The April terrorist attack in Toronto, Canada that left 10 people dead at the hands of a suspect who claimed to be involuntarily celibate (incel for short) has opened people’s eyes into a new online community of men who are isolated from the rest of the world, yet united in their inability or unwillingness to convince women to engage in romantic encounters with them.
New research from the Institute for Family Studies suggests that there is indeed a growing population of men who have experienced an ongoing sexual drought, but it’s not because of their claim of a few men dominating the sexual economy of women or as they put it “20 percent of the men get 80 percent of the women.”
According to the study, sexlessness is rising in men aged 22-35 because of delayed marriage, education, and co-residence with one’s parents. In other words, there’s a growing number of men who aren’t having sex the longer they put off marriage, the longer they’re in school, and the longer they live with their parents. We’ve often seen studies related to these exact symptoms of a bad economy for millennials.
Unemployment for millennials typically runs higher than the national average. However, in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, the unemployment rate for that same demographic was exacerbated. As a result, millennials put off marriage to save money, enrolled in graduate degree programs with the hopes of getting a better job on the other side, or even moved back in with their parents after college with the hopes of taking one or multiple jobs to give them the solvency to live on their own.
Now, of course, there are men grouped into these estimations who are voluntarily celibate, and put off sexual intercourse for religious or health reasons. We can’t lose sight of the fact that there are plenty of good and decent humans who don’t have sex. But the men who hold these intolerant views that somehow women are to blame for their inability to sleep with them need to be condemned and corrected.
There could be a plethora of reasons for why incels exist and how there are a growing number of them, but it would be a mistake to assume that a struggling economy in the last decade had nothing to do with it.
