Get Laid or Die Trying

A Review of Incel by ARX-Han

This is a Carousel guest post from Twitter anon Arbogast.

Is it possible to make an incel sympathetic?

If this question were left up to the loudest chorus in the world (the mainstream media and their cybernetic sycophants), the answer would be a resounding and emphatic “No.” Incels (short for “involuntarily celibate”) represent the absolute socio-political nadir in the popular imagination—weak, resentful, chicken-chested men who blame women for all of their ills.

Incels are also synonymous with extreme politics, with many being adherents to similarly reviled ideologies like fascism, white supremacy, and misogyny. And they are violent too. Lurking inside of every terminally online incel is an Alex Minassian, Elliot Rodger, or George Sodini. The government is looking into this problem, mind you, and they have found a solution—funding NGOs to go after the “manosphere” and the angry young men that flock to it.

There are kernels of truth in all of this. Angry young men, especially those who believe that the normie world has cheated them, do indeed pose a potential danger to the body politic. And yes, a large portion of self-described incels are pathetic. Their vitriol is so often a mask to hide deep-seated feelings of inadequacy, from their lack of good looks to their deficient success in all aspects of their life. A culture wherein incel ideas and ideals are widespread is a culture dangerously infected with an antisocial contagion. In such a case, state suppression could be justified.

Yet, so much of the current discourse on incels is wrong. For starters, the lazy stereotype that incels are predominately white men aggrieved over their downward mobility is not backed up by the data. The idea that incels are mostly right-wing is another pernicious myth. At best, your typical incel is a young NEET (not in education, employment, or training), sometimes college-educated, sometimes not, and are more likely to live with their parents than others in their age cohort. Many incels suffer from mental illness; others simply have a bad case of poor self-esteem. Almost all incels battle with loneliness and anxiety on a daily basis. Most of the time, an incel is not really an incel at all, as the word has devolved into a meaningless slur used against any man who runs afoul of the contemporary orthodoxy regarding gender, sex, dating, etc.

In sum, incels are not too different from the bog-standard stereotype of aimless millennials or over-socialized Zoomers. So why so much hate?

Novelist ARX-Han’s debut novel attempts to address the incel phenomenon by doing the impossible, i.e., trying to make his incel protagonist sympathetic. Incel (Positive XP LLC, 2023) is set somewhere on the West Coast in 2012. In those halcyon days, “incel” was years away from common knowledge, and incel-like ideas were mostly confined to the dankest corners of the internet. (Side note: reading Incel makes it clear just how mainstream incel and manosphere talking points have become in a mere decade). The novel’s protagonist is anon. He does not have a name. That is the point, for anon could be any well-educated white male grinding through a graduate degree on a California campus right now.

The fact that anon is white is important, though. Incel relies on the aforementioned tropes. Anon is not just lily white, but he also holds white supremacist views. A believer in racial purity, and proud of his Northwestern European heritage, anon’s stomach churns because he is forced to swim in the multicultural stew that is the American city. In one scene, he characterizes his doctoral supervisor as “an undeserving affirmative-action hack who’s parlayed his African-American phenotype into leading a well-respected Evolutionary Psychology department.”

In another, anon takes umbrage at the sheer number of Chinese students in his school’s cafeteria. All throughout the novel, anon is constantly observing and criticizing different races—their behaviors, motivators, and their innate inferiority to his own pristine Anglo-American stock. Little of this is ever said aloud, of course. Like a good anon, the protagonist saves his vitriol for the internet, where he posts threads on preserving Western Civilization, or creating a white ethnostate in America.

Offline, anon is a struggling psychology student. His interests in evolutionary psychology, ethnocentrism, and the science of female arousal are not shared by his fellow students or his doctoral supervisor. The latter outright denies anon’s dissertation proposal during a tense conversation about human superiority and anon’s preference for computer modeling as opposed to studying actual beings. Socially, anon is helpless. His sole goal in life is to lose his virginity before he turns twenty-three. This mission leads anon to embark on several embarrassing encounters with women. He uses “day game” at stores, where he is mostly rejected. One time when a female reciprocates, anon fumbles the date. Another chance at sexual glory ends when anon fails to get it up. The third and penultimate attempt only comes after anon gets himself intentionally pummeled by a Greco-Roman-esque chad at a downtown bar. Anon’s mathematical total on the eve before his birthday is: 

Approaches: 951.

Numbers: 38.

Dates 3.

Bangs: 0

Anon has one friend and one sister. The sister dislikes him to the point where she cuts off all communication. This stems from anon’s misery and his hard, deterministic, and social Darwinian view on life. To him, evolution does not care about humanity. Its goal is to increase suffering. His sister counteracts such bleakness with “Go to therapy,” “Just be yourself,” or “Join OkCupid.” When anon argues his point with force and volume, she mutes him and returns to the loving arms of her Mexican boyfriend Juan. Anon eventually goes to therapy, but net result is failure.

Anon’s friend is different matter. Jason is a tall, tattooed, and muscular Korean American who fucks like a fish when he’s not practicing his kickboxing. If anon’s cardinal sin is self-loathing, then Jason is guilty of rage. Andrew channels this anger into the pursuit of pussy, as well as frequent ruminations on philosophy that lean towards an inchoate Zen Buddhism. Jason and anon make for an odd pair, but it is worthwhile that Jason is the only person who stays by anon through the novel’s entirety. Their bond was formed many years ago when Jason saved anon from a four-on-one beating that involved a grotesque golden shower.

Incel is plot-free, more or less. Anon’s goal of getting laid sometimes gets lost in the thick of the main character’s thoughts. And anon does quite a lot of thinking. Han does a fantastic job of taking his readers into the mind of an incel. The experience is disorienting. Anon analyzes and overanalyzes everything. All interactions become a science experiment, with outcomes already determined by anon’s nihilistic, zero-sum philosophy. It is not a comfortable stay inside of anon’s frontal cortex, nor is it familiar. Anon thinks differently than most (including this writer), and it would appear that if anon is emblematic of a type, then Han is correct in quietly suggesting that IRL incels are wired differently. This makes the hate even more understandable, for few things anger, upset, and confound normal individuals quite like irrational actions done by others with distinct and different mental hardwiring.

By the end, anon does change. These are marginal changes at best. He goes to therapy, but it’s a dud. Anon spends most of the session needling the vegan Buddhist psychiatrist. He goes out drinking with Jason one more time, but both wind up alone before the night is through. He tries to reconnect with his sister, but it is met with silence. The only person who talks to him is the grieving widow that lives next door. This is the sum total of anon’s growth. Han channels Michel Houellebecq in writing an outsider protagonist with no discernible future. Han succeeds in making such an outsider a perennial loser, too. After all, if the novel’s climax represents anon’s growth, what growth can be had in reliving the pointless death of a cancer-riddled man? Very little.

Anon’s story fits nicely into the greater cannon of incel and proto-incel literature. Prior to the internet age, incels existed, but they were not called that. Arguments can be made that Don Quixote, Holden Caulfield, and Ignatius J. Reilly all foretold the rise of incel men. Same applies to Travis Bickle. Anon is easy company alongside these fellows. At least here he will not be lonely, and furthermore, Incel is part of a broader upsurge in new literature exploring incels and their ilk. Dan Baltic’s NUTCRANKR examines an incel type from a humorous angle, while the critically overlooked Triangle by Lance Biggums has its own hapless protagonist in Aron, who ends his days in far worse shape than anon.

What makes Incel unique is that it is part of a specific socio-political project. Han writes in the Afterword that his goal is deradicalization. After going too deep into online politics following a friend’s suicide, Han recognized the pernicious rise of nihilism and connected violence. “I give to you, the reader, in the sincere hope that you will…reject the twin sirens of rage and nihilism, however tempting they may be,” Han writes.

Incel is therefore part of a decidedly left-wing program to “rescue” incels from the abyss. The Afterword removes all doubt about this, with Han bemoaning not only limited funds for therapy, but also providing the now-obligatory resources for suicide prevention hotlines. Incel even comes with a trigger warning about racism and sexism (note: this trigger warning was removed and does not appear in the second edition). The interior text is more subtle, and yet the evidence is all there too. Anon is a white weirdo in a world where all the villains are white men (for example, Jason’s white stepfather is so abusive that he drives his wife to suicide). On top of this, white American men are uniformly weak, and if they are not trying to jump Jason, they are thinking about black cocks on the internet. An argument could be made that Incel is reflective of the sub-culture’s fantasy world, i.e., Han has a novel in which the incel dystopia is true. White women are not loyal, Asians have more or less taken over California, the white man is on the bottom of the food chain. Conversely, these could express some of Han’s true feelings.

The novel’s politics matter less than its art. As a deradicalization effort, Incel fails spectacularly. Anon does not achieve enlightenment, nor does he let go of his anger or rage or self-loathing. At best, he makes a human connection based on grief. This makes Incel realistic but not hopeful. Incels and other maladjusted misfits have horrific mindsets, but their dispositions do not come from out-of-the-blue. The world really is awful, economic opportunities for educated men are stagnate, academia is a temple to obsequiousness, and the sexual marketplace is an unnatural horror show where everyone, male and female, is miserable and being led along by miserable ideals.

As a piece of art, Incel is exceptional. Han writing is intricate and thought-provoking and correct. His summation of the internet is honest and incisive.

What I like most about the internet—well, what everyone likes about the internet, I suppose—is knowing that you are not alone in your suffering. Insofar as the anonymity of a forum displays the hidden qualia of otherwise atomized individuals in a centralized pools, its value lies in its honest ability to capture the median primate’s daily existence on this orbiting hellscape…Thus, the cure for loneliness is to plug into the lives of others; through the reciprocal interface of voyeurism and exhibitionism, you can relegate yourself to a single node among a collective of otherwise isolated individuals. This amounts to a networked vampirism—a sucking of energy from the lost, disaffected souls who spend days immortalizing their grievances onto the marks of a digital ledger.

Incel gets the online inferno correct. It also gets men like anon correct. But for both, there is no salvation. Incel is as nihilistic as the philosophy it hates. The only recourse for anon is to suck it up and suffer. The lights are pale and dim in our godless world, and anon’s off-putting beliefs are proven correct. There is not much of a future for men like him. Their lot is to go lonely to their graves—unloved, unmoved, and untouched. And yes, anon succeeds in getting laid, but the victory is hollow. Even the most hardcore incels admit that sex without love is unfulfilling. This is anon’s experience as well. Anon’s one connection—his single meaningful attachment to love—is via another person’s suffering. This is weak glue.

Incel is complicated dynamite. It is powerful, but sometimes this power is directionless. Ultimately, Han’s novel gets more right than wrong, and its tale has the makings of a classic. Anon is legion, and for that reason, Incel should be required reading for anyone earnestly trying to get a grip on the rise of atomized and loveless young men.

Buy Incel on Amazon