Is it simply: involuntarily celibate, or does it come with a package?
To me, “incel” has always meant someone who’s simply just celibate against their will, but it feels like the term now also implies a specific worldview or even a subculture. Does identifying as an incel automatically come with those negative beliefs around gender and society, or should those two have separate terms? Has the definition changed?"
I’m just here thinking, someone is asking a small group of people what they believe to be the definition of a word rather than use the vast wealth of knowledge published by experts in their field on these here internets.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/articles-heterodoxy/202208/inside-the-minds-the-incels
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-024-06236-6
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/10/new-paper-explores-the-rise-of-incels/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9780135/
Wiki: A portmanteau of “involuntary celibate”. A term associated with an online subculture of people (mostly white, male, and heterosexual who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one, and blame, objectify and denigrate women and girls as a result. The movement is strongly linked to misogyny. Originally coined as “invcel” around 1997 by a queer Canadian female student known as Alana, the spelling had shifted to “incel” by 1999, and the term later rose to prominence in the 2010s, following the influence of misogynistic terrorists Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian.