I think boys and men have serious issues in our society that are not getting the attention they need. This along with changing social structures leaves some men behind. And they turn to the dark corners of the internet where other men just like them seem to care about them, and seem to have the same problems as them.

Boys and men are falling behind in schools and universities. Many colleges that have affirmative action are now having to use it to boost enrollment for men. Many of these rules were originally meant to increase numbers for women.

Women and girls have issues that society needs to help them with, and often times these issues get a lot more attention and are met with sympathy and understanding.

Whereas sometimes for men’s issues, the base reaction of society is to say stop crying and be a man. Men asking for help in and of itself is generally seen as not a manly thing to do.

This is an oversimplification of the issues, but just making fun of incels without trying to understand where they are coming from is probably not the best strategy to get them the help they need.

This in turn, leads them to start listening to men like Andrew Tate and other asshats.

There’s no real blanket statement for this. It will always be anecdotal evidence.

My anecdotal evidence is that incels I’ve met tend to be men who were always turned away by women for being weird in one way or another. This can be never bathing, weird anime obsessions, never holding a job because they perceive themselves as above it, etc. And because of this constant spurring of them and depression or anxiety they start to blame whatever they can. They see being in a relationship with a women as what would make them happy, but women don’t want them. So it must be the women’s fault. From there they just go further and further down the rabbit hole.

All anecdotal by the way and in no way is this a blanket every incel statement.

I had incel like behaviour for a while when I was younger I had a pretty normal family and upbringing, but I spent a lot of time online I really resonated with the “nice guys” memes of the late 2000s - I genuinly believed that I was really nice and that no one saw it because they were “sluts” (which they totally weren’t and it’s shocking that I thought that) and that they only liked guys who were sporty I was good in school, I got good grades and I think I leaned into the trope shown in media where the smart guy is always a jerk, so that didn’t help I had nerdy hobbies too and would assume women in those spaces were fake nerds, when really they were more nerdy than me!

I’m so glad I matured out of that headspace, I hate the person I was - but tldr I think the nice guy memes were a big influence, and while they’re not as widespread now, they are on some corners of the Internet

If you look up studies on “incels” you’ll find most report that incels have an incredibly high rate of mental health disorders, mostly untreated and sometimes undiagnosed. Issues like depression, anxiety, and autism are very common. These mental health issues affect their ability to form social connections which can eventually lead to inceldom where they surround themselves with other incels and feed off each other. I read one study that called this “tendency for interpersonal victimhood (TIV)”.

Upbringing could certainly have an effect on people’s mental health, but not everyone with mental health issues is an incel. Becoming an incel is an extra step only some take and I don’t think anyone truly knows how it happens.

Honestly I have doubts it’s related to female exposure; I grew up in a family of men, my mom was the only woman in the entire house and had her own bathroom. She was an oncology nurse and worked crazy hours. I learned more about women dating women than I ever did from hints and lessons from Mom. I’m more inclined to think it’s related to the men in their lives and the examples they set in their interactions with women. The men online who shovel misogyny and bullshit about alpha men are doing more harm to the male sex than anything else I’ve seen.

Nothing to do with upbringing.

I was borderline incel. Viewed positive female peers (family, etc.) as completely different from “tainted whores” or whatever.

Bad experiences, chronic isolation are what make an incel. Lonely men without supportive friend groups who turn to the Internet for their social needs. Rejection and dismissal from real world people, acceptance and empathy from the hive mind.

Loneliness does a lot more damage than a shitty upbringing.

Hypothesis: what matters here is a social toolbox for engaging with “attractive”/compatible women in a non-romantic/sexual way.

I.e. someone who, even as a teenager, had lots of female friends, is likely to have a learned how to deal with them as persons, beyond “I’d like to hit that”.

(Paradoxically, such a person is more likely to find a romantic partner, because they might have lots of M-F acquaintances/friendships that can potentially become something more.)

Someone who never learned that, can only interact with (to them) attractive women through the lens of “I’d like to hit that”, which has a much higher risk of ending in failure.

If someone in the second category was always raised on the values of romantic success being a requirement for a non-failed life, and possibly with a touch of chauvinism/misogyny, they might wind up caught up in a frustrating loop of failure.

This is how incels can happen.

Lack of personal accountability (“my baby is a perfect angel,” “he’s just a kid”)

Discrimination (racism/sexism/propensity to find scapegoat for issues)

Not teaching conflict resolution at all ages

Popularity of toxic masculine celebrities

Mental disorders not being treated/toxic behaviors not being called out

Since I haven’t seen it mentioned…it might be the same attitude you displayed with the question OP. Immediately wondering which woman’s fault it is that a man is acting badly.

It is not linked to the past, it is a rejection trauma.

It is considered normal in our societies to be with someone. And as a man, you are culturally expected to be able to find a woman, and you are responsible for it. If you are a single man, it is because you choose it or because you’re a failed man. The media like to talk about how you now have sex at 11 and how men have many relationships. When you’re still virgin at 18, you already feel like a miserable failure. And the longer it goes, the harder it become. For some men they don’t even need to be virgin, they may have had their first relationship by luck.

Then came #metoo. Many men discovered how hard women had it because of men. And this broke something: before, when you were bad with women, you merely had to man up. There was only one model for men, but it was there. After metoo, this model was broken. Now men are completely helpless.

This second point is reinforced politically by the fact that the left spend a lot of time to talk about women problems, but never talks about how men should be to be successful with women. You have feminist movements spreading hatred against all men, and this is also hard. When communication makes it like all men are assholes and can’t behave with women, but no one tells you how you should do instead, you just feel attacked and helpless.

With that, these men are completely destroyed. Suicide is an option an this point. But hatred is another one. And fascism lives out of hatred. But fascism came later. First there was hatred as an exit of this situation for the desperate men: it’s not their fault, it’s women fault. That’s only the only way you can go out of the misery. And with hatred, you can start to blame them for everything that’s happening. You’re single because the women are stupid and prefer the machist men. And feminism is a fraud.

And oh boy do fascists love this situation! Now they can easily radicalise you because you already did the job. Because the progressive left abandoned these men, the fascists gladly took the opportunity. And you now have a strategy and a market around this.

Not all men fall for this. But the pain and hardship is shared by many men nonetheless. The problem is societal: there is no counter-model to the one old toxic one that’s been discarded by #metoo. You can’t merely make your own model, because the point is to be attractive to women. Which means it actually is a problem for women too. But the progressists unfortunately forgot those men in their fights for the rights of the sexual minorities and the women, so these men are alone.

As a man, you no have 3 solutions : you are lucky enough to be with a woman already ; you embrace the toxic masculinity of the fascists ; or you’re left alone in a no man’s land of solitude and despair. The incels are the men going from the 3rd to the 2nd category.

Society is changing. The process will take time with highs and lows. We’re getting into a low with this problem, and we’ll go to a new high when we will have fixed it. But for now, incels will be the symptom of the failure to include men in feminism.

A digital upbringing it seems. Self taught, doomscrolling with no one around who loves them enough to tell them they are slipping away into darkness.

My casual take: I’m not sure if it’s 100% upbringing but for most it seems some sense of entitlement. They deserve the pretty girl because something-something even though they might not be bringing much to the table attraction wise.

And now I just had a passing thought. We don’t seem to hear about gay incels much. Is that even a thing?

I want to add to this that it’s also a self circulating thing too. It’s easy to start reading text that’s antiwomen, seeing videos about it, slowly further looking into more and more negative things. Some guys literally brain wash themself on this. That’s why some media worry me.

For example I recently watched a video that discussed the negatives of Captain Marvel as a movie. Not long after my videos started showing negatives of other shows and movies like velma, shehulk and snow white etc.

Then not long after that all my videos started showing anti women, and more just outright incel videos.

I don’t think, that there’s a certain type of environment, but some combinations of environments, character traits, and maybe just events in life.

What I noticed is, that incels fundamentally lack the ability to see other people as people, but more as automatons, NPCs. You manipulate levers and dials in a certain way and get a predictable result. To me, that sounds a bit autistic. Most people who have that trait in one form or another (I’d include myself), learn that this is not actually the case and humans are in fact a bit more complex.

But if you don’t learn that and then end up in a life situation, where you are sexually “underserved” (which is very likely for autistic people, ask me how I know), but desperately want love, but also don’t understand, that you’re might be the problem, I guess there’s a chance, that you could become vulnerable to that mindset.

On the other hand, there’s the loudmouths of the movement, who I personally suspect to just be socially incompetent narcissists. They can’t fathom that someone doesn’t want them, so they’ll create a narrative, why everyone else is at fault.

I’ve never met any incels in the real world. I assume it’s because like many other synthetic groupings of individual traits, they’re a minority that has worked themselves into an echo chamber which has simply gotten loud enough to be noticed by others not within that group.

I find that actually going out and interacting with people in the real world, absolves most individuals of these kind of horrendous traits. In the real world, people can call you out for your bullshit and you can’t just close the browser tab and run away from it.