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minoanmiss How the incels warped my research: Opinion by Daniel Conroy-Beam • 6mo • 5 min read
Feminism has ruined dating for American men. American women are too entitled, they don’t respect their men, and they just don’t understand their role in life. If you want to find a good, traditional woman who will treat you right, you need to go abroad. But don’t bring her home or wokeness will corrupt her, too.
This is the world according to “passport bros,” a viral social media movement that advocates that men give up on American women. The sinister core of the movement is a group calling themselves “incels”, or involuntary celibates, an identity they’ve cultivated in a larger online ecosystem dubbed the “manosphere.” Composed of Reddit groups, TikToks, blogs, podcasts, wikis, and influencers, the manosphere tells men that women’s psychology, empowered by feminism, makes happy relationships impossible. Because of evolution, women will never date a guy like you; even if they do, they’ll eventually leave you for someone better.
Incels have been behind horrific attacks like the Isla Vista killings, when six students were murdered and over a dozen more injured near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, 10 years ago. The perpetrator explained in a book-length manifesto that his motivation for the massacre was frustration with women who didn’t find him attractive and envy of the men they did. This year, a man in Sydney stabbed six women to death in a shopping mall. The attacker’s father suggested his motivations were similar to the Isla Vista killer’s: frustration over his failure with women.
The manosphere claims its worldview is grounded in science, specifically the discipline of evolutionary psychology. That’s my discipline — I am an evolutionary psychologist and associate professor at UC Santa Barbara, the home of evolutionary psychology. In fact, it turns out incels have coopted some of my research to justify their ideology.
I have generally tried to ignore the manosphere. But as an evolutionary psychologist, I’ve found that hard to do. You can hardly read two paragraphs of incel ideology without coming across references to my field.
Louis Bachaud and Sarah Johns recently published a content analysis of manosphere messaging in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences, explaining the ways in which our research gets appropriated by manosphere circles.
For example, incels maintain a wiki page of scientific citations they claim support their worldview — an annotated bibliography of misogyny. In one case, in a sort of Russian nesting doll of misrepresentation, the incel wiki quotes a paper citing a study of mine as demonstrating that women prefer dominant men — which they further twist into the incel notion that women actually prefer violent men as romantic partners.
Reading this entry, I thought, “That’s odd, I don’t remember ever publishing on dominance preferences — do the incels know my work better than I do?” No. I double-checked: That study didn’t even mention dominance preferences.
Curiously overlooked in this whole wiki section on women’s preferences is the fact that kindness is repeatedly found to be among the most desired qualities in large-scale, cross-cultural studies of mate preferences.
This is just one example. Peering into the manosphere has been like walking through a funhouse mirror version of my science. The manosphere view of evolutionary psychology is distorted, filtered, selective, and embellished.
What has made evolutionary psychology so popular with incels?
Evolutionary psychology is the academic subdiscipline of psychology that tries to understand how the human mind works by understanding the problems it evolved to solve. Over the past four decades, evolutionary psychologists have explored the psychology of relationships — including patterns in what people look for in a partner, attitudes towards casual sex and long-term relationships, relationship emotions like love and jealousy, and the connections between hormones and mating psychology. All of these topics are central to incel ideology.
Like any biological approach to behavior, evolutionary psychology has always been controversial. In part, this is owing to some truly bad actors in the field. All it takes is some thoughtless tweets or blog posts for the entire field to earn a reputation as a safe space for provocateurs. This initiates a vicious cycle, where rabble rousers flock to the field, establish academic journals where they publish inflammatory work, get invited to speak on popular manosphere podcasts, and then use the publicity to sell books and garner enough career success to inspire the next generation of charlatans.
This grift cycle produces a small number of loudmouths who end up being the public face of evolutionary psychology. From the inside, I can promise you that most of our research is genuinely boring. But cool as this work is to nerds like myself, the good research doesn’t get you booked on Joe Rogan.
This allows the manosphere to sell its audience a scientific consensus around its ideology that simply does not exist. Its members appropriate and mischaracterize the literature on evolutionary psychology to lend a scientific patina to their hateful, misogynistic, and dangerous ideas.
For instance, incels are obsessed with the “dual mating strategy” hypothesis, a divisive idea that interprets fluctuations in women’s sexual desire as evidence that women have evolved to seek out men with “good genes” at the most fertile point in their menstrual cycle. Incels use this hypothesis to explain, in their eyes, why relationships are doomed: No matter how good a partner you are, women will always be looking to sleep around with someone better.
Part of the problem is that the dual mating strategy hypothesis was indeed a popular idea among evolutionary psychologists until about 2016. After that, it became one of the more prominent epicenters of psychology’s replication crisis, which revealed that large swaths of psychology research were based on unreliable findings. But even before this major setback, the dual mating strategy hypothesis was critiqued by some evolutionary psychologists like my friend and colleague Jim Roney. Nonetheless, Jim’s work gets hardly any play in manosphere circles, and the hypothesis has since morphed into a version quite unlike the one promoted by incels.
At the end of the day, incels attempt to draw from evolutionary theory a power it does not have. Evolution is not destiny. It is a powerful tool for explaining how we came to be who we are today, but it cannot tell us who we should be today or who we can be tomorrow. In fact, we can leverage an understanding of our evolved psychology to create the world we want to live in. The manosphere interprets my science to mean that love is impossible — but a major focus of my lab is helping people form happy, enduring relationships.
I am embarrassed to have ignored the appropriation of my work for so long. My complacency and that of my peers has allowed the manosphere version of our science to fester, grow, and borrow against our field’s credibility to suit its own interests. Because of our negligence, our science has a body count.
So I’m sticking my neck out. And I’d encourage my level-headed colleagues to do the same. The manosphere and our peers who cater to it don’t represent our field. If I could teach the young men flicking through passport bro videos anything about evolutionary psychology, it would be that believing evolution is important for explaining human behavior need not commit you to a regressive worldview. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling ideology, not science.
Daniel Conroy-Beam is an associate professor in the psychological and brain sciences department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Public Voices Fellow at The OpEd Project.
Feminism has ruined dating for American men. American women are too entitled, they don’t respect their men, and they just don’t understand their role in life. If you want to find a good, traditional woman who will treat you right, you need to go abroad. But don’t bring her home or wokeness will corrupt her, too.
This is the world according to “passport bros,” a viral social media movement that advocates that men give up on American women. The sinister core of the movement is a group calling themselves “incels”, or involuntary celibates, an identity they’ve cultivated in a larger online ecosystem dubbed the “manosphere.” Composed of Reddit groups, TikToks, blogs, podcasts, wikis, and influencers, the manosphere tells men that women’s psychology, empowered by feminism, makes happy relationships impossible. Because of evolution, women will never date a guy like you; even if they do, they’ll eventually leave you for someone better.
Incels have been behind horrific attacks like the Isla Vista killings, when six students were murdered and over a dozen more injured near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, 10 years ago. The perpetrator explained in a book-length manifesto that his motivation for the massacre was frustration with women who didn’t find him attractive and envy of the men they did. This year, a man in Sydney stabbed six women to death in a shopping mall. The attacker’s father suggested his motivations were similar to the Isla Vista killer’s: frustration over his failure with women.
The manosphere claims its worldview is grounded in science, specifically the discipline of evolutionary psychology. That’s my discipline — I am an evolutionary psychologist and associate professor at UC Santa Barbara, the home of evolutionary psychology. In fact, it turns out incels have coopted some of my research to justify their ideology.
I have generally tried to ignore the manosphere. But as an evolutionary psychologist, I’ve found that hard to do. You can hardly read two paragraphs of incel ideology without coming across references to my field.
Louis Bachaud and Sarah Johns recently published a content analysis of manosphere messaging in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences, explaining the ways in which our research gets appropriated by manosphere circles.
For example, incels maintain a wiki page of scientific citations they claim support their worldview — an annotated bibliography of misogyny. In one case, in a sort of Russian nesting doll of misrepresentation, the incel wiki quotes a paper citing a study of mine as demonstrating that women prefer dominant men — which they further twist into the incel notion that women actually prefer violent men as romantic partners.
Reading this entry, I thought, “That’s odd, I don’t remember ever publishing on dominance preferences — do the incels know my work better than I do?” No. I double-checked: That study didn’t even mention dominance preferences.
Curiously overlooked in this whole wiki section on women’s preferences is the fact that kindness is repeatedly found to be among the most desired qualities in large-scale, cross-cultural studies of mate preferences.
This is just one example. Peering into the manosphere has been like walking through a funhouse mirror version of my science. The manosphere view of evolutionary psychology is distorted, filtered, selective, and embellished.
What has made evolutionary psychology so popular with incels?
Evolutionary psychology is the academic subdiscipline of psychology that tries to understand how the human mind works by understanding the problems it evolved to solve. Over the past four decades, evolutionary psychologists have explored the psychology of relationships — including patterns in what people look for in a partner, attitudes towards casual sex and long-term relationships, relationship emotions like love and jealousy, and the connections between hormones and mating psychology. All of these topics are central to incel ideology.
Like any biological approach to behavior, evolutionary psychology has always been controversial. In part, this is owing to some truly bad actors in the field. All it takes is some thoughtless tweets or blog posts for the entire field to earn a reputation as a safe space for provocateurs. This initiates a vicious cycle, where rabble rousers flock to the field, establish academic journals where they publish inflammatory work, get invited to speak on popular manosphere podcasts, and then use the publicity to sell books and garner enough career success to inspire the next generation of charlatans.
This grift cycle produces a small number of loudmouths who end up being the public face of evolutionary psychology. From the inside, I can promise you that most of our research is genuinely boring. But cool as this work is to nerds like myself, the good research doesn’t get you booked on Joe Rogan.
This allows the manosphere to sell its audience a scientific consensus around its ideology that simply does not exist. Its members appropriate and mischaracterize the literature on evolutionary psychology to lend a scientific patina to their hateful, misogynistic, and dangerous ideas.
For instance, incels are obsessed with the “dual mating strategy” hypothesis, a divisive idea that interprets fluctuations in women’s sexual desire as evidence that women have evolved to seek out men with “good genes” at the most fertile point in their menstrual cycle. Incels use this hypothesis to explain, in their eyes, why relationships are doomed: No matter how good a partner you are, women will always be looking to sleep around with someone better.
Part of the problem is that the dual mating strategy hypothesis was indeed a popular idea among evolutionary psychologists until about 2016. After that, it became one of the more prominent epicenters of psychology’s replication crisis, which revealed that large swaths of psychology research were based on unreliable findings. But even before this major setback, the dual mating strategy hypothesis was critiqued by some evolutionary psychologists like my friend and colleague Jim Roney. Nonetheless, Jim’s work gets hardly any play in manosphere circles, and the hypothesis has since morphed into a version quite unlike the one promoted by incels.
At the end of the day, incels attempt to draw from evolutionary theory a power it does not have. Evolution is not destiny. It is a powerful tool for explaining how we came to be who we are today, but it cannot tell us who we should be today or who we can be tomorrow. In fact, we can leverage an understanding of our evolved psychology to create the world we want to live in. The manosphere interprets my science to mean that love is impossible — but a major focus of my lab is helping people form happy, enduring relationships.
I am embarrassed to have ignored the appropriation of my work for so long. My complacency and that of my peers has allowed the manosphere version of our science to fester, grow, and borrow against our field’s credibility to suit its own interests. Because of our negligence, our science has a body count.
So I’m sticking my neck out. And I’d encourage my level-headed colleagues to do the same. The manosphere and our peers who cater to it don’t represent our field. If I could teach the young men flicking through passport bro videos anything about evolutionary psychology, it would be that believing evolution is important for explaining human behavior need not commit you to a regressive worldview. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling ideology, not science.
Daniel Conroy-Beam is an associate professor in the psychological and brain sciences department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Public Voices Fellow at The OpEd Project.
no subject
Date: 2024-11-25 07:18 pm (UTC)And when Leslie Fish's Goddess of Love tells Jack the slob to change his underwear and comb his hair if he wants to get laid, he says "I want a woman to take me as I am" - and Venus does so.
And nobody spared a tear for female incels - girls who never got asked for a date, because we weren't pretty enough or capable of pretending to be "modest", "feminine", or'"dumb", or "obedient. "Just lose 25 pounds, get a different hairdo, wear prettier clothes, and don't talk too much."
no subject
Date: 2024-11-26 01:25 am (UTC)“I wrote this as a jolly warning to lazy louts; be careful what you pray for, especially to the Goddess of Love – she just might grant your wish. No, it wasn’t inspired by any one person, though plenty of women have sworn they know guys like this. “—Leslie Fish.
Warning for Black Comedy Rape:
https://lesliefish.bandcamp.com/track/jack-the-slob-and-the-goddess-of-love
no subject
Date: 2024-11-26 04:17 am (UTC)Ahahahahahahah I remember singing this song with the other filkers, in the Time Before.
no subject
Date: 2024-11-26 04:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-25 09:26 pm (UTC)Ugh. May his public correction of their entire pseudoscience make any kind of dent.
no subject
Date: 2024-11-25 09:38 pm (UTC)More seriously, if anyone somehow needs more info or more detailed info behind this asinine foolishness, Dave Futrelle has mostly cut back on his work but I think there's still occasional posts and still archives up at his site https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/ which has been tracking the incel/MRA/Pick-Up-Artist bullshit for a bunch of years.
no subject
Date: 2024-11-26 02:03 am (UTC)"Curiously overlooked in this whole wiki section on women’s preferences is the fact that kindness is repeatedly found to be among the most desired qualities in large-scale, cross-cultural studies of mate preferences."
OMG everyone should be shouting this from the rooftops. The reason incels are involuntarily celibate is because they're ASSHOLES. They just refuse to accept responsibility and blame everyone else for their assholery.
no subject
Date: 2024-11-27 02:51 am (UTC)