Review #6 of 2024: Incel by ARX-HAN

The Red-pill deconstructed

Incel is a self-published, indie, literary fiction by substack author ARX-Han that follows the hilarious and depressing escapades of a dude trying to get laid before his 23rd birthday. You can find it on amazon.

I’m not sure if it’s entirely a good idea to talk about this kind of thing on platforms that have my real name attached to them (Goodreads and Substack). This is because, to review this book properly, I need to talk about my own experiences surrounding inceldom, and its accompanying nihilist, materialist life philosophy. From the ages of about sixteen to twenty-one, I identified as an incel, or an involuntarily celibate individual. I don’t think I’m an unattractive man, although you can judge for yourself by my profile picture, but a combination of a porn addiction, an obsession with love, and unconventional personality made it impossible for me to form and maintain romantic relationships during that stage of my life. As time wore on, this lack of romantic experience or success led me to increasingly believe that I was defective; there was something wrong with who I was that prevented other people from being attracted to me as they got to know me. The ideologies of the various pills (primarily: red–pickup artistry and seduction techniques, black– nihilistic acceptance that it’s just not meant to be for most people) were appealing during this time of my life. Their reductive materialism that women (and also men) are merely just flesh robots whose buttons you had to figure out how to push offered the dual exit valves of logical, iterated self-improvement (gotta learn the game bro), and nihilism (I was born this way, there’s nothing I can do), which were much more appealing than the difficult road of introspection and “self-improvement”.

            Luckily, over the course of my junior year of college, I was saved by the intervention of Divine Providence. At the beginning of that year, I lost my virginity to a girl from tinder. It was an empty, shitty experience that left me feeling drained for weeks. This showed me that even “winning” in the world that the redpill and the blackpill believed in didn’t amount to much. At the end of the same year, I stepped into the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, saw a sunbeam shining down onto Jesus’ tomb, and knew I didn’t, and couldn’t believe in (pure) materialism anymore.

            I have since had meaningful, if not as long lasting as I would have hoped, relationships with wonderful women whom I have loved. However, in the time between relationships, when love seems to have emptied out of the world, it’s easy to fall, if only for a little bit, into the Siren song of those ideologies that I know to be false. Why? And what can I do about it?

            These are the questions that the debut novel of ARX-Han, Incel, attempts to answer.

Incel is narrated from the first person (although sometimes second person) perspective of a 22-year-old graduate student in psychology who self-identifies as an incel. The narrator, who is referred to as anon throughout the text is on a quest to lose his virginity before his 23^rd birthday. If he does not complete this task, he plans to get into a bar-fight after using an experimental drug that will cause his head to explode if punched. The dark comedy of this planned ritual suicide is an encapsulation of the tone of the entire work.

            During most of the novel, it is not easy to have sympathy for anon. A true disciple of materialism, he treats his interactions with everyone, including himself, like they are with machines or inanimate objects. This especially apparent in his attempts to interact with women to “obtain sex”. Following the standard pick-up-artist playbook, all anon thinks he needs to do is follow the script enough times, and he will get a women to have sex with him.

            What makes anon a somewhat sympathetic character, and what makes this book work in general, is that on some deep level, anon doesn’t actually believe any of this shit, nor does getting what he wants within this framework (sex) actually make him happy. There’s a scene midway through the novel where he rescues an earthworm from drowning, which someone with a purely materialist perspective never would do. After all, worms are just (lesser) flesh robots too. Anon’s best friend is Korean-American, despite anon being a self-proclaimed white supremacist. Anon also loves and respects his sister, while his internal monologue is filled with nothing but disdain for the decision making skills of women. And when anon finally manages to have sex, his mind dwells not on that experience, but on cuddling with his ex-girlfriend. What anon wants in reality is love, which is not something that can be obtained through pick-up artistry, or through his reductionist worldview in general.

            This theme is where Incel really shines as literature, and as an attempt at deradicalization. What many critiques of radical, “hateful” ideologies fail to do is move beyond the framing of the question in terms of truth/falsehood of scientific facts. This is perhaps easiest to understand in terms of racism. Proponents of racism love to point to things like disparate crime outcomes or IQ tests as justification for racist behavior. By engaging the scientific racists on this level, “anti-racists” are implicitly suggesting that if the racists were correct about intelligence disparities, that it would be okay to treat members of that other race as if they were sub-human. This perspective is totally dismissive of the inherent value of the conscious perspective of the other, even if that perspective is radically different from your own. It also doesn’t actually lend itself easily to “debunking” these ideologies, as evidence from the scientific literature can be found to support both the racist and anti-racist views.

Rather I think it is more powerful to axiomatically deny the importance of this shallow materialism. Consciousness has inherent value, even if it is that of someone of a different gender, race, or even species from you. Love and friendship cannot be explained merely mechanistically. There is magic and wonder in this world still.

I only have two minor critiques of Incel. The writing was beautiful throughout, although in a very specific style of that of a heavy internet user. However, I found the switch between the first person and second person perspective to be jarring and slightly unnecessary. This is supposed to be a window into anon’s consciousness, not an attack on our own. Secondly, I also found the afterword to be a little superfluous: the work can stand on its own two feet and doesn’t need a ten-page explication included with the book.

This was a difficult book for me to read. Although I don’t think inceldom or its related ideologies have anything to offer me or other young men anymore, there is still a lot of healing that I need to go through in relation to my own sexuality. At times I found I had to put the book down: I was so viscerally uncomfortable with how it reminded me of my own past mentality and experiences. Perhaps that’s an indicator of how much healing I have done. Or perhaps of how much I still have left to do.

Regardless, I cannot recommend Incel highly enough for its frank deconstruction of radicalization, and its startingly accurate window into the minds of many young men.

You can find the book on Amazon.