Today I learned about incels, “involuntarily celibates”, men who believe that they are unable to have sexual relationships and blame it on women. On the one hand, that sounds like what so many college boys used to say: “Girls say they like nice guys, but they really don’t; they just like handsome powerful guys and they won’t give an ordinary guy like me a chance.”
On the other hand, they decide that their imagined feminine conspiracy is unfair to them and commit terrorist acts targeting women. They call themselves a “movement,” but I think it sounds more like a dangerous mental aberration.
Discussions of this phenomenon relate it to “men’s rights” groups, to adolescent insecurities, to neo-Nazi ideology. Others say this is a new breed of terrorist.
So should nice girls be paid by the government to date men who loathe women and want to kill them? Probably not.