“I would do anything to not call this place home”: The black pill, involuntary celibacy, and the neoliberal male grasp in digital incel communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing from gender studies, critical theory, media studies, and anthropology, this thesis examines “involuntary celibacy” and the links between neoliberalism, masculinity, digital community, and misogyny. Based on an analysis of the webforum incels.co, it chronicles the development of the “incel” identity, situating it as a reaction to contemporary social hierarchies and cultural norms, including the infringement of neoliberal market logic onto social relations and gender stereotypes. The “incel identity” is framed as a site wherein these norms meet and contradict each other, leading to the construction of a group epistemology that attempts to explain the incel’s oppression. This group knowledge, dubbed the “black pill”, is an alternative set of norms, behaviours, and social truths rooted in masculine supremacy and supported through the usage of positivist, scientific claims. This project explores the rationality and sentiments of the black pill, especially as they relate to expressive traits of the body. At its core, this thesis argues that “incel” ideology exposes a contradiction between the neoliberal marketization of the self and contemporary masculinity, and it draws upon this contradiction to formulate a way of understanding the process and practice of digitized community.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.065 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".