"It is a horrible thing to feel unwanted—invisible, inadequate, ineligible for the things that any person might hope for."

"It is also entirely possible to process a difficult social position with generosity and grace... These days, in this country, sex has become a hyper-efficient and deregulated marketplace, and, like any hyper-efficient and deregulated marketplace, it often makes people feel very bad. Our newest sex technologies, such as Tinder and Grindr, are built to carefully match people by looks above all else. Sexual value continues to accrue to abled over disabled, cis over trans, thin over fat, tall over short, white over nonwhite, rich over poor. There is an absurd mismatch in the way that straight men and women are taught to respond to these circumstances.... Men, like women, blame women if they feel undesirable. And, as women gain the economic and cultural power that allows them to be choosy about their partners, men have generated ideas about self-improvement that are sometimes inextricable from violent rage.... In the past few years, a subset of straight men calling themselves 'incels' have constructed a violent political ideology around the injustice of young, beautiful women refusing to have sex with them.... Incel culture advises men to 'looksmaxx' or 'statusmaxx'—to improve their appearance, to make more money—in a way that presumes that women are not potential partners or worthy objects of possible affection but inconveniently sentient bodies that must be claimed through cold strategy. (They assume that men who treat women more respectfully are 'white-knighting,' putting on a mockable façade of chivalry.)"

"The Rage of the Incels/Incels aren’t really looking for sex. They’re looking for absolute male supremacy" by Jia Tolentino (in The New Yorker).