Photo courtesy of Netflix
Incel is a term that started to come into popular use a few years ago, fuelled by the digital era, and escalating during the enforced lockdowns during the pandemic, which disrupted our collective social lives. The term itself is a short form for involuntary celibate and neatly highlights the frustration felt by people, predominantly heterosexual men, who feel their choices in dating and seeking fulfilling relationships with women have been severely restricted by the rise of feminism and awareness of female rights, dignity, choice and self-worth.
Being unable to find a job, being unemployed in a capitalist economy, leads to people feeling unvalued. Similarly, being unable to connect socially in personal relationships leads to a sense of low self-worth that is chronic and underlies many aspects of irritability, aggression and depressive disorders. Often, being unemployed or in an unsatisfying job (thereby being mockingly called jobless by online trolls) and being single with no prospects of becoming partnered go together, which explains the stereotype that has developed of social misfits living in their mothers’ basements and spending their time online, immersed in a virtual reality that is illusory but superior to the quality of their real life.
It is important to note that the derisive terminology most often used to describe incels is as inhabitants of their mothers’ basements not parents’ basements. They are not able to support themselves and it is their mothers who will usually take ongoing responsibility for their children’s welfare in an uncaring world.
This situation perpetuates and unnaturally extends an adolescent state of dependency and the frustration directed by incels towards girls and women who reject them, whether professionally or personally, lead them to blame women, as a preferred alternative to feeling inadequate themselves. The frustration is fuelled by cultural objectification and stereotyping of women as caregivers or objects of desire. That a woman may have greater aspirations for personal fulfilment than this, and a strong sense of her own destiny and evolution, is not recognised by the holders of patriarchal beliefs of which incel culture is just a recent expression. Women who have choice may very well not choose them and that possibility is unbearable to them.
The rise of superficial modes of valuation of people based on their physical appearance, their financial situation, their earning capacity and the assets they possess and display, has created terms like “high value” being applied to men and women. Experiences are judged by the value they add to our life and we are measured professionally by the value of what we bring to the table.
Incels are those who feel undervalued by their society and are looking for external validation in a world where they are repeatedly shown that they are seen as inferior and undeserving of respect or consideration. It is inevitable that such an angry sub-culture would emerge at a time in human history where courtesy and respect and consideration for others is eroding rapidly under the onslaught of the mockery and cruelty prevalent in the social media-fuelled landscape in which we live.
Incel culture is often associated with online misogyny, Western alt-right forums and frustrated young men who blame women for their loneliness. But in Sri Lanka a subtler and culturally embedded version of this dynamic plays out, not online but at home, often nurtured by the very matriarchs who appear to hold power within the nuclear family.
At the heart of many Sri Lankan homes lies a contradiction: a mother who appears powerful – running the house, managing finances and raising children – yet who is often the survivor of emotional suppression in her own marriage. In response to her own lack of agency, she pours her emotional world into her son. He becomes her confidant, her comfort and often her reason for endurance. In doing so, she unconsciously elevates him to a pedestal of emotional entitlement where love is unconditional, mistakes are forgiven without consequence and expectations are always met without negotiation.
This dynamic creates sons who are emotionally dependent but not emotionally developed. They are raised in homes where their feelings are soothed but never challenged, where discomfort is avoided rather than navigated. When these boys enter adulthood, they often find the real world, especially emotionally autonomous women, confusing and threatening. Rejection, which is a normal part of life, feels like betrayal. Frustration, an inevitable aspect of living in the chaotic contemporary world, feels like personal insult. And slowly resentment begins to brew and narcissism begins to grow.
Meanwhile, daughters in these same homes are often burdened with responsibility from a young age. They are taught to serve, to regulate their own emotions, to protect their brothers and to prepare themselves for marriages where emotional labour will again be expected of them. The double standard is deeply ingrained; boys are excused, girls are expected to sacrifice themselves and overlook the faults of others and sublimate their own needs and ambitions for personal fulfilment to maintain family cohesion.
This matriarchal nuclear structure doesn’t dismantle patriarchy; it simply perpetuates it in silence. It creates generations of emotionally fragile men who were never taught to handle “no” and emotionally resilient women who are punished for setting boundaries. The mother, often unintentionally, becomes the gatekeeper of a cycle that reinforces male entitlement and female burden.
Enter feminism, perceived in Sri Lanka as a Western import. To many men and to the traditional family unit as a whole, feminism is seen not as a call for equality, but as a threat to the status quo. It’s labelled “un-Sri Lankan,” “too modern,” or even “anti-family.” It threatens the emotional monopoly the mother held and challenges the unspoken rule that women exist to soothe, serve and suffer quietly, in a self-sacrificial model of desirable, dutiful womanhood.
To emotionally entitled men, feminism doesn’t just look like rebellion – it feels like rejection. And rejection, when you’ve been raised to believe you’re the prize, a prince and a hero, breeds anger. Instead of examining their own stagnation, many men retreat into mockery, control or withdrawal. The resentment grows louder on social media, in relationships and even in casual conversations masked as jokes.
Incel culture in Sri Lanka does not wear a label but its roots run deep. Until we interrogate the emotional dynamics within our homes, especially the sacred pedestal of the son, the invisible labour of the daughter and the quietly but unjustly sacrificed dreams of the mother – we will continue to raise generations emotionally at odds with each other, trapped between tradition, silence and the fear of change.