Last month, The Cut reported on the dark online world of ‘incels’, involuntarily celibate men who mostly consider their lacking attractiveness are accountable for their inability to get laid, their lacklustre careers and their general sense of unhappiness. The article explored the intense lengths these men are willing to go to boost their physical appearance so as to change their circumstances. Specifically, it found that a community of incels are visiting top surgeons to have invasive surgery that may supposedly make their faces more archetypally attractive and traditionally masculine, in a bid to unravel their personal and skilled problems. 

I wasn’t all that shocked by the content of the article or the incel forums. Having struggled with an eating disorder for the past decade, I’m all too conversant in striving for aesthetic perfection and the ways wherein our psychological yearnings manifest within the physical. The truth is, upon discovery of those incel forums, I used to be struck by the ways wherein they mirrored the pro-anorexia web sites (online forums which endorse and advocate eating disorders) I frequented during my teens. While precise behaviours and core motivations of those incel forums do in a roundabout way map those of pro-anorexia web sites, (for one, unlike incel forums that are male-only, pro-anorexia web sites might be mixed gendered, although they’re largely female-centric) the lengths to which anorexics are willing to go to attain physical perfection is shockingly similar. 

Amongst probably the most extreme of the incel communities is lookism.net. The lookism community is premised on the notion that humans are ‘lookist’, discriminating positively towards people who find themselves more physically attractive (symmetrical faces, even distribution of fat and muscle) and negatively towards individuals who will not be. Certainly one of the central mechanisms of the community is a rating system, whereby group members award one another a number out of ten based on how attractive they seem. 

At the highest end of the spectrum are the Chads. Chads are like highschool jocks, alpha males with stereotypically masculine features (big muscles and powerful jawlines) whose looks rating between six and 10. Incels who rating lower than 4 on the size consider they have to transform themselves into Chads, doing all the pieces from taking aggressive steroids to undergoing drastic cosmetic surgery to achieve this. 

“At their core, these groups are reflective of an existential striving for meaning and purpose, a logical explanation for imperfection”

Like incels, many pro-ana groups have arbitrary rating systems, where users provide images of themselves or give their height and weight measurements and ask one another to rate their bodies, give feedback on whether or not an individual has lost or placed on weight, or simply simply provide a solution to the query: Am I fat? Where incels have Chads, pro-ana groups have ‘thinspiration’, images or references of people that embody their ideal body types. For some, it’s Victoria’s Secret models and for others mere contemporaries; as one user comments, “my real thinspos are fellow short girls who’re skinnier, more petite and more childlike.” Also providing inspiration are images of rib-cages, hip-bones and clavicles which feature as profile pictures for a lot of users. 

In addition to being there to guage one another seemingly objectively, incels and pro-ana members also provide one another with suggestions and tricks to attaining their ideal level of perfection. To assist one another with their transformations into Chads, incels take to forums like ‘looksmaximising’, an open discussion board where, across over 4,000 threads, they explore all the pieces that constitutes the proper masculine look, offering tips about all the pieces from penis stretching, hair transplants, and aggressive cosmetic surgery (jaw and cheekbone reconstruction, shoulder widening, rib removal) to drinking pomegranate juice to extend testosterone levels, the best gym routine to broaden shoulders and mewing techniques, an oral posture technique which involves keeping the tongue on the roof of the mouth so as to create a more defined jawline. There are also countless references to academic studies detailing the symmetry of gorgeous faces. Members even photoshop one another’s selfies to indicate what they would really like if transformed into Chad. References the poster can then take to the surgeon.

Over in pro-ana forums, users give one another advice on how you can achieve all the pieces from outstanding collar bones to the infamous thigh gap. Focused largely on self-starvation, these communities have a primary goal to manage the ‘unruly body’ with forum advice centred around dangerous and restrictive weight-reduction plan. Topics include: how you can distract yourself from hunger, how you can avoid eating when staying with friends, and how you can avoid eating usually. 

Built on the false guarantees that if you happen to are thin like a supermodel or masculine like a ‘Chad’ you might be beautiful, desirable, and successful, each forums are stuffed with arbitrary formulas and subjective rating systems that try to quantify beauty and objectify perfection, effectively rendering true attractiveness as an attainable pursuit. At their core, these groups are reflective of an existential striving for meaning and purpose, a logical explanation for imperfection, pain and misfortune, embodied within the seek for physical perfection. But though extreme of their approach to physical perfection, these behaviours are indicative of a wider cultural phenomenon; the heightened value we place on the person and on this case, individual appearance.

“If we would like to challenge the existence of those sorts of online communities, and forestall others from forming, we must look to a broader cultural climate that exists offline”

“We live in an increasingly competitive society ushered by the recent shift to individualism,” explains social and personality psychologist Thomas Curran. In consequence of this shift, Curran argues, we’re seeing a rise of perfectionism and with it, an increase in Body Dysmorphic Disorder, an anxiety disorder related to body image that is often related to anorexia and seems to resonate greatly with the warped mindset of an incel. Curran believes body dysmorphia is “baked into the capitalist model” because if we were content with how we appeared, then we’d not have to eat and consumption is like oxygen to markets. Members of each of those forums are equally obsessive about their body flaws and united by a fundamental desire to embody the image of perfect beauty we’re sold.  

While their pursuit of physical perfection is undeniably disturbing, there’s an argument that sees these online communities as a method of providing a level of emotional support for mental health issues that are increasingly present but equally difficult to discuss IRL. The truth is, a controversial paper was published last yr which explored the potential advantages of pro-anorexia web sites. Wooldrige, the paper’s writer, explains how one in all his patients experienced the sites as a spot where she could “withdraw from overwhelming emotional pain.” 

But while pro-anorexia web sites offered Wooldrige’s patient a “psychic retreat”, there is no such thing as a denying the harmful effects of those communities. The truth is, just a few years ago, latest laws were introduced to criminalise pro-anorexia web sites with the laws arguing these forums encourage dangerous behaviours for vulnerable people affected by eating disorders. Based on Dr Bryony Bamford, Clinical Director at The London Centre for Eating Disorders and Body Image, while these sites could appear helpful within the short term, in the long run, “they serve to advertise behaviours and thought patterns that may have very serious consequences”. Within the very worst cases, pro-anorexia web sites can encourage self-starvation to the purpose of death. Likewise, buried amongst the ‘looksmaximising’ forums of Lookism are dark conversations radicalising members and inspiring misogyny, rape and extreme violence. Alek Minassian, the principal suspect of a van attack in Toronto that killed 10 people, posted to Facebook shortly before the attack: “The Incel Rebel has already begun! We are going to overthrow all of the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” Elliot Rodger, who killed six people before shooting himself in the scholar town of Isla Vista in California, also frequented incel forms. While no such laws yet exists for forums like Lookism, it’s something which should seriously be considered. 

But beyond that, if we would like to challenge the existence of those sorts of online communities, and forestall others from forming, we must look to a broader cultural climate that exists offline. This implies not only finding ways to challenge beauty standards and widen representations in media but additionally questioning fundamental assumptions around selfhood and what it means to be a person. Only once we challenge the environment-at-large can we expect to see a discount in mental health issues like eating disorders and subsequent disinterest in pro-anorexia web sites and forums like Lookism.