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Incels constitute a fairly small fraction of the manosphere, but the vast majority of incels appear to embrace the Blackpill ideology, per Beckett-Herbert. That nihilistic attitude can extend to any kind of participation in what incels term “Soyciety”—including educational attainment and employment. When that happens, such individuals are best described by the acronym NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training).
“It’s not that we have large swaths of young men that are falling into this rabbit hole,” said Beckett-Herbert. “Their ideology is pretty fringe, but we’re seeing the community grow, and we’re seeing the ideology spread. It used to be contained to romantic relationships and sex. Now we’re seeing this broader disengagement from society as a whole. We should all be concerned about that trend.”
The NEET trend is also tied to the broader cultural discourse on how boys and young men are struggling in contemporary society. While prior studies tended to focus on the misogynistic rhetoric and propensity for violence among incels, “I thought that the unemployment lens was interesting because it’s indicative of larger problems,” said Beckett-Herbert. “It’s important to remember that it’s not zero-sum. We can care about the well-being of women and girls and also acknowledge that young men are struggling, too. Those don’t have to be at odds.”
“Lie down and rot”
Beckett-Herbert and her advisor/co-author, McGill University sociologist Eran Shor, chose the incels.is platform as a data source for their study due to its ease of public access and relatively high traffic, with nearly 20,000 members. The pair used Python code to scrape 100 pages, amounting to around 10,000 discussion threads between October and December 2022. A pilot study revealed 10 keywords that appeared most frequently in those threads: “study,” “school,” “NEET,” “job,” “work,” “money,” “career,” “wage,” “employ,” and “rot.” (“They use the phrase ‘lie down and rot’ a lot,” said Beckett-Herbert.)
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