Incels Debate My Value

They believe my worth is in the eyes of other men. I believe it’s in myself.

Photo: Rika Hayashi/Getty Images

Like most women writing on the internet in 2019, I’m aware of incels, a group of (mostly) men who claim they are unable to find a sexual partner and so are involuntarily celibate. I did not, however, expect to get so intimately acquainted with them — or rather, them with me. But one afternoon I received an anonymous tip on Twitter linking me to a 150+ post Reddit thread debating my value. The thread was started in response to an essay I had just published, which apparently hit a nerve in the incel community, or at least with a particular kind of sexually entitled man who lives in some weird corner of Reddit, and, well, tomayto, tomahto.

The inciting essay explored the tension between romance and fertility, specifically how women find themselves reassessing their romantic priorities as they reach the end of their child-bearing years, forced to confront the limitations of time in a real way. Women emailed by the dozen to thank me for articulating a complexity that is often overlooked. Meanwhile, a group of men decided it wasn’t so much about tension as it was me having unrealistic expectations about the kind of guy I could land. I won’t link to the thread for obvious reasons but, upon clicking it, I was warned that the discussion was comprised of “shocking and highly offensive content.” The post was titled “Woman wonders why she can’t find a husband to marry and have kids with.”

The general sentiment was that I had set my sights on men who were too good for me and thus set myself up for failure. Inherent in this view is the assumption that there is an objective scale on which individuals can be measured against one another; in order to be “too good” for me, I must have a particular value, which my desired partner exceeds. This is not how I, or any evolved human I know, approaches partnership. What I’m looking for is not someone who is as “good” as me (or “better”), but someone with whom I have a connection — we are interested in similar things, make each other laugh, move at complementary speeds. My good is often someone else’s no good, and so on.

But the incels have created a scale, a metric called “Sexual Marketplace Value,” or SMV for short. SMV is a so-called objective measurement of desirability. And a good chunk of this Reddit thread was dedicated to debating mine. The gist was that I am demanding a high SMV while presenting a low SMV, and the economics of attraction simply don’t work like that. My physical attraction was a hefty part of this calculation, and so was debated to a disturbing degree (I stopped reading at the second mention of “ugly feminist,” enlisting a few generous guy friends to tactfully summarize the thread for me, instead). In addition to physical appearance, the issue of my age in this SMV calculation was paramount.

“Her biological clock is about to strike but it’s too late, her SMV has crumbled,” read one particularly popular comment. Apparently women’s SMVs peak in their early to mid-20s while men’s increase with age. This is largely due to the notion that men traditionally value youth and beauty in a partner, whereas women traditionally value experience and status.

The idea that there is a universal scale by which we are valued in the dating world is both infuriating and also a little true.

The men on this thread are not, nor do they represent, the men I interact with on a daily basis. It is preposterous to assume that this gnarly Reddit thread constitutes the popular opinion of most men who are, by and large, decent people. And yet I can’t help but see shadows of everyday dating dynamics present in their thinking. Seeing these sentiments — which are often danced around in conversation but feel increasingly resonant (for both genders) — so explicitly and unabashedly stated was enraging, of course, but it was also, bizarrely, kind of satisfying.

The idea that there is a universal scale by which we are valued in the dating world is both infuriating and also a little true. While any decent and thinking human is searching for a unique connection that cannot be measured on a global scale (my “10” is someone else’s “5,” for example), this more objective measurement feels increasingly present, especially in the now ubiquitous world of online dating. When shown a person’s age and photo and not much else, our brain reverts to this kind of one-dimensional, simple-minded analysis, if only because we lack any other data on which to go by.

The idea that men are drawn to younger women, for example, is not restricted to incels. Many of my progressive male friends date younger. They claim it’s not superficial, it’s just who they’re drawn to, but I’m not quite sure I understand the difference. Likewise, my girlfriends and I are most commonly pursued, at least in any kind of serious way, by older men. The most visceral connections I have with men — the kind where the conversation is endless and you inherently just kind of get one another — are almost always with men around my age, but these men are rarely equipped to navigate a relationship with someone of comparable experience, agency, and demands. These relationships require compromise, humility, and the willingness to relinquish control, which is more than many men are willing to give. And they usually don’t have to. Though of course, it happens — I have many friends in same-age partnerships, or where the woman is older — it is universally less common.

The age difference thing has always been a personal pet peeve. The truth is at 37, I think I ought to be valued far more than I was at 27. As I get older I see the ways in which I have more to offer, and will feel the same 10, 20, 30 years from now. By and large, I think we all get better with age. Essentially, I am expecting to be valued the same way we value men. And that’s the heart of the outrage.

As women increasingly define their own value, men are losing control.

What’s really driving these incels crazy is that the way I value myself has split from the way society has traditionally valued me. To place a value on someone is to control them, to dictate how they behave. And as women increasingly define their own value, men are losing control.

For a long time I viewed my self worth (my SW, shall we?) as a shadow of how men viewed me, which is to say my SW mapped very closely to the idea of an SMV. The more desirable I was to men, the better I felt about myself. I knew men generally liked women with smooth, straight hair, so I felt good when I straightened my hair. I knew men generally preferred thin women, so I felt better when I was thin (dangerously so). I knew men generally liked when women were friendly, so I went out of my way to make sure conversations were smooth and easy and that I made few demands. It goes without saying that this is not the case for all men, but this was the societal party line, and I toed it.

But in the past few years my personal SW has broken away from the typical “SMV” rubric. This may be a function of my age, not caring what people think and valuing myself more, but I also think it’s a function of our collective age — this point in history — when women are reclaiming a thread of feminism that was all but absent in the earlier part of this century.

My self worth is no longer tied to how attractive I am to men. It is, in fact, most often the inverse. I no longer waste an hour a day and hundreds of dollars a month straightening my hair. I don’t obsess over what I eat, and I certainly don’t go out of my way to make conversation effortless for someone I barely know. If I feel confident enough to leave the house with no makeup on, it is a good day. Not that I don’t care about fitness and style and basic human decency. But I’ve learned to feel good about myself not when men are pleased, but when I am pleased.

I can already picture a certain kind of man laughing at how deeply I’m digging myself into a hole of loneliness. Reddit thread aside, I received half a dozen emails from men coaching me on how to more effectively attract men, including suggestions such as “comb your hair” as if I haven’t put more time and energy into my curly hair than the suggesting man will likely ever put into anything in his life. And yet I can say with certainty that if I ended up with any of the men whom I dated in my twenties, who valued me at least partially along the lines of this kind of SMV thinking, and certainly if I continued to value myself that way, I would be far, far lonelier than I am now.

I’d like to think there’s a world where the more I value myself, the more I’m valued by a partner.

There was a fascinating piece in The Cut recently that explained how far incels go to look beautiful, spending absurd amounts of money on plastic surgery to become what they call a “Chad.” The thinking that caused them to pick me to pieces is the same thinking they apply to themselves everyday. And so I can hardly get angry. I understand what it’s like for this kind of mindset to dictate how you live your life. It’s torture. It’s also, in a way, easier. To have a measurable framework to value oneself is to believe that if you just spend enough money you can be better — that there is a quantifiable “better” to reach — rather than taking on the agonizing, Herculean task of trying to like oneself.

I’d like to think there’s a world where the more I value myself, the more I’m valued by a partner. That as I get older and pile on life experiences, earn my failures and successes, improve my ability to articulate my needs and understand someone else’s in a way I was oblivious to before; as I slowly rack up insights and, little by little, learn to like myself rather than buying all the things that make me think I should like myself, it all adds up to something to offer. And that this “something” is not just a perceived imposition or a threat, a pile of complexities that make the pursuit of a relationship that much more challenging (though it certainly will, at times). I hope that what I have to offer makes the challenges worth confronting, and that maybe the navigation of such is what gives intimacy its texture. There are certainly some men out there for whom this is true. So, no, counter to what the incels believe, it’s not “Chris Hemsworth” I’m holding out for, but someone who is compelled, not frightened, by complexity, even if it requires a little more effort and the logistics are a little less smooth. In the meantime, the incels can have fun with their value system; I’m sticking with mine.