‘Hot or not’ culture is turning men into basket cases
‘In the diseased outlook of incels, what’s inside doesn’t enter the equation’
One night last week, exhausted from a long day working far from London, I lay in bed. Rather than turn immediately to the interminable season five of Call the
Midwife, as I normally do to wind down after a busy day, I found myself on Facebook Messenger, the instant messaging app, where two male friends and I had been discussing “incels” earlier in the day.
Incels, who describe themselves as involuntary celibates, are a group of sexually desperate men who hate women. In their diseased view, women wantonly dole out their bodies to other, better-looking men (whom they refer to as “chads”), while meanly and cruelly withholding these from incels. In some cases, incels set out to get revenge on women and the world through mass murder, successfully in the cases of Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in 2014 in Isla Vista, California, and Alek Minassian, who is accused of killing 10 by driving a van into pedestrians in Toronto last year. (He is facing trial for murder and attempted murder.)
The discussion with my friends had revolved around the latest exposé of online incel forums, published in
New York magazine, which revealed that more and more of them are going under the knife, often spending their life savings on cosmetic surgery, in the belief that all their problems will go away if they can have their jaws made wider, chins stronger, brows more jutting and shoulders broader.
Scrolling through the incel discussion, my eye was snagged by a weird picture: an “attractiveness scale” produced by incels that had been doing the rounds. It has two columns, each with 10 pictures of women and men; ranked from 10 (most attractive to the opposite sex) to one (repellent).
Using incel-speak, which prioritises harsh binaries (“hot or not”) and biological terms (“females” and “males”, instead of women and men), each headshot on this “scale” is helpfully captioned. In the incel view, the world is as cruel as it is simple.
Men who are “10s” are “considered attractive by 99 per cent of females”, have a “square face with masculine features and hunter eyes”, while “an eight” is “objectively good-looking, but looks suffer from ... mild flaws”. Male “fives” will struggle to find a “spouse”, but “fours” will struggle to even pair up with female ones or twos: “some are called ‘soy boys’ because they put up with cheating to get laid”.
The column of women reeks of sexual jealousy and loathing: the
female “six” will “use your charms and your above-average looks to cheese your way through a career”, whereas female “fives” will turn down her male equivalents “in favour of a chance with an eight or nine”.
You get the picture. But the terrible, homicidal logic of these men is as fascinating as it is appalling. This is because there’s something vaguely recognisable, almost understandable, in their frustration.
Incels largely hate women, but they are also raging at a society obsessed with the “hot”, in which men like them are made to suffer life-destroying “lookism” (discrimination based on looks). Their “attractiveness scale” is a crude exaggeration, of course, but it’s also true that the most superficial forms of beauty can now determine the wildest forms of financial, professional, sexual and social power, and even fame. Take reality TV star Kim Kardashian, worth $350 million, or the scores of other millionairesses whose business plan is essentially looking “hot” on social media.
What the incel story highlights is just how much men have become basket cases about their appearance. Boys as young as 12 hit the gym, rates of men with eating disorders are soaring (by 70 per cent in Britain between 2010-16), and there are far more opting for cosmetic procedures, with rates doubling in the past decade, according to the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons.
Looks have always been valued, of course, but we are in a harsh age of superficial yet iron-fisted judgment that extends into the most mainstream domains. Thus a new study by Harvard has found a strong link between users of dating apps like Tinder and Bumble – which rely on rapid assessments of attractiveness – and extreme dieting behaviours. The survey of 392 users found that men keen to look trim were far more likely than women to fast, take laxatives or vomit.
The apps aren’t directly causing such behaviour, of course, but they do both reflect and stoke a fixation on “hotness”: daters have the tiniest window in which to lure potential dates before they are swiped right (yes) or left (no). Their next pressing problem is getting their real-life body to match up to their saucy snaps.
All the same, even in Tinder world there is still room for manoeuvre, for humanity, for letting someone grow on you with first-rate banter or a fascinating discussion. I once seriously dated someone from the app who, at first view, I found utterly unappealing.
But in the distorted outlook of incels, what’s inside doesn’t enter the equation. This is a hideous irony, of course, since for all the superficiality of modern mating, no amount of engineered good looks can make up for an internal void of decency and charm. Yes, “hot or not” applies – but so does “nice or not”.