From the Sewer of the Internet, a Slang Surfaces

Introducing “Gigachad” | Generated using EHStock / Getty Images Signature

“Been gymmaxxing lately,” my friend quipped as he made a protein shake. 

“Proteinpilled too,” I said.

My generation is speaking a new slang—new to us, anyway. Not quite ubiquitous, but familiar to that contingent of chronically online youth (and is that phrase not becoming a tautology?). These are phrases borrowed from incels, or “involuntary celibates,” an online community of radical misogynists. A quick glossary of now mainstream incel terms:

• “Chad/gigachad”: Term describing a man with desirable or hyper-masculine features.
• “Manlet”: Derogatory word to describe short men. 
• “Normie”: Derogatory word for someone with conventional tastes.
• “NPC”: From video game terminology, short for “Non-Playable Character.” A person who lacks critical thinking, acting as if pre-programmed.  
• “-maxxing”: Suffix denoting one is doing something to optimize their odds of success. 
• “-pilled”: Originally from The Matrix. Suffix denoting one is enlightened for “buying into” something.

A more comprehensive list can be found here. 

Incels are no run-of-the-mill women haters. In 2014, incel Elliot Rodger massacred a sorority, killing six and injuring 14 before turning the gun on himself. Years on, institutional actors have taken notice; in 2022, the Secret Service published a report on incel terrorism. There have been a host of think pieces. And the recent spate of assaults in New York opened a conversation about the rise of ideologically motivated attacks against women.

 After my conversation with my gymmaxxing friend, I wondered why my social circle had started using incel language. What was appealing about it? We’re leftists, feminists. We share no sympathies with incels. Actually, to us, they’re the epitome of uncool. Like most young Americans, we view that community of basement-dwelling virgins as either a social problem or a punchline. 

How did a fringe group of radical misogynists gain outsized influence on the slang of my generation? To answer the question, I needed an up-close look at the incel community. I went to the forums. 

Browsing the largest incel forum, Incels.is, I felt I’d entered a madhouse of pathological misogynists, insecure paranoiacs, and manic would-be social scientists. Note the following examples of my findings are explicit and offensive. 

I found terribly racist and homophobic diatribes flanked by graphic smut—one user fantasized about having sex with Tinker Bell. There were posts lamenting incels’ incurable loneliness, like one titled: “I don’t give a single fuck about anything except having a gf.” Conspiracy theories: “The FBI defeated us in a very insidious way.” And something like dating advice: “Thailand is not forever, Thaimax now or the door closes.” Coalescing several incel tropes—racial hierarchy, gamification, paranoia—the user argues Thailand will soon cease to be a fertile hunting ground for Western men, concluding, “Soon Afromaxxing, Iraqmaxxing, and Afghanmaxxing will be THE ONLY viable options, Thailand will be flooded by foreigners looking for pussy but not enough pussy due to a declining birth rate that started over a decade ago.” 

The sheer depravity made this outcast subculture’s influence over American youth slang, especially leftist youth slang, only more perplexing. Shouldn’t we be more sensitive than that? Moreover, I struggled to articulate what, exactly, differentiated incels from conventional misogynists. After all, the belief that heterosexual men are entitled to sex is a common justification for bigotry and violence against women. But something about the interaction between traditional prejudice and internet culture struck me as particularly meaningful. 

 One post caught my attention. It was titled “Marxist-Rodgerism. Opinions?” (“Rodgerism” in reference to the aforementioned terrorist.) An ostensibly Marxist treatise on “sexual economy,” the post argued that, “there are two distinct classes of men – Chads … and everyone else.” This class of oversexed men, the Chads, monopolize access to sex, depriving the so-called “sexual proletariat.” The writer proposed an incel class consciousness to overthrow the Chad-bourgeoisie. 

It was a perverted Marxism. Still, sincere or tongue-in-cheek, the post demonstrated a surprisingly lucid understanding of class, power, and markets that helped make incel ideology legible to me. While I had heard the claim that inceldom is only a modern and especially violent form of patriarchy, I’d felt there was something missing in the explanation. It seemed as though incels manifested a certain excess absent in traditional misogyny—some quality that brought inceldom beyond “normal” (or normie) sexism. Could this excess be a strain common to both incel ideology and political economy? 

Indeed, a core tenet of incel ideology is “sexual market value.” Incels maintain this value is largely or entirely determined by biology—and individuals, especially men, thus compete on a sexual marketplace that produces, as any marketplace, a hierarchy of winners and losers. To explain unequal patterns of distribution, incels refer to the “80/20 rule,” borrowed from neoclassical economics, which dictates the “top” 80 percent of women will only pair with the “top” 20 percent of men. This “market analysis” is the foundation of incel theory. One user in the incel forums, for example, suggested that modern age-of-consent laws inflate womens’ sexual market value by artificially restricting the supply of “fertile females.” 

However, even as incels insist the sexual market is society’s real structuring force, they reject market fundamentalism. They advocate state paternalism, hoping for a regime that would redistribute the means of sex. In his 107,000-word manifesto, Elliot Rodger argued the state should put women in selective extermination and breeding camps, abolishing womens’ agency and with it sexual market competition. 

While alt-right youth may know the sordid origins of incel slang and use it sardonically or with pride, its adoption by liberal and left-wing youth suggests ignorance. Still, an organic selection process has clearly taken place, as the same youth have not adopted incel slang wholesale. Terms like “roastie” (used to describe a promiscuous woman) and “femoid” (which stands for “female human organism”) have not become widespread. 

What, then, distinguishes the epithets that have successfully infiltrated mainstream discourse from those that haven’t? 

The successful terms seem to be those which can leave behind the overtly misogynistic content of incel ideology while still preserving its numerical dimension. The suffix “-maxxing,” for example, has a quantitative meaning beyond simply “trying very hard at something.” The modifier “-pilled” indicates that someone is superior for adopting an ideologically sound position or for using a self-valorizing instrument. “Chad” and “manlet” rank men in hierarchical relation to one another. And “normie” likens unthinking people to sheep (echoing Nietzsche, a perennial influence for right-wing individualists). 

I believe this is what makes incel slang broadly attractive—even to my cohort of left-wing peers. Its ordinal qualities express the increasing economization of everyday life, including the quantification and interpersonal competition imposed on my generation by the technologies of the information age. 

As socialization retreats online, we are more and more exposed to a highly quantified way of relating to others, solidifying neoliberalism’s grip on the psyche. Wendy Brown explains, “Although we continue to refer to ‘the’ economy … this usage is becoming almost anachronistic as the boundaries of the economic erode through the neoliberal dissemination of market metrics to all other spheres of life and human activity.” The neoliberal subject, the figure of our youth, sees numerical value everywhere. “Follower” and “like” counts foment social comparison; lifestyle and self-help TikToks advise users on how to optimize their value (that is, -maxx); Instagram encourages relentless aesthetic competition; the braggart’s forum of LinkedIn trains individuals to assess themselves and their peers in terms of symbolic capital and market fitness. For the very online person, social life begins to look identical to economic life: socialization to the market. 

Nowhere is this more apparent than in romance, for which online dating platforms assume ever-greater importance. Incels often bemoan their lack of matches, discuss how best to play the algorithms, and compare the digital-romantic success of demographic groups. Of course, they draw wrongheaded conclusions from all of this. But their anxiety is far from unique. 

Dating apps have cultivated deep insecurity in young people—already creatures of insecurity—hoping to achieve sex or love. Women report fear of loneliness and choice overload, while men describe feelings of “shame, contempt, embarrassment, and ‘awkwardness.’” To allay this anxiety, one learns to play the odds, and begins to view personal grooming, career placement, and appearance as multipliers affecting one’s chances of romantic success—measured by proxy of attention received online. Of course, grooming with an eye to validation is hardly new, but this level of quantitative feedback is. Ours is the first generation to only know a dating world dominated by metrics.

What’s more, this economic rationality, or the impression that failure in romance is failure to compete on the sexual marketplace, is not entirely wrong. Tinder, the most popular dating app, has assigned users a hidden ‘Elo’ rating similar to that of competitive chess players: users gain Elo by accruing right swipes, indicating a match, and lose it with left swipes, meaning rejection. As well, right swipes from high-Elo users have greater weight, meaning “desirable” profiles quickly gain visibility, while “undesirables” sink to the bottom. (Tinder claims to no longer use Elo ratings.) On Tinder, then, the sexual marketplace is no incel fantasy, but a reality. One really does have a numerical ranking in the sexual marketplace—a score that quite literally places one into a hierarchy of attractiveness that determines visibility. While the case of Tinder is particularly striking, it is a microcosm of how social media generally enforces a quantitative regime of social relations. 

As the pandemic enforced physical isolation, it drove young people, the so-called “digital natives,” to spend even more time online. In so doing, it laid our social existence at the hands of tech firms whose mandate is to collect user data, draw a value, and sort them according to whatever will drive engagement—positive social outcomes are only incidental to this goal. We only naturally internalize this new social reality. Such an existence, a life so determined by metric appraisal, is unprecedented. 

It is no wonder that, at the moment of our terminal solitude, when young people most needed a new language to express our existence, incel slang burst onto the scene. 

It’s true that youth vernacular has always been syncretic. Left-wing youth, in particular, have often been complicit in the appropriation of Black slang. Now, Black slang is often misidentified as Gen Z internet-speak. But the appropriation of Black slang follows its own logic. So does Incel slang, which seems like a peculiar artifact of the information age.

The incel community, perhaps because it is internet-born and relentlessly exposed to the requisite surveillance and ordering, offers up a ready-made rolodex of terms to describe the market competition of online life. In its original context, it also expresses a repulsive, hyper-misogynist worldview.

But the internet’s confused mélange of content allows coded terms to lose specificity and traverse the mainstream. For example, some Kamala Harris supporters now refer to themselves as “coconutpilled.” And the Red Scare podcast, which from the beginning used provocative language to taunt liberals, poses an interesting case study: its hosts went from being staunch Bernie supporters to crypto-fascist MAGA pundits. Their political defection is instructive. It is a product of, and mirror to, the decontextualizing force of the internet, which allows contrary discourses to slingshot from one extreme to the other. 

Should we purge our vocabularies? No, I don’t believe simply speaking incel slang makes one an incel or an incel accomplice. The slang my peers and I use is only a symptom, not the root, of a greater social affliction.

Now when my friend says he’s gymmaxxing, or when I hear a leftist twenty-something call someone a “normie,” I may still grin; I may still laugh along with the dilettantes who think they’ve been to the edge of culture and back. But I’ll catch the note of disaffection, the sigh of a generation for which distancing never really ended. A generation whose social life capital has disfigured into a seemingly intractable loneliness.

I’ll laugh. But there’ll be something sad in it.