Women are flawed . . . They are incapable of reason or of thinking rationally. They are like animals, completely controlled by their primal, depraved emotions and impulses.
—Elliot Rodger
. . . her nature, which is more ‘natural’ than man’s, the genuine, cunning suppleness of a beast of prey, the tiger’s claw under the glove, the naiveté of her egoism, her uneducatability and inner wildness . . .
—Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
In this remarkable parallel of imagery, in two sentences drawn from wildly different sources, we see a convergent evolution of similar ideas about women through different processes. Elliot Rodger, ‘the world’s most famous incel’, according to the philosopher Amia Srinivasan, belongs to the realm of delusional testimony; Nietzsche, to the realm of serious philosophy.
Of course, much philosophy written by men has been misogynistic in various respects. But the striking thing about incel ideology is that we find its reflections, if not its roots, in unexpected sources: for example, in the sexual Marxism of the socialist Charles Fourier, who coined the term ‘feminism’. We find women such as Esther Vilar writing about a global system that disenfranchises and demeans men, a view that undergirds the worldview of the MGTOW movement. And we find modern feminists such as Amia Srinivasan writing about unequal access to sex.
The ideas of inceldom, though rightly derided and often produced through personal grievance rather than philosophical insight, have nevertheless been taken seriously by serious scholars.
Reading List
Cahill, Ann J. ‘Sexual Desire, Inequality and the Possibility of Transformation’. In Body Aesthetics, edited by Sherri Irvin, 281–98. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Evola, Julius. ‘Gods and Goddesses, Men and Women’. Chap. 4 in Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex, 115–171. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1983.
Fourier, Charles. ‘The Nature and Uses of Love in Harmony’ and ‘New Amorous Institutions’. In The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier, edited by Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu, 332–46 and 359–80. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971.
Jerome. Against Jovinianus. 393 CE.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. On Women. Translated by Joseph Godfrey. Introduction by Guy de Maupassant. New York: Felshin Publishing, 1931.
Srinivasan, Amia. The Right to Sex. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. Available online.
Tomassi, Rollo. ‘Hypergamy’ and ‘The Female Imperative’. In The Rational Male. 2013.
Vilar, Esther. The Manipulated Man. Translated by Eva Borneman. London: Pinter and Martin, 1971.
Weininger, Otto. ‘Men and Women’, ‘Male and Female Psychology’, ‘Eroticism and Aesthetics’, and ‘The Nature of Woman and Her Purpose in the Universe’. In Sex and Character, translated by Ladislaus Löb, edited by Daniel Steuer and Laura Marcus, 12–15, 161–87, and 211–29. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.