How to Make an Incel

Reviews / Votes

Through the application of structured action theory, Lucy incisively documents the absorbing, relentless, and troubling trajectory through which some men ultimately come to ingest the blackpill and identify as incels. How to Make an Incel is an important and insightful work that makes a cutting-edge contribution to contemporary understandings of incel misogyny, antifeminism, and dominating masculinities. I highly recommend it! -- James W. Messerschmidt, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Southern Maine, USA In How to Make an Incel, Stu Lucy offers a rigorous and unflinching account of the gendered pathways that lead young men into misogynistic radicalization. Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic immersion in incel digital spaces and interviews with current and former incels, Lucy maps the structural conditions, lived experiences, and technosocial environments that collectively foster incel identities. With both empirical precision and critical empathy, Lucy argues that we cannot understand incel misogyny without grappling with the patriarchal social structures and digital architectures that make it possible and socially seductive. -- Tristan Bridges, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA This is an exceptionally important and timely book, one of the very few existing triangulated studies of incels, and undoubtedly among the most rigorous, humane, and analytically sophisticated contributions to the field to date. Through rich empirical data and an ambitious interdisciplinary approach, Lucy overcomes the often-limiting structure/individual divide that characterises much existing research. By triangulating interviews with current and former incels alongside longitudinal ethnographic immersion across incel digital spaces, the book produces an original and compelling map of the journey young men undergo in adopting an incel identity.


What makes this work so powerful is its refusal to settle for simplistic explanations. Instead, it carefully traces how lived experiences, poor mental health, social isolation, and broader gendered structures intersect to shape both the vulnerabilities that draw some men toward incel communities, and the harms associated with them. The analysis adopts a position of feminist critical empathy, insisting that if we are to address gender-based harms seriously, we must understand the challenges, pressures, and social conditions men face within gendered social structures.


The result is an engaging and often harrowing account that never loses sight of the violence and misogyny associated with incel spaces, while simultaneously recognising the vulnerabilities, loneliness, and despair that can precede participation in them. This is a difficult path to navigate, but it is handled here with remarkable nuance, care, and intellectual honesty.


By combining the accounts of men acquired through direct contact with extensive observations of a broad array of community discussions and platforms, the book brings together differing but interlocking forms of evidence. The long-form, triangulated, and interdisciplinary analysis offers an original, significant, and methodologically robust contribution to the field.


This is the book to read if we want to understand how young men are made into incels-and, crucially, how we might begin to unmake those pathways. It deserves to become a landmark study in the sociology of gender, digital cultures, masculinities, and extremism. -- Lisa Sugiura. Professor of Cybercrime and Gender, University of Portsmouth, UK