Spend a few minutes in certain corners of the internet, and you’ll notice a pattern: men who call themselves “incels” talk about women’s looks with a level of scrutiny that borders on obsession. Every post, every comment section, every thread seems to circle back to the same topic — ranking, rating, and dissecting women’s appearance as if beauty were a mathematical formula that could justify their own unhappiness.It’s an odd spectacle, because these same men often describe themselves as rejected or ignored by women — yet they speak about women with the cold precision of an art critic and the entitlement of a casting director.
Beauty as a Battleground
On social media, you’ll often see incel spaces filled with charts, “attractiveness scales,” and even pseudo-scientific breakdowns of facial structure. A woman’s nose, jawline, height, and weight become data points for discussion. There’s rarely talk of personality, humor, or kindness — just surface-level measurement, as if humanity itself were filtered through Photoshop.
What’s fascinating is how detached the tone becomes. These men talk about women as objects to be studied, not people to be known. It’s a kind of emotional distance disguised as analysis.
The irony, of course, is that this obsession with appearances doesn’t come from confidence — it comes from resentment. But that’s not what makes it unsettling. What makes it unsettling is how routine it has become.
The Language of Contempt
If you look closely, the language in these spaces carries a distinct flavor — cold, cruel, and oddly impersonal. Words like “low-tier,” “used up,” “past her prime” or “4 out of 10” appear constantly. Women are graded the way people grade electronics: by “value” and “wear.”
This kind of talk spreads easily because it sounds analytical. But beneath that “logic” is something emotional — a deep sense of grievance, wrapped in vocabulary that pretends to be objective.It’s not really about beauty. It’s about control. By judging women so harshly, they reclaim a sense of power that they feel life has denied them.
The Performance of Judgment
The internet makes this kind of behavior performative. Every cruel comment earns attention, every insult gets a reaction. What starts as venting becomes sport.
You can see how threads evolve — one man posts a photo of a random woman, another rates her, another mocks her, and before long, it becomes a competition to see who can be the harshest. The cruelty becomes currency.
And yet, behind all of it is a strange kind of longing. Because when you strip away the noise, these men are still talking about the very people they claim to have given up on.
The Paradox of Attention
For a group that claims to have “sworn off women,” incels spend a remarkable amount of time analyzing them. Every viral post by a woman becomes a new subject of debate. Every dating video or profile photo gets dissected. It’s as if they can’t look away.They call women “vain,” yet dedicate entire communities to discussing them. They accuse women of “judging men by looks,” while spending hours doing the exact same thing — only harsher.It’s not admiration. It’s fixation — resentment and desire fused into one.
A Mirror, Not a Microscope
In the end, their constant judging says less about women and more about themselves. The obsession reveals envy, insecurity, and loneliness dressed up as analysis. It’s a mirror disguised as a microscope.The more they critique, the more they expose how much power they still give to the very thing they claim doesn’t matter — women’s approval.It’s a strange, sad irony: in trying to prove that looks and attraction are unfair, they’ve built entire subcultures that prove just how much looks and attraction still control them.
The conclusion is simple: the internet has given everyone a megaphone, but not everyone uses it wisely. When judgment becomes identity, empathy disappears — and that’s what makes so much of incel culture not just angry, but hollow.
Because at its core, all that harshness isn’t confidence — it’s heartbreak with a Wi-Fi connection.
