Everyone’s talking about Incel now Wired

in the beginning This year, The Cut kicked off a short rhetorical cycle by announcing a new lifestyle trend: “maximum friction.”

The idea, in short, is that people have overused apps, artificial intelligence, and other means of near-instant gratification, and would be better off with more friction in their daily lives—that is, those mundane challenges that require little effort from them.

Whatever your feelings on this philosophy, the use of “maxxing” as a suffix that is supposedly familiar or at least understandable to most mainstream media readers is evidence of another trend: the assimilation of incel terminology across the broader Internet. The online ecosystem for “single” men is saturated with this kind of medical jargon; Affected participants isolate and isolate themselves and identify themselves through in-group symbolic language intended to confuse and repel outsiders. So, how did non-incels (“norms” as incels are called) end up adopting and reworking these loaded words?

Slang, regardless of its origins, has a viral nature. It tends to break containment and mutate. The buzzword “woke,” as it relates to our current politics, comes from African American vernacular English, and once referred to awareness of racial and social injustice — and this usage dates back to the mid-20th century, even before the civil rights movement. But this century’s culture wars have turned “woke” into a favorite pejorative for right-wingers, who use it as a catch-all term for anything that threatens their ideology, like black pilots or gender-neutral pronouns.

Back in 2014, the outbreak of harassment on Gamergate paved the way for a different linguistic reorganization. An organized backlash against women working in the video game industry, and ultimately any kind of diversity or progressivism within the medium, revealed a reactionary anger that would gain a fuller voice during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. This was the period in which many in the digital mainstream got their first taste of the nihilism and invective that fuels toxic message boards like 4chan and gave rise to a network of anti-feminist atmospheric sites known collectively as the “PSL” community: PUAHate Juniors, was closed shortly after the 2014 Isla Vista killing spree carried out by Elliot Rodger, who frequented the forum). SlutHate (a live center of misogyny), and Lookism (where bigots viciously criticize each other’s appearance).

Lookism, named after the idea that prejudice against less attractive people is as common and harmful as sexism or racism, is the only forum for the PSL trifecta that still exists today, and although we don’t know who coined the term “maxxing,” it is the most likely source for the first verb with this construction. “Looksmaxxing”, which borrows from the role-playing game concept of “min-maxing”, or raising a character’s strengths while reducing weaknesses, has become a favorite expression for attempts to improve one’s appearance in the pursuit of sex. This could mean something as simple as a change of technique or as extreme as “bone smashing,” a technique supposed to achieve a more defined jawline by tapping it with a hammer.

If the 2000s introduced people to terms like “game” and “negation,” the 2010s marked the beginning of a language that expanded the Darwinian vision of the dating community as a strictly hierarchical marketplace. “AMOG,” the initials for “alpha male of the group,” gave us “mogging,” a display in which a man displays his physical superiority over his rival. The ideal masculine specimen can also be identified as a ‘Chad’, who allegedly enjoys his choice of attractive partners, while among Chadians the Chad is of course ‘Gegachad’. Women were disparaged as “feminine humanoids,” then “humanoids,” and finally just “humanoids.”