In her searing New Yorker essay “The Rage of the Incels,” Jia Tolentino charts the psychological freefall of young men who feel so broken, so undesirable, that they trade intimacy for ideology. These are men who live in the shadows—paralyzed by fear, consumed by resentment, and desperate to rewrite their own narrative of failure. Lacking the confidence to form real connections, they retreat into a warped fantasy of grandiosity and “absolute male supremacy,” hoping to drown out their self-loathing in the cold armor of systemic power.
At the core of this fantasy lies a cruel sleight of hand: to escape the feeling of being disgusting, they dehumanize others—namely women. Online, where pornified, transactional, and violent depictions of sex are the norm, this dehumanization metastasizes with chilling efficiency. On the internet, there’s no need for empathy, just anonymity and algorithms.
Tolentino highlights the gendered nature of this despair. When women feel undesirable, they tend to turn the blame inward. Men, however, often blame the system—or more specifically, women. This externalization leads some into the dark corridors of inceldom, where racism, misogyny, and white supremacy form the ideological bedrock of a movement built on grievance.
The young men most vulnerable to this radicalization often come with tragic resumes: childhood trauma, social ineptitude, academic failure, economic hopelessness. They are digital shut-ins, living in their parents’ basements, marinating in their self-hatred and curating worldviews that feed their rage. With no jobs, no degrees, and no meaningful relationships, they rot—and rot loudly.
This psychological spiral is embodied in Adolescence, the Netflix miniseries centered on Jamie Miller, a 13-year-old whose descent into incel ideology leads to horrific violence. The show doesn’t offer easy answers—it shows a boy abandoned long before he ever picked up a weapon. His parents aren’t just grieving the victim of his crime; they’re grieving their own son, whose silent suffering metastasized into something monstrous. The tragedy is not just what he did—but how long he was hurting, invisible to everyone.
Cinemorphosis 