Blissful Beginnings: Elliot Rodger’s Sexual Awakening

“Viewed externally, Hamlet’s death may be seen to have been brought about accidentally… but in Hamlet’s soul, we understand that death has lurked from the beginning: the sandbank of finitude cannot suffice his sorrow and tenderness, such grief and nausea at all conditions of life… we feel he is a man whom inner disgust has almost consumed well before death comes upon him from outside.”

Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik

This is the story of how I, Elliot Rodger, came to be. This is the story of my entire life. It is a dark story of sadness, anger, and hatred. It is a story of a war against cruel injustice. In this magnificent story, I will disclose every single detail about my life, every single significant experience that I have pulled from my superior memory, as well as how those experiences have shaped my views of the world. This tragedy did not have to happen. I didn’t want things to turn out this way, but humanity forced my hand, and this story will explain why. My life didn’t start out dark and twisted. I started out as a happy and blissful child, living my life to the fullest in a world I thought was good and pure…

Elliot Rodger, My Twisted World

What makes an incel? Is an incel born or made? Or a bit of both? To understand the incels as a whole we should start in medias res—with Elliot Rodger’s crime—working our way from the particular to the universal, from the single case to the community. But to understand Elliot Rodger, we start where his novelistic narrative starts, at the “blissful” beginning.

My Twisted World is not a manifesto, it is a bildungsroman. It is a novel that tells the story of one’s formative years or spiritual education, a coming-of-age story. It’s the story of how Elliot Rodger came to be an incel. Only at the very end, in the final pages where he lays out his plan to kill people, is there some semblance of a misogynist “political program”—and even then it is only a vague, fantastical outline. That it’s called a manifesto is only a reflection of the surface, the crime itself, the final act. The Unabomber’s Industrial Society and Its Consequences, another text adored by yet another overlapping internet community, is a manifesto: its object is a critique of the industrial revolution and technology, its aim is for a return to wild nature. My Twisted World does no such thing. Elliot Rodger is more interested in telling us how he became who he was.

The text is a bildungsroman with a tragic structure. What he learns—what makes him an incel, what constitutes his moral development—is also what kills him. It is his tragic flaw. And it is apparent from his early childhood.

Elliot Rodger describes his early life as “blissful” because it precedes his awareness of sex’s “cruel hierarchy.” His narrative starts from his earliest memories with incredible detail, but always foreshadows the misery to come. Childhood is a bucolic utopia where the things that he wants are readily available, offering themselves to him. His parents give him the presents he wants. They go on exotic vacations. Boys and girls are equal. Everyone plays together, and everything is fulfilling.

The young Elliot Rodger interacts with things in their immediacy. The world itself unfolds as a gift to him. He “acquires” things—the same term he uses in reference to girls. We aren’t at the absolute existential terror of sex yet—but it’s coming, he tells us.

Gradually, the harsh truth of growing up becomes apparent. In time, he starts to realize that some kids are “cooler” than others. They seem to have this thing about them that gets the attention and respect of others, but he can’t quite identify it. With his “superior memory” he remembers so many minute details about his early life, things that others would have surely long since forgotten. He remembers the cacti around the house when he went to Spain at age three. He remembers what kind of birthday cake he had at every birthday party and the names of everyone else who attended. Of his interactions with others, we hear names of children he plays with. But other than the ominous warning that particular children would later grow up to be “everything he hates,” we learn almost nothing more about them. They are just names. But the social reality behind the names, the truth of the other people, he never learned in the first place. Perhaps that truth contains the secret to being cool?

We read how he tries to make sense of this concept of “coolness.” Skaters are the cool kids, so he asks his parents to give him a skateboard. They do that, and so he has something do to with the other kids. The skateboard is the object through which he plays with the cool kids, the same cool kids he says would later cause him endless torment and suffering. The same goes for Pokémon cards and computer games at the local cyber café. And it works for a little while.

But objects do not retain their allure forever. Eventually he gets tired of skateboarding and Pokémon cards. The other kids get gaming computers of their own, so there’s no reason to go to “Planet Cyber” with him anymore. He abandons the fixations on the particular objects, but never acquires whatever it is he’s supposed to get next. Once he no longer possesses those objects that he shares in common with others, nobody has any reason to hang out with him at all.

But the impenetrable hierarchy of coolness in prepubescent children is just a prelude to the hierarchy that emerges with puberty. The hierarchy of sex that plays out in an oedipal drama.

He introduces his family ominously. His father is first mentioned with clinical, veterinary coldness. “My father, Peter Rodger, was only 26 when he impregnated my mother.” Peter is “of British descent, hailing from the prestigious Rodger family; a family that was once part of the wealthy upper classes before they lost all of their fortune during the Great Depression. My father’s father, George Rodger, was a renowned photojournalist who had taken very famous photographs during the Second World War, though he failed to reacquire the family’s lost fortune.” Elliot is born deprived of his ancestral inheritance. His family possessed something, once upon a time, something that his ancestors enjoyed but is lost to him.

Both Elliot’s father and grandfather are photographers. The family profession is one of creating titillating images. Left unmentioned by Elliot is what specific “very famous photographs” George Rodger had taken in the Second World War—scenes of mass death at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. George Rodger swore off working as a war correspondent ever again after realizing that, in documenting the carnage of the camp, he had spent most of the time looking for graphically pleasing compositions of the piles of bodies lying among the trees and buildings. Nothing repressed stays repressed forever: the brutal reality of these images will reoccur in the violent fantasies at the end of Elliot Rodger’s text. Peter Rodger’s photography and filmmaking career took a different trajectory, bringing the family to Hollywood, where they would schmooze with the entertainment industry elite.

Elliot himself is “an accident.” His mother, “of Chinese descent” (but born in Malaysia), got sick while working as a nurse on one of his father’s film sets and the medication she took for her illness cancelled the effect of birth control pills—“their lovemaking during this period resulted in my life.”

Against the backdrop of a great aristocratic family’s epic decline he describes the whimsies of his infancy. He was born in London but moved out to the countryside. A pastoral life in a red brick house in Sussex, with fields of grass. “The Old Rectory.” They vacation in France. His mother leaves her job as a nurse to care for him. His grandma moves in to help. He calls her “Ah Mah” and they take walks in the fields picking berries. “She would always warn me not to touch the stinging nettles that sometimes grew in our fields, but my curiosity got the better of me, and I got stung a few times.” He remembers his third birthday party and the helicopter cake and the tantrum he throws when he doesn’t get the first piece. They vacation in Malaysia to visit his mother’s family. They vacation in Spain. He goes to pre-school and gets lost during a field trip to a park. The pre-school is strict and makes him wear a uniform. He plays with George and David in the sandpit. He rides a toy tractor and runs through fields. They vacation in Greece. The hot Mediterranean climate is not like the England he’s used to. In Greece his father learns of his grandfather’s death. It is his 4th birthday and the first time he sees his father cry.

Soon they’re off to America. Father buys a new house in LA. It has a pool, which makes Elliot happy. But father passes up the opportunity to buy the “Old Rectory,” which they had only been renting. It’s a decision he would later regret, as “it would have been a fine investment”—one of many instances Elliot feels his father squanders his wealth or passes up financial opportunity. His father always appears as a provider, both financially and romantically, but it always appears to Elliot that there is never anything left over for him.

So the Rodger family moves to Los Angeles. We hear more names: of children, of schools, of parks, of toys. His memory is a cascade of mundane details. He gives us a map of his world: Topanga Valley, Calabasas, West Hills. On the other side of the mountains is Malibu, Santa Monica, the ocean. Valley View Drive. Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Dumetz Road. Ventura Boulevard. Frequent moves—both in residence and in school—make his attachment to the specific places fleeting. This sense of rootlessness only intensifies further when his parents get a divorce.

Elliot Rodger is, of course, not alone. People travel from all over the world to have their dreams broken here. Southern California: sun, warmth, dry Mediterranean air. A desert, essentially, buried under suburban sprawl as far as the eye can see, sustained by water stolen from the faraway Colorado River, all concealing the fundamental inhumanity of the terrain itself. A sprawl inhabited by people equally superficial and lost. An industry town and its industry is beauty. Equal parts paradise and hell. We could imagine Elliot Rodger inhabiting the uncanny fever dream of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.

Divorces are traumatic for children, and Elliot Rodger was no exception. The stability of the nuclear family is broken, and Elliot has his first lesson in the art of love:

After only a couple of months since my seventh birthday, a new and very important person would come into my life. After father picked us up from school one day and took us to his house, I saw a woman with dark hair and fair skin standing in the kitchen, and she introduced herself as Soumaya. She would become my stepmother. Father told me she would be living with us from now on. At first I thought she was just another friend who was temporarily staying with father, similar to what Uncle Dan was doing. My father having a girlfriend so shortly after divorcing my mother didn’t even occur to me. I couldn’t understand it. Soon enough, though, I realized that Soumaya was, in fact, his “girlfriend”, and they were together just like how my father and mother were together. It was the first time I learned the concept of a “girlfriend”, and it was hard to grasp. Before that, I always thought a man and a woman had to be married before living together in such a manner, and that it would take a long time for such a union to happen. Father finding a new girlfriend in such a short amount of time baffled me. I was completely taken aback.

Because of my father’s acquisition of a new girlfriend, my little mind got the impression that my father was a man that women found attractive, as he was able to find a new girlfriend in such a short period of time from divorcing my mother. I subconsciously held him in higher regard because of this. It is very interesting how this phenomenon works… that males who can easily find female mates garner more respect from their fellow men, even children. How ironic is it that my father, one of those men who could easily find a girlfriend, has a son who would struggle all his life to find a girlfriend.

Elliot’s father has what it takes to effortlessly “acquire” women. The term governs his relations to things and people.

To “acquire.” The Latinate word sticks out wherever it appears. It suggests a certain passivity—as opposed to the forceful “seize” or the simple Anglo-Saxon “get.” To acquire is to be given something, something formal enough to be legally-recognized property. Grandfather “failed to reacquire the family’s lost fortune.” Acquisition suggests a diplomatic manner that conceals the naked brutality of a conquest—acquisitions are the spoils of war, the agreements worked out between parties in the negotiations of a peace treaty. Applied to all objects and contexts, it reveals an awkward disjunction of meaning.

“I went to James’s house soon after I acquired my new hair color, and the look of surprise on his face when he saw me gave me a good laugh.”

“The only pets I’ve had previously were my turtle and iguana, who both died within a year of acquiring them.”

“The upside of moving to the apartment was that my mother acquired high speed internet.”

“James Ellis also acquired Xbox Live with Halo 2.”

“I acquired a very nice piece of armor for my character.”

Elliot’s use of the word expands to mean a more abstract object of desire, barely concealing an aggressive desperation under its stately aura as his romantic situation grows ever more dire:

“I had absolutely no idea or plan of how to acquire any sort of power.”

“I imagined buying a beautiful, opulent mansion with an extravagant view, and acquiring a collection of supercars which I would use specifically to attract beautiful girls into my life.”

“I had no talents, so it was impossible for me to become a professional actor, musician, or athlete; and those were usually the ways that young people acquired such money.”

Like the parapraxis in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, finding a new girl is for Peter Rodger a matter of “mergers and acquisitions”—for Elliot it is one of “murders and acquisitions.” Elliot’s resemblance to Ellis is uncanny. Both are rich, spoiled brats raised in the San Fernando Valley, both experienced “idyllic” California childhoods torn apart by divorce, both describe their cartoonishly materialistic enjoyment with an affectless nihilism. Both are writers. But whereas Ellis succeeds in sublimating his own “incel” tendencies into art that is recognized as such, Elliot is so concerned with the immediate payoff of writing a blockbuster “epic fantasy” novel for the literal, sole sake of getting rich and attracting women, that the genuine sublimation of his anxieties—realizing oneself in art—can never get off the ground.

Pondering the question of how his father “acquires” women is something that would take up his entire life. His mother could be discarded, and a new mother, one that he would quickly come to hate, acquired. Ex girl to the next girl.

Elliot’s father is Jupiterian. He is conspicuously absent but has total sovereignty from distant Olympus. Elliot writes of his father’s career taking off: “the only downside of this was my fathers’ absence from my life. In spite of this, I always looked up to him as a powerful and successful man.” Unlike Elliot, his father has an art form that does seemingly enable him to realize himself: he goes away to do his work for long periods of time, and when he is present, he oozes sexual power. His true form is manifest at a dinner party. With a wink and a lax nod between conversations with grown-ups, against the arid Mediterranean backdrop of the Santa Monica Mountains, father, the giver-of-laws, allows Elliot a taste of the ecstasy of Bacchus.

“I celebrated my birthday again at father’s house on the night we returned to America. I was allowed to have my very first glass of beer for this celebration. I always thought of alcoholic drinks, such as beer and wine, as mysterious drinks that were forbidden to children like myself. Father would let me have only a small sip of wine from time to time. Having my first glass of beer felt like a big honor.”

Mother, by contrast, is tender and loving:

Despite father’s move to a much larger house and all the benefits that came with it, I still preferred my time at mother’s house, just because of her gentle and fun attitude and the energy of her household. My mother indulged in me more than my father and Soumaya ever did. She knew what I liked and what I didn’t like, and she would go out of her way to make my life pleasant and enjoyable.

Whereas father is the powerful white man Elliot wants to be, the man that has whatever it takes to get the adoration of women, Elliot is stuck with the “effeminate” Asian characteristics of his mother.

“This revelation about the world, and about myself, really decreased my self-esteem. On top of this was the feeling that I was different because I am of mixed race. I am half White, half Asian, and this made me different from the normal fully-white kids that I was trying to fit in with.”

Mother doesn’t have the secret to unlocking the secret world of sexual delight contained within objects—rather, she is the sexual object. His mother’s value is acknowledged in the men she dated: celebrities like George Lucas. But even with access to the glamor of Hollywood, his mother just doesn’t have the same effect:

Finally having something to brag about, I told everyone at school the next day that I went to the [Star Wars] premiere because my mother is friends with George Lucas. The problem was that most Eighth Graders thought of Star Wars as being a “nerdy” interest, and they didn’t really care. I was left frustrated and disappointed by their reaction.

Elliot perceives his mother as poor and is ashamed:

“My father cut off a portion of the child support he had been paying my mother, which forced my mother to move house. We moved to a small blue house on Glade Avenue in Canoga Park. I didn’t like Canoga Park at all. It was a very ugly and low-class area to the north or Woodland Hills, and I felt it demeaning that we would have to live there during mother’s week.”

“When I stayed back after school one day, my mother saw me with Connor when she came to pick me up. She has been concerned about me not making any new friends at Pinecrest, and I suppose she was relieved to see me with a “friend”. She invited Connor to come over to my house, which he accepted. I was a bit hesitant to invite anyone from Pinecrest to my mother’s house, because it was located in Canoga Park, a bad area, and most of the kids at Pinecrest were upper-middle class who would look down on me for living there. But I couldn’t back out of this once my mother invited Connor. He came over and all went well, we played a few video games for a couple of hours. But after that playdate, he would always rip on me for living in a “poor” house. He would also tell other kids at Pinecrest about it. This infuriated me to no end, and I would keep proclaiming that my father lives in a prestigious three-story house in the Woodland Hills Heights. I became vehemently obsessed with proving to Connor and everyone else that I wasn’t poor. I went so far as to bring pictures of my father’s house to school.”

Elliot Rodger is the human personification of the McMansion ideology—the mass-produced dwellings characterized by an oversized, disharmonious mix of architectural symbols to suggest wealth or taste. The McMansion of Woodland Hills views its spiritual brother, the slightly-more-modest suburban tract home of Canoga Park, with disgust. The McMansion’s size and gaudy assemblage of architectural styles barely conceals its awkward, uncomfortable interior. Elliot Rodger is a child of the McMansion, his psyche is mapped out by its tasteless contours. Its tensions and contradictions are endlessly reproduced in his perspective of the world: one could say he is a McMansion McManson. The McMansion wants to see itself as “old money,” but it has a “new money” susceptibility to boom-and-bust cycles. Elliot is even more contemptuous of his mother when she moves yet again:

“My mother decided to move to an apartment in Woodland Hills. I reacted indignantly. An apartment! I had never lived in an apartment before, and I always thought of apartments as being poor and low-class. I would be embarrassed to admit it to anyone.”

Much later in the text, when Elliot is in college:

I was glad that she moved to a better place, but I would have much rather she got married to a wealthy man and moved into his mansion. Even though she was no longer seeing Jack, she dated other men of high class. She had a special way of charming them. I continued to pester her to get married so that I can be part of an upper class family and enjoy all the benefits that would come with that, but she always refused, claiming that she never wants to get married due to her unpleasant experiences with my father. I told her that she should suffer through any negative aspects of marriage just for my sake, because it would completely save my life, but she still refused.

It is the men who possess the money that attracts women. Elliot’s mother is not as independently wealthy as his father, and thus she has little of value to offer him. Elliot himself is no more than the “accidental” leftover of their sexual intercourse, the heavenly sex that father experiences but he never will.

Elliot directs his racist self-loathing toward his mother because he contains the effeminate mark of her exoticism, the intolerable, excessive mark that prevents him from realizing his “true” white self, the wholesome masculinity that was promised to him, owed to him by his Anglo-aristocratic ancestry. Paradoxically, one could say that Elliot Rodger is a colonized subject: his indignant racism plays out the tension between the western-patriarchal master and the oriental-feminine subject. The empty, pathological enjoyment derived from his fixation on his own Asian ancestry conceals its own meaninglessness. In other words, when faced with the fact that it is not his “Asian-ness” that alienates him, but rather something simultaneously more simple and more inscrutable, the truth is too horrific and cruel for him to accept.

“As my frustration grew, so did my anger. I came across this Asian guy who was talking to a white girl. The sight of that filled me with rage. I always felt as if white girls thought less of me because I was half-Asian, but then I see this white girl at the party talking to a full-blooded Asian. I never had that kind of attention from a white girl!”

It’s not that girls won’t talk to him because he’s half-Asian. He is just awkward. How much simpler things would be if all his troubles were the direct consequence of his mixed race!

The irony in Elliot’s intersectional contempt of his mother is that she is the one who facilitates social interaction by scheduling playdates with other children—these would be the only “dates” he’d ever know.

“I always had a pleasant experience during mother’s week. She always arranged playdates for me, because she knew I was too shy to initiate them myself.”

Playdates mediate Elliot’s childhood friendships. Most playdates are with his mother’s friends’ children. By contrast, playdates never occur under his father’s watch, where domestic sovereignty is handed over to the illegitimate judicial authority of his stepmother:

“I once had a playdate with Philip at father’s house, and when I yelled at my sister because she was annoying us, Soumaya punished me by sending me to my room for an hour, embarrassing me in front of Philip. After this incident, I never had a playdate at father’s house ever again.”

Mother facilitates playdates. Elliot’s skateboard offers the promise of replacing his mother as the gateway to social life, but the transformation is never fully completed. Although the skateboard gives him a ticket to interacting with the cool kids, he never fits in with them on his own. His “playdates” never evolve into the more adolescent “hanging out” with friends. Mother is always there in the background, buying him things, driving him to the skatepark, “indulging” his interest.

“On mother’s week, I spent more and more time practicing skateboarding, and I had lots of playdates with James where we would skateboard together.”

“I needed a skateboard for mother’s house too, and so my mother took me to Val Surf and bought me a gray Val Surf skateboard. I would use this skateboard much more than the red skateboard I had at father’s house, since I had all of my playdates during mother’s week, and mother would make more of an effort to indulge in my new interest, eventually taking me to skateparks every weekend.”

“For the first few weeks of summer, mother arranged playdates with various friends and acquaintances I made from Topanga Elementary, including Trevor Bourget, Matt Bordier, Charlie Converse, John Jo Glen, and Philip Bloeser. It was interesting to have Trevor and Matt over. I never thought I would have playdates with them. Matt was one of the coolest kids in the school; he was a skateboarder and a baseball player who seemed to garner respect from everyone. I envied him during Elementary School even when we were friends, and I would deeply envy and hate him later on in life, when I find out how much success he would have with girls.”

Elliot is very clear on the symbolic meaning of the skateboard. It is an object that promises some tangible social reward. The skateboard is coolness crystallized into a tangible object.

In the public imagination, the skateboard is associated with danger, carelessness, and laziness. Skaters themselves are a subculture that value creativity, risk, and freedom. It is not a sport run by adults. The authenticity of skateboarding is ensured not through the organization of a “little league” but through the spontaneous creativity and danger that makes it “cool.” This democratic social organization contributes to a relative lack of emphasis on competition. Being too competitive can even be a sign of inauthenticity as a skater. The genuine skater is a carefree slacker whose mastery of the dance is expressed in effortless cool.

Although skaters can practice skating in constructed spaces such as skateparks, real skate culture also occurs in “found spaces” in an urban or suburban environment. Skaters often seek out found spaces where skating is specifically prohibited—grinding on benches, jumping staircases, doing tricks over garbage cans—which contributes to the public perception of the skater as a “deviant.” Skating is distinctly Californian, originating in the late 1950s to mimic surfing on land. Skate culture is inextricably embedded in its surrounding environment, and Los Angeles is its epicenter. Skaters occupy an almost-mythic point of resistance against the formal suburban sprawl and alienation of Southern California.

“For the first week of Fifth Grade, I was at mother’s house. I considered myself to be very “cool” by now. I had gotten better at skateboarding, I had blonde hair, and I dressed like a skateboarder. I felt great anticipation for what the cool kids would think of me once they saw my transformation. To my disappointment, no one really cared. They were all in their own worlds. I don’t remember any kids showing recognition of my new “coolness.””…

“Once again, I used skateboarding as a way to increase my standing, telling the skateboarder kids that I knew how to skateboard and that I could do some tricks. This got them to treat me more cordially. I even talked to Robert Morgan a few times, who I hated and yet subconsciously revered for being so popular. Whenever a so-called popular kid would say a word to me or give me a high five, I felt immense satisfaction.”

A skateboard can be acquired by a transaction mediated by mother, but the phantom coolness that lurks beneath it is not so simple. While the skateboard provides a semblance of coolness, it can never deliver on the promise of truly earning the respect of the cool kids. Elliot is always an impostor around the skaters because he is categorically incapable of internalizing the social structure of the subculture. His relationship to the culture is stuck to his motherNo matter how well one dresses the part, the cool skater kids don’t have “playdates.”

On multiple occasions he decides to abandon skateboarding for a while…

“I had been trying very hard to get better at skateboarding, but when I saw that there were boys a lot younger than me who could do more tricks, I realized that I sucked. I was never good at sports or any physical activity, and when I discovered skateboarding, I thought that finally here was a sport that I could excel in and even became a professional at. It crushed me a little inside to see that I was a failure at skateboarding after more than a year of practicing it. I could never master the kickflip or heelflip. All I could do was the ollie jump and ride down a few ramps. I saw eight-year-old boys at the skatepark who could do a kickflip with ease, and it made me so angry. Why did I fail at everything I tried? I asked myself. My dreams of becoming a professional skateboarder were over. I felt so defeated.

Because of this, my interest in skateboarding slowly faded away during this summer. James had recently told me that he was no longer interested in the sport, so I no longer had him to skateboard with anyway. I just decided to forget about it for the moment.”

…but his discouragement is initially only temporary. Elliot does not yet gives up on skateboarding because he continues to be reminded of how the skateboard seems to function successfully as a gateway to social acceptance for others. The skateboard comes to embody everything that Elliot lacks:

“Alfred was just getting good at skateboarding, and he was starting to become popular with the skateboarders. He once brought his skateboard to school and landed a kickflip, the move I was never able to master in the past. I was secretly jealous, even though I insisted to everyone that I was no longer interested in skateboarding.”

But by the time he is in high school he has finally disavowed skateboarding:

My life at Crespi got even worse. Alfred and Brice apparently told everyone how weird I was at Pinecrest, and people in my own grade started to tease me. They found out that I didn’t like being called a skateboarder, and it was true. Because I failed to become good at skateboarding, I developed a hatred for the sport, and whenever someone called me a skateboarder, it reminded me of my failure and I got very angry. The whole school started calling me it just to anger me, along with other insulting names. They teased me because I was scared of girls, calling me names like “faggot”. People also liked to steal my belongings and run away in an attempt to get me to chase after them. And I did chase after them in a furious rage, but I was so little and weak that they thought it was comical. I hated everyone at that school so much.

The sign of the “skater” has run its full course in the Elliot Rodger story, finally twisting back to a complete inversion of its original cool. In this new context, to be called a skater is to be called out on one’s fraud, to be outed as a poser. Having failed at the sport that values fitting in more than winning, the very mention of skating exposes the ever-widening chasm between Elliot and the unattainable object of his desire.

The skateboard no longer stands for coolness, and coolness no longer stands for itself. As Elliot becomes older and enters puberty he comes to the awareness that coolness is merely a placeholder for sexual appeal. Coolness is a precursor to sexiness—it reveals itself to be and to always have been meaningful not in and of itself, but in the service of sex. This is confusing and unsettling:

“Even through watching movies and T.V. shows I got a glimpse of what was in store for a Middle Schooler. There was talk of girls, and how it would soon be “cool” to be popular with the girls.”

Introduction to sex is the dark closure to his idyllic youth. Sex is a looming menace…

“I heard stories of how boys are expected to start kissing girls in Middle School! Such things overwhelmed me. I tried to dismiss it as much as I could and enjoy my life in the present moment.”

…but it can only be ignored for so long. A traumatic experience at Planet Cyber:

One time while I was alone at Planet Cyber, I saw an older teenager watching pornography. I saw in detail a video of a man having sex with a hot girl. The video showed him stick his penis inside a girl’s vagina. I didn’t know anything about sex at the time. I barely even knew what sex was. I was slowly starting to develop sexual feelings for hot girls, but I didn’t know what to do with them. To see this video really traumatized me. I had no idea what I was seeing… I couldn’t imagine human beings doing such things with each other. The sight was shocking, traumatizing, and arousing. All of these feelings mixed together took a great toll on me. I walked home and cried by myself for a bit. I felt too guilty about what I saw to talk to my parents about it. I was quite shaken for a few days.

This was among the very first glimpses I had of sex. Finding out about sex is one of the things that truly destroyed my entire life. Sex… the very word fills me with hate. Once I hit puberty, I would always want it, like any other boy. I would always hunger for it, I would always covet it, I would always fantasize about it. But I would never get it. Not getting any sex is what will shape the very foundation of my miserable youth. This was a very dark day.

Soon enough, I would inevitably find out about what sex was, whether I saw that foul video or not. Boys at my school started talking about it. Connor Hanrahan and his friend Jordan Carlton one day told me exactly what happens when a man and a woman have sex. Finding out about sex was just the beginning of my horrific downfall.

Sex sets the tragedy in motion. Sex disrupts the harmony of his youthful body. Sex introduces a conflict between his desire and what is possible, an impossible impasse. A gaping chasm separates the two, the chasm of the woman. Sex—the beginning of the horrific downfall! He will always want this, but it will never be there. The skateboard, Father with his new girlfriend, the hierarchy of coolness, all just innuendos that barely conceal the truth, the “shocking, traumatizing, and arousing” video in the Planet Cyber, now sprawled out in the open, naked, plain as day. The brutal, grotesque contortions of animal flesh—why would humans want this? And then the shameful question: Why does Elliot want this for himself?

There is, for now, one way out of the relentless onslaught of unwelcome sexual awareness, one that promises total control and customization of his own “body:”

“One day, I was looking up things on the internet about Warcraft 3. That is when I found out about a new, revolutionary Warcraft game coming out, called World of Warcraft. I didn’t think much of it at the time, ignorant of the effect it would have on me in my later life.”

I made a WoW account with my father, and then I created my first character, a night elf druid. It really blew my mind. My first experience with WoW was like stepping into another world of excitement and adventure. It was a video game world, but they made it so realistic that it was like living another life, a more exciting life. My life was getting more and more depressing at that point, and WoW would fill in the void. It felt refreshing and relieving. I was only able to play it for a few hours for my first session. It was all I would think about when I wasn’t able to play it.

To avoid the looming reality of sex, Elliot retreats into video games. WoW is “revolutionary;” it is a disembodied object of obsessive fixation, a virtual world he can entirely submerge himself in that affirms him, detached from his own awkward teen body and real-life social inelegance. Video games offer anyone a sense of power and immediate gratification that completely bypasses the difficulties inherent in real-life communication. WoW fills the void left by the skateboard. Video game culture welcomes someone like Elliot in a way that skate culture never could. Wow!

Elliot himself sees this new fixation as demarcating a major transition in his life—he writes the story of his own life as the succession of phases of object-fixation. The final paragraph of “Part 3: The Last Period of Contentment, Age 9–13” sums it up:

This was the point when my social life ended completely. I would never have a satisfying social life ever again. It was the beginning of a very lonely period of my life, in which my only social interactions would be online through video games, with the sole exception being my friendship with James. The ability to play video games with people online temporarily filled in the social void. I got caught up in it, and I was too young and naïve to realize the severity of how far I had fallen. I was too scared to accept it. This loss of a social life, coupled with the advent of puberty, caused me to die a little inside. It was too much for me to handle, and I stopped caring about my life and my future. I even stopped caring about what people thought of me. I hid myself away in the online World of Warcraft, a place where I felt comfortable and secure.

So goes Elliot Rodger’s sexual awakening. Sex—the unattainable, utopian, heavenly sort—then presents itself as something sinister, an evil tease lurking around every corner. For Elliot Rodger, every object in the world either reminds him of the thing that he lacks—or offers him the promise that the object could be the thing that finally makes him “cool.” Everything Rodger interacts with is recruited into the task of attaining this unattainable thing. And there is no shortage of things to recruit. He asks his parents for gifts, whether they are, as at this point in the narrative, video games, or later, new designer clothes and accessories, a fancy BMW, or first-class tickets to exotic European vacations. Every one seemingly offers the opportunity for Rodger to reinvent himself, to finally make him cool and desired by others. But they never fulfill their promise.

For Elliot Rodger, and for other incels, attempts to reach the unattainable object of desire take the form of extensive inventories. Incel forums are filled with analyses of the particular ways the incel subjects (the forum posters themselves) are deficient and how that means they will never be able to possess the thing. This is not only encoded in luxurious objects that can be bought, but in the body itself: bone structure, jawlines, height, shoulders, penis size, and so on. The incels fixate not only on their alienation from the world around them, but also on their alienation from their own bodies.

Celebrities, of course, apparently possess the elusive thing. They have both the wealth and the physical characteristics that deliver on the promise of fulfillment. They check off all the boxes in the inventory. On incel forums we see an endless kaleidoscopic k-hole of side-by-side comparisons of shrimpy incels with chiseled A-list superstars, all to drive home the nihilistic “blackpill” message: “this is what you aren’t.” Elliot Rodger would know—he was surrounded by celebrities. And increasingly, with Instagram and Twitter and everything else, the rest of us are too.

Could the difference be that he broke down? That he just snapped? That he was unable to navigate the codes and cues of dealing with women, couldn’t conceal his desires and expectations under the mask that well-mannered men can? Or did the logic that produced his desire also produce his breakdown?

This post is an excerpt from a broader work that is intended to cover the entirety of the Elliot Rodger text. Here, only the first parts of the manifesto are covered. To be continued…

A Cure for the Incels: Preliminary Notes

I theorize about the incels, but how can one treat them? This is among the most frequently asked questions on the subject.

First, there can be no single, universal method because the practical approach needs to be based on each individual, rather than trying to fit the individual into a preconceived set of answers. There’s not really a single therapeutic method—even within the Lacanian psychoanalytic field the incel can be both a neurotic and a psychotic, which would entail very different approaches in the clinic. (The difference between a neurotic and a psychotic and its relevance in the clinical context is handled in more detail in Bruce Fink’s Against Understanding Part 1.) Not to mention the very different ways that cognitive-behavioral theorists, evolutionary psychologists, and so on, would frame their conception of the incel, and thus of their conception of a possible cure. I will not go in great detail on those because, to my knowledge, no one in those fields has provided insight into the incels with any real depth. In fact, the fragmented and inadequate science of the incels, the dismal science that affirms their hopelessness and the general cruelty of the world (as can be seen on the Incels Wiki) tends to come from insights gathered from these fields.

Second, many incels will grow out of being incel. For many, it really is only a phase—for these sorts it can be seen alongside other, often harmless, forms of “youthful alienation,” and it is especially in this light that we can speak of a “poetry” of the incels: perhaps such that an “incel period” in a poet’s life would be their tumultuous early work, from which they emerge with a serene, stoic new sobriety, or for another kind of poet it would be a morose and somber “blue period” that transforms into cubist experimentation.

And even though there are many that may never grow out of it, inceldom should not be thought of as only a terminal condition, as many mental illnesses have come to be understood. This is the trap that is set by attempts to reclaim mental illnesses as constitutive of positive “neurodivergent” identities, whereby the subject enjoys their symptom and in doing so gives up on any attempt to overcome the impasses in their desire, effectively giving up on, or suspending, their desire. This suspension of desire takes form in, for example, the “depressed” identity in vogue among today’s youth—the subject has depression and will have depression forever, all attempts to work through this must do so without abandoning that crutch, positively embracing this condition is seen as a positive act, or even a revolutionary political one. Embracing one’s own misery should not be seen as liberation.

But what does a “cure” even mean?

Is the goal of the cure to normalize the subject to their surroundings? For the incels to adapt themselves to the inescapable tyranny of bourgeois family life and gender roles, a tyranny that is nonetheless preferable to the anarchy of its absence? This is the “Freudian” position. But to some extent, wouldn’t this normalization, this adaptation of the incel-animal to conform to his social environment, mean a “doubling-down” on the mad logic of inceldom, which is none other than the “normal” logic of our patriarchal-bourgeois-capitalist-consumerist society without any polite or ironic distance from its unpleasant truth? That is, that the logic of inceldom is the logic of our society stripped of all its innuendo and doublethink, rendered completely literal and “autistic”? The Law of paternal authority, but autistic, and demanding nothing short of patriarchal omnipotence. For the incel to fit into normal society, in this sense, they would continue to be incels, but “ascended” (their term). They would be incels that fuck. They would not be cured, because their desire is not simply contained in fucking. If anything they would be worse off, because now they would have to face the insurmountable otherness of the woman in her naked immediacy, which before, in their loneliness, was mercifully distant.

The cure needs to have both some adherence to the structure of “the Law,” the “Name-of-the-Father,” while not forgetting about the subject who, despite being prey to the structures of the unconscious, manages to not give up on his desire. The cure must be truly “emancipatory.” The political implications of this should be obvious, but one should be careful not to reduce the incel and the incel cure to a particular political programme.

For Lacan, analysis does not have as its final aim a “recovery;” it should lead to a real point where the subject can lift himself back up and live again. Lacan’s own definition of the cure to “raise impotence to the impossible.” The analysis is to unblock a situation that is initially experienced by the analysand as an impotence, so that it leads to a real point where the subject, bogged down in the imaginary, can once again recover some of its powers of symbolization. (Here I have been paraphrasing Badiou in his conversation with Roudinesco.) The curative act remains intelligible from the point of view of the form, the point of view of the structures of the unconscious. The goal for the incel in analysis should therefore be to bring the subject to the real point where they are able to “remove the impasses in their desire.” Whatever that goes on to look like, it should mean a clear break from the emphasis on pure “normalization.”

For better or for worse, the role of the analyst is nothing like what it was in the time of either Freud or Lacan. This is especially true in the United States, where Freud, Lacan, and psychoanalysis have almost no legitimacy in the medical institutions of contemporary psychology. It will no doubt be necessary to think of the psychoanalytic cure outside the context of the psychoanalytic clinic, not least of all for economic reasons. It goes without saying that the incels will sooner watch the videos of Jordan Peterson (and even pay the subscription fees for his services) than pay hundreds of dollars a session to see the rare Lacanian analyst that is up-to-date enough to help them.

Note on the Femcels: Can a girl be an incel?

Can a woman be an incel? There is more at stake in the question than one might think. There are two immediate answers.

The answer of polite society is this: Of course women can be incel, there are countless women out there who are celibate in spite of their best efforts, and their experiences are no less valid than those of the more well-known male incels. Indeed, it is possible that because of the patriarchal society we live in, that femcels are even more alienated than the male incels, since they are denied a community in which to raise their undesirability up as a positive trait. Moreover, we uphold a fluid distinction between gender identity and sexual orientation and—although we would not consider “incel” to be a sexual orientation so much as a life condition or outlook—it would seem that defining inceldom to be exclusively male would necessarily be grounded in an archaic and problematic notion of gender as essentially identical with biological sex. So, this logic goes, whatever it means to be an incel, we should make sure that women can be included.

The answer of the incel subculture is this: Of course there are no femcels, those who claim to be femcels are essentially liars, since there will always be some man out there willing to fuck her, it is just a matter of her standards. Because of the “passive” role of the woman in courting, she actually possesses sex herself, her decision is the key to sex, and thus it is categorically impossible for her to be an “involuntary” celibate. According to the Incel Wiki: “It is generally accepted that involuntarily celibate women don’t exist with the exception of women that have medical issues like vaginismus, terminal illness, horrendous lesions all over her body or if she lives is in a sexless relationship caused by the man, or in a country with arranged marriages… Of course women can be sexless, but this is largely self-inflicted because men have a higher sex drive meaning there will always be men around willing to sexually satisfy any woman.”

The correct answer cuts through both immediate explanations, and requires a clarification of what it means to be “incel” in the first place. I argue that the essential characteristic of the incel, if one can be found in common against a backdrop of infinite exceptions, is in how the subject relates to an unattainable object of desire.

It would seem that the elusive object, the thing that the incels desire, is sex: the sexual Act, “getting it in,” the dirty, immediate reality of fucking. Popular wisdom holds that the incels “just need to get laid.” What makes an incel is not having sex, and if you have sex you can’t be an incel. Once one passes the trial of the sexual Act they become a man, and that is why the incels see themselves as something less than men.

The incel subculture cannot tolerate the idea of the femcel because, for the incel, sex (in the sense of fucking) is the impossible, sublime Thing, whose grotesque fullness is the cause of all their problems, whose residue can be seen everywhere they go, but always remains inaccessible, behind closed doors. The incel has no sex but sees it everywhere, all surfaces in the incel’s world ooze with its leftovers, as if the horrific act covers all objects with an uncanny layer of oily film. The incel has no choice. He is paralyzed by its abundance.

The sex that the incel imagines is impossible. It is pornography, which is why it is no surprise that pornography offers their only glimpse “behind the closed doors” to the inaccessible thing. It is the violent super-reality of the penetrative act itself, torn out of continuity with normal life. Thus, in porn, we rarely see the awkward moments, the mistakes, the bloopers, not to mention all the “erotic” signifiers of courting or seduction, these are completely outside the camera’s frame, the “poetry” of romance that occurs outside the penetrative act but is nonetheless an essential part of “sex” itself. In porn, we never really can understand why it is that the woman is supposed to actually desire the man she is fucking.

Femcel texts, by which I mean posts on forums or subreddits written by a “femcel” lamenting her life situation, tend to differ from incel narratives in a few key ways. The most fundamental, aside from the fact that the authors are (ostensibly) women, is the distinct emphasis away from the penetrative act as the site of an impossible, pathological object of desire. The femcel is more concerned with “recognition,” more concerned with how she is (un)desired, and what she wants is not something necessarily contained within the frame of the pornographic video. The femcel thinks more about the “Staceys” (the female “Chads,” the most desirable women) and the attention and affirmation that the Staceys get. When they think about boys they think about the ideal boyfriends, who is characterized not only by sexual potency but by a capability to truly “love” her.

For sure, the male incels also think about most of these things. They do not only talk about sex. Being an incel is not just about sex, but about recognition. This is true, but only the femcel actually understands this intuitively; the incel always returns to a pornographic/phallocentric relation to their desire. The femcels might have sex, but the sex they report is unfulfilling, they are fucked and abandoned. The penetrative sexual act is thus not some sublime triumph but a disappointing reminder of what they lack, a violent emptiness that leaves them worse off than they were before.

This is why the “femcels” (the female incels) are so intolerable for the “real” supposedly-male incels of incels.co and r/braincels. The femcels reveal the incoherence of the formal incel and the asymmetry inherent in sexual difference. For the male incels, the femcels are “faking it”—any woman no matter how ugly can get laid because there are always men with lower standards, it’s the femcel’s choice that she is celibate because she refuses to have sex with any male incel suitors, and so on. The male incel imagines the desired Thing as encapsulated in the sexual Act, in the biological penis, in the crude collision of genitals, whereas for the femcel the Thing is dispersed across and beyond the body, leaving the phallus behind. For the femcel, alienation occurs in the all-too-real experience of being used for cheap sex and dumped immediately after. For the male incel, that scenario is a distant, titillating fantasy.

In other words, the femcels are the symbolic phallus, as they signify what the male incels lack. First, in the sense femcels have access to the sexual Act, and second, in the sense even that is lacking. For this reason it could be said that the femcels, rather than the male incels, are the “true” incels, much like how those who most experience “penis envy” are in fact those with a penis.

So the pornographic discourse of the male incels is itself cope—cope with the fact that whatever it is that they want, which is unbearable to them, cannot be contained in the biological penis. Nor is it contained in other body parts. Cope is a science, the pop-phrenology of hunky Chads, in which the incels fixate on the measurements and ratios of the physical features of beautiful men in a doomed search for the ideal male form, the form of the mythic man who is never refused sex.

What this is all to say is that the incels are all too human: a community based around a shared lack of something. That lack is itself lacking. The incels have tried to master that lack in countless ways. The ways that they have tried to master that lack unfold in the form of texts on the internet. And in these texts they always say more than they mean to say.

The texts are the surplus of the incels’ compulsive enjoyment of their condition. Words on words on words, so many words, they seek to fill the void in the incels desire, but also shield the incels from the unbearable thing.

Postscript on Names and Exceptions to the “Universal Incel”

What the incels desire cannot be contained only in the collision of genitals, as if the genitals were completely detached from their respective bodies and elevated to sacred objects. There are, after all, “escortcels,” incels that have sex with prostitutes. And there are others indistinguishable from incels who do manage to trick unsuspecting women into sex from time to time, the “ascended incels,” who never truly lose their incel-ness. This is all to say, to truly define incels we must detach it from the arbitrary, material contingency of whether fucking occurs.

Every incel is an exception to the incel as a principle, the universal incel. The incels generally divide into two sub-groups: incels that are characterized by mental shortcomings and incels that are characterized by physical shortcomings. Both tend to think that they themselves are the “true” incels who have it the worse off, the former because they have such difficulty communicating with women despite perhaps “not looking that bad” and the latter because women are so supposedly shallow that they cannot see past their bodies to appreciate the “nice guys” they really are. The Incels Wiki lists many forms of incels (but not all, which is impossible), both empirically-observed and theoretical, which I will reproduce here: gymcel, mentalcel, autistcel, elbowcel, emcel, acnecel, americel, arabcel, baldcel, blackcel, bincel, christocel, currycel, cybercel, denialcel, escortcel, ethnicel, eyecel, femcel, haircel, lesbocel, NEETcel, muslimcel, nearcel, noncel, nosecel, nymphocel, oldcel, peniscel, permacel, persocel, poorcel, protocel, quasicel, framecel, queercel, rainbowcel, ricecel, semicel, skinnycel, smallcel, standardcel, stoicel, stuttercel, transcel, truecel, turkcel, uglycel, whitecel, workcel, wristcel, yellowcel.

Any word with “-cel” suffix means that the word becomes the characteristic that alienates the incel subject from the Thing—“the cause of the celibacy”—which can be done (and basically is) to any word in language. A philosopher could say that all could be considered instances of the absolute languagecel. (The Chad is said to be outside language, able to sidestep the whole issue of the relationship of the signifier with the signified, attracting the Stacey with his inarticulate grunts of pure immediate thought; whereas for the Incel—as for his treacherous twin brother, the Cuck—“language is to the wife as desire is to the husband”… always saying something else…)

It is tempting to conclude from this that “there is no fixed incel essence, only an infinite multitude of incels in their particularities.” But the “universal incel” should not be seen as the container of this multiplicity of identities, but rather as the site of contradiction within the idea of the incel itself, which the countless identities are failed attempts to grasp and overcome.

Some incels fuck, and some incels have more agency over their sexless condition than others. The term is a logical antagonism, an abstraction that is always left behind in the lived existence of these people in the world. Involuntary / Celibate. The incel is not necessarily “involuntary” nor “celibate” but the superposition of those notions—notions that are both lacks, the lack of choice and the lack of sex. So the incel isn’t necessarily celibate—but is non-non-celibate with respect to their choice in the matter, which isn’t necessarily involuntary, but rather non-non-involuntary.

What this dizzying word game means to indicate is that there is a void at the core of the incels’ formal essence that carries over into their lived reality as a double alienation.

Stop Calling Me a Psychoanalyst

There is a common misconception of psychoanalysis that claims that it reduces all psychological problems to one particular schema that inevitably returns “sexual repression” in some variation, like a magic 8-ball’s answer to everything. This is an response I’ve heard to my writing on fascism and “masculine anxiety,” ostensibly to refute that there is any connection between the two at all. I am not an analyst so I have no grounds or reason to defend the practice itself, but it is nonetheless worth addressing because my work is generally informed by Freud, Lacan, and others.

Usually this is intended to resist an “uncovering” of some obvious surface aspect in “manosphere” or other far-right phenomena. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a licensed psychoanalyst to see that a general group like “fitcels” bodybuilds to compensate for a perceived weakness, wish to make their flesh literal armor, that they’re terrified of women, and so on. In fact these sorts of points are more often than not openly admitted by their members. It should go without saying that this sort of truth—about a collective—is well outside the range of psychoanalysis. The truth of these observations are so mundane as to be banal.

It is the obviousness and banality of the truth that makes it unspeakable. And so the members of these online fandoms must mediate their relationship to it with an ironic distance. The leaders see themselves as characters, Roosh is a performance, BAP is a performance (undoubtedly they themselves know that most of their followers are idiots). Irony mediates everything these days because there is such an abundance of noise that the various channels need to be distinguished from each other. It feels almost impossible to have an unironic position on the internet.

The ironic position in these far-right/manosphere contexts means that, in short, since they talk about sex they can’t be sexually repressed in any sense. With the BAP fandom, the overt and excessive homoeroticism specifically defends them against the accusation that there is anything “gay” or “weak” about them, since they are supposedly aware of their fixation on male bodies, the “Dominated by Doug” text, and all the other artful parts of that whole hyper-erotic fascist mythos.

The misconception implies that since we now live in a permissive society—sex is promoted everywhere you look: at the cinema, at the theatre, at the Super Bowl, on TV and in newspapers, in songs and on beaches, in podcasts and Twitch streams, in our cars sitting in traffic, in schools, and even in churches—people are supposedly less anxious about problems linked to the sexual sphere. The taboos have fallen, they say, and people are no longer afraid of sex.

Lacan called the idea that sex is invading all aspects of life “an advertising phenomenon”—and we know it probably applies now even more than back then. And it’s clear that even in a so-called permissive society people never fail to find a way to be immiserate themselves over their sexuality. You can teach teenagers how to use condoms and practice safe sex and they’ll still turn into incel spree killers (although that shouldn’t necessarily dissuade us from doing so).

It is interesting how many of my critics (from the Right) who take issue with the connection between a new fascism and masculine anxiety seem to implicitly accept the unmistakably “boomer” ideologeme that removing the public taboo of sex will completely undercut all the “old” problems and anxieties. In other words, that free love will liberate us from the authoritarianism of the nuclear family. Many of these people talk openly about sex and engage in a kind of discourse that could be described as pornographic—always at least figuratively (Elliot Rodger), sometimes also literally (BAP). It doesn’t matter whether they come down as “pro-sex” or “anti-sex” at the end of it all, because either way they are compulsively, fearfully fixating on it.

Whatever the case, people (people-qua-“subject” and not people-qua-“multitude”) are going to continue to find ways to be alienated from their own bodies, no matter how advanced our collective social-engineering mechanisms become. People are going to find new ways to have anxiety, and they’re going to find new ways to talk about it.

But they will always talk about it. And that’s why we haven’t even come close to the limit of Freud.

The Thing that the Incels Desire

The incel—the pathological incel—is mysteriously drawn to repeat the trauma of his own suffering. The incel is drawn back to the scene of what we will call The Thing. The Thing is the object of the incel’s desire. The Thing involves the physical act of sex and it involves what we would call “love”—but it cannot be reduced to either. The Thing is beyond signification, but it is Real. It is empty, but it is filled by the incel subject’s fantasy. The Thing is something that, if the incel were to have, would make him cease to be an incel. For the pathological incel, The Thing contains a traumatic reminder of his own misery. The Thing taunts the incel by showing him what he does not have, and it suggests (wrongly) that others have The Thing that he does not. The Thing is presented as good, but the idea of The Thing being accessed is experienced as suffering and evil. The excessive goodness of accessing The Thing in its immediacy is intolerable, impossible. The Thing is the object of the incel’s intense desire and it also brings him face-to-face with the horrific truth of himself. The Thing, in its deepest core, also promises to contain the most sinister riddle: the code to what exactly it is that women desire.

This description of “The Thing” as it relates to the incel’s pathology may seem abstract, obscure, or a needless indulgence in Lacanian terms, but to see its relevance we may look no further than Elliot Rodger’s “My Twisted World” manifesto. For Elliot Rodger, the archetypal incel, The Thing is heavenly. Whenever he is talking about the “heavenly” things, he is talking about The Thing. (Keep in mind what one must cross to reach “heaven.”) Here is the scene of The Thing:

After I left the campus I drove around downtown Santa Barbara to explore new areas. I went up and down State Street, the main common area of the city where everyone frequents. Countless restaurants and shops lined a magnificently designed street with wide walkways. It was absolutely beautiful… a true paradise, for those who were thriving there. I can only imagine how heavenly it would be to walk with a beautiful girlfriend down that street. My life would be complete if I get to do that. It would be the epitome of gratifying perfection. To have a beautiful blonde girl by my side, to feel her hand clasping my own as we walk everywhere together, to feel her love! That is what I want in life. Instead, I had to watch other men experience my idea of heaven while I rot in bitter loneliness.

For Elliot Rodger, fantasy surrounding The Thing is particularly symbolized by blonde girls, but the Thing itself isn’t simply the blonde girl, or simply sex-qua-fucking with this girl. To say that The Thing is “to feel her hand clasping my own as we walk everywhere together, to feel her love!” comes closer because it includes the desire of the other, but that does not encapsulate it adequately either. The Thing is situated in this scene, this street in downtown Santa Barbara, “the common area of the city where everyone frequents”. Rodger describes The Thing psychogeographically, as if it is embedded in the terrain, which comes in his account before the nameless, anonymous blonde. Dante’s Paradiso and his beach-blonde Beatrice. The Thing is tied to a place, signified by a place—and a public, social one at that. It is where one is recognized not just by a single other, a partner, but by all others, the Big Other of society. But the thing also isn’t simply the place in its inert, materialistic immediacy. It is the place as saturated with the fantasy, it is the place as it is with the presence of the blonde girl, the place as it is with all the people there, the place as it is with everyone belonging and playing their part: it is the Scene.

We must also pay close attention to the ending of this paragraph, which is a perfect representation of the horrific aspect of the Thing, the Terror, as it relates to its total experience. This Terror comes out of The Thing, as its consequence, an afterthought, a closing punctuation. The Terror follows The Thing like its shadow. It reveals itself as the hole, the emptiness that characterizes the real truth of The Thing. It comes after the Scene, like the ending of Jodorowsky’s “The Holy Mountain,” when the Alchemist, Jodorowsky, the author himself, reveals that the whole thing was a fiction all along, and smiles a geeked up smile with shroomywide pupils—he is seeing something that you aren’t, or rather he’s seeing the absence of The Thing you see, which is to say he sees nothing.

The excess of heavenly goodness in The Thing means that it becomes experienced as suffering and evil. It is simply intolerable, unacceptable. Approaching the goodness of The Thing is a violation of morality, an injustice:

Sex is by far the most evil concept in existence. The fact that life itself exists through sex just proves that life is flawed. The act of sex gives human beings a tremendous amount of pleasure. Pleasure they don’t deserve. No one deserves to experience so much pleasure, especially since some humans get to experience it while some are denied it. When a man has sex with a beautiful woman, he probably feels like he is in heaven. But the world is not supposed to be heaven. For some humans to actually be able to feel such heights of heavenly pleasure is selfish and hedonistic.

We know, of course, that Rodger is not simply talking about “sex,” but The Thing. And anyway, if The Thing is so evil—and not just evil but “the most evil concept in existence”—inducing such suffering and misery, self-evident proof of the fundamental flaw of life itself … why does he always return to it? Here is another scene in which the horrific reality of The Thing reveals itself to Rodger, exciting him so intensely that he acts out:

Another incident happened on the following day, near the same location. I went to the Starbucks at the Camino Real Marketplace by myself, like I usually did every morning. I ordered my coffee and sat down on one of their chairs to relax. A few moments later, when I looked up from my drink, I saw a young couple standing in line. The two of them were kissing passionately. The boy looked like an obnoxious punk; he was tall and wore baggy pants. The girl was a pretty blonde! They looked like they were in the throes of passionate sexual attraction to each other, rubbing their bodies together and tongue kissing in front of everyone. I was absolutely livid with envious hatred. When they left the store I followed them to their car and splashed my coffee all over them. The boy yelled at me and I quickly ran away in fear. I was panicking as I got into my car and drove off, shaking with rage-fueled excitement. I drove all the way to the Vans at the Fairview Plaza and spent three hours in my car trying to contain my tumultuous emotions. I had never struck back at my enemies before, and I felt a small sense of spiteful gratification for doing so. I hated them so much. Even though I splashed them with my coffee, he was still the winner. He was going home to have passionate heavenly sex with his beautiful girlfriend, and I was going home to my lonely room to sleep alone in my lonely bed. I had never felt so miserable and mistreated in my life. I cursed the world for condemning me to such suffering.

Rodger experiences The Thing traumatically. His account is unambiguously unpleasant for him; it does not seem fun. And yet he comes here to order his coffee, like he does “every morning.” Presumably he always sees people like this, not just here and but the many other places where all the “beautiful blonde girls” congregate with their “obnoxious punk” boyfriends. He does not avoid this. Not only is he not a complete recluse but he instinctively seeks out places he can assume the tortured voyeuristic gaze. For some reason, he is compelled to always come back to The Scene of The Thing, to experience the trauma of The Thing over again, this hellish, humiliating, hours-long shock-experience that affects him both emotionally and physiologically—an instinctive compulsion that comes into contrast with the pleasure principle.

So far I have described the concept of The Thing in the Elliot Rodger case and tied it to the repetition compulsion. We also see this dynamic in play in a virtual, discursive space like the r/Braincels subreddit, as well as other “Manosphere” sites, particularly those with comment/message boards, in which the experience of The Thing is fragmented and distributed across a collective.

In incel/manosphere internet spaces (scenes) like r/Braincels, most posts have certain characteristics:

Anecdotes of women’s sexual activities that serves as a reminder of the unjust distribution of sexual pleasure in the world. Women are gushing with eroticism, it is flowing out of them constantly. Stories about women that are out there in the world, being sluts and having some sort of heavenly utopian fulfilled sexual life, a utopian life that is real but always absent to the incel subject, always behind closed doors, the pearly gates. Women are just out there, all of them sluts, getting their heavenly holes filled, and someone is enjoying it, but it sure ain’t you!
Anecdotes of women who cheat on or want to cheat on their weak “cuck” boyfriends or husbands. Women say one thing but mean another. They are liars and hypocrites, and no matter what they say (such as when they say they like guys with a “nice personality”), their small brains are programmed in such a way that their insatiable sexual appetites override their limited capacities of reason—they will cheat on you the first chance they get once they meet a stronger, taller, more attractive, “bad-boy” male. One recurring thing is links to posts from the “relationship advice” subreddit, which often includes stories of various “cuck” men in relationships with women who are cheating on their boyfriends or husbands.
Anecdotes of stronger, more attractive “Chad” men and how they are desired by women, and satisfy that desire. The Chad will always melt the walls that these “sluts” put up to keep the incels out. Whereas incels and cucks, who together are the majority of men, hopelessly throw themselves at the feet of women, the Chad enjoys women throwing themselves at him. One recurring type of post includes pictures of Tinder conversations between women and a (presumably fake) attractive/buff/male-model Chads—the Chad goes straight to the point and says he wants to fuck them, or otherwise treats them aggressively and disrespectfully, such as opening a Tinder conversation by saying he wants to rape them, and the women are shown to still be interested, flattered, confessing to deep-down rape fantasies, giving out their numbers, and so on, presumably leading to, of course, something heavenly.
Analysis of the particular ways in which the incel subjects, the forum posters themselves, are deficient, discussions and comparisons of all the qualities that they have that characterize their lack, and how that means they will never be able to possess The Thing. This entails a special attention to the eroticism of various body parts: bone structure, jawlines, height, shoulders, penis size, and so on. It also can include racial comparisons. For example, the black incel laments that he is not a “Tyrone” (the name for “black Chad”). However, the sometimes-charming intersectionality does not extend to women: the existence of “femcels” (female incels) is denied. This policing of the borderlands of the conceptual incel includes such things as a quasi-scientific analysis of why it is impossible for femcels to exist to support the claim that even the ugliest women still have men chase after them (and so, by calling themselves “femcels” these women are stealing an identity that they don’t deserve…).
Presentation of the horrific, unspeakable, “black-pilled” truth—the Terror. This is the real truth, the truth that evades being articulated in polite language. It is both heavenly and hellish. This is a terrible truth that you know, but you perhaps didn’t even know that you knew—what Rumsfeld would call an “unknown known.”

welcometoreality — “Welcome to Reality.”

Is this supposed to turn us off from sex? To dissuade us from trying? To show us our hopelessness and inadequacy and turn us into ascetics so we live alone in the desert like the early church fathers? Or is the feeling that one gets from this scrolling-feed kaleidoscope of psychotic, deranged, and fragmented texts (looking beyond the usual political disagreement with the sexism and all), not a kind of strange arousal? In a sense, I get the impression that I almost wish the world was like this—oozing with desire out of every disgusting pore, needlessly and effortlessly cruel, the feeling Bataille must’ve gotten when he thought about his ex-wife fucking Lacan, just dangerously and preposterously horny. Who are these mythical people who are actually having this heavenly sex, this sex in which the participants are in total agreement with the fantasy of the other, and nothing is kept secret, in which all pleasure is brought to the conscious light of day and retains its naughty allure? I would like to meet them. This fantasy world is a space that, like the Scene of Elliot Rodger’s Santa Barbara, is completely saturated in erotic energy, even if that erotic energy is always accompanied by the terrible, traumatic, humiliating realization, the sadistic morality that comes after the feast, that The Thing is entirely inaccessible. Though the images themselves are not (usually) pornographic—and often the incels/manosphere discourse tends to be explicitly anti-porn—the texts sure are, at least in the way that romance novels targeted at old ladies are. When the “arousing” aspect of this experience is considered, the formation of a community/subculture that has its own rules, language, and hierarchy seems like a logical consequence of this collective-desiring-creature and less like a weird, freak aberration that somehow exists in the “post-patriarchal” society we like to think we live in. And so we can maybe come closer to making sense of why these people keep coming back, coming back to The Scene of The Thing, posting, posting and reading these infuriating reminders of their own impotence, grasping on to their own psychic condition, grasping as if it were the last thing in this “twisted” world they had to call their own.

Letter from a French Incel, PhD: Response to “The Aeneid for Incels”

The following is an email I received in response to my Jacobite article “The Aeneid for Incels” back in May.

Hello Mike,

I have just read your “Aeneid for Incels” piece.

Although it seemed all too “mild-mannered” to me, i.e. you need to spread a lot of academic drivel to arrive at a key point and do barely tell it right, but by the same way you make it palatable to bourgeois bohemian types who fancy themselves to have a higher human value, it was also one of the most interesting reads I’ve seen on the infamous Elliot Rodger affair.

Allow me to introduce myself. I am French, born and raised in Paris, but have fled this city—where a disenfranchised middle-class son cannot have roots unless he sucks the right dicks—to get a try elsewhere. This was a good choice. I managed to pull from a master degree in philosophy to a PhD program. Now I can write my name with the famous three digits put after. However, although this allowed me to develop my intellectual abilities and master many social cues, hard analytical paradigms and rhetorical tropes, this is not the most interesting part.

No: the most interesting part is that I have been an incel. My first fuck happened just before I turned 20. Although I was a rather athletic guy who knew the secret entrances to the much-fantasized unofficial Paris Catacombs, my notch was a 4/10 (and I’m gentle) fat black girl whom I didn’t even intend to fuck before we became inebriated. She later resented me (I think I was a honest 6/10) for having allegedly “abused” her in her inebriated state, although both of us were inebriated. Later on, I paid 150 € to fuck an escort who was tired from “work” and merely waited for the hour to pass. This was cruel. She was below average, too, yet she had a value, and a high one, on the sexual marketplace. I, on the other hand, was worth nothing on the market, so much nothing that I had to pay a pricey sum to get a non–seduction-processed notch, and even then, I was just another customer to someone who would barely remember each customer at the end of her day.

Only much later, in the course of my doctoral studies, did I meet a girl who actually desired me. This led me to start treading down the PUA way. It was difficult, yet less than I had imagined it to be. Then I stopped being an incel, I almost went overnight from “shitty worthless little white guy” to “fucking shitlord hooking with and fucking 3 girls at the same time.”

Now one of these girls became the only one. We have married, and she’s pregnant with our second child. Doesn’t look very much “incel,” does it? Yet I was. And I know for sure I will never throw off this aspect of my past, just as no sane individual accepts having part of his dearest, closest-to-the-chest personal history mocked, stigmatized, spat upon and treated as if below the mud.

I also wrote for several Alt-Right websites, then for Return of Kings. (It is fun that you mentioned ROK on the article, as no one on ROK ever approved of Elliot Rodger or the “PUA hate” movement. Why is Elliot Rodger supposed to “represent” ROK better than thousands of expatriated men who strive to pick up girls? Just a nasty Leftist caricature. If, say, ten per cent Muslims kill but 0.001% so-called masculinists do, they will defend Islam against “intolerance” yet make unfair generalizations and show the worst intolerance towards people who never claimed to be “masculinists.” But I’m straying from the point.)

Let me get it straight. You reached the heart of the issue when you wrote: “It’s not just about literal sexual intercourse, it’s about sexuality in its deepest, most fundamental sense. It’s about Eros.”

Of course it is. And of course is there something social here. But what is it? The incel issue is exactly the same as the prole, or proletarized issue. You were born a middle class white guy, and you grow up to find out that no one wants you. Recruiters do not think of you as “interesting” even when you accept getting paid like shit. Girls do not think of you as a potential sexual partner, you’re a forever orbiting beta male at best. You’re supposed to have experience to work, but you never had experience, so how do you start? Likewise, it seems like you are supposed to be already sought after to get sought after—but you’re not.

The crux of the point is, you’re disenfranchised. You are a legitimate son, a rightful heir, employee, partner, citizen—and you are not acknowledged as such. To the contrary, you are at best ignored, at worst supposed guilty of whatever “oppression” or “ism” or “phobia” the almighty Left will throw at you. You are of no value, no one wants you. To be “of value” it seems like you have to play an inauthentic role, accept shit tests and humiliations, be treated like dirt and get scraps. You are socially dis-integrated. Isn’t that what being an incel is on the seduction/sexual plane? An incel is just like someone without a job. (Incidentally, I got a job. I even have so much work it becomes stressful at times. But, once again, I refuse to despise and throw mud at what I was, at what many deserving, legitimate men are.)

Being socially disintegrated is even more cruel when criminals, liars, thieves, and invaders receive positive attention and you don’t. And then, when you finally succeed, you are expect to bury your origins and pretend you are part of the Cathedral’s chosen as if the other ones (you know, the ones just like you were before) were nothing, or monsters.

Even my own father, who tries hard to be a good bourgeois bohemian (and, of course, a Leftist), does not have a clue when I try to tell him that Alt-Righters are courageous, fair, honest, decent, hard-working, not to say virtuous or meritorious. He doesn’t even understand that people who never get acknowledged unless they are inauthentic crave recognition for their true deeds. And such is Eros—sexual recognition.

There is a French writer called Yann Moix who said that, when he became famous and acclaimed from his writings, he saw women’s way of looking at him change. When he was “nothing,” he was nothing in their eyes. Certainly not someone they would open their legs to, much less desire. Then, when he gained fame, he saw these women notice how cool and interesting and intelligent and spiritual he was. He then pretended to seduce some of them, just to break their hearts later. Revenge is best served cold. He also fucked some of them to “next” them, that is, replace them right after.

The top tastes even better when you come from the bottom!

What matters is not to fuck. What matters is being desired. Being desired is being integrated into sociability. This is what matters. Or, at least, having these girls do their best to fake desire, which means that you matter, that you’re integrated—and who knows, perhaps their faking will lead to a spark of true desire.

Abolish the sexual oligarchy and the deregulated marketplace. Perform some justice. Kick the invaders out and punish those who abused from their position, whether they are douchey chads, politicians, or privileged boomers. Then, perhaps you will solve the incel issue.

Things are not that simple because the bourgeois bohemian class and world became autistic and showed itself unable to listen and talk on an equal foot with non-liberals. They need to make elaborate, and ultimately worthless, theories on why people elected Trump. Why don’t they simply ask said people? Perhaps because they can’t even stand the answers. They can’t consider these without putting a distorting filter, accusing, slandering, caricaturing and reproducing a heap of double standards and intelligent-yet-idiotic norms such as forbidding their own to go to the point without academic drivel.

BTW, if a bit of “let’s deconstruct liberals” seems interesting to you, I can provide some ROK pieces, most of these written from my desk.

IMO people such as Jack Donovan, Paul Waggener or even many ROK writers are much closer to reality than bourgeois bohemian autists who need to put a filter between said reality and their closeted world. Want the heart of the problem? They’ve stolen the West, and they want every other Westerner to make it to bobolandia or disappear in silence as his name is covered with filth. Then they do not understand. LOL. Incels are no more absurd than the Dark Knight‘s League of Shadows. But here am I wandering off the point again.

Please, keep up with the good work. Thank you for having read my non-native, although highly alt-polished English, up to this point. I just wish Jacobite Mag leaned closer to Social Matter.

Take care,

[Redacted]

(and yes, I’m a white man named [Redacted], if this needed to be mentioned)

Thursday, May 24, 2018