Incels should be offered dating coaches, a world-leading expert on the misogynistic subculture has said.
Andrew Thomas, a senior lecturer at the University of Swansea and the author of the largest global study into incels by the Commission for Counter Extremism (CCE), said that relationship coaching could help incels shed their misogynistic ideology.
The incel movement, short for involuntary celibate, is an online community of men who believe they are entitled to sex but, because they have not had sex recently or at all, feel bitterness or hatred towards women.
Incels tend to subscribe to the “black pill” worldview — a philosophy that states there is nothing they can do to improve their romantic prospects. The dark online subculture is deeply rooted in misogyny, the reclusive men blaming women for their lack of sexual success.
Thomas said “date coaching” and “speed dating” could be useful tools for reintegrating incels into society by helping them to learn how to form relationships. He said the idea was “not about getting these guys laid”, which he called an “unhelpful” interpretation of his advice.
“My perspective is that for a lot of these guys there’s a huge deficit in knowing how to have any sort of social relationship at all. And helping them with that puts them in a social position where it’s harder to hold the views that they have.
“It’s very easy to walk around hating 50 per cent of the population if you’re never subjected to that half of the population.”
Thomas pointed to research in Singapore that found dating coaches had helped young men who struggled to form relationships, which could lead to successful longer-term relationships.
The Netflix series
Adolescence has thrust the rising threat of the incel movement up the agenda in the UK, and triggered a national conversation about the impact of social media and misogynistic influencers in the wider online subculture known as the “manosphere”.
The four-part series follows 13-year-old Jamie who is accused of murdering a girl at his school. It showed how the incel movement can warp the minds and attitudes of boys towards the opposite sex.
After its release, Sir Keir Starmer held a meeting in Downing Street to discuss how to combat the extreme misogynistic attitudes generated by the manosphere.
Schoolchildren are due to be given lessons to
counter misogyny and the growing appeal of influencers, such as Andrew Tate, under the government’s new relationships, health and sex education (RHSE) guidance.
This year, a
report by Home Office officials found that the manosphere needed to be tackled through changes to the government’s approach to tackling extremism.
Thomas said that
Adolescence was likely to change the public’s view of incels. His latest paper, published in January, found that society pities incels rather than fears them.
However, he said the Netflix series would be “a sweeping cultural phenomenon” because parents would now worry their sons who spend time in their bedroom were planning to “go out and knife someone”.
Thomas said: “I’m not saying ‘get these guys laid and that will solve the problem’, that is not my perspective … we’ve seen research out of Singapore showing that speed dating coaching can work — not necessarily with incels specifically, but with young men who struggle to form relationships.
“Coaching them on dating skills improves their ability to connect, and that can lead to the formation of longer-term relationships.”
Thomas conceded that date coaching would not be suitable for some of the more extreme members of the subgroup. He said that for those with “dark personality styles” including psychopathy, narcissism and those with far-right views, such training would allow them to take advantage of women.
Instead, the focus would be on helping deeply isolated single young men form relationships and stop hating women, he said. “We’ve done some more digging, and what we’ve found is what looks to be two separate pathways into the incel experience,” Thomas added.
“One is marked by high levels of autistic traits, poor social skills, a history of bullying, poor mating, perceived mating value and self-esteem. The other one is the high dark triad. So dark personality style, psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, far right-wing views.
“If we’ve got a young male with poor social skills or they are autistic, they would benefit quite a bit from some social skills training.
“But give that same social skills training to someone who is high on psychopathic personality, well, they already have social skills, and they use them to take advantage of people. And so you’re strengthening a problem that’s already there.”
Thomas said that during his work as a psychotherapist who works with incels, he had been able to help them form relationships by getting them to re-engage socially.
He said: “One of the common things that incels will say is that it’s not safe to approach women to ask them on a date. They’re constantly sharing with each other examples of how society hates you. Society will reject you. It’s unsafe to talk to women. And so they developed this sense of ‘everyone hates us’.
“They withdraw to an online community and expect rejection and believe they are experiencing rejection and their concept of women is very one dimensional and based on the stereotypes they see online.
“But the moment you encourage these guys to go out and start re-engaging with family members, re-engaging with female friends, that can give them counterexamples of real women who are not one dimensional, but three dimensional. And then what have become black or white view starts to turn into shades of grey.
“And then what happens is they end up having more female friends. They build the skills that you need like the social skills for having friends and then having a relationship becomes a lot less of a hopeless prospect for them.”
