Incels

Incels is the 43rd Episode, released on August 17th 2018.

Reception
As of March 31st 2019, Incels remains Natalie's most popular video, with over 2.1 million views. Incels is the only video at present to have hit 2 million, and the first of her videos to pass 1 million.

Script
''[Mendelssohn: String Quartet No.6 In F minor, III. Adagio]''

Voiceover (Abigail Thorn): [Reading a post] Imagine how a woman feels. Imagine how soft and warm her skin feels. Imagine the sweet smell of her perfume. Imagine her tenderly pressing her soft lips against yours. Imagine her letting you get on top of her and insert your [bleep] inside her, softly moaning as it slides in. Imagine the walls of her tight, warm [bleep] wrapped around every inch of your [bleep]. Imagine her breathing getting heavier with every thrust. Imagine her wrapping her arms and legs around you, holding you as close as she possibly can and begging you to [bleep] inside her as you release every ounce of your [bleep] into her. Then imagine the feeling of pure satisfaction and peace that comes afterwards, and looking beside you to see a person that cares about you and has accepted you in the most intimate way possible. You will never get to experience this because your skeleton is too small or the bones in your face are not the proper shape. Have a nice day.

[Melancholic smooth jazz plays over the screen fading to a skull]

Natalie: Hello boys. Let's talk about bone structure.

[Incels]

Natalie: There's something basically Soviet about the way the internet names things. Stalin had portmanteaus like agitprop, politburo, and kompromat, and we have webinar, podcast, and incel, short for involuntary celibate. The word incel was invented in the late 90's by a lonely bisexual called Alana, who created a website called Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project that was essentially a safe space for people who just couldn't get it in. But in our own miserable moment of Internet history, the word "incel" refers to a more specific community of mostly heterosexual men, centered around forums like Incel.me and r/braincells.

Natalie (VO): This group has recently gotten a lot of bad press because for the last few years they've been churning out mass murderers faster than Marvel can make Avengers movies.

Natalie: But most incels aren't violent killers. They're just men who've formed an identity around not getting laid. In this video I don't want to mock incels or lecture them or even sympathize with them. I just want to understand who they are and why they're like this. To start with, sometimes the best way to understand a person's worldview is to learn their language, and the language of the incels...well. You'll see.

[1st Base: Incelese]

Natalie: Does it ever bother you that the word "women" makes adult females sound just a little bit too human? Well incels have a solution to that. They've taken to calling women "feeeeeemooooooiiiids."

Natalie (VO): The choice of vocabulary tells us how incels think of women; not as sisters or mothers, and certainly not autonomous people, but as a kind of foreign, inscrutable object, comparable to a natural resource -unobtainium- to which all incels believe men are entitled, and to which they feel they have been unjustly denied.

Natalie: There's a long tradition of nerdy men talking about women in nerdily misogynistic ways. I'm reminded of famed rocket scientist Werner von Braun's remark about female astronauts:

"We're reserving 110 pounds of payload for recreational equipment."

Natalie: Which is not to say that alpha males are less misogynistic than nerds, but simply that the nerds have a nerdy style of misogyny. Now, "femoid" is about as neutral a term as incels have for women, and it's only downhill from there. There's the usual standbys; bitches, sluts, whores, all conveying a searing resentment of female sexuality, the pinnacle of which is represented by the bespoke incel coinage "roastie" [Image of raw beef] which I'm sorry to inform you refers to the incel belief that the human vulva is mutilated through repeated penetration by different men-though not repeated penetration by the same man interestingly-and thereby come to resemble roast beef. Now by definition incel haven't observed any vaginas, but to incels anatomy is more a metaphysical speculation than crude science. Though if you ask me the right metaphor for a veteran vag is not roast beef, but sour grapes.

[Natalie pops a grape into her mouth]

Natalie: Of course, not all [slowed down] femoids are created equal. There are various subspecies:

[David Attenborough style voiceover]

"The Becky, or normie femoid is to be contrasted with the Stacy, or sexually desirable femoid, whose distinguishing features include; makeup on point; never works a day in her life; naturally curvy body gives men instant erections; big tits and ass show fertility."

Natalie (VO): Leave my buns alone you savages! [Over image of "Becky's" hair buns]

Natalie: The Stacy, naturally, has a male counterpart, whom incels call the Chad.

[David Attenborough style voiceover]

"A Chad is a hunky alpha, whose hands are always prepared to grab nearby fertile pussy; he has never heard a song in his entire life; he has a sloped forehead with a strong brow, ram bow chin, strong jawline, flat occipital plate."

Lady Foppington: It must needs be remarked that the skull of the Chad exhibiteth a brow ridge most pronounced, whereas the skull of the virgin is most inadequate in this regard, predisposing such specimens to an abject existence of lamentation and cuckoldry.

Natalie: It's time to talk about bone structure. According to a classic incel meme;

[David Attenborough style voiceover]

"The difference between Chad and non-Chad is literally a few millimeters of bone."

Natalie: I would like to propose a sociological theory.

"Foppington's Law: Once bigotry and self loathing permeate a given community, it is only a matter of time before deep metaphysical significance is assigned to the shape of human skulls."

Natalie: Why skulls, you ask. Well, the best explanation I can come up with is that a skull is inanimate and unchangeable. It's therefore a perfect symbol of the intrinsic and permanent characteristics that bigots like to assign to certain groups of people. If you believe for example that a certain race or gender is intellectually inferior, you can justify your belief by pointing to the shape of a skull and saying, well that's the reason why, it's just nature, there's nothing that can be done about it. And that is exactly the way incels think about love and celibacy.

Natalie (VO): Mankind is divided into two groups of people, the Chads with the fuckable skulls, and the incels whose bones come up a few millimeters short.

Natalie: [Munching on a corn-dog] Corn-dog anyone? I'm really hungry. [Through a mouthful of food] Of course it's not just the skulls the incels blame for their sexlessness. They have a whole dictionary of jargon explaining the causes of involuntary celibacy.

Natalie (VO): Heightcels are incel due to their inferior stature. Whereas Mentalcels can't attract women because of mental illness or autism, or they're addicts and then called Drugcels.

Natalie: Wristcels, on the other hand, are doomed by their overly delicate wrists. Now, obsessing about your wrist size does seem a little weird.

[Angry voiceover]

"Oh yeah? Is it a little weird that the average dildo has more girth than my wrist? Is it weird at all that some men have thicker dicks than my wrist? But yeah, obviously "obsessing" about my tiny wrists that are smaller than even some women's is completely irrational body dysmorphia and the reason no woman wants to be with me or even talk to me is my shitty personality, even though literally 80 IQ men who have nothing to talk about except who won the game last night are still able to attract a loving partner."

Natalie: ...Interesting. A significant number of incels are not white, in which their unfuckability is attributed to race, and they are accordingly termed, apologies in advance, blackcels, [deep sigh] ricecels, currycels, and so on. Which is not to say that all non-white men are celibate. There are of course the occasional Chads of color, with their superior skulls and towering stature, whom the incels have christened Tyrones, Changs, and Chadpreets. I'm so sorry. So you can be incel because of your looks, your height, your mind, or your race, but what unites them all is the conviction that love and sex are forever out of reach. Unless, of course, you delusionally imagine that you can "ascend," that is escape your inceldom. If you falsely and pathetically believe that there is any possibility for improvement, well, that makes you the lowest of the low, a sad and sorry, Hopecel.

[Second Base: The Red Pill]

Natalie: So we have the building blocks of the incel worldview: the Stacy's, the Chad's, the incels, and the normies. From these elements, incles have constructed a theory of human nature and sexuality, which they call the red pill. Incels share the Red Pill worldview with the rest of the manosphere, that is, pickup artists, men's rights activists, and the voluntary celibate community known as Men Going Their Own Way, abbreviated MGTOW. According to Red Pill theory, women by nature are hypergamous. Hypergamy, new Greek for marrying above, refers to the practice of seeking relationships with men above one's social status, and also, in incel usage, above one's attractiveness.

Natalie (VO): According to incels, physical attractiveness is naturally distributed equally between the sexes. So if you were to assign numerical ratings to attractiveness, as incels like to do, there would be as many say 8/10 women as 8/10 men. Incels believe that in a just world, a 5/10 man would naturally wind up in a relationship with his looksmatch, that is, a 5/10 woman, equivalently attractive to himself.

Natalie: But sadly, this just system has been ruined by hypergamous women, who, regardless of their own attractiveness, are only interested in dating Chad. Incels sometimes call this the 80/20 rule, the idea that only the top 20% of men will ever be desired by women. Now since most heterosexual men do end up in relationships with women, you might be raising your eyebrow at that idea. But incels have an explanation. According to the Red Pill theory, women often pursue a mating strategy called alpha fux beta bux.

Natalie (VO): This means that in her 20's a woman will, as incels say, ride the cock carousel, [Theme park music plays] sleeping with as many Chads as possible. But as she ages into her 30's, she will settle down with a beta normie, whom she's not really attracted to, but whom she will use for financial support, all the while continuously cuckolding him on the alpha cock carousel, before inevitably abandoning him, taking him for everything he's worth in a divorce settlement, and running off into the Mediterranean with all the children and a new Chad boyfriend, while the beta cuck is left behind to fester in alimony payments, solitude, and poverty.

Natalie: So the upshot of the Red Pill theory is that for men, there are three possible outcomes.

Natalie (VO): Either you're an incel, doomed to a lifetime of excruciating loneliness and resentment, or you're a normie, destined to wind up in a sexless marriage with an unfaithful wife, who will divorce you, win custody of the children and run off with all your money. Or you could be an alpha-an independent promiscuous man who sleeps with a lot of women and forms attachments to none of them.

Natalie: In the Red Pill philosophy there are two ways to become alpha. The first is simply to be a Chad by nature. The second is to become a pickup artist. Red pilled pickup artist believe basically the same things about women that incels believe, that they are hypergamous, duplicitous, and fuckable, but not lovable. The difference is that pickup artists are not celibate, in fact they try to have sex with as many women as possible by following a series of strategies and scripts known as "game" as described by the book of that title, as well as by the red pilled pick up artist Roosh V, author of a book called-

Natalie: [Beauty Guru voice] -Bang, a new mascara from Benefit. So the tube is bomb, I am living. Let's see what the wand looks like. [Astonished] Ooo, it's so big.

Natalie: I wonder what Roosh is up to lately.

Roosh V: I bake my own bread. Yes, I am outing myself as a baker, as someone who likes to cook. I'm not a woman. I am ultra masculine, as you can see, but baking and cooking in general is a scientific thing. And men like scientific things. I used to be a scientist.

Natalie: Well, Roosh you know what? If it means you leave women alone then I hope you enjoy your new life as an ultra masculine baker-sorry, I mean bread scientist [laughs].

Natalie (VO): So remember the red pill is the realization that women are hypergamous by nature, 20% or less of men are really attractive to women, dating is a sexual marketplace, and feminism is a pretext for enabling women to behave however they want while cosigning men to emasculation and impotence. The black pill is the additional realization that one's place in the sexual marketplace is genetically determined, that one is a permanent virgin, that sex and relationships are forever out of reach, and hence happiness is impossible and there's nothing one can do except Lie Down And Rot (LDAR).

Natalie: The black pill is, essentially, dogmatic hopelessness about dating and about life in general. It's the pinnacle of what psychotherapists call-

Natalie (VO): Catastrophizing: a cognitive distortion where anxiety of depression leads you to infer apocalyptic conclusions from mundane setbacks.and anxieties. For instance a catastrophizing person might begin with the thought, oh no, I'm going to be late to work, and from there infer: my boss is going to be angry, I'm going to lose my job, I'm not going to be able to get another job, I'm going to be unemployed forever, my family will starve, oh god we're all going to die.

Natalie: Each step in this sequence is sort of plausible, but the leap from step one to step seven is completely absurd. This is exactly how the black pill works.

Natalie (VO): You start with experiences of rejection and isolation. From there you infer that you are unattractive to women, that you will never be attractive to any woman, that you will be forever alone, that you will always be unhappy, that women did this to you, that feminism empowered women to do this to you, that the social trends that made this possible are only getting worse, that humanity itself is doomed and your only option is to Lie Down And Rot.

Natalie: Of course, not all incels take things quite so far, but a lot of them do. On incel forums, suicidal ideation is very common, and posts are often tagged "sui fuel" or "rope fuel" meaning they make you want to kill yourself, usually because they're reminders of how hopeless the incel situation is, or how devastating it is that incels are missing out on the incredible bliss of sex and romance. Now if you suggest to incels that posting sui fuel on forums already populated with lonely and depressed people is maybe not the most responsible idea, they usually say that "oh it's just dark humor, it's just a cope, throw us a bone here."

Natalie (VO): But a lot of the suicidal stuff shows no signs of humor, and it's common to see people express pretty extreme states of depression, which is not surprising, since hopelessness is the logical conclusion of the black pill worldview. One's possibility of happiness is determined by the genetics of height, frame, and facial bone structure, and if you don't have these gifts there's no relief but to cope or rope.

Natalie: Now-it's pretty tempting to mom the shit out of these kids. You want to grab them by their Black Ops t-shirts, shake them a bit and tell them there are millions of men with small wrists and weak chins getting laid every day, that they're their own worst enemies, that they need to get off the computer, go outside, make some friends, stop hating women, get some hobbies, and who knows maybe then they'll develop a disposition that women find a little more approachable. Essentially you want to tell them, clean your room bucko.

Natalie (VO): [Over a clip of Jordan Peterson] In fact for the young men in this demographic who are receptive to that kind of advice, Jordan Peterson is probably helpful.Because he's telling them a lot of what they need to hear, and he's kind of a sexist old man so they might actually listen.

Natalie: But most incels don't want to hear this kind of advice. In fact, they view it as essentially a microaggression. You are, in effect, Chadsplaining their oppression to them when you give them basic advice like take a shower, be more confident, to people who have already experienced a lifetime of rejection and isolation, and who believe they've tried everything. So they despise this kind of advice, and devote endless posts to bitterly mocking the futility and insensitivity of it.

Voiceover: [Image of man crying at a party] Just go out to parties, bro! [Image of a shirtless buff guy] Instead of hating on women all day why don't you losers just try being confident like this average looking guy. Confidence is key. [Image of a man reading a book] You incels need some hobbies. Try reading some books, women love INTELLIGENCE! It works for me bro! [Sad boy standing behind some girls] Aw, you just need to get out more.

"No one knows what it's like to be hated."

Natalie: To incels, their worldview seems ironclad. It has built in defenses against anyone who would try and change their minds. So if you want to understand incels, and in particular if you want to understand why their community produces so many mass murders, you have to understand that black pill is more than the dogma that you can't get laid. It's also the dogma that because you can't get laid, you can never be happy. So what we have on our hands is more than a bunch of angry internet misogynists. It's, at worst, a kind of death cult, complete with an eternal hell and an omnipotent enemy. And it's not surprising that that state of mind leads a few of them to conclude since triumph is impossible, why not try revenge?

[Third Base: Tinder is Garbage]

Natalie: I know I said that I wasn't going to sympathize with incels, and I know they don't want my sympathy anyways, and I know it's bad praxis to sympathize with the devil-but on some level I can't help it. The internet is for introverts, so I'm sure a lot of people watching this feel the same way. [Image of Sad boy standing behind some girls]  I bet some of you have been this guy. I've been this guy. So look, I'm gonna tell you something I've never come out about on this channel, [obnoxious voice] so this is like a really vulnerable moment for me, [voice goes back to normal] but I used to live as a man. And I'm not proud of that but I'm ready to move on if you're ready to forgive. I'm in the unusual situation of being a woman who dates men who used to be man who dates women. What kind of fucked up shit is that? Is that even allowed? Alright calm down lesbian stans I'm still attracted to women, and those that lieth betwixt, cats, the inherent eroticism of the sea.

[Mendelssohn, Hebrides Overture]

Natalie (VO): Mmmmm yeah... Don't you just wanna get in there? Take me mommy!

Natalie: But I have been on a heterosexual kick lately.

Danny Devito: I gotta get my hetero on.

Natalie: What I'm getting at is I've used Tinder as both a man seeking women, and as woman seeking men. And I think that gives me some relevant experiences. When you're a man the strategy is you've gotta send a lot of messages because women get a lot of messages, and then you've just gotta try to be less of an ogre than the other fuckboys. Whereas if you're a woman, you get to lie recumbent on your chaise longue and receive the inquiries. Let's see how we're doing here. How many men have liked me on Tinder? I'm paying $30 for this information so this better be good! I have 2500 likes. That's a lot of Baltimorean men who swiped right on a tran. What a divine city!

[Game show music]

[If you noticed the problematic thing CONGRATULATIONS you win today's discourse!]

Natalie: Awwwww, that's so nice of them to be interested in me. Let's see what kind of messages I got. DICK OR NO DICK? PRE-OP OR POST OP? DID YOU CUT YOUR DICK OFF? Oh my God. I'm gonna cut it off, okay? Jesus.I will let you smash my pussy so so hard, if you just be patient. It's-it's a whole process.

[Abigail Cockbane busts into the room]

Abigail: That's not a pussy, that's a fuck hole. [Whispers] You'll never know what it means to squeeze life out of your sacred passage.

Natalie: Well, that's true. I'm not going to be squeezing any life out unless something goes very seriously wrong. And I assure you that none of the passages I have down there ever have been or ever will be sacred. Abigail, leave my fuck hole out of this.

[Abigail closes door slowly]

Natalie: When I first started using this app I was messaging a guy who seemed super chill, he was going to take me to a concert, and I was like that seems like a lot for a first date but we'll try it. 15 minutes after we agreed to that he sends me a message.

"What color panties are you wearing? I would love to smell them."

[Looks at camera]

Natalie: ...Can we get coffee first? The hell of it is, I probably would've let him smell my panties. But this is a thing you bring up on the third fuck. You don't open with panty sniffing. Like the only point of in-app messaging is for me to figure out if you're going to murder me, and you're already fucking it up. So this is the experience of women on Tinder. We're drowning in dick, and most of it is terrible. [#notalldick] Not all, I do have some very sweet messages, and I haven't used this app in a couple months, so if I didn't respond to you or if we didn't match, it's not because I rejected you, it's because I don't like the app. [Please don't hurt me] People screenshot my profile and post it online, and they call me Contrapoints in-app and like-I'm too famous for this shit. My life is hard.

Natalie: So girls, we do a lot of complaining about the firing squad of bad dicks that's constantly pointed at us on dating apps. But how would you feel if instead of that, you were just getting radio silence like the incels get? I can't speak for other women, but personally, I prefer the firing squad of dicks. You know. At least these pricks care enough about my pussy, to be an asshole about my dick. I feel sorry for men on dating apps, I really do. You have to deal with a lot of rejection and that must be difficult. And these apps are especially brutal to people who aren't photogenic. If you're meeting people at a bar or a party, you might strike up a conversation with someone who you're not initially physically attracted to. But then maybe they're super funny, or charming, or maybe they're attracted to me-and that's an attractive quality in another person, that they appreciate how beautiful I am. But on Tinder, you're just browsing a catalog of faces, and gatekeeping who even gets to talk to you in the first place. Red-pillers have a really gross way about dating in terms of "sexual market value" but like, dating kind of is a marketplace, or at least you can analyze like one. And our culture is so visual, and these apps are so picture-centered that bone structure, like it's not the only thing that matters, but it matters a great deal. And this is where I do have sympathy for the incels, because as a trans woman I know what it's like to obsess over millimeters of bone. I actually had to interrupt work on this video to go to a consultation for facial feminization surgery so that I can pay luxury car amounts of money to shave off a few millimeters of bone here and there because it must needs be remarked that the skull of the female exhibiteth a brow ridge less pronounced. I mean I'm just as obsessed with bone structure as the goddamn incels, because I think certain parts of my face make me look like a man, and I worry about it every day. We're all obsessed with the bones honey. We all have bones inside us, we all love touching bones.

[Asmr whispering while Natalie taps sensually on a skull]

Natalie: You want to take a measurement from the supraorbital ridge to the lambdoid suture, and multiply that figure by pi to calculate what we call the Chad circumference.

Natalie: [Voice back to normal] Why is no one talking about the Chad circumference?

[4th Base: Just the Tip]

Natalie: There's another way I think my experience [obnoxiously] as a trans woman [returns to normal] is relevant to the incel discussion, and that's that I recognize delusional self loathing when I see it. I'm far from the first to point out the "supreme gentleman" incel mass murderer [clip of...] Elliot Rodger was, apart from his narcissistic psychopath personality, an eminently bangable twink. Now I'm not going to show you pictures of incels, but on their forums they do sometimes post selfie threads. And you can't say this on incel forums without enraging them, but in confidence from one pretend clinician to another, let me tell you that the truth about incels is that almost all of them are completely normal looking guys. But of course that's not the feedback they get from other incels. The feedback they get is that their chins are weak, their hair is thin, their skin is garbage and there's no hope whatsoever, no woman will ever love them, they are truecels with no option but to lie down and rot. And the interesting thing is, these guys post selfies to these threads knowing that that's the kind of feedback that they're gonna get. So why? Why do they do it? Well, I'll tell you a little story. There is a website on the internet called 4chan.org that has a board called LGBT. A few years ago it was used mainly by the 25 gay men that actually like Milo Yiannopoulos, but recently it's used mostly by "men" who are entertaining the notion of becoming women, and by early transition trans women. So the board is jokingly called TTTT. Now I've recently moved that first stage of my transition, but the memory is still fresh, and let me tell you, it is a painful, awkward, humiliating stage of life. So the trans women of TTTT are tragic, they're basically still in man mode, which is why they're using 4chan, and I bring them up because they remind me a lot of incels. For incels the core frustration is that they can't get laid. For TTTT it's that they can't pass as female. Both groups post selfies knowing they're going to get brutal unconstructive feedback. And both groups have a weird vocabulary with which to express their anxieties. For instance on TTTT a major piece of jargon is "hon," a slur used by trans women for other trans women, which basically means you look like a man in a dress, which is what every trans woman is afraid of. And there's another commonality with incels too, with all the bigots and self loathers, which if you've been paying attention you've already guessed.

Voiceover: "You will never be seen as a woman because of your head size. Have all the surgeries in the world, your massive man noggin will stay the same."

Voiceover: "lel, this freak thinks he has very soft facial features. His head is fucking huge, lel and the hons on reddit are hugboxing him and telling him that there are women with big heads. No, there aren't. There aren't fucking women with heads as big as that and ffs won't change shit. You might as well repress. You transition with a man's head. You will be clocked, you will be looked at as a freak, you will never be seen as a legit woman. 100%."

Voiceover: [Response to last comment] "THIS is why I am not transitioning. Thank you Skull-people for showing me the way and that no matter what I do I will always be a manly man skull wise. You saved me the embarrassment of being a literal big headed man in a dress."

Lady Foppington: Tis evident the cranial vault of the autogynephile be much more voluminous and the facial plane wider-

Natalie: It always comes back to the skulls. Every time. The other interesting thing about TTTT, is I used to be posted there a lot. For a while I had some stans on the board who basically viewed me as inspiration. Yikes! Because that kind of post is frowned upon. If I'm not looked at as a big-skulled manly freak, if my transition is going well, that means that some of their transitions might go well too, and that is an unacceptable conclusion for a community founded on self-loathing and hopelessness. So it was necessary for the rest of the board to explain why I didn't pass, why I would never pass, and why anyone who looked less good than me shouldn't even fucking think about it. They shouldn't transition at all, they should just repress, they should lie down and rot. And I used to read this stuff all the time. Like I would specifically seek out threads about me. Which might seem strange considering I had hundred of fans telling me that I was a gorgeous goddess every day. So why did I turn away from that it to intentionally seek out this dismal den of hons talking about how my giant hon skull is clockable at a thousand paces, and my voice sounds like a ridiculous muppet falsetto hybrid of Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh. Well basically there was part of my brain that simply refused to believe it when people told me I was gorgeous. And for semi-plausible reasons. A lot of trans people on the internet tell other trans people they look gorgeous no matter what they look like. That's where the word "hon" comes from. [Obnoxious voice] You look great hon. So what TTTT is saying about reddit hugboxing is true to some extent. There is a kind of priori and dogmatic flattery that prevails in some trans spaces. So I came to regard all compliments as "everyone is beautiful" politically correct cuckoldry. And there would be this thrill of going to TTTT and reading other people saying what my deepest anxieties told me was really true. And that was always painful but there was a kind of pleasure too. There was a rush. It's exciting to burst out of the politically correct bubble and say what you're really thinking: that personality doesn't matter because big skulled Chads get all the girls, that Contrapoints is a big-skulled hon with a voice that's like nails on a chalkboard. And at first I justified the habit by telling myself I was just doing research. I have to keep tabs what the bigots are saying, that's simply my job. But soon I realized that it wasn't just research, and it was infecting me away from the computer. This ridiculous vocabulary-hons, AGP- was popping up in my head at unexpected times. It was starting to color how I thought about myself, and worse, it was starting to infect how I thought about other trans women. And that's the moment when I realized I need to stop looking at this stuff right now or I'm going to become a monster, and once that happens it's going to be very difficult to fix. This is exactly how the incel black pill works. There's something infectious about these vocabularies. Like on the days I've been working on this video, I'll go out at night and these words just involuntarily show up in my thoughts.

Natalie: [Internal monologue] That bartender is such a Chad,he's totally height mogging that tiny cuck.

Natalie: And the tragic thing is some incels don't realize what this is doing to their minds until it's too late.

Voiceover: [Reading reddit post] Let's face it; black pills are sui fuel, and a lot of us can't handle them. I gleefully indulged in this subreddit the moment I discovered it, since I loved uncovering secrets that society had been hiding from me, but it has affected my mental health in a bad way. I made my first call to the suicide hotline a few weeks ago, and I've never needed to do that before. I could always talk myself out of it through logic, but my mind is ruined now.

Natalie: This is a form of of what psychologists are calling digital self harm, prototypically teens who leave themselves abusive comments from sock puppet accounts. But the more sophisticated adult version involves intentionally seeking out abusive and disparaging comments about yourself made by other people. I have a long history of doing this, intentionally looking for abusive comments, especially ones that cut to the core of my deepest insecurities and fears. Why? I don't know. Why do people cut themselves? Part of it is what we call a masochistic epistemology: whatever hurts is true. I've recently gotten much better about this. I haven't been to any of the worst places in a couple months, and my mental health is much improved. So, incels. I'm not going to respond to your worldview like it's an intellectual position worthy of rational debate. Because these ideas and arguments, you're not using them the way rational people use arguments. You're using them as razor blades to abuse yourselves. And I know because I've done the exact same thing.

Natalie (VO): The incel worldview is catastrophizing. It's an anxious death spiral. And the solution to that has to be therapeutic, not logical.

Natalie: A lot of you are lonely. You've been bullied and neglected. You feel left behind by society. But what you're doing when you're reading incel forums, is you're slowly internalizing a cruel and distorted way of looking at yourselves, and at other people in your situation, and at women. And you're forming mental habits that are going to make it very difficult for you to live a happy life. So what you have to do is get off those forums as fast as possible. I'm going to post a link in the description of this video to instructions on how to block certain websites from your computer, because for me, that's what it took.

[5th Base:]

Natalie: [Whispers] ...anal. So the incel reddit/transgender 4chan analogy has a limit, and that limit is that for a significant subset of the incel community, their primary hatred is not directed at themselves, but at women. And they really hate women. Like I'm basically a professional internet bigotry scholar at this point, I look at this kind of stuff all the time, but researching this video I was honestly kind of shocked at the intensity of misogyny on incel forums. I won't show the worst of it but we're talking blaming women for rape, saying they deserve to be raped, calls for state mandated girlfriends and sex slaves, but most of all just a kind of generalized misinformed rage.

Voiceover: [Angrily reading a post] ''I hate women. I really do. Every time I look at them, my blood pressure shoots through the roof. When they're gabbing on the cellphone about Paris Hilton. When they're adjusting their lipstick and taking up my time by rifling through their stupid purse. When they whine to me about their period. When they blither on about some artist/film director/musician nobody gives a flipping fuck about. When they cry and expect your personal sympathy. But most of all I hate them because they're the smug hyperactive little bitches made that way by our shithole society. Look at what uncontrolled feminism and the media has done-''

Natalie: Hi Stacy, it's Tracy. Well, I was at the mall with Amber, Heather, Jenna, and Trish and we were talking about Paris Hilton, a very relevant cultural figure in 2018. They live in this cartoon caricature world where it's easy to avoid thinking of women as fully human. And that's where my sympathy runs dry. Because this kind of hate just needs a spark [snaps fingers] to turn to violence. So incels, I know you're not gonna listen to anything I say, and you're just gonna say I'm a tranny and a faggot and a degenerate, and to that I say, how dare you say things that are entirely true. But also: volcel if you wouldn't bitches. And I know you don't listen to suggestions about how you could probably actually have healthy relationships. So no one can really reach you until you get out of those forums and allow yourselves to be reached. But by way of a closing remark I guess I simply invite you to consider that you don't even need a warm body or a sex robot to satisfy the erotic longing. You know when I was your age in 1975 every teenage boy had a stratocaster in his bedroom [shredding over an image of a guitar] that was the outlet for his sexual frustration. What I'm suggesting is that the manosphere exists because rock 'n roll is dead. But there's other options. Think about the eroticism of a rainstorm, the clap of thunder, the rustle of the leaves, the steam rising off the warm pavement [deep sniff]. And whether you're a Chad, a Stacy, an incel, or a hon, you can always return to the caress of our dark mother, the sea, whose salty embrace envelops every contour of your naked body.

[Fin]

[Mendelssohn, Hebrides Overture plays as the Patreon credits roll past]

Voiceover: Whew, is it hot in here or is it just me?