No, incels, women are not “too shallow”

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When we were in high school, one of my friends got a lot of male attention. Nothing in this post is going to make me look good, so let’s just pull off this Band-Aid. I was very jealous. I was also very genuinely confused. I was prettier. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Then again, people across cultures find traits such as facial symmetry, large eyes and lips, and clear skin attractive.

Why did nearly all men so clearly prefer her to me?

I’m remembering this because someone is wrong on the internet and I cannot let it go. I should. But I can’t. So here we are. (This is the sentiment behind most Sex and the State posts, and possibly the entire project, if we’re being real.)

Make sure you’re sitting down when you learn who is wrong, my sweet, sweet babies.

There’s this thing called an “incel.” It’s shorthand for a person who self-describes as being “involuntary celebate.” Yes, in the internet age people identify around their inability to get laid without having to directly pay for it.

My thinking on incels hasn’t changed much since March 2023.

Still single at the time, I wrote:

I don’t think “incels” exist. For every person, there is a person who would have sex with them. When people say they’re an incel, I think they’re saying that who they want and who wants them hasn’t lined up yet. Or, as I like to put it, especially in the case of self-described incels and myself, their/our standards exceed their/our market value.

Then again, do we choose who we do and don’t find attractive? I didn’t consciously decide to only desire people with extremely avoidant attachment styles between 2017 and 2021. I wasn’t even aware until a few years into therapy.

The blame in incels’ (lack of) game, however, is not the point of today’s post. Today, I want to tell you why another fundamental, animating incel belief is absolutely wrong.

This contention is just so obviously insane that, for a long time, it just didn’t seem worth addressing. But then I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Okay, I told myself. Let’s just see how long it takes me to find an academic study or two to back me up. The answer: About 30 seconds. I’d also forgotten about this tweet.

Incels claim that women, writ large, only care about looks when deciding with whomst we’re going to have the sex.

(Redpill/blackpill/manosphere/MRA/MGTOW/PUA communities also seem to believe this lie.)

I honestly have some trouble accepting that anyone actually believes this. But then I heard it again in Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity by Ruth Whippman (ongoing review thread here).

So I guess it really does need saying. There is no one alive who is involuntarily celibate because women are too shallow.

Anecdotally, I can tell you that most women do not really care about looks.

But no self-respecting incel (do I contradict myself?) thinks I’m credible on how to have sex with women. “The entire [red pill] philosophy says that you shouldn’t ask a fish how to be caught, you should ask the fisherman,”

Cartoons Hate Her

helpfully wrote recently.

Okay, fine. Perhaps consider the research demonstrating that women are, on average, less interested in a potential partner’s looks than men. Women tend to value status far more than looks. For men it’s the opposite.

To be fair, some evidence indicates that women care more about looks when choosing a “short-term” partner. But that’s “more” than when she’s looking for a long-term partner. In no scenario is the average woman as shallow as the average man.

So it is true that short and ugly men tend to have a harder time finding a woman who will have casual sex without getting paid than a tall, handsome man will. But having casual sex is hard for most straight men because most women don’t have casual sex with anyone. Hookup culture is a myth. Of course outliers exist. Roughly 10% of the population is slutty as all hell (you rang?). But the average person has like four partners their entire lives. A huge percentage of women have one or two.

So this belief that women are too shallow to have sex with ugly men is completely disconnected from reality no matter how you slice it.

You know what kind of man has the most sex of all? A married one.

Men who want sex would get a lot further, a lot faster, by finding a wife.

Can’t find one? Stop “looksmaxxing,” first of all.

To the extent that women do care, we can fix most of what’s wrong with clothing and basic grooming. Marrying a woman mostly requires getting off the internet and actually talking to, and perhaps even listening to, real living breathing single women.

Now, many grown men hold all kinds of obviously and clearly very stupid and also unambiguously, empirically false beliefs.

I suspect this one has stuck in my craw because it’s such a perfect example of how masculinity fundamentally emotionally disables so many men.

(In this and nearly all cases I am using the term “masculinity” to describe a norm, not a mere collection of traits. Read more about this in The New York Times is lowkey anti-gender and Abolishing gender is not transphobic!)

Like a bound foot can’t grow properly, a man’s brain can’t fully develop while poisoned by masculinity. This leaves men vulnerable to believing all kinds of insane things.

For example, the incel brain clearly lacks theory of mind.

The truth is that, at least when compared to women, it’s men who are shallow. It’s women who benefit most from looksmaxxing.

Incels, unfortunately, seem to be incapable of conceiving of a brain that works differently than theirs. This gives them no other option than to project their own desires and priorities onto everyone else, including women. When women tell the truth about what we want, incels accuse us of lying because they are lying to themselves about their own vapidity.

This is incredibly stupid for many reasons. I guess what really galls me is that there really are many hard truths out there. The Genetic Lottery, for example, is real. Some people really are born way uglier, dumber, lazier, and meaner than the average person. That’s depressing as shit.

The “intellectual” backbone of “blackpill” ideology is that this fact, combined with women’s super high looks requirements, means ugly men will never receive the sex, love, and connection they crave, no matter what they do.

Guess what, shitbirds? Ugly, dumb, lazy, mean people GET LAID EVERY DAY. You know what separates them from the people who don’t? They LEAVE THEIR PARENTS’ BASEMENTS. Now, many of us might prefer they didn’t. But at least they aren’t self-pitying whiners or mass shooters.

It’s just such a waste to believe a situation is hopeless based on an idea that is clearly, demonstrably, and empirically batshit. If you’re going to give up, “take the black pill,” and spend all day and night online reading stuff, couldn’t you read a few academic papers on what women actually look for in a romantic partner?

There are good reasons to refuse to shower or leave your house. “Women are too shallow” ain’t among them.

I guess another reason it galls me is that I, too, spent too many years overestimating the importance of my looks.

One day, as I watched my high school friend throw her head back and laugh at something that wasn’t very funny, something suddenly clicked.

Men seem to like it when you’re nice to them.

This girl got a lot more attention from men than I did at least in part because she gave them a lot of positive attention and I gave them zero.

Men thinking women are too shallow is even dumber than me thinking men are too shallow because I have the excuse of being told (correctly, as it turns out) that men are more shallow than women. I just wish I’d known sooner that men vary a lot in this regard. It would also have helped to realize sooner that I’m actually fairly hot and most of the neutral or negative reactions I get from men are about my everything else. This would have been helpful because improving my personality turned out to be much cheaper than makeup, hair extensions, plastic surgery, or cosmetic dentistry.

I wish I could say everything changed that day. But I still spent too many years worrying too much about being too ugly and not enough about being too damn weird.

Another reason it’s even dumber for men than women to be overly concerned about looks is that it’s even harder for men to get hotter. I could’ve tacked on boobs for a lot less money, time, and pain than leg extension surgery. I could get hair extensions for $600. I don't even know how much hair implants run.

It just feels like in the year 2025, with solid research on what men and women care about when choosing a partner literally at everyone’s fingertips, it’s even more stupid to waste time and energy worrying about something that’s really hard to change and doesn’t actually matter that much. Especially when you could, as I did, improve what actually matters far more easily.

We’d just graduated high school when I had that realization about my friend. That was the summer I first met Rob. We met maybe one more time when I was back in town the next summer, and then had zero contact for 15 or so years. In that time I learned how to be far more charming. But Rob isn’t with me because I can make eye contact and ask open-ended questions. He was excited when I DMed him out of the blue, and I DMed him out of the blue, because we were actually attracted to each other’s weirdness.

Our relationship works because we both had a lot of therapy in the meantime. We have put effort into developing more secure attachments.

As someone who spent years being hot and feeling lonely because I was only attracted to people who weren’t that into me, being an “incel” just seems a lot less like an ugly-people problem and much more like a hallmark of an insecure attachment style.

I’d recommend therapy to incels, except that, once again, masculinity is going to prevent the male ones from being full humans and doing what’s required to experience social connection. What a (not) fucking waste.