um yeah they just think it would be too costly to actually leave there's also some
00:20:58.280evidence as well and that's really interesting that's really interesting it's kind of like an
00:21:02.760unintended consequence because you know you tend to think of you know women's socioeconomic success
00:21:07.080as just a net good and it has been for like um economically and for a country's gdp and things
00:21:14.620like that but you know there's a maybe a bigger picture to think about and you have capitalist
00:21:20.020capitalist giants like morgan stanley they released a forecast called the rise of the
00:21:25.480she economy and predicting that 45 percent of working age women and between the ages of 25 and
00:21:32.52044 would be single and childless by the by the year 2030 that's the largest share in recorded
00:21:39.260history up from 41 percent in 2018 and so you can see that their capitalist giants are putting the
00:21:47.040foot to the floor on this she economy badass feminism because they get access to worker
00:21:53.080drones who will work 60 hour work weeks and you might recall Michaela do you remember that
00:21:57.560New Yorker cover it had a like a picture and maybe you can get it up on the screen in the edit
00:22:03.820it shows a woman kind of living in a kind of like a bachelor pad it's really messy kind of
00:22:09.600home office and she's in her flip-flops at the with a glass of wine at her laptop and it's kind
00:22:16.500of talking like seeming to suggest that this is the vision women should strive for yeah it looked
00:22:22.700a bit bleak for me but i'm kind of libertarian in my sensibilities i kind of like more more freedom
00:22:27.840the better yeah yeah me too but but more i feel like stay-at-home mom or kind of that traditional
00:22:34.640kind of um the role is a bit more demeaned in the mainstream certainly oh 100 it's more demeaned
00:22:41.440i think there's also like there's also a major issue with it that i think most countries aren't
00:22:47.800tackling with being a stay-at-home mom is like maybe one of the ways to encourage that is we
00:22:53.240lower taxes for people who have kids right i know um i think it's hungry i think and i think people
00:23:01.640will correct me if i'm wrong about this but i think it's if if a woman has more than four kids
00:23:06.040she doesn't pay income tax anymore and like those kind of incentives to kind of modernize staying
00:23:12.600at home. Otherwise you do lose half your income. I mean, you gain kids, right? But yeah, it's a
00:23:20.160complicated issue. I'm also wondering if some of these women who don't end up getting into
00:23:24.620relationships because they don't like, like you said, you don't want, you really don't want to
00:23:29.140have sex with someone you don't want to have sex with. Um, I don't, I don't think, uh, you probably
00:23:34.920know more about this, but I don't think women have the same urges either. Like, I don't, I don't
00:23:38.640think I think you can go personally I know like I can go six or seven months not have sex and I
00:23:44.740don't really feel that much different than I did at the very beginning of that like there's I'm
00:23:49.760like okay like there's not some sort of urge to go have sex that there wouldn't have been at the
00:23:56.180very beginning I don't know if it differs for for incels or people who can't have sex or it's like
00:24:01.660the longer it goes the worse you feel yeah there's certainly a sex difference there in sexual
00:24:08.040psychology and the the effect sizes of the differences between men and women in sexual
00:24:13.540psychology are some of the biggest in all of psychology they're the effect sizes that are
00:24:18.320basically like the equivalent of the differences between men and women in upper body strength so
00:24:23.140that's almost unheard of in psychology so that's huge but those are average group differences
00:24:28.240right there's obviously individual differences between you know some women would have maybe more
00:24:32.900male typical sex drive but yeah the the kind of desire for frequency of sex variety of sex partners
00:24:39.460number of sex partners is always generally much more among men and that makes sense and your
00:24:44.680father kind of hinted at this um when he said about women being choosy in his video he talked
00:24:49.800about well you'd be choosy too if you got pregnant or potentially might have got get pregnant every
00:24:54.640time you had sex and if we think about like birth control is uh has just been developed in the blink
00:25:00.240of an eye over our evolutionary history and so our psychological sex psychology mechanisms evolved
00:25:06.800in a world without any you know contraception and things like that where pregnancy and giving birth
00:25:12.660and carrying a child was very very dangerous and risky for a woman and you know a lot of
00:25:18.740mortality during childbirth things like that so you know it's a it's not really surprising that
00:25:24.820that biological difference between men and women that greater parental investment uh you know
00:25:29.620the most amount of offspring or children that a single woman has had is 69 right and that sounds
00:25:37.620like a lot right that sounds like a lot for one single woman but men yeah that's a really an
00:25:44.400outlier right was that like triplets repeatedly for a number of triplets for sure but 69 did you
00:25:52.380say 69 69 is the highest right but that's nothing compared to some men like Genghis Khan for example
00:25:58.860is reported to have thousands of offspring so you know for a woman she can only have a limited
00:26:04.220amount like 69 is a crazy 69 limit you know that's like we recognize that's crazy extreme
00:26:10.440but for a man theoretically there's no limit all it takes is one successful sex act which
00:26:17.200i'm reliably informed can take just as quick as three minutes so yeah but that's not speaking
00:26:22.840from personal experience but uh yeah theoretically unlimited amount um but you know the human male
00:26:29.980invests a lot more in their offspring uh than vast majority of other mammals it's um
00:26:36.100but but nowhere near as much as the human female interesting okay so throughout your studies um
00:26:45.060have you identified what the average incel looks like uh so they like i have my big study my
00:26:53.120quantitative study didn't uh look at their looks at all but i have interviewed some um qualitatively
00:27:00.540in one-to-one interviews over zoom but but i wouldn't like to comment one way or the other
00:27:05.040what they look like no no i mean i i don't mean looks like exactly in that way i mean like
00:27:10.760characteristics sure okay my dad would have corrected me on that he's like that's a bad
00:27:15.760question you posed a bad question but yeah characteristics of the average in cell because
00:27:20.140what you hear online is kind of what you said earlier which is like violent aggressive women
00:27:26.180hating dangerous so what do they actually look like okay so i can talk through some of the data
00:27:32.420that i found so one of the things we investigated was their levels of well-being because men's sense
00:27:38.820of their own mate value is a direct proxy for self-esteem right you can actually track the two
00:27:43.780things track each other very well and so we hypothesize that incels would have very low
00:27:48.380levels of well-being and they did they had higher levels of depression anxiety and loneliness
00:27:53.700lower levels of satisfaction with life but just to put that into context for you of just how bad
00:27:59.300the levels of well-being are we used the phq9 and the gad7 which are instruments to measure
00:28:06.160depression and anxiety that are used by the NHS in the UK to clinically diagnose patients with
00:28:12.820depression and anxiety. So we found that roughly 73% of incels could be clinically diagnosed
00:28:19.180using that criteria as severely or moderately severely depressed versus 33% of non-incels.
00:28:26.520In terms of anxiety, we found that roughly 67% of incels could be diagnosed as severely or
00:28:33.580moderately anxious versus 38 percent of non-incels and we found that they scored higher on what's
00:28:42.500called socio-sexual desire which is um basically like the desire to have um uncommitted sex so to
00:28:50.420short-term mating so the high levels of desire and that it tracks a lot of data where men who feel
00:28:56.820that they can't get sex in their behavior their desire goes up we also found that incels scored
00:29:03.320very high on a new personality construct called the tendency for interpersonal victimhood and
00:29:09.000that's kind of leads to like an external or an external locus of control which means that you
00:29:15.520feel that your life and everything that happens to you is completely outside of your own control
00:29:20.300that you can't control it and the tendency for interpersonal victimhood is comprised of
00:29:25.960four different dimensions the first one is a need for recognition so it's like a preoccupation with
00:29:32.020having the legitimacy of your grievance acknowledged so for incels i've noticed that
00:29:37.480one of the worst things you can say to them to make them feel bad is you don't look so bad or
00:29:41.980you don't have it so bad you could get a girlfriend for sure they hate that they want you to actually
00:29:46.840say no you know what you're right and you have a real problem here and the second dimension is
00:29:52.720moral elitism so the belief that the individual or their in-group behaves more morally than others
00:29:59.000And you can kind of see that in incels whereby they maybe poke, they highlight how superficial the mating market is, how Stacey and Chad are kind of, you know, a bit superficial.
00:30:10.140And maybe they have a little bit of a point, but incels might suggest that their mating preferences would be a little bit more moral or intellectual.
00:30:20.620The third dimension is a lack of empathy.
00:30:24.120So the way this transpires is that because incels have been hurt in the past, they feel entitled to hurt others. Nobody cares about my feelings. Why should I care about anyone else's? And the final one is rumination. And so constantly a preoccupation with playing back perceived instances of rejection or hurt over and over in your own head.
00:30:46.920And this idea of a tendency for interpersonal victimhood, the external locus of control, makes a lot of sense when you think about the incel black pill philosophy or the black pill worldview.
00:30:58.900Sorry, are you familiar with black pill?
00:31:00.840Yeah, let's do that. What is the black pill worldview?
00:31:03.460you sure so the black pill is the derivative of the concept of the red pill from the movie the
00:31:09.400matrix and the red pill denotes a kind of a willingness to see the world as it really is
00:31:15.080as opposed to taking the blissful ignorance of the blue pill the black pill then for incels
00:31:21.200refers to their belief that there is nothing and there was never nothing that they could do to
00:31:26.460improve their romantic prospects and it's kind of entered into this very online parlance now that
00:31:32.820people are black-pilled on various type of things and it describes just a kind of cynical attitude
00:31:37.260but the black pill kind of worldview uh kind of captures it would be one of the only things that
00:31:44.280i think a large swell of incels kind of agree on you know it's um it's hard to get them to agree on
00:31:49.940a lot of things but they seem to agree on that one do you think this increase in um sexless
00:31:57.420sexlessness and i guess to the incel community is it possible that the community itself seems
00:32:02.640larger because they have access to these forums online so it's like oh there's lots of people out
00:32:07.220there like me do you is that possible yeah i think so and you know given that just 10 percent of incel
00:32:14.080accounts the most extreme minority within the community do most of the talking and shout the
00:32:19.620loudest and they're the ones we tend to focus on certainly in the media so it maybe gives us the
00:32:24.660impression that there's far more incels uh who think like this but yeah the incel kind of depending
00:32:30.760on how you define incel it could be larger or smaller um but yeah yeah that's certainly a
00:32:37.140possibility but one thing i definitely think for incels is that we live in a kind of like a sex
00:32:42.420saturated world or we get the impression that we do anyway so you walk through a city you see
00:32:47.160billboards of really attractive men and women uh you watch tv and there's amazing sex on every
00:32:52.560every show because it sells uh you know you get this kind of impression that everyone is having
00:32:57.520an amazing sex life but actually it's not true people often overestimate the amount of sex other
00:33:03.380people are having so that might be one avenue to maybe help incels realize that they're not
00:33:08.020suffering as uniquely because one interesting finding from covid was that incel mental health
00:33:15.360actually there's some evidence to show that incel mental health got a little bit better during covid
00:33:20.040because it was like for them they were thinking well everybody's experiencing what i'm experiencing
00:33:25.200all the time now so that was a kind of a paradoxical finding uh the one positive of covid
00:33:31.780yeah right and they're kind of like cynical incels so maybe they'd be like oh if i can't have any i'm
00:33:37.640glad no one else can either yeah yeah feel better about other people suffering as well so a couple
00:33:42.980of other things we found about the incel kind of demographic just said that the last few things
00:33:47.180there we investigated their socioeconomic status because you know we figured that socioeconomic
00:33:52.740status there's a large body of evidence from evolutionary psychology that socio-economic
00:33:57.260status matters a lot to women in the mating market and so we wanted to investigate that
00:34:02.000and we found that 50 percent of incels versus 27 percent of non-incels in our sample still live
00:34:08.100with a parent or carer and you might say oh well incels are just very young men so they just haven't
00:34:13.120moved out but the average age for incels in our study was 27 so you know you'd expect perhaps
00:34:20.180they should have moved out by then 17 of incels compared to nine percent of non-incels in our
00:34:26.140sample reported to be NEAT which stands for not in education employment or training so they don't
00:34:33.180seem to have much job prospects and 36 of incels versus roughly 20 of non-incels have a high school
00:34:40.920education or lower so on all those kind of data points they're a little bit kind of being left
00:34:47.160behind and another thing we wanted to investigate was um in the media incels are commonly and even
00:34:53.200in this latest olivia wilde uh article described as kind of largely overwhelmingly white and white
00:35:01.100supremacist almost and far right so we wanted to investigate the ethnicities and um uh political
00:35:08.500affiliations and we found that 36 percent of incels were incels of color and in a largely uk
00:35:15.240and u.s sample that's actually over representative and compared to all our participants of non-incels
00:35:21.620and incels we can analyze whether it's actually more than you would expect by mere chance and it
00:35:27.460was significantly more than you would expect by mere chance compared to the rest of the sample
00:35:31.380in terms of their political affiliation and i just asked one question in a large study i and in my
00:35:37.880paper i recommend that we investigate political beliefs a little bit more but we found that
00:35:43.120roughly 39% reported that they're right-leaning in their political affiliation, 45% reported to
00:35:49.860be left-leaning, some more left-leaning, and 17% said they were centrist. Other studies have found
00:35:57.480that just 3% of incel posts online could be considered racist, and meanwhile 30% of incel
00:36:04.420threads in their forums could be considered misogynistic. And that same study found that
00:36:10.620self-hatred was by far the most common form of toxic language so yeah it's um we're asked a lot
00:36:17.700of times um to think about incels in terms of extremism and it might be the case that extreme
00:36:23.460inceldom actually looks more like suicidality than extremism yeah there's a high level of 82
00:36:30.640percent of incels in their own internal survey from the forums indicated that they had strongly
00:36:36.620considered suicide in their life which is kind of stark and there's another really good study
00:36:42.460by dr sarah daly called goodbye my friend cells and it documents kind of online rhetoric in the
00:36:50.420forums of suicidality and you know which is so prevalent in my gosh that's horrible yeah she
00:36:56.660even highlights like some cases where maybe someone has wrote a last post and then they've
00:37:02.140never heard from again we don't know whether that person actually went on to commit suicide it's
00:37:07.440kind of sad yeah no that's that's really depressing i think so when when this olivia
00:37:12.540wild thing happened with my dad i called him and told him about it you know hero to the incels
00:37:18.620um and his like i didn't put everything he said online i caught some of it and put it in a reaction
00:37:25.160video but his main reaction was we should be you know trying to solve this problem and feeling
00:37:33.940not feeling sorry for exactly but having compassion towards these people because it's actually like
00:37:40.100sad you know and you can't you can't like as an instill you wouldn't want to be angry and
00:37:45.380misogynistic and hateful um but he said what he was working on was taking like lost men in
00:37:51.940particular and saying hey you have the power to improve your life and if you improve your life
00:37:57.420then everything around you will improve right including probably you being an incel right
00:38:03.160because there are things you can do about it um i would assume i mean that's depending on your
00:38:08.700situation yeah that's like it depends on what you mean by incel savior or incel god even yeah savior
00:38:16.460might be actually more appropriate because his tough love pick yourself up build yourself up
00:38:21.720tidy your room develop yeah interesting might actually be what incels might need but in terms
00:38:28.520of oh incel representative he goes counter to the incel worldview you know his whole idea is
00:38:36.280if every woman thinks this about you they're right um so you know that uh what you said about
00:38:43.280your dad his work often is about helping young men in particular or everyone cultivate that
00:38:50.380internal locus of control which our study shows that incels lack um you know i'm even an example
00:38:57.020of one when i started listening to your dad in like 2016 and 2017 and started like applying some
00:39:03.880of his principles my life kind of trajectory started to get a lot better and i'm amazed at
00:39:09.420where it took me so i can totally that's the individual personal advice i would think that
00:39:15.380listening to jordan peterson's self-development advice would perhaps be good for in cells but
00:39:20.920they hate that rhetoric they hate that idea of being told you need to develop you can do some
00:39:26.420yeah well that that's kind of interesting though because i feel like you can see that in a lot of
00:39:31.160groups like um you know my backstory probably a little bit with the autoimmunity i had a
00:39:36.120just horrible autoimmune disorder and when i was really sick i was in some of these groups for
00:39:43.540people with autoimmune disorders on Facebook. Um, and it was mostly to like talk to other people
00:39:48.720to try and figure out how to get out of it. Right? Like, Hey, have you figured out a medication that
00:39:52.660works and all these things, those groups are just like, that's just hell on earth. Those groups,
00:39:57.800they're very depressing. Um, but when I finally figured out that there was a solution out of it
00:40:04.060for me anyway, with diet, um, you can't communicate that into it. And I remember people coming to me
00:40:11.260when I was very sick saying like, have you tried diet? And I always took it as a slight. And I
00:40:17.400think it was kind of condescending, like, oh, you're doing something wrong. And that's why
00:40:20.900you're in this situation. And so that's not a good way to communicate something, especially
00:40:25.200if you're trying to get somebody to change. Um, but I do remember scoffing at people who told me,
00:40:30.440oh, you should exercise more. You should diet, um, and being angry, right. And being angry about
00:40:37.040that so i can kind of understand like if someone's telling you hey if you did things you could get out
00:40:42.780of the situation you're in it's like well how dare you you don't know how serious the situation i'm in
00:40:47.900is yeah and that really very much applies to incels because it's kind of a wallowing in victimhood
00:40:55.080ecosystem so a lot of incels might even if an individual incel reports having romantic success
00:41:02.200or having a date or something like that the other incels might kick him out of the forum or say he's
00:41:06.980a fake cell and he wasn't ever really struggling and you know so he loses all that fraternity and
00:41:13.620friendship as well but yeah that's your dad's message is you can only focus on the sovereignty
00:41:19.340of the individual it's very unlikely that you can change the world around you sufficiently to
00:41:24.340to make it so much better for you but what you can't control is how you behave how you act in
00:41:29.400the world whether you tilt the world towards heaven or hell in every day make tomorrow better
00:41:33.940than yesterday like that that is so much about the individual and uh what you can change but
00:41:39.520yeah that's an antithetical to incels who say black pill thinking it's over there was no point
00:41:45.720in trying jordan peterson's message would be there's always hope and worth trying you know
00:41:52.420that you can always affect change in your life is there overlap between the incel group and kind of
00:42:00.100the serious um i would i don't exactly know what even to call that group men's rights activism but
00:42:08.640that's not what it is it maybe it's called a black pill community online uh is that what it is
00:42:14.180manosphere yeah is there like an overlap there or those two separate things as well so i think
00:42:20.980infels are often kind of thrown in whenever the manosphere is talked about in like uh on online
00:42:27.140articles or new media articles but the manosphere is a kind of a broad church and and a lot of
00:42:34.040areas of the manosphere would probably sneer at incels and look down on them so it's not like
00:42:39.060it's this collective sphere it's a different facets of it like MGTOW which is kind of like
00:42:45.920incels but it stands for men going their own way and that's for men who think that they probably
00:42:51.500could get sex or relationships but think that it's worth not worth their trouble so they're
00:42:56.460kind of going their own way and they would maybe differentiate themselves from incels and then
00:43:01.700there's red pill kind of communities which is more like trying to maybe the opposite of woke
00:43:07.600of trying to wake people up in another direction of this is how the mating market works and
00:43:13.400these are all the tricks you need to know and that kind of thing pick up artists it's a broad
00:43:19.560church but I kind of think that there is there needs to be maybe space for foreign cells or for
00:43:26.160young men who are struggling an ethical pickup artist culture because yeah I can recognize that
00:43:32.000the pickup artist world has descended into maybe toxicity and Andrew Tate might be an example of
00:43:38.120that in the extremes but that doesn't mean that there's not something worth salvaging there and
00:43:43.560there's a lot of young men who are really struggling and your dad makes a good point
00:43:47.920when he was asked why do you care about young men so much why does it matter if they're developed
00:43:54.180and he says well women should care too don't they want competent partners and that's a good point
00:43:59.220it's like you know when one sex loses the other sex loses too and so I kind of I haven't given
00:44:05.480up hope on ethical pickup artist kind of world but it's funny because whenever you attach the
00:44:11.640goal of achieving romantic success to self-development for men it gets framed as
00:44:17.120misogynistic and it's like oh you're being manipulative even Barack Obama in his autobiography
00:44:22.940he wrote um about how he was reading different books to impress different types of women and he
00:44:29.040got lambasted in the media for a short while saying oh that's so manipulative and you know
00:44:34.580for men listening that's intuitive but you know get the goal get the girl that's kind of like
00:44:40.980an intuitive archetype for men always and ever and you know your dad mentioned in this
00:44:46.660Olivia Wilde kind of fiasco in his original video that I kind of highlighted when he talked about
00:44:54.120how women are right he talks about how female sexual selection is actually an engine of evolution
00:44:59.700more generally and that the the mind of one sex the mind of the female actually shapes the body
00:45:05.980and the mind of the other sex so whatever like yeah reward men will go out and do it's why men
00:45:12.560have strived maniacally for status and success um for you know generations and so it's a it's a
00:45:20.480real motivator and i wouldn't be so hasty to take it away from men it's a you know it's a it's not
00:45:27.400to be trifled with scary that's so so now and now i suppose that's kind of ruled by women on birth
00:45:33.540control right do you know what percentage of women are on birth control oh i don't but i'd
00:45:38.300say it would be increasing i can look that up but there's a really good book on birth control by um
00:45:45.000my uh a professor called sarah hill and she was in the david buss lab previously uh to me and
00:45:53.060she wrote a book called this is your brain on birth control and it talks about yeah it's a
00:45:57.800really good book yeah and so i direct your listeners to that one she's an expert on that
00:46:02.500not me you should maybe have her on the show she's great okay yeah i'm gonna write that down that
00:46:07.240that's a really good idea no I'm yeah when I did some research into birth control it's scary and I
00:46:12.480remember being on birth control um and my dad being who my dad is we were kind of like I knew
00:46:19.360these things like oh by the way if you're taking birth control you might prefer like more feminine
00:46:24.640men like just that and and me being like well I'll just undo that in my head just like I'll just be
00:46:32.840aware, like as a 19 year old being like, I'll just like keep that in mind, like who I'm attracted
00:46:38.620to, like maybe go for the more masculine person to try and offset this birth control, which
00:46:43.520definitely doesn't work. It looks like 98% of sexually active women have used birth control
00:46:48.900and 62, 62% of those of reproductive age are currently using birth control. So that means
00:46:56.000what men are doing in society or what they think is attractive is being dictated by women on birth
00:47:02.420control that's scary yeah it's certainly like bringing a bit more complexity to it anyway and
00:47:08.060you know the hormones play a lot into mate choice and female sexuality so yeah I think Sarah Hill
00:47:14.440would be a better expert than me but it definitely you know it's not having no effect but you know
00:47:20.020what you mentioned there of oh I'll just override my preferences I remember actually being in the
00:47:25.680audience for one of your dad's talks in like 2018 maybe or 2017 and uh he gave us all a good
00:47:32.180classic jordan peterson finger wagging and he told us that he goes you have no idea why you
00:47:37.200want what you want and i thought it always resonated with me because a lot of what the
00:47:41.480brain does and a lot of our preferences is kind of cryptic to us we don't actually know
00:47:46.440so the idea that you know you just can control your mate preferences and you know even things
00:47:52.400like efflatory cues, like your sense of scent,
00:47:55.580you might really be attracted to someone
00:47:57.480and then you get close to them and you sniff them
00:47:59.360and, oh, whoa, no, actually the attraction isn't there.