Post by soul49 on May 30, 2019 12:18:52 GMT -4
How Many Bones Would You Break to Get Laid?
www.thecut.com/2019/05/incel-plastic-surgery.html#_ga=2.200441198.1131857599.1559047996-1366930337.1549645201
TLDR: Incels are turning to plastic surgery to better their chances at getting laid.
One could argue these people still have the internal insecurities and personality they had before the surgery, but I guess if this keeps them from going on a killing rampage, that's at least one positive note.
www.thecut.com/2019/05/incel-plastic-surgery.html#_ga=2.200441198.1131857599.1559047996-1366930337.1549645201
Truth4lie was 27, depressed, and living in a student apartment after a year in a psychiatric hospital on suicide watch when a friend showed him Neil Strauss’s pickup-artist guidebook, The Game. Together they practiced lines from the book, planning to use them on girls in nightclubs. “Would you like to kiss me? I didn’t say you could.”
In real life, pickup artistry made Truth4lie anxious. One rule stated he needed to initiate conversation with a woman three seconds after seeing her, which felt like taking an exam. Still, he tried the techniques for a few years, with middling success. Eventually, he stumbled on a forum called Sluthate, where anonymous men gathered to “discredit the effectiveness of pickup art.” In one post, a user described coming to the realization that it didn’t matter what he said because of the way he looked.
The user uploaded a selfie, and other Sluthate posters agreed, mocking the flaws in his face. They congratulated him for “taking the black pill,” shorthand for waking up to the tragedy of being ugly. Ugly people, especially ugly men, they said, are destined to lead unhappy lives and die alone.
Reading this, Truth4lie felt exhilarated. In the mental hospital, counselors had told him the roots of his depression and anxiety were repressed childhood traumas. In therapy, he relived getting in physical fights as a kid with his dad and the time he punched his sister in the head. Cognition determined emotions, the counselors told him. By changing his mind-set, he could change his behavior. But what if his problems weren’t inside him but outside? Looks can’t be changed with a mind-set adjustment; neither can the cruelly superficial world that values them above all else. The realization was awful and great all at once, as if someone were finally telling him the truth about himself after a lifetime of fake validation.
“The difference between a mirror image and non-flipped image of myself drives me crazy,” he typed one night, after spending hours comparing his phone’s selfies to his reflection. “I see all my asymmetries … How can it only be my brain?”
Friends and family said he had body-dysmorphic disorder, a condition the International OCD Foundation says affects about one in every 50 people. Psychiatric manuals describe it as an obsession with perceived flaws in one’s appearance that others don’t see or notice. But Truth4lie’s imperfections were perfectly noticeable to other forum users: weak jawline, feminine nose, small frame, thinning hair. To Truth4lie, their assessments explained why he hadn’t fit in in high school, why his ex didn’t love him, why women he looked at on the street didn’t make eye contact.
Truth4lie had for a while tried to write a novel about his time in the psychiatric hospital. He read Camus, who said that life has no great meaning. He pondered nihilistic theories posited on the forums he frequented. He discovered terms like “oneitis,” a disease of romantic obsession that enslaves men, and “hypergamy,” an evolutionary principle that pushes women to seek mates above their status. In a post-monogamy society, that means a tiny percentage of genetically superior alpha guys hoard most hetero sex. There were infographics to back it up, Tinder experiments with precise data. Beyond that, there was biology: Genetic wiring controls most everything about life, the forums’ users argued, ensuring the misery of people like him.
The forums’ posters blamed their plight on women’s rising social power. Once upon a time, women without careers married for stability; today they inevitably spent their 20s riding a “cock carousel” of the hottest guys they could land, settling for an ugly or average-looking man only when they were old and used, i.e., above 30. Even then, women could hardly be depended on for loyalty. Showered with attention on dating apps, favored by divorce courts, beloved by HR diversity initiatives, women had become a privileged class. The forums rarely mentioned wage gaps, pregnancy discrimination, or sexual violence, except in jest.
“Truth4lie” was an early user name; over the next few years, he’d use others. His depression lingered well into his 30s. He started an online editing business and moved into his parents’ house in a small village in the Netherlands, where he knew almost no one. Most days, he would work from home, post on the forums, then eventually dress — leather jacket, torn jeans, fingerless leather gloves — and take a walk around the village, silently cataloguing how many people glanced at him or returned a smile.
The sight of certain women began to bother him. When a woman he hired turned out to be beautiful, he fumed online: “An 8/10 girl works for me since today. I’m going to dominate the hell out of her. Trust me, I’m going to kill her confidence.” Women with babies ignited anger, too. “Every time I pass by a pram, it fills me with disgust to know that she has ruined her body and chose to reproduce with another guy,” he wrote. Other users responded with gifs: angry WWE faces, a cackling Nic Cage. “Seeing women taking care of their sons is the only situation in which I don’t hate them,” agreed one user named Biebercel.
The posters called themselves “incels,” short for “involuntarily celibate.” On one forum where Truth4lie posted — Lookism, which succeeded Sluthate — there are 10,000 registered users. They were on other websites, too (incels.me, incels.co, r/braincels), although it’s impossible to know who was posting on multiple accounts. Incels called women like the one Truth4lie had hired “Stacies.” Alpha men had a name, too. They were called “Chads.”
You know, those guys who are “praised day and night for their top-tier genetics, making a shit-ton of money, getting insane amounts of validation, never having to worry about paying the rent or any of that bullshit; all they think about is their next football match and coming home and having a threesome with two supermodels, supermodels that puke at the thought of them touching you.” That’s how one incel with a Pepe frog as his avatar described Chads, posting a picture of Lucky Blue Smith and Jordan Barrett backstage at a Balmain fashion show.
Truth4lie’s friends hated Chad, but they were also convinced their lives would improve significantly if they could somehow become Chad. They tried “gymceling” and “steroidmaxxing” (incel-speak for bodybuilding and taking steroids). They tried jelqing (penis-stretching exercises) and mewing (chewing hard foods to bulk up the masseter muscles, said by British orthodontist Mike Mew to augment the jawline). They tried pulling on their faces to reshape them. They got into skin care.
Some wanted more elemental improvements. More than pudgy flesh or pocked skin, it was their bones that made incels unfuckable, they believed. Their quarrel was with the very collagen that had ossified in their mother’s womb, the calcium phosphate with the potential to outlast civilizations, maybe even souls — or to be weeded out of the gene pool. “The difference between a Chad and an incel is literally a few millimeters of bone,” reads one meme.
To transform skull and skeleton could be done only with great expense and pain. It would take surgery. Some incels spent years researching procedures. More and more, they congregated around a single name: Barry Eppley, a cosmetic and reconstructive surgeon in Indiana.
“I had a dream: to meet the great Dr. Eppley,” wrote Truth4lie in one of over 1,100 Lookism posts mentioning the doctor. “I finally met the man, the true master artist, a superior human being. He should be mentioned with the likes of Mandela, Shakespeare, Luther King, Descartes, and Mother Teresa. He is the Einstein of Aesthetics,” he wrote. “He’s changed thousands of incel lives for the better.”
Cosmetic surgery among people who identify as male rose 325 percent between 1997 and 2015 in the U.S., according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. Eppley, who is boarded in oral and maxillofacial surgery as well as plastic surgery, is one of a handful of doctors explicitly targeting young men with procedures to transform the face and body rather than to reverse aging. It’s a burgeoning demographic: Patients fly here from around the world, looking for something their local surgeon doesn’t perform, often a procedure Eppley invented. He does around 450 surgeries a year — eight to ten a week.
When I show an incel forum to Eppley, he at first seems confused by the anonymous usernames. We look at a thread by a user named Saiyan who has posted images of his designs for Eppley cheekbone implants and post-op selfies. Finally, it seems to dawn on Eppley: “That patient has done more to promote that style of implant than anyone I know,” he says. He has fielded requests from dozens of patients who specifically reference Saiyan’s photographs. He hadn’t known where they’d found them.
Eppley’s “whatever you want” philosophy is certainly part of his appeal. Some surgeons will not operate on patients they believe may have body dysmorphia. “To me, that’s a red flag when someone has 200 pictures of themselves on their phone,” says Joe Niamtu, a cosmetic surgeon in Virginia, who declines to operate on many young male patients seeking sculpted faces. “The risk is they’ll never be happy.” Niamtu has referred some patients to Eppley.
"Nature isn’t fair,” Truth4lie, who is half-Dutch and half–North African, tells me. “Some races are more attractive than others,” and biology, he says, determines beauty, not cultural norms.
In 1993, a 34-year-old neo-Nazi made an appointment with a Chicago plastic surgeon and murdered him, saying later in court that he was motivated to protect “Aryan beauty.” Incels tend to venerate the same European features, but they also revere the surgeons who bestow them. Only a handful are white supremacists — “stormcels,” as they’re known. Far more are like Truth4lie: not white, but convinced that most paragons of male beauty are.
In forum posts, incels classify Chads by phenotype (“Keltic Nordid,” “Gracile Mediterranid”) and style (jock, lumberjack, vampire, pretty boy). They repost scientific research on the importance of symmetry and harmony in universal standards of beauty. They discuss the Golden Mask, a Platonic ideal of a face designed by a California surgeon using the ratio of phi.
Truth4lie’s preferred Chad was a common incel favorite: David Gandy, the face of Dolce & Gabbana’s Light Blue cologne ads, in which the British model has a bronzed six-pack, a plump Speedo, and crystal-blue eyes. (That Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce are gay designers best known for an aesthetic of homoerotic high camp was an irony most incels missed.)
The more Truth4lie read about Eppley, the more the doctor seemed capable of turning even Truth4lie into a Chad. He remembers one widely shared photo showing what it said was an Eppley patient with a new chin, a new jaw, a new forehead, new temples, and a new skull. “It was like Eppley created a whole new person,” Truth4lie recalls. “Incels have this idea of an ideal superman, and Eppley is the one who does that crazy stuff.”
Truth4lie’s jaw wasn’t severely recessed, Eppley noted, peering at the videoconference feed of the dark-haired 35-year-old side by side with pictures he’d sent by email. Eppley said he could fix his slightly weak chin, asymmetry, and lack of vertical length with a custom jaw implant based on a CT scan of Truth4lie’s skull. (Truth4lie wouldn’t send me pictures of himself, but I found a few online, although I wasn’t sure if they were pre- or post-op. He has short dark hair and dark eyes, a cupid’s bow on his upper lip. He is squinting into the camera. He reminds me of Joseph Gordon-Levitt with a wider face.)
Dreams of Chad: On the incel forum Lookism, users regularly Photoshop each other’s selfies to show what they would like if transformed into Chads.
Incels I spoke to framed posts as a kind of dark humor, helping them face painful truths about the world wth a shield of irony. But trolling also seemed like a gateway to extreme ideas. When incel Alek Minassian drove a van onto a crowded sidewalk in Toronto in 2018, killing ten, he prefaced his crime with a Facebook post praising “the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger.”
Cosmetic surgery seemed to serve a similar function to trolling but on a grander, more permanent scale. Incels said it would help them to live more normal lives and alleviate loneliness and depression. Just as often, it seemed to carve their prejudices in bone.
Much like women getting breast implants, South Koreans getting eyelid surgery, or bodybuilders taking steroids, the posters on incel forums seem at first to be motivated by the undeniably relatable desire to look better — and therefore be treated better. Natalie Wynn is an academic turned “one of YouTube’s leading B-list transsexuals” (her words). On her YouTube channel, ContraPoints, she comments on far-right internet culture while sipping wine and sporting 18th-century cosplay. Her most popular video is on incels, and she grants the group more sympathy than you’d expect. “I’m just as obsessed with bones as the goddamn incels,” she says at one point, noting that she’s about to pay “luxury-car amounts of money” for facial-feminization surgery. Some transgender people are against that surgery, she tells me by phone, because “they think we’re trying to pass and look cis, which is only a thing that we’d want to do in a really transphobic society.” But is it right to blame individual trans people for trying to be happy? “To me, it seems not the point.”
Unlike transgender people who pursue surgery, of course, incels tend to be perpetrators, rather than targets, of violence and discrimination. Still, the positions of some incels I talked to echoed Wynn’s analysis. PostSingularityVirgin, a 21-year-old Canadian, started reading incel forums when he was 17. Soon after, he dropped out of college to save up for cosmetic surgery, which he has yet to get. He believes people like him are the future; in the next century, cosmetic surgery will be widespread and affordable to everyone, he tells me. “I feel like inequality in humans is like the greatest source of misery,” he says. “Wealth inequality, how you’re treated because of the way you look. A lot of those things are being eliminated by technology.”
For other incels, the anger they held on to even after their surgery suggests their motivation may be something closer to what feminist writer Jessica Valenti has described: “Incels are not a community of sad men that reflect a societal problem with loneliness. They’re a community of violent misogynists that reflect a societal problem with sexism and sexual entitlement.”
Mike, a tour guide in Austria in his mid-30s, has spent so much time on incel forums that he “doesn’t know anyone in real life anymore.” But he’s not technically an incel, he says: He’s slept with 50 women in his life, though only “10 percent were hot.” “An average man has to swipe about 114 times on Tinder to get one match,” Mike said when we talked on WhatsApp. On the forum, meanwhile, he has read about “how many matches and messages women get, even women with gross deformities, women with disabilities, morbidly obese women.”
In conversations like this, it was difficult to empathize with incels — they had so little empathy for anyone else. It’s not as if straight men are the only ones who experience punishing standards of hotness and social-media alienation. But only incels react with bile.
When I discovered his real-world identity and tracked him down, Truth4lie at first denied he was the user from the Lookism forum. Then he came clean.
“I feel ashamed about everything,” he told me. “I’m talking to a woman, and I said bad things about them. I’m actually a nice person in real life.” He declined to speak further, preferring not to be reminded of this dark chapter in his past.
A few minutes later, he changed his mind and called me. By that time, Truth4lie’s account on Lookism had been dormant for roughly a year. One of his last posts, from June 2017, announced he was leaving the online community for good. “Slowly slithering back into society, because looks = NT,” he wrote, using an acronym for “neurologically typical.” In Truth4lie’s view, mental illness was a by-product of his outward appearance; if he were better looking, his depression would disappear.
After his first surgery with Eppley, he tells me, he returned to the Netherlands to wait for the swelling to go down. He was happy with his rhinoplasty revision but couldn’t figure out whether his new jaw was too big. Some days the results seemed perfect. Other days one side looked horrifically large. “Just realized my face is slightly too flat,” he wrote one morning. “Should I fly back to the U.S.?” Eppley pressed him to wait. To feel calmer, Truth4lie listened to long videos of rain sounds.
On the phone, Truth4lie told me he had recently had his fifth jawline-implant revision, this time with a local surgeon in Holland. “Do you say, ‘I’m happy with how I look now?’ ” he asks. “Or do you go deeper down the rabbit hole with the chance to fuck up everything with another procedure because you can always be better looking?”
He says he doesn’t hate women anymore. But he hasn’t left behind most of the theories about life that he was exposed to on incel forums. Sometimes when he notices a woman making eye contact with other men in the street, the entire world seems to narrow to a harsh, suffocating plane of power dynamics, in which sexual attraction determines all. “Every time I try to talk myself out of things I used to believe, of the black pill, it feels like I am moving away from the truth,” he tells me. It’s hard to want to live when that happens.
The second time we speak on the phone, Truth4lie tells me he has just been released from the hospital after attempting suicide. His last jaw-implant revision was still monstrously swollen, and he was so anxious about it that death seemed easier than looking at his face in the mirror.
He swallowed pills, then read on Google that his final hours would be slow and painful. So he called an ambulance. When he woke up in the hospital, it felt like being reborn, joyous, akin to the dopamine rush he always felt after being operated on.
In the months since we first spoke, Eppley has been trying to come to terms with his incel celebrity. He seemed pensive, if not exactly shocked, when I asked him about it recently. “I’ve often wondered why some of my patients are the way they are. I’ve been dealing with them for years, unknowingly,” he says. “I just take them as some of our challenging young male patients, but this certainly explains some of their behaviors. Psychologically, this is an abnormal group.”
I ask him what he thinks about Truth4lie’s case. “It’s easy to look back on something and say we shouldn’t have operated,” he tells me. But screening for someone who will never be happy is difficult. “My job is not to be a psychiatrist sitting in a chair. You’re serving a need, and you don’t know the depths of that need.”
He considers the question of whether the surgeries could end up reinforcing incels’ misogyny beyond his purview: “A doctor who puts in 500 breast implants, there will be someone who says, ‘He’s a terrible person. He’s making women sick for profit.’ ” Someone who operates on transgender patients will be told, “ ‘He shouldn’t have a medical license. That’s against God.’ ”
But breast implants and gender affirmation don’t reinforce patients’ hatred of other groups of people, as incel’s procedures might, I point out. “How is it any different?” Eppley says. “You have no idea what someone’s motivations are, whether that’s trying to be more attractive and feel better about themselves” or something more nefarious.
Eppley stops short of saying anything that might discourage incels from continuing to seek him out. “I have zero positive or zero negative things to say about them. They’re just people. The only thing I care about is that on an individual-patient basis, are they happy?”
Eppley’s career has given him plenty of opportunities to study the nature of human appearances, and over time, he’s had a few insights. He believes each of us is actually three people: how we see ourselves, how others see us, and how we actually are. Eppley will turn 64 this August. He has blue eyes, plenty of crow’s-feet, and a mane of hair that does indeed channel Einstein’s. “I don’t have any pictures taken of myself,” he tells me. “I prefer to walk around with an illusion of what I look like.”
In real life, pickup artistry made Truth4lie anxious. One rule stated he needed to initiate conversation with a woman three seconds after seeing her, which felt like taking an exam. Still, he tried the techniques for a few years, with middling success. Eventually, he stumbled on a forum called Sluthate, where anonymous men gathered to “discredit the effectiveness of pickup art.” In one post, a user described coming to the realization that it didn’t matter what he said because of the way he looked.
The user uploaded a selfie, and other Sluthate posters agreed, mocking the flaws in his face. They congratulated him for “taking the black pill,” shorthand for waking up to the tragedy of being ugly. Ugly people, especially ugly men, they said, are destined to lead unhappy lives and die alone.
Reading this, Truth4lie felt exhilarated. In the mental hospital, counselors had told him the roots of his depression and anxiety were repressed childhood traumas. In therapy, he relived getting in physical fights as a kid with his dad and the time he punched his sister in the head. Cognition determined emotions, the counselors told him. By changing his mind-set, he could change his behavior. But what if his problems weren’t inside him but outside? Looks can’t be changed with a mind-set adjustment; neither can the cruelly superficial world that values them above all else. The realization was awful and great all at once, as if someone were finally telling him the truth about himself after a lifetime of fake validation.
“The difference between a mirror image and non-flipped image of myself drives me crazy,” he typed one night, after spending hours comparing his phone’s selfies to his reflection. “I see all my asymmetries … How can it only be my brain?”
Friends and family said he had body-dysmorphic disorder, a condition the International OCD Foundation says affects about one in every 50 people. Psychiatric manuals describe it as an obsession with perceived flaws in one’s appearance that others don’t see or notice. But Truth4lie’s imperfections were perfectly noticeable to other forum users: weak jawline, feminine nose, small frame, thinning hair. To Truth4lie, their assessments explained why he hadn’t fit in in high school, why his ex didn’t love him, why women he looked at on the street didn’t make eye contact.
Truth4lie had for a while tried to write a novel about his time in the psychiatric hospital. He read Camus, who said that life has no great meaning. He pondered nihilistic theories posited on the forums he frequented. He discovered terms like “oneitis,” a disease of romantic obsession that enslaves men, and “hypergamy,” an evolutionary principle that pushes women to seek mates above their status. In a post-monogamy society, that means a tiny percentage of genetically superior alpha guys hoard most hetero sex. There were infographics to back it up, Tinder experiments with precise data. Beyond that, there was biology: Genetic wiring controls most everything about life, the forums’ users argued, ensuring the misery of people like him.
The forums’ posters blamed their plight on women’s rising social power. Once upon a time, women without careers married for stability; today they inevitably spent their 20s riding a “cock carousel” of the hottest guys they could land, settling for an ugly or average-looking man only when they were old and used, i.e., above 30. Even then, women could hardly be depended on for loyalty. Showered with attention on dating apps, favored by divorce courts, beloved by HR diversity initiatives, women had become a privileged class. The forums rarely mentioned wage gaps, pregnancy discrimination, or sexual violence, except in jest.
“Truth4lie” was an early user name; over the next few years, he’d use others. His depression lingered well into his 30s. He started an online editing business and moved into his parents’ house in a small village in the Netherlands, where he knew almost no one. Most days, he would work from home, post on the forums, then eventually dress — leather jacket, torn jeans, fingerless leather gloves — and take a walk around the village, silently cataloguing how many people glanced at him or returned a smile.
The sight of certain women began to bother him. When a woman he hired turned out to be beautiful, he fumed online: “An 8/10 girl works for me since today. I’m going to dominate the hell out of her. Trust me, I’m going to kill her confidence.” Women with babies ignited anger, too. “Every time I pass by a pram, it fills me with disgust to know that she has ruined her body and chose to reproduce with another guy,” he wrote. Other users responded with gifs: angry WWE faces, a cackling Nic Cage. “Seeing women taking care of their sons is the only situation in which I don’t hate them,” agreed one user named Biebercel.
The posters called themselves “incels,” short for “involuntarily celibate.” On one forum where Truth4lie posted — Lookism, which succeeded Sluthate — there are 10,000 registered users. They were on other websites, too (incels.me, incels.co, r/braincels), although it’s impossible to know who was posting on multiple accounts. Incels called women like the one Truth4lie had hired “Stacies.” Alpha men had a name, too. They were called “Chads.”
You know, those guys who are “praised day and night for their top-tier genetics, making a shit-ton of money, getting insane amounts of validation, never having to worry about paying the rent or any of that bullshit; all they think about is their next football match and coming home and having a threesome with two supermodels, supermodels that puke at the thought of them touching you.” That’s how one incel with a Pepe frog as his avatar described Chads, posting a picture of Lucky Blue Smith and Jordan Barrett backstage at a Balmain fashion show.
Truth4lie’s friends hated Chad, but they were also convinced their lives would improve significantly if they could somehow become Chad. They tried “gymceling” and “steroidmaxxing” (incel-speak for bodybuilding and taking steroids). They tried jelqing (penis-stretching exercises) and mewing (chewing hard foods to bulk up the masseter muscles, said by British orthodontist Mike Mew to augment the jawline). They tried pulling on their faces to reshape them. They got into skin care.
Some wanted more elemental improvements. More than pudgy flesh or pocked skin, it was their bones that made incels unfuckable, they believed. Their quarrel was with the very collagen that had ossified in their mother’s womb, the calcium phosphate with the potential to outlast civilizations, maybe even souls — or to be weeded out of the gene pool. “The difference between a Chad and an incel is literally a few millimeters of bone,” reads one meme.
To transform skull and skeleton could be done only with great expense and pain. It would take surgery. Some incels spent years researching procedures. More and more, they congregated around a single name: Barry Eppley, a cosmetic and reconstructive surgeon in Indiana.
“I had a dream: to meet the great Dr. Eppley,” wrote Truth4lie in one of over 1,100 Lookism posts mentioning the doctor. “I finally met the man, the true master artist, a superior human being. He should be mentioned with the likes of Mandela, Shakespeare, Luther King, Descartes, and Mother Teresa. He is the Einstein of Aesthetics,” he wrote. “He’s changed thousands of incel lives for the better.”
Cosmetic surgery among people who identify as male rose 325 percent between 1997 and 2015 in the U.S., according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. Eppley, who is boarded in oral and maxillofacial surgery as well as plastic surgery, is one of a handful of doctors explicitly targeting young men with procedures to transform the face and body rather than to reverse aging. It’s a burgeoning demographic: Patients fly here from around the world, looking for something their local surgeon doesn’t perform, often a procedure Eppley invented. He does around 450 surgeries a year — eight to ten a week.
When I show an incel forum to Eppley, he at first seems confused by the anonymous usernames. We look at a thread by a user named Saiyan who has posted images of his designs for Eppley cheekbone implants and post-op selfies. Finally, it seems to dawn on Eppley: “That patient has done more to promote that style of implant than anyone I know,” he says. He has fielded requests from dozens of patients who specifically reference Saiyan’s photographs. He hadn’t known where they’d found them.
Eppley’s “whatever you want” philosophy is certainly part of his appeal. Some surgeons will not operate on patients they believe may have body dysmorphia. “To me, that’s a red flag when someone has 200 pictures of themselves on their phone,” says Joe Niamtu, a cosmetic surgeon in Virginia, who declines to operate on many young male patients seeking sculpted faces. “The risk is they’ll never be happy.” Niamtu has referred some patients to Eppley.
"Nature isn’t fair,” Truth4lie, who is half-Dutch and half–North African, tells me. “Some races are more attractive than others,” and biology, he says, determines beauty, not cultural norms.
In 1993, a 34-year-old neo-Nazi made an appointment with a Chicago plastic surgeon and murdered him, saying later in court that he was motivated to protect “Aryan beauty.” Incels tend to venerate the same European features, but they also revere the surgeons who bestow them. Only a handful are white supremacists — “stormcels,” as they’re known. Far more are like Truth4lie: not white, but convinced that most paragons of male beauty are.
In forum posts, incels classify Chads by phenotype (“Keltic Nordid,” “Gracile Mediterranid”) and style (jock, lumberjack, vampire, pretty boy). They repost scientific research on the importance of symmetry and harmony in universal standards of beauty. They discuss the Golden Mask, a Platonic ideal of a face designed by a California surgeon using the ratio of phi.
Truth4lie’s preferred Chad was a common incel favorite: David Gandy, the face of Dolce & Gabbana’s Light Blue cologne ads, in which the British model has a bronzed six-pack, a plump Speedo, and crystal-blue eyes. (That Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce are gay designers best known for an aesthetic of homoerotic high camp was an irony most incels missed.)
The more Truth4lie read about Eppley, the more the doctor seemed capable of turning even Truth4lie into a Chad. He remembers one widely shared photo showing what it said was an Eppley patient with a new chin, a new jaw, a new forehead, new temples, and a new skull. “It was like Eppley created a whole new person,” Truth4lie recalls. “Incels have this idea of an ideal superman, and Eppley is the one who does that crazy stuff.”
Truth4lie’s jaw wasn’t severely recessed, Eppley noted, peering at the videoconference feed of the dark-haired 35-year-old side by side with pictures he’d sent by email. Eppley said he could fix his slightly weak chin, asymmetry, and lack of vertical length with a custom jaw implant based on a CT scan of Truth4lie’s skull. (Truth4lie wouldn’t send me pictures of himself, but I found a few online, although I wasn’t sure if they were pre- or post-op. He has short dark hair and dark eyes, a cupid’s bow on his upper lip. He is squinting into the camera. He reminds me of Joseph Gordon-Levitt with a wider face.)
Dreams of Chad: On the incel forum Lookism, users regularly Photoshop each other’s selfies to show what they would like if transformed into Chads.
Incels I spoke to framed posts as a kind of dark humor, helping them face painful truths about the world wth a shield of irony. But trolling also seemed like a gateway to extreme ideas. When incel Alek Minassian drove a van onto a crowded sidewalk in Toronto in 2018, killing ten, he prefaced his crime with a Facebook post praising “the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger.”
Cosmetic surgery seemed to serve a similar function to trolling but on a grander, more permanent scale. Incels said it would help them to live more normal lives and alleviate loneliness and depression. Just as often, it seemed to carve their prejudices in bone.
Much like women getting breast implants, South Koreans getting eyelid surgery, or bodybuilders taking steroids, the posters on incel forums seem at first to be motivated by the undeniably relatable desire to look better — and therefore be treated better. Natalie Wynn is an academic turned “one of YouTube’s leading B-list transsexuals” (her words). On her YouTube channel, ContraPoints, she comments on far-right internet culture while sipping wine and sporting 18th-century cosplay. Her most popular video is on incels, and she grants the group more sympathy than you’d expect. “I’m just as obsessed with bones as the goddamn incels,” she says at one point, noting that she’s about to pay “luxury-car amounts of money” for facial-feminization surgery. Some transgender people are against that surgery, she tells me by phone, because “they think we’re trying to pass and look cis, which is only a thing that we’d want to do in a really transphobic society.” But is it right to blame individual trans people for trying to be happy? “To me, it seems not the point.”
Unlike transgender people who pursue surgery, of course, incels tend to be perpetrators, rather than targets, of violence and discrimination. Still, the positions of some incels I talked to echoed Wynn’s analysis. PostSingularityVirgin, a 21-year-old Canadian, started reading incel forums when he was 17. Soon after, he dropped out of college to save up for cosmetic surgery, which he has yet to get. He believes people like him are the future; in the next century, cosmetic surgery will be widespread and affordable to everyone, he tells me. “I feel like inequality in humans is like the greatest source of misery,” he says. “Wealth inequality, how you’re treated because of the way you look. A lot of those things are being eliminated by technology.”
For other incels, the anger they held on to even after their surgery suggests their motivation may be something closer to what feminist writer Jessica Valenti has described: “Incels are not a community of sad men that reflect a societal problem with loneliness. They’re a community of violent misogynists that reflect a societal problem with sexism and sexual entitlement.”
Mike, a tour guide in Austria in his mid-30s, has spent so much time on incel forums that he “doesn’t know anyone in real life anymore.” But he’s not technically an incel, he says: He’s slept with 50 women in his life, though only “10 percent were hot.” “An average man has to swipe about 114 times on Tinder to get one match,” Mike said when we talked on WhatsApp. On the forum, meanwhile, he has read about “how many matches and messages women get, even women with gross deformities, women with disabilities, morbidly obese women.”
In conversations like this, it was difficult to empathize with incels — they had so little empathy for anyone else. It’s not as if straight men are the only ones who experience punishing standards of hotness and social-media alienation. But only incels react with bile.
When I discovered his real-world identity and tracked him down, Truth4lie at first denied he was the user from the Lookism forum. Then he came clean.
“I feel ashamed about everything,” he told me. “I’m talking to a woman, and I said bad things about them. I’m actually a nice person in real life.” He declined to speak further, preferring not to be reminded of this dark chapter in his past.
A few minutes later, he changed his mind and called me. By that time, Truth4lie’s account on Lookism had been dormant for roughly a year. One of his last posts, from June 2017, announced he was leaving the online community for good. “Slowly slithering back into society, because looks = NT,” he wrote, using an acronym for “neurologically typical.” In Truth4lie’s view, mental illness was a by-product of his outward appearance; if he were better looking, his depression would disappear.
After his first surgery with Eppley, he tells me, he returned to the Netherlands to wait for the swelling to go down. He was happy with his rhinoplasty revision but couldn’t figure out whether his new jaw was too big. Some days the results seemed perfect. Other days one side looked horrifically large. “Just realized my face is slightly too flat,” he wrote one morning. “Should I fly back to the U.S.?” Eppley pressed him to wait. To feel calmer, Truth4lie listened to long videos of rain sounds.
On the phone, Truth4lie told me he had recently had his fifth jawline-implant revision, this time with a local surgeon in Holland. “Do you say, ‘I’m happy with how I look now?’ ” he asks. “Or do you go deeper down the rabbit hole with the chance to fuck up everything with another procedure because you can always be better looking?”
He says he doesn’t hate women anymore. But he hasn’t left behind most of the theories about life that he was exposed to on incel forums. Sometimes when he notices a woman making eye contact with other men in the street, the entire world seems to narrow to a harsh, suffocating plane of power dynamics, in which sexual attraction determines all. “Every time I try to talk myself out of things I used to believe, of the black pill, it feels like I am moving away from the truth,” he tells me. It’s hard to want to live when that happens.
The second time we speak on the phone, Truth4lie tells me he has just been released from the hospital after attempting suicide. His last jaw-implant revision was still monstrously swollen, and he was so anxious about it that death seemed easier than looking at his face in the mirror.
He swallowed pills, then read on Google that his final hours would be slow and painful. So he called an ambulance. When he woke up in the hospital, it felt like being reborn, joyous, akin to the dopamine rush he always felt after being operated on.
In the months since we first spoke, Eppley has been trying to come to terms with his incel celebrity. He seemed pensive, if not exactly shocked, when I asked him about it recently. “I’ve often wondered why some of my patients are the way they are. I’ve been dealing with them for years, unknowingly,” he says. “I just take them as some of our challenging young male patients, but this certainly explains some of their behaviors. Psychologically, this is an abnormal group.”
I ask him what he thinks about Truth4lie’s case. “It’s easy to look back on something and say we shouldn’t have operated,” he tells me. But screening for someone who will never be happy is difficult. “My job is not to be a psychiatrist sitting in a chair. You’re serving a need, and you don’t know the depths of that need.”
He considers the question of whether the surgeries could end up reinforcing incels’ misogyny beyond his purview: “A doctor who puts in 500 breast implants, there will be someone who says, ‘He’s a terrible person. He’s making women sick for profit.’ ” Someone who operates on transgender patients will be told, “ ‘He shouldn’t have a medical license. That’s against God.’ ”
But breast implants and gender affirmation don’t reinforce patients’ hatred of other groups of people, as incel’s procedures might, I point out. “How is it any different?” Eppley says. “You have no idea what someone’s motivations are, whether that’s trying to be more attractive and feel better about themselves” or something more nefarious.
Eppley stops short of saying anything that might discourage incels from continuing to seek him out. “I have zero positive or zero negative things to say about them. They’re just people. The only thing I care about is that on an individual-patient basis, are they happy?”
Eppley’s career has given him plenty of opportunities to study the nature of human appearances, and over time, he’s had a few insights. He believes each of us is actually three people: how we see ourselves, how others see us, and how we actually are. Eppley will turn 64 this August. He has blue eyes, plenty of crow’s-feet, and a mane of hair that does indeed channel Einstein’s. “I don’t have any pictures taken of myself,” he tells me. “I prefer to walk around with an illusion of what I look like.”
TLDR: Incels are turning to plastic surgery to better their chances at getting laid.
One could argue these people still have the internal insecurities and personality they had before the surgery, but I guess if this keeps them from going on a killing rampage, that's at least one positive note.