/soy/ - Soyjaks

It is… complicated…

To put it simply the vast majority of incels are actually people with extremely poor social skills, self esteem and mental illness with the focus on dating issues either being a side effect or a way to express their own belief that they are unloveable. This is often caused by social ostracization and rejection at a young age (usually due to a combination of factors that effect men such as stigma of mental illness, being seen as dangerous, etc combined with neruodivergence, abuse or mental health issues). This results in a feedback loop of worsening mental health and social skills that eventually leads to bitterness, misanthropy, paranoia, nihilism and bad coping strategies. Despite a lot of discourse talking about how incels want s*x the truth is they want to feel wanted and accepted (which is why ironically taking pity on incels is actually seen as offensive by incels).

A lot of what people consider to be incel ideology is actually the result of nihilistic catestrophizing or actual experiences. For example frustration over how men are given very little support/sympathy (ironically trying to tell incels to not be misogynistic results in more misogyny as it furthers these frustrations) (this is also why so many incels say that society caters to women not men), frustration over how male insecurity is stigmatized and a genuine fear of feminism as they consider it to be perpetuating the stigma that led to their issues in the first place (it really does not help that a lot of these people are borderline schizophrenic). They will also just straight up agree with any sexist or racist statements if they are inherently nihilistic even if they are not racist or sexist themselves (eg X groups problems are their own fault).

Now to finally answer your question…. the reason why incels don't try to moderate themselves is because of two reasons. First of all they actively seek deregulated niche spaces on the internet as they have intense social anxiety (this is also why they tend to use dark humour and irony instead of talking normally). Second of all inceldom itself is a form of self harm, they are not trying to get better, they don't think they can get better and they don't think they deserve to get better. Incel fourms are first and foremost suicide forums.

Incels are not mentally well people, their association with the far right and school shootings is the result of them being the perfect group to target for radicalization by bad actors which is why studies consistently show them as being less violent and more left wing than most men.
All of this does not apply to all incels though, infact recent studies suggest that a lot of the right wing incels are just…. straight up psychopaths, without any link with mental illness or neruodivergence…. just… literal psychopaths…

Sorry for the wall of text, this stuff is really difficult to explain, we really need to acknowledge that that these issues exist and stop trying to compare the experiences of men and women or have a zero sum mentality on gender equality (thankfully this is slowly changing). We also need to create targeted messaging towards these demographics by mixing nihilistic dark humour with more hopeful left wing messaging (The only good example I can think of this would be the video game Disco Elysium).