Why do almost all 'incels' blame their situation on looks?

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I was agreeing with you being choosy.

Under social circumstances then prevailing, heterosexual men's looks really did not matter a whole lot. This wasn't a "false narrative." (On the other hand, what did matter a whole lot, for a man, was his earnings potential.)

What changed once can change again -- though hopefully via some means other than a return to the rigid gender roles of man as breadwinner, woman as sex object. Hopefully we can just move away from today's mass mutual slave market mentality via a return to a sense of human-scale community, via stronger identification with the subculture(s) of one's choice. I don't think we'll ever have a world where looks don't matter at all, but I do think it's possible to attain a world where looks matter a lot less than they do now.

Agreed. We are both from this generation, and it might be hard for somebody that is not to see that it really worked like that. When I was young, most men didn't care much about their looks and didn't use anything to improve on them.



Agreed. Although, these are things NTs adapt, and the natural state for NDs is not the old rigid gender roles, and I don't think I bought the rigid gender roles of that time as young, and I still don't think they are any good. I don't think judging people on looks is better either.

What I did value was being hard-working & persistent, for both genders. That was valued back then but now it is all about social position & attention-seeking.

Looks are deal breaker for most along with some other things.

Have you not seen photos of the 70s. The playing field was levelled. Everyone looked bad. Both the men and the women had long Frizzy hair

But that was the fashion back then. So they didn’t look bad.
They’d think we look bad with our fashion.
1930s guys dressed in full dress suits with coats and hats, that was the fashion back then.

Incels focus on looks because it's by far the most important factor when it comes to dating and relationships. People can cherry pick all they want, and point to the 3-4 exceptions they know of, but the science is pretty clear on this. Denying this is disingenuous, and leads to bad and misleading advice.

This also applies to this forum. Fact is, if the lonely guys on this forum had let's say 9/10 looks, they would have absolutely no problem finding a parter, regardless of "bad attitudes", poor jobs, depression or autism.

Some caveat to that - with 9/10 looks they could still be blocked out by atypical body language or personalities that don't fit the demands of social conformity or don't match 1:1 to the archetype of what their looks suggest that their personality should be. Those two are in close competition for show-stopping power along with poor looks.

In my estimation they could still easily get maybe a 5 to a 7 for a long term relationship with the looks alone. I don't necessarily disagree with you, but looks, even in isolation, will give benefits other factors don't.

I hate to disagree but I've seen too much evidence that 'failure to socially conform' is as big a problem as looks.

I happen to think that long frizzy hair looks good.

People, at least in a romantic context, are generally more forgiving of flaws and quirks if they find themselves immensely physically attracted to someone. It would depend how bad the flaws and quirks are, but in general I don't think they'd be bad enough to exclude a 9/10 from the dating market. I agree with Closet Genius that ordinarily, if they can't get another 9, they'd certainly be able to get at least a 5.

Could you give examples of how a 9/10 could 'fail to socially conform' and as a result have an extremely limited prospective dating pool?

Yes, so...

1) They could say things too often that people haven't heard before.

2) They could be interested in things that no one else is interested in.

3) They could have a knack for, when in a conversation, even if what they're saying is technically topic-related its pulling in a different direction than everyone else would think to take the topic in, and if they're fundamentally different they'd do that constantly which is an effect that would accrue against them.

4) If they don't have high social standing women would see signs of that in either their confidence or how other guys treat them, a guy without social standing is something like a 1 or 2/10 with or without looks.

5) If a guy has had life experiences that force him to act differently from the fundamental flow of his nervous system, like people perpetually misunderstanding him and getting lopsidedly negative or positive reactions which are nothing like other people would get for the same behavior that guy is likely to manually take the nuances of his behavior, both inward and outward, under his own conscious control. When people see a person not 'acting' as natural as if they were exerting no self-control at all they tend to assume the worst - ie. that this person's a sociopath trying to hold up an act, that this person is up to something, that this person is something other than what they're presenting themselves to be and that they have bad intentions. The trouble is - people are absolutely terrible, practically murderous, to anyone who doesn't fit their internal reference sheet of what a given person looks like and how they're supposed to behave, who they're supposed to be, etc. based on their looks.


My own experience with this - in my childhood and even teen years I learned that my place was 'kneel down and lick our boots forever'. My intelligence had no place, who I was as a moral agent had no place, and so I took myself into my own hands and tried to discipline who I really was at my core through my nervous system and out into the outer world. My goal was really to look at other people who were able to surface the traits that I had in me and wanted to show them to the world - and who people were buying into these good qualities - had a certain way of packaging and presenting them, and I tried to take on those qualities.

The hard thing I learned - if you're self-made in that way you'll get even worse responses from people. If people wanted you lick their boots and you ended up getting good at all kinds of verbal and rhetorical self-defense, if you got sharp, if you're on point, if what they see and what they want to get aren't in line with what they get - the result is ignoring, disconfirming, ie. they try their best quite often to shut you out of life.

That seemed to marginally get better as I got into my later 20's but in my early 20's it was hell. Even in my late twenties and early 30's though I'd run into enough problems. I hear often that I'm probably an 8/10, so not a 9, but I can honestly say that my experience through highschool, and even worse in my early to mid 20's, was girls constantly - like a new one every month or even a couple every month, flirting with me, I'd try talking to them, and over the course of a week or two they'd go from interested to really sour or resentful. It went on for so long that I started feeling sick the moment anyone would flirt with me.

The above problem could have been that I was listening to my own inner telos, ie. I cared about dating someone who was like me or like me enough where we enjoyed each other's company, and to these girls I think that was a completely crazy paradigm - ie. something like I was supposed to want them because they looked good and if we had nothing in common or could only hold a conversation so well so what? I'm a guy and girl is a girl is a girl right....? Having been an outcast back in gradeschool, a very high self-monitor because of my PDD-NOS, and knowing full well that I was both in a lot of ways deeper (which got me in constant trouble) and very into a lot of 'weird' and sort of mystic things like being a huge metalhead by 5th grade, wanting to be a world-class drum n bass producer by the time I was 19 or 20, these things didn't conform to local flavor and - as far as I can tell - conformity is God to most people. To that kind of guy - no, a girl, no matter how good she looks, is just someone that he either may feel safe with or may not, may be able to relate to or may not, none of them were like me and apparently they didn't like not making progress.

I guess maybe that points out a different kind of problem? A guy could be a 9 and be rejected on being different partly because he's holding people at a distance to make sure they fit his life rather than letting them run the table on him but, when I really think about that, someone with that much self-control and self-aware orientation would also completely and utterly fail at having a one-night stand with most people. It seems like, at least in the places where I've been, the girls were really crass and shallow and if the guy wasn't with her every step of the way for the whole night things would turn on a dime to 'Oops, I made a mistake - you're a loser, get the ---- out'.


Sorry if that was a really long post but there was a lot to unpack.

One of the thing I've really liked about Monday FA Monday's channel is he touches on these really bizarre outlier places guys can find themselves in, like a lot of guys who are conventionally attractive but can never find dates being held out of dating - almost permanently if not permanently - for things of equal absurdity to 'he picks up a fork with his left hand' and everyone around that guy will fail to point out to him what's going wrong, which then raises the question - would they did see it?

My own theory is that a lot of this seems to be a cultural metaphysics of narcissism where a large percentage of people, especially all the kids back and school who set the bar for what 'cool' was, were playing an inside-baseball game which was meant to level their competition, that the whole idea of so much of what they did was to make their social games impervious to reason, and if anyone showed up who could say the emperor has no clothes they'd take them out deep into astroturf to drown them, tribal-gaslight the f out of them, prove to them that reality can't save them, and essentially ruin that person by just how well they could bend social reality to their will. I notice a lot of guys like Monday are very sincere, honest, straight-laced, even if their fine on the social skills and guile front you can tell they're integrity-first, and I think there's another issue where they have a knack for triggering narcissists which ends up with them getting thrown into some sort of social out group or what Monday calls social ghettos - ie. places where the social group you're in is almost exclusively guys, where everyone is socially clueless, and where your social skillsets and prospects end up decaying. His emphasis seems to be less on autism and more on abuse, ie. that if a kid's self-esteem is wrecked by their parents similar kinds of things can happen. I don't know because I have the opposite situation - my parents were lovely and it was almost everyone else who made my childhood and young adulthood hell.

I don't know if the world's always been like this and if it's just something people never talked about but it seems like the social caste system amounts to how good people are at rimming narcissists and other people with dark triad traits. That's probably yet another reason why so few people - especially financially successful people - seem to have much in the way of basic integrity, they can hardly afford it.

And you think this was good?

Women end up in all girls social ghettos too. Sometimes bitter ones join and make it a men not allowed in at all group and only ever organise girls only activities. I'm the only one who organises anything for mixed groups which one of my friends finds very amusing and keeps bringing up.

It's difficult to claw your way out and find some male company.