Everyone Speaks Incel Now

At the beginning of the year, The Cut kicked off a brief discourse cycle by declaring a new lifestyle trend: “friction-maxxing.”

The idea, in a nutshell, is that people have overconvenienced themselves with apps, AI, and other means of near-instant gratification—and would be better off with increased friction in their daily lives, which is to say those mundane challenges that ask some minor effort of them.

Whatever your feelings on that philosophy, the use of “maxxing” as a suffix assumed to be familiar or at least intelligible to most readers of a mainstream news outlet is evidence of another trend: the assimilation of incel terminology across the broader internet. The online ecosystem of incels, or “involuntarily celibate” men, is saturated with this sort of clinical jargon; its aggrieved participants insulate, isolate, and identify themselves through in-group codespeak that is meant to baffle and repel outsiders. So how did non-incels (“normies,” as incels would label them) end up adopting and recontextualizing these loaded words?

Slang, no matter its origins, has a viral nature. It tends to break containment and mutate. The buzzword “woke,” as it pertains to our current politics, comes from African American Vernacular English and once referred to an awareness of racial and social injustice—this usage dates to the middle of the 20th century, preceding even the civil rights movement. But the culture wars of this century have turned “woke” into a favorite pejorative of right-wingers, who wield it as a catchall term for anything that threatens their ideology, such as Black pilots or gender-neutral pronouns.

Back in 2014, the eruption of the Gamergate harassment campaign set the stage for a different linguistic realignment. An organized backlash to women working in the video game industry, and eventually any sort of diversity or progressivism within the medium, it exposed a vein of reactionary anger that would gain a fuller voice during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. This was a period when many in the digital mainstream got their first taste of the trollish nihilism and invective that fuels toxic message boards such as 4chan and gave rise to a network of anti-feminist manosphere sites collectively known as the “PSL” community: PUAHate (a board for venting about pickup artists, it was shut down soon after the 2014 Isla Vista killing spree carried out by Elliot Rodger, who frequented the forum), SlutHate (a straightforward misogyny hub), and Lookism (where incels viciously critique each other’s appearance).

Lookism, named for the idea that prejudice against the less attractive is as common and pernicious as sexism or racism, is the only forum of the PSL trifecta that survives today, and while we don’t know who coined the “maxxing” idiom, it’s the likeliest source for the first verb with this construction. “Looksmaxxing,” which borrows from the role-playing game concept of “min-maxing,” or elevating a character’s strengths while limiting weaknesses, became the preferred expression for attempts to improve one’s appearance in pursuit of sex. This could mean something as simple as a style makeover or as extreme as “bonesmashing,” a supposed technique of achieving a more defined jaw by tapping it with a hammer.

If the 2000s introduced people to pickup lingo like “game” and “negging,” the 2010s ushered in language that extended the Darwinian vision of the dating pool as a cutthroat and strictly hierarchical marketplace. “AMOG,” an initialism for “alpha male of the group,” gave us “mogging,” a display where one man flexes his physical superiority over a rival. An ideally masculine specimen might also be recognized as a “Chad,” who allegedly enjoys his pick of attractive partners, while a Chad among Chads is, of course, a “Gigachad.” Women were disparaged as “female humanoids,” then “femoids,” and finally just “foids.”

Once these building blocks were in place, it was easy to generate endless recombinant forms. You can “maxx” almost anything: “jestermaxxing” is the time-honored technique of seduction through humor, while “moneymaxxing” is the equally traditional strategy of accumulating wealth to elevate your dating prospects, and “gymmaxxing” entails a hardcore fitness regimen. Similarly, men can “mog” in a variety of ways; the tallest can be found “heightmogging” the shortest, the well-coiffed are “hairmogging” the bald, and the most muscular routinely “framemog” anyone skinny-shouldered or noodle-armed. On top of that, you have esoteric phrases like “chadfishing,” which describes the practice of catfishing on dating apps with pictures of conventionally handsome men.

This ever-widening glossary is absurd, and to an extent, that may be deliberate. The silliness obscures the bitter, dehumanizing contempt that incels feel for women, sexually active men, and themselves—it’s common among this cohort to encourage the abandonment of all hope (known as “taking the black pill”) and suicidality. Normies would never submit to such a harsh worldview, but as its goofy nomenclature seeped into the groundwater of online discourse over the past decade, they acquired the semantics.

Most recently, the spread of incel gibberish has been accelerated by the emergence of a 20-year-old Kick streamer known as Clavicular (real name: Braden Peters). Currently the most visible proponent of “looksmaxxing,” Peters, who did not immediately return a request for comment, is open about abusing steroids and methamphetamine, rubs elbows with an avowed white nationalist and an alleged human trafficker, peddles sexist clichés, and throws around the N-word. For $49, he also offers entry to a radicalizing “academy” that teaches young men how to “ascend,” or transform into the hottest version of themselves. Yet the entire conversation around the Clavicular persona—seemingly astroturfed by advertisers paying to disseminate clips of his exploits—derives from videos with inane captions like “Clavicular ran into a frat leader at ASU and got brutally frame mogged by him” and “Clavicular was mid jestergooning when a group of Foids came and spiked his Cortisol levels.”

These trigger phrases, with incomprehensible variations of the existing lexicon piled on for comedic effect, have activated the social media masses, who saw the chance to apply “maxxing” and “mogging” in every imaginable circumstance. As a result, the sentence “Trump brutally lawmogged by SCOTUS for tariffmaxxing, a decision sure to spike White House’s cortisol” is now actually legible to the irony-poisoned commentariat. Peters, then, is seen less as a symptom of a noxious, dead-end attention economy and instead as entertainment, including by the people disposed to reject his cruel means of fame and influence. His edgelord aura can be written off as a ridiculous character, or perhaps a satirical performance of gender optimization.

It’s worth noting, too, that Peters is an “incel-ebrity” steeped in the logic and rhetoric of incel society despite not being one himself; his constant access to women makes him an aspirational figure to those without it.

There can be no clearer sign of the subculture’s potency than everybody else accepting its dreadful conditions, jokingly or not. As an artificial phenomenon, the Clavicular saga—which now encompasses a “Chad leaderboard” and a cast of bizarre side antagonists that has drawn comparisons to anime—forces an engagement with something you would do better to ignore.

On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that incels, true artists of resentment, will take offense at the appropriation of their memes and seek to distance themselves further from the general population they so despise. They could well devise a dialect so inscrutable that it takes another 10 years for outsiders to absorb and normalize it.

For the moment, however, their peculiar eugenic theory has found purchase as a kind of verbal stimulation. How else can you put it: The established vernacular got wordmogged.