Elliott Rodger murdered six people in 2014 to punish women for rejecting him. Today, his ideological descendants shape how teenagers talk about their jawlines.
The incel subculture has accomplished something its violent origins would seem to preclude: total linguistic saturation. Terms forged in the darkest corners of the internet now circulate through TikTok comment sections and Snapchat stories with zero awareness of their genealogy. On Behind the Bastards, Robert Evans notes that almost everyone he knows uses words that originated in incel communities, now stripped of context and deployed as casual Gen Z or Gen Alpha vernacular.
This is not merely a semantic drift. The concepts carry ideological weight. Consider "looksmaxing," the practice of extreme physical optimization through measures ranging from jaw-smashing surgery to experimental drug regimens. Figures like the influencer Clavicular exemplify this trend, which Evans traces directly back to incel anxieties about the "Chad" archetype, the hyper-masculine ideal incels believe women universally crave.
Guest Kat Abou Kat identifies the bizarre paradox at the heart of this aesthetic obsession. The culture projects a hyper-masculine ideal while maintaining distinctly homoerotic undertones, fixating on male physical perfection in ways that have little to do with actual female desire. Evans emphasizes that this worldview is "totally detached from reality," ignoring that most people prioritize kindness, humor, and respect over chiseled bone structure.
The danger lies in the disconnect between packaging and content. While the terminology has gone mainstream, the underlying pathology hasn't disappeared. The same forums that birthed these terms remain breeding grounds for extremism and violence. Yet their vocabulary has penetrated popular culture with surprising efficiency, normalizing frameworks that reduce human worth to facial measurements and genetic lottery tickets.
The result is a generation fluent in the language of sexual hierarchy without necessarily understanding its origins or implications.
Robert Evans, Behind the Bastards:
- It's how has the incel subculture been so influential because almost everyone I know every day uses words that originally came out of the incel community and have now just become common Gen Z or Gen Alpha internet slang.
- Despite how fringe and extreme and toxic and scary the actual incel subculture is, they've also had this incredible history of shotgunning terms and concepts into mass consciousness.
