🎧 Audio Discussion Included
The social system in the west is unravelling. Caught in the cross fire of the ongoing gender wars are the rights and the roles, of men and women, and the landscape of possible relationships between them.
Helen Andrews argues that the last decade has witnessed ‘the great feminisation’, where for the first time women out-number men in many spheres in life. She argues that:
“No civilization in human history has ever experimented with letting women control so many vital institutions of our society, from political parties to universities to our largest businesses. Even where women do not hold the top spots, women set the tone in these organizations, such that a male CEO must operate within the limits set by his human resources VP.” (Andrews, The Great Feminization, 2025)
There are consequences to such a rapid and disorientating shift in gender dynamics.
The manosphere is a broad umbrella term for a loose network of online communities focused on men’s issues, identity, and grievances. It’s a subculture defined by, and reacting against, feminism. Prominent within the Manosphere are the Incels. Seen by many as the embodiment of toxic masculinity. We will argue that Incels are a misunderstood symptom of a failing system, and most likely predictive of deeper social unrest to come.
Moreover, the challenges to marriage as the primary institution of male female pair bonding, are not unique to the west. The Muslim community, here and throughout the Muslim world, is subjected to similar pressures to those that created Incels. Furthermore, the Muslim community is as vulnerable to the explanatory framework of the manosphere, as it is threatened by feminism.
What are Incels?
Incel – short for “involuntary celibate” – refers to an online identity and worldview built around the belief that one is unable to form romantic or sexual relationships and that this inability is permanent and externally imposed. The ideology frames attraction as almost entirely determined by fixed traits like physical appearance, height, or race, and by portraying women as holding disproportionate sexual power in society. This produces a strongly fatalistic outlook: self-improvement is seen as futile, and frustration often hardens into resentment toward both women and socially successful men. Incel spaces tend to be inward-looking and nihilistic, with little emphasis on constructive action, though in extreme cases this grievance narrative has contributed to real-world harm, which is why the term has attracted public and academic scrutiny.
Incel Narrative
At its core, the incel narrative is a story about unjust exclusion, told through a rigid and pessimistic framework about how the world works. Incels believe that romantic and sexual relationships are governed by an unforgiving hierarchy based primarily on physical attractiveness and status, and that this hierarchy is largely fixed. In this view, a small minority of highly attractive (high status) men monopolise most female attention, while the rest – especially those deemed physically unattractive – are effectively locked out of intimacy regardless of effort, kindness, or personal growth. What hurts most is not simply being single, but the belief that nothing they do can meaningfully change their position.
From this follows the central grievance: incels feel they have been lied to. They were taught – by parents, media, schools, or cultural narratives – that being respectful, working hard, or “being yourself” would eventually lead to love, and when that didn’t happen, the failure was experienced not as bad luck but as systemic betrayal. Feminism and modern dating culture are often blamed for this shift, with women portrayed as having unprecedented choice and sexual power, while men are left competing in a marketplace that rewards only the top tier. Rejection is therefore moralised: it is not just painful, it is evidence that the system is unfair.
Emotionally, the incel worldview is driven less by entitlement than by shame and comparative humiliation. Masculinity is equated with sexual success, so celibacy becomes proof of personal worthlessness. Because vulnerability and open grief are culturally discouraged for men, this pain is often expressed sideways – as anger, bitterness, irony, or misogynistic humour.
The final piece of the narrative is resignation. Many incels embrace the “Black Pill”: the belief that the truth about dating is so bleak that hope itself is a delusion. Self-improvement is dismissed as ‘cope’, therapy as gaslighting, and success stories as statistical anomalies or lies. This is what distinguishes the incel narrative from adjacent movements like the Red Pill: where Red Pill says “adapt and win,” incels say “the game is rigged and unwinnable for people like us.” The grievance, ultimately, is not just about sex, but about dignity, recognition, and a sense of belonging in a world that they believe has permanently excluded them.
The Elliot Rodger killings in 2014 were the moment incels entered mainstream awareness. Rodger explicitly framed his violence as punishment for sexual rejection and left behind manifestos and videos that mirrored incel beliefs circulating online at the time. Media coverage seized on the term because it offered a label for a worldview that linked misogyny, entitlement, and grievance to violence.
In the years that followed, the incel worldview increasingly overlapped with other online extremisms, while the Red Pill and manosphere became more visible and monetised through influencers, YouTube channels, and social media algorithms. Ironically, this visibility both diluted and hardened incel culture: some users drifted toward Red Pill self-improvement narratives, while others doubled down on the “blackpill” belief that nothing could ever change. By the late 2010s, “incel” had become less a self-description for many and more a cultural shorthand – often misused – for misogynistic or socially alienated men, even as the original communities continued to exist in more fragmented, moderated, or hidden forms.
Incel Myths
The primary myth is that incels are typically violent, extremist men who hate women and are on the brink of committing attacks. In reality, research consistently shows that most incels are non-violent and far more likely to express self-directed distress (depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation) than outward aggression. Violent actors associated with incel ideology exist and matter, but they represent a tiny minority, and treating them as representative badly distorts the picture.
Another common assumption is that incels are older, socially maladjusted, or “basement dwellers.” Empirically, incels skew young – often late teens to mid-20s – and many are students or early-career adults. They are disproportionately likely to report neurodivergence (especially autism traits), social anxiety, and poor mental health, rather than antisocial personality traits. Many are not socially isolated in a literal sense; they may have friends, jobs, or families, but struggle specifically with romantic and sexual initiation.
There’s also a belief that incels are simply lazy or unwilling to self-improve. Research complicates this. Many incels report having tried self-improvement repeatedly – gym, grooming, social skills, therapy – without success, which actually feeds the fatalism. The defining feature isn’t lack of effort, but a belief that effort doesn’t pay off if you fall too far down perceived attractiveness hierarchies. That’s where the “Black Pill” ideology takes hold, and it’s psychologically corrosive rather than indulgent.
It’s also much assumed that incels are motivated primarily by a hatred of women. William Costello’s work suggests that while misogynistic language is common in forums, the underlying emotional drivers are more often shame, envy, loneliness, and perceived social inferiority. Hatred tends to be an expression rather than the root cause.
Finally, there is a widespread misconception that incels are entirely wrong about their struggles. Research shows a more uncomfortable truth: some incel claims have more than partial empirical support, especially around dating app dynamics, skewed attention toward high-status men, and the impact of looks on initial attraction. Where incel ideology arguably goes wrong is in turning statistical tendencies into absolute laws, stripping away agency, variability, and hope, and moralising rejection into injustice.
A Gynocentric Society
The sexual revolution, from roughly the 60’s to the 80’s in the west, transformed attitudes and behaviour around sex, relationships, gender roles, and family life. At the most basic level, the sexual revolution decoupled sex from marriage and reproduction (Wikipedia, 2026). For women, the effects were particularly transformative. Greater control over fertility enabled higher educational attainment, workforce participation, and economic independence. Marriage shifted from an economic necessity to a more voluntary, companionate arrangement. Feminist movements leveraged these changes to challenge legal inequalities and restrictive gender roles. In that sense, the sexual revolution is often seen as foundational to modern gender equality. But gender equality has not only changed the rules, it has arguably shifted the balance of power in the arbitration of social rules in what Helen Andrews calls the great feminisation.
She cites the influx of women – who until recently were underrepresented – in the workplace, and their domination of institutions as a central reason for a shift in work culture and public life. She argues that:
“Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.” (Andrews, 2025)
She continues:
“Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization….. wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.” (Andrews, 2025)
She rationalises that this isn’t about differences between men and women on an individual level, where variation between the sexes overlaps, but it’s about female group dynamics which exaggerate and assert feminine values.
“The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.” Accordingly, “Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.” (Andrews, 2025)
Feminism becomes the villain in the incel narrative because it is associated – sometimes accurately, often simplistically – with women’s increased autonomy and choice. From the incel perspective, feminism sparked the sexual revolution which changed mating norms. Previously, most men used to be able to get partners, but without monogamy low status males are denied companionship and reproductive opportunity. Feminism is therefore framed not as “women gaining freedom,” but as “men losing guarantees.” This framing ignores the fact that those guarantees often came at women’s expense, but it resonates with men who feel abandoned by changing norms and unheard by progressive discourse that struggles to address male pain without sounding like it’s excusing entitlement.
The Wider implications on Civilisation
At an individual level it’s easy – and tempting – to dismiss Incels as a misfits and failures, and to not pay much mind to their grievances, but when you consider their impact at scale, as a growing demographic, the implications for cohesive society are startling.
Male social integration
Across cultures and history, pair-bonding and family formation have been key mechanisms for socialising men. Men who expect to marry, have children, and be embedded in families tend to be more future-oriented, risk-averse, and invested in social norms. This isn’t romanticism; it shows up in criminology and sociology repeatedly. Marriage and stable partnerships correlate with lower rates of violence, substance abuse, and antisocial behaviour in men, even when controlling for background factors.
As articulated by Willam Costello a growing minority of alienated and disaffected young men threatens social cohesion. He argues that when a growing minority of men perceive themselves as permanently excluded from intimacy, they lose not just personal hope but stakeholding. If you believe you’ll never be desired, never be a partner, never be a father, then the incentives to conform, sacrifice, or delay gratification weaken. Long term relationships and parenthood stabilise men. Louise Perry argues that societies with strong monogamous norms have been economically more productive, and exhibit lower rates of crime, child and domestic abuse. (Perry, 2022).
Most excluded men won’t become violent – but even mild disengagement at scale (withdrawal, nihilism, low productivity, bitterness) has social costs. (Costello, 2022). This is where incels matter sociologically – even if their explanations are wrong: they may be an early warning signal of male disconnection rather than its cause.
Sexual inequality and high-variance mating markets
When societies remove constraints on mating (such as arranged marriage, strong monogamous norms, stigma against casual sex), mating outcomes become more unequal. A minority of men have many partners; a significant minority have few or none. Dating apps exaggerate this effect by making selection fast, visual, and hyper-comparative. Sexual markets naturally concentrate attention, especially when commitment is decoupled from sex. Historically, strict monogamy functioned as a kind of redistributive institution: it limited elite male monopolisation of women and ensured most men had some chance at partnership and fatherhood. That arrangement may be seen as unjust to women individually – but it was stabilising at a civilisational level.
Incels are excluded from both casual sex and long-term pairing, which makes them the clearest losers in a high-variance system. Again, the grievance may be misdirected, but the structural exclusion is real.
Declining fertility and relationship fragility
Louise Perrys, amongst others, points out that across almost all affluent liberal societies, fertility rates have fallen below replacement. This is not controversial. What’s debated is why. Strong predictors include delayed family formation, unstable relationships, high relationship turnover, and economic precarity – but sexual culture matters too.
Casualisation of sex doesn’t directly reduce births, but unstable pair-bonding reduces the likelihood that people ever transition into durable family structures. Many people want children “eventually,” but serial short-term relationships can defer parenthood until it doesn’t happen at all. Incels matter in this picture because they represent the absolute floor of the mating system: zero entry. If a growing share of men never form families, total fertility drops even if others have children. And when reproduction becomes concentrated among fewer, less stable couples, single-parent households rise – not because of moral failure, but because commitment norms weaken.
Fewer Fathers
The claim that father absence is associated with worse outcomes for children is one of the most replicated findings in social science, even after accounting for income and background. This doesn’t mean single parents can’t raise good children – but at population scale, fatherlessness correlates with higher rates of behavioural problems, school failure, and later criminality, especially among boys.
The more boys grow up without consistent male role models, and the more men believe they are unwanted and irrelevant, the more the feedback loop worsens. Masculinity becomes increasingly feared, stigmatised, and unmentored.
Incels, in this framing, are not the threat; they are the failed output of the system.
Why this feels ominous for social cohesion
Put together, the worry looks like this:
- A sexual culture that maximises individual choice produces high inequality in outcomes
- A subset of men become romantically excluded and socially disengaged
- Pair-bonding weakens, fertility declines, and family instability rises
- Fewer men feel invested in the future; fewer children are born into stable households
- Social trust erodes, and resentment grows at the margins
- None of this requires mass violence to be destabilising. Low-level alienation at scale is enough.
Curiously, this is not advanced as an argument for rolling back women’s rights, or even a criticism of feminism. Costello, Perry and those advancing arguments for natalism and monogamy simply point out that liberal societies have dismantled stabilising institutions without replacing their social function and express fears for social continuity and cohesion.
The Muslim World
The Muslim world, is not characterised by the casualisation of sex, dating apps nor single parent families. Yet assorted pressures on the marriage market create a not dissimilar asymmetrical and status-based skewing.
Economic barriers
Across parts of the Middle East and Muslim-majority countries, rising wedding costs, high dowries, and economic insecurity are delaying or discouraging marriage. In places like Egypt, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states, the cost of weddings and marriage rites has risen sharply relative to young men’s incomes, meaning men often postpone marriage until their late 20s or 30s – or cannot afford it at all. In Egypt, for example, researchers have documented that families may need to save several years’ income just to afford a son’s marriage, pushing the average age of marriage into the early 30s and leaving a significant share of men unmarried by what local norms consider “mature” age. (Thayer, 2010)
In Kuwait and the UAE, official studies link high dowries and associated costs to rising numbers of unmarried young people, especially men who delay or forego marriage for financial reasons (Al Khalifa, 2024). In Yemen, sociologists note that unemployment, low wages, and exorbitant wedding costs are making marriage “unthinkable” for many young adults unless they or their families can accumulate substantial savings (Mohammed, 2025).
Overall marriage costs “can be excessive, rigid and stubborn to economic pressures.” (Ragab & Saad, 2022). These patterns resemble a marriage squeeze: a situation where economic constraints and social-cultural norms combine to reduce the chances of union formation, particularly for economically weaker men.
Customary norms and expectations
In many Muslim societies, there are strong expectations about what it means to enter marriage successfully. Families often expect men to be economically established before marriage, including providing dowery, a proper home, and sometimes generous wedding gifts. That expectation historically served as a kind of social filter, but today with rising living costs, it creates socio-economic barriers that delays union formation. (Al Khalifa, 2024)
The effect is that men who don’t meet financial or social expectations have more difficulty entering marriage, which can mirror some of the demographic exclusion themes seen in discussions about Western dating markets – even though the cultural and institutional drivers differ.
Delayed marriage and unmarried adults
Recent reports and studies from various Arab contexts show growing proportions of unmarried men and women well past traditional ages of marriage.
According to research conducted by Thayer and Hudson:
“Delayed marriage has become a new norm in the Middle East… In one study, nearly 25% of young adult males in Egypt had not married by age 27; the average age was 31…. In Saudi Arabia, men usually are unable to marry before age 29; often they marry only in their mid-30s. In Iran, 38% of 25-29 year-old men are unmarried. Across the Middle East, only about 50% of 25-29 year-old men are married, the lowest percentage for this group in the developing world. Whether in Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, or the United Arab Emirates, the exorbitant costs of marriage have delayed the age at which Muslim men marry” (Thayer, 2010)
Delays in marriage can have ripple effects on fertility rates and family structures in Muslim majority countries, not unlike concerns raised in Western contexts.
The implications for social cohesion and family stability
While the literature is less developed on long-term societal consequences (compared to the incel debate in the West), demographers and sociologists do worry about the implications of widespread delays in marriage.
Economic insecurity may drive young people to postpone marriage, emigrate, or shift family structures in ways that change traditional norms, not to mention that inhibiting marriage logically incentivises illegitimate western style relationships.
Additionally, given that fatherhood somewhat ‘tames men’, the Muslim world is not impervious to the challenges of growing numbers of unmarried, sexually frustrated men, “high on testosterone and low on responsibility“ (Perry, 2022) who feel disgruntled at being excluded from the opportunity to marry, especially when marriage is such a central life expectation for most Muslim men.
Muslim Influencers
In recent years Muslim online spaces have been noticeably infected by red pill and incel ideology, specifically targeted at young Muslim men. Influencers such as Andrew Tate found a receptive audience among Muslims by combining hyper-masculine rhetoric, hostility to feminism, and a language of discipline, hierarchy, and control that appears – at least superficially – to resonate with certain Islamic ideas.
Some Muslim figures have gone further. Mahdi Tidjani, for example, has openly acknowledged drawing from red pill spaces, stating that “there are a lot of red pill realities I have a debt of gratitude for, having learned it from the non-Muslims in the red pill space”. When questioned on this, his justification was that “Islam does not have a monopoly on general knowledge” whilst advancing claims such as women want to be objectified and advising men to “love her from a position of detachment.” Similarly, Daniel Haqiqatjou (AKA The Muslim Sceptic) has argued that the red pill is not inherently contrary to Islam, positioning feminism as the primary ideological threat. These narratives circulate widely on YouTube Shorts and podcasts, indicating not a fringe phenomenon but the mainstreaming of manosphere ideas within contemporary Muslim discourse.
Muslims may be particularly vulnerable to these ideas for several reasons. Gender segregation and the prohibition of premarital relationships mean many young Muslim men have limited, abstract, or anxiety-laden experiences of women, making them more susceptible to sweeping theories about “female nature.” At the same time, a selective reading of Islamic concepts is used to legitimise red pill assumptions like hypergamy, male dominance, and female submission. This occurs against the backdrop of a perceived cultural threat from Western liberal feminism, which is interpreted as hostile to religion, masculinity, and traditional family structures. The result is a hyper-fixation on male-female relations framed as a zero-sum ideological battle – feminism versus red pill – despite the fact that Islam does not centre sex relations in this adversarial way.
The dangers of this convergence are significant. First, it risks reversing the proper epistemic order: Western manosphere ideas are adopted first and only then retrofitted into Islamic evidences for validation, effectively subjugating Islamic texts to propagate a pre-existing ideology rather than deriving values from revelation itself. Second, the red pill’s reliance on rigid and reductionist claims about male and female psychology (mostly based on social Darwinism) – women as inherently submissive, men as naturally dominant – intensifies mistrust and polarisation between the sexes.
This influence is not merely theoretical but actively propagated. Muslim influencers and male-focused podcasts platform figures like Tidjani, normalising these ideas for large audiences. Young men, in particular, encounter these speakers as role models, absorbing simplified messages: that masculinity is defined primarily by dominance and sexual access; that a woman’s worth lies in her virginity or submission; that male desire is uncontrollable and should be maximised through marriage (preferably polygyny) and that failing to aspire to multiple wives reflects weak masculinity. While some of these claims draw selectively on Islamic evidences, they strip them of context, ethical restraint, and moral nuance – ignoring, for example, the Quranic encouragement to marry widows and divorcees; the strong condemnation of materialism; and Prophet’s emphasis on kindness, mercy, and mutual respect within marriage.
What ultimately emerges is not an Islamic vision of gender relations, but a hybrid ideology that borrows Islamic language while inheriting the resentments, cynicism, and instrumental view of relationships characteristic of the manosphere. In doing so, it risks reshaping Muslim social norms in ways that make healthy, compassionate, and realistic marital relationships more difficult for both men and women to form.
Conclusion
Incels are not a policy problem to be “solved” directly. They are a signal that something in the mating, family, and status-allocation system is failing a non-trivial minority of men. Ignoring that signal because incel ideology is toxic risks missing the broader structural issue.
Toxic masculinity is usually considered in terms of excess: too much confidence, too much entitlement, too much aggression. Incels suggest that masculinity can also become ‘toxic’ through deprivation.
The Muslim world, like the western one, shows a growing population of unmarried men at ages when earlier generations expected to be married (Thayer, 2010).
The Muslim ‘marriage market’ shows rising barriers to entry as broader economic conditions make it harder for men to reach expected economic and customary thresholds for dowry, and social status. Additionally, the rise of Muslim Marriage Apps mimics the arbitrary selection criteria and hyper-selectivity of western dating apps. (Ragab & Saad, 2022)
The manosphere is best understood not as a single movement but as an ecosystem unified by reaction to changing gender norms, yet fragmented by competing explanations for why men struggle and what, if anything, should be done about it.
A sizeable minority of unmarried men pose a challenge to the peaceful cohesion of any population, and the normalisation of casual relationships, delaying marriage and excluding men contributes towards already declining fertility rates.
Lastly, there are dangers in allowing western discourse, and its warped view of sexual politics, to contaminate how Muslims see the opposite sex or shape relationship norms between the sexes. Islamic marriage works, and does not regard spouses as adversaries in a power struggle. Husbands and wives have roles defined not by feminism, nor by the manosphere, but by Allah (SWT)
