TLDR:
I guess happening in the fringe internet spaces news today is the schism in the Incel (involuntary celibate, that largely meaning people who want sex but for some reason can't get a partner for sex) community. Twitter user "komesarj" reportedly had sex, and now has transitioned from being an Incel, then spurring backlash. I'm told this is significant because they were a community leader in those spaces. Youtuber Kira (who covers games, crypto scams, and yes sometimes this fringe stuff) has less than understanding commentary on the matter, but their perspective as a relatively neurotypical person is necessary as added context, so go check their video out if you want extra credit.
CW's: Discusses radicalization, extremism, and an identity obsessed with toxic attitudes towards sex.
Incel Identity in a Nutshell:
"Involuntary Celibate" as a term seems like something you would expect to hear in a textbook or court ruling, but instead this highly clinical terminology is a reductive self-label used by people online who identify as having trouble getting a mate. It's hard to speak about incel values and culture without coming off as reductive, the above linked Kira video is very dismissive of effectively everything that community values or finds to be a problem. Validation isn't always healthy, so I agree with challenging the perspectives of Incels but I also think respect is a two-way street, so for my own scholarship, today I will be summarizing some of the cultural highlights of the label. Like furries, Incel is oft a voluntary identity, meaning literally: You exert effort to actively identify with the group.
Identifying as an Incel is not necessarily a significant qualifier to your personhood. In Queer spaces, an understanding of asexuality is sometimes trickier to pen down for the closer-to-neurotypical baseline members of the group. Asexuality is a blanket term for 'not really interested in sex', and has a lot of nuance. Many Asexuals in the Furry Fandom for instance are neurodivergent queers such as myself who while having a rich highly sexual fantasy play-scape (E-RP, making/consuming fictional pornography, etc), we often have one or more barriers to entry when it comes to conventional sex. Autism Spectrum Disorder and adjacent phenomena such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Hormone Dysregulation, Disorders of Sex Differentiation, etc, can all contribute towards difficulties with sex. These can be pervasive physical disabilities regarding sex organs, and that's before talking about Queers with traditional Disabilities (paralysis, muscular dystrophy, etc).
Humans are inherently sexual animals. This is not some uniquely human feature, in fact, it is a trait humans share with all of their fellow Eukaryotic organisms. Recombination of alleles through chance is one of the most powerful adaptations life has evolved, so it makes sense that as far-removed from the 'basics' as humans seem, they have this powerful urge to mate. Recreational sex, and sex positivity in general, are part of our high-brain (cerebellum) contributions to human society over many generations. Because pregnancy is now somewhat well understood and reproduction is not as necessary for day to day survival, humans pass on a lot of themselves to successive generations through their labor, ideas, and other tangible contributions that alter the environment. Globally our species is becoming low fecundity, that is to say: our potential to reproduce is chilled by modern society in one or more factors. There is more to say about the 'global fertility crisis', but that's another topic. Humans have sex, our society recognizes that, and failure or refusal to have sex is perceived by many societies as an abnormal or unusual trait.
"We're not Jedi" -- What differentiates Incels from Voluntary Celibates:
Human religions have celibacy in one or more forms, and these are social controls enacted as forms of population control, policing/harm mitigation, and more importantly locus of power. By controlling who can get married through use of Abstinence, it is another element of your life that is dictated to by the hierarchy of the religious institution. In concert with other elements of control, the reality is that religious organizations such as macro-scale Christianity is that of dictation and manipulation of behavior for various goals. It can be argued that disease control is part of Abstinence education, but this is actually a late phase reaction to our increasing informational landscape, as prior to Germ Theory becoming part of public education in the ~1900's, no one really cared about those concerns. Incels are not however abstaining from sex for religious purposes, unlike monks, and aren't required to from any societal structure, like Chinese Court Eunuchs.
Involuntary Celibate refers to generally speaking: "I can't get laid". Not "I won't", "not I shouldn't", and often times to the explicit point of exclusion of "I am disabled / it is not healthy for me". This generally is a Queer-Adjacent 'fail-out' status, meaning that some kind of societal structure is producing people who feel like they are unfairly pushed out of a key function of their personhood. Despite what people like Kira say, there is a pervasive throughline culture of machisimo which persists, and overwhelmingly, Incels demonstrate cultural rigidity chafing with social expectations. Of particular note is that like many fringe communities of its type, Incels are overwhelmingly male, socially conservative, and extremely critical of their society and peers to the point of it being reflexive. Incels tend to externalize a lot of the problems they have towards a grander society, and it seems like this is the social script many are trained within. Incel ideology is one of male entitlement stretched almost to parody, often dehumanizing women reductively as simple property, an extreme patriarchal overtone permeates above the entire status.
Tracing the origin is more than I think I have time for today, but the key here is Patriarchy and Conservative Social Attitudes. Incels overwhelmingly resemble the hyper-masculine attitudes stemming from insecurity in mating, and a fear of Queerness. Ironically, by having the indicators of Queerness themselves, they reject this status in favor of a hyper-masculine tough-guy attitude, being belligerent and hostile to virtually everyone (even their so-called community members), pairing brilliantly with homophobic and transphobic rhetoric. You'll find Incels won't engage with "inferior races", "gays", "jews", "liberals", and a whole host of other targets which have ideologies that hold all any pro-social values that are not part of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant perspectives. This is owed to the origin of Incels likely being the U.S., and definitely being a construct of American Whiteness in general, a uniquely specific demographic anomaly where-in most cultural origin identifiers are stripped in favor of a bland and ahistorical one. Incels are almost hyper-concentrated versions of the male-dominated American Whiteness attitudes I have in the past called NASSAU.
Incels easily suck in ASD kids, and turn them into horrible men.
As mentioned earlier, Incel identity overwhelmingly recruits men, practices strict and rigid structural perspectives of entitlement and male-domination, and offers that structure from the perspective of victimhood. This makes it pretty aligning with Queer attitudes, in the sense that when you are rejected by society, you are often looking for places to go and for a reason why you don't belong. Autism is very much a reliable Queer making disorder, demographics demonstrate increasingly how significant it is in producing exemplars in society which the neurotypical baseline ostracizes, and that discontent and pain can lead you to dark and horrible places. Incel communities prey upon the trusting and impressionable tendencies which comprise rejected youths from conservative value backgrounds, and youth who chafe against their society or structure demanding they accept uncomfortable realities or compromise with people they don't immediately like.
ASD is characterized sometimes by highlighting two main features: deficits in empathy, deficits in mental flexibility. These both share a mechanism in a neuropsychological sense: dysregulation of information processing leading to sensory overload. Social deficits in ASD often times can be directly attributed to the difficulty of operating the machinery of human society: the face, the voice, the body. Motor-band dysregulation and Cerebellum abnormalities of what wires and how often results in trouble with meaningfully reacting in a timely manner, difficulties with perception due to focus on one's posture, positioning, and the ambiguity of language pairing with often noisy and object-filled environments. ASD kids are way more likely to also have ADHD, Synesthesia, or other information processing disorders, so we can get nervous and shy in novel situations because we don't quite know what it is we're expected to do. The nightmare that is Mild to Moderate Autism is that you are perceived accurately as 'weird', because you are using much more effort to attempt to fight through walls of sensory overload and neurological imbalance to participate in a neurosensory activity largely assumed to be universally accessible.
That assumption by the neurotypical world means you live as a 'weird' second class citizen, and this is where the Incel really comes forward as an obvious adaptation. Societies of humans produce groups of interest usually along the manipulated pressure-points that society is built with, and as mentioned before the control of mating behavior is an institutional mechanism built upon a natural instinct and biological imperative. The tendency of ASD kids to look for community online because their peers do not self-select so rigidly into categories of interest makes web forums especially helpful to them. Incel communities formed over the shared difficulty of existing in a society with hypermasculine perspectives force-fed to many young men as an "ought to be", a structured and prescribed identity which then contradicts their lack of social success. Feeling like they have failed their fundamental purpose as a "man", they look to fringe spaces where the platform exists beyond the prying eyes of the uncaring and judgemental public, and without much effort, can find attitudes that replicate their distress and help them find community in that. However, the antisocial nature of male machisimo is an adaptation to reduce competition in mating... so hostility is part of the equation.
An Identity with no path forward:
After a few years, successive generations of participants in Incel spaces will experience attrition through time and effort. You have to actively collect stamps to be an Incel, participating amicably in society and finding sex and companionship means not being in the vortex of despair that is prerequisite to being an Incel. Many cannot leave that space because of disordered thinking, some may have been brought there and anchored to it by disability, and others literally cannot find another community and just want friends. There is a tragic irony in that once you become dependent upon the Incel community enough to rise to notability, you dramatically decrease your odds of escaping the problem that made you an Incel in the first place! Because of this, Incel identity is hyperfixated on one basic fucking goal of self-actualizing through a physical activity which could just be purchased as a commodity (sex services, legal or not, exist), but use of that is prohibited by Conservative Values. Lacking an exit path, there is an aimless perpetuity which allows the Incel community to become a cruel reflection of the institutions which produce it.
Once you have sex. You are no longer an Incel. By saying you are an Incel, you acknowledge the status as a pressure point and create a social structure incentivizing the status. Once there, the structure is hard to escape, and once it infects all of your social spaces? Well. That's the road to nowhere. That's where indoctrination and escalation of the stakes becomes existential, where the flesh hooks dig in so deep it motivates people who are vulnerable to extremist ideologies to do terrorism. Our final example is not the silly story of contradictions above, but a real terrorist attack. On April 23rd, 2018, an Autistic Man killed 11 people and wounded 15 with a van as he drove through a crowd. This attack was motivated by the fringe internet weirdness that is the vortex of despair that creates Incels, and it shares DNA with those idiot children who cry about Gamergate, who spread hatred of Feminism, who broadly associate with racists of White Nationalist origin, and generally speaking promote their respective Cultural Hegemonies.
It's tragic and inhumane, but that's human society in microcosm: people getting fucked up, and making their trauma a weapon to injure others with. Incels are a cruel reflection of the 'losers' who fail to find success in a society obsessed with it, and consequently, by calling yourself an Incel, you sort of make it impossible to escape back towards your goal of mating and finding companionship.