The Shame Machine by Cathy O'Neil

Author:Cathy O'Neil [O'Neil, Cathy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2022-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

The incel response to this shame is to amplify and celebrate it—a denial of sorts. Their mutual shame brings them together. And their openness about it puts them all in the same boat, which provides a measure of comfort. In this sense, their Reddit forums are like rehab programs, or Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, where people unburden themselves of shameful secrets. But there are crucial differences. While patients in rehab group sessions are attempting to leave their problems behind, incels glorify their wretched state. And unlike most rehab groups, in which members sit together in a single room or on a solitary Zoom session, incels meet and evangelize on global shame networks. That’s where their hopes and dreams devolve into darkness.

“It’s like a game of one-upmanship,” says Bradley Hinds, a California-based journalist who has followed the online communities. “One person says his life is awful, that he’s in the basement and hasn’t showered in two weeks, and someone else will say that he’s filthy, too, and then add, ‘The last time I talked to a girl, she spit in my face.’ ”

The incel forums are incubators of despair, which generates sporadic violence, both murders and suicides. And their common bond has a significant appeal to a sizable constituency. After all, loads of people find the dating game difficult. The incel groups offer fellowship and a sense of power, along with a framework to explain why the world seems to be so monstrously unfair to them.

These groups represent a different variety of shame engine. They draw in people who suffer from shame and enable them to shift from defensive crouch to attack mode. Only a handful of men turn the rampant misogyny and hatred into murderous violence; the vast majority wage their battles with words. Most sit by themselves, says Hinds, spending nearly every waking hour in the “manosphere,” a decentralized complex of gaming platforms, websites, and chat rooms. With their posts, they eviscerate the apparently content and sexually fulfilled people, society’s winners. They dehumanize women, often referring to them as “femoids.” Indeed, their grievance-fed ideology is bursting with male supremacy and frequently drifts into white supremacy.

Like many shame engines, from the diet industry to pharmaceuticals, the incel community builds its arguments upon a foundation of pseudoscience, attempting to validate it with scraps of biological determinism and evolutionary anthropology. Many of these ideas are accompanied by statistics, giving them the sheen of science. The 80/20 divide, for example, postulates that 80 percent of women focus on the most desirable quintile of males. Most women, the thinking goes, can have sex whenever the urge strikes them. This gives them immense and arbitrary power over the males, especially over those who didn’t win the genetic lottery—who lack the height, body type, jawline, and skin color (white) that the women supposedly demand.

They see the jockeying for sexual partners as fundamentally unfair. And they lard their worldview with metrics. This, again, is common to other shame engines. The incels apply metrics to mating, ranking people on a scale.

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