Mona Pereth wrote:
kraftiekortie wrote:
The “Incel” thing started with Elliot Rodger, for all intents and purposes.
No, it started much earlier. Elliot Rodger just gave it some mass media notoriety.
It actually started with PUA. PUA has its roots in late 1980's in printed books, but it remained very obscure until early 2000's, when the internet went mainstream. (I own a PUA book that's copyrighted 1989.) Unlike today's Red Pill, which is 100% free, online PUA writers charged people for their e-books, although there was also enough free stuff out there to get by. The biggest problem with PUA e-books was their high noise-to-signal ratio. That is, a subset of each book was very helpful, but the rest was fluff at best and damaging at worst. The onus was on the reader to sort out trash from treasure. No such skill is needed with Red Pill sites today. They don't even focus so much on what to do, but rather on how women think, and are mostly user-contributed content, with no centralized publications.
Red Pill and Incel developed from PUA, partially as a reaction to its flaws and partially to address those flaws. When the incels (lowercase) read the PUA e-books without critical thinking and tried out the tactics, it backfired on them. So they reacted. Some by trying to figure out how women actually think, which led to Red Pill, and others by overtly hating women, which led to Incel (uppercase).