CMV: Using “incel” as an insult is inherently toxic and harmful to society.

The word incel is short for *In*voluntary *cel*ibate. The term was coined by a Canadian woman, Alana, as part of a self-help program for people who couldn’t find a partner despite wanting to. She referred to herself as a late bloomer and created a safe space to discuss and share experiences with other late bloomers. She specifically mentioned how people at her college would talk about “lonely virgins” and make jokes about people who hadn’t started dating in high school. That experience contributed to her creating her website: Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project. Which she described as a friendly place where both men and women could freely discuss why they couldn’t find a partner free from that kind of peer judgment and stigma. Using the word as an insult eliminates its use for self-help and personal growth.

Now, obviously contemporary incel spaces aren’t that same sort of healthy and growth-oriented space that Alana’s website was. Those spaces are largely characterized by social isolation, nihilism, misogyny, and other forms of bigotry. And my stance is in no way a defense of all the harmful behaviors and ideas present in those spaces.

When people use incel as an insult however, they’re typically using it essentially as a synonym for misogyny. We already have a word for misogyny though…it’s misogyny, so why not just call a misogynist a misogynist? By using incel as an insult instead, you’re attacking the wrong behavior entirely. You’re implying that the problem with this person, the thing that they should be made to feel ashamed of, is not having sex rather than…being misogynistic. And while there’s a significant amount of misogyny in incel spaces, plenty of misogynists still have partners and therefore are not incels, and plenty of incels (including those who don’t interact in incel spaces or self-identify as such) don’t hate or disrespect women and therefore aren’t misogynists.

Additionally, the word has become a *gendered* insult. Subsequently creating the female-variant: femcel. Gendering the word is harmful for both men and women.

The word femcel removes “involuntary” from the word, implying that no woman can struggle to find a partner. As if any woman who’s not having sex must be in that state voluntarily. This essentially ignores women’s struggles in dating, while also upholding the idea that men are just sex bots that will fuck anybody.

As for incel, it’s basically an evolution of calling a guy a virgin, or saying “you get no bitches” as insults. It upholds the toxic idea that a man’s worth is based on his ability to have sex. There’s been a social push among progressives against things like slut-shaming, and against the idea that a woman loses value if she’s not a virgin. But these insults are two sides of the same fucked up coin. It’s entirely hypocritical to be against insulting women for their sexual behavior, while still insulting men for not meeting sexual requirements in that same toxic societal expectation.

Now, the most common response I get to this stance is that the toxicity of incel spaces has already eliminated the words value for self-help and personal growth. I don’t *entirely* agree, but I also don’t think it’s going to be used positively any time soon because of the association with those toxic spaces and the mass shooting by a self-proclaimed incel who’s name I won’t mention.

That does not change my view at all, it’s still toxic to use it as an insult for the reasons stated above. Nazis hate all sorts of groups, but that wouldn’t make it okay to call Nazis a slur for one of those groups just because it would piss them off more than being called a bigot.

To change my view I’d really need to hear:

- Why the word incel has any value to describe misogynists that the word misogynist doesn’t already achieve.

- How it can be interpreted that doesn’t uphold toxic ideas about sex as it relates to a person’s value.

- How gendering the word is beneficial in any way