Incels have become one of modern culture’s most effective boogeymen. Cast as hate-filled misogynists driven by an alleged entitlement to sex, they are presented as an imminent danger to women and to society at large. Popular media routinely depicts them as villains, while the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has classified them as a potential domestic terror threat. The result is a caricature so complete that the incel is treated not as a social outcome to be examined, but as a moral contaminant to be eradicated.
This stigmatization is so pervasive that even genuine attempts at rehabilitation are met with social opprobrium. Public figures such as Jordan Peterson, who offer young men a framework oriented toward responsibility, self-discipline, and personal development, are frequently criticized for attracting an audience that includes these men. The irony is difficult to miss. Content aimed at addressing the very conditions society condemns is itself condemned for acknowledging their existence, while more explicitly nihilistic figures are treated as the primary threat.
More striking still, the demonization of sexless young men has intensified during what researchers have begun calling a sex recession. Rates of sexual inactivity are rising across the population, yet as incels grow more numerous and public anxiety surrounding them increases, there has been no corresponding rise in so-called incel-related terrorism. The phenomenon remains overwhelmingly online, rarely escaping its digital containment.
I argue that this hyperfixation on celibate men in an increasingly celibate society reveals a deeper and more unsettling anxiety. An anxiety that few commentators have been able to clearly articulate. The death of adulthood. What is being pathologized is not hatred or entitlement, but withdrawal in the face of a social order that no longer offers a reliable path from adolescence to mature responsibility.
What Is an Adult?
An adult is a sexually mature human being, someone capable of both producing and caring for offspring. Across cultures and throughout history, adulthood has not been defined primarily by age, identity, or self-expression, but by the assumption of sexual and generational responsibility.
The interiority of adulthood is inseparable from sex. Sexual maturity marks the transition from dependence to potential stewardship, the capacity to form pair bonds, create families, and sustain the next generation. This is why sexuality has always been tightly regulated by social norms, rites of passage, and moral expectations. It is also why societies have historically treated the transition into sexual adulthood as a serious and consequential threshold.
Our language still reflects this reality, even as we pretend it does not. When we refer to adult content, no clarification is required. We all understand that the term denotes sexual material. Adulthood, at its core, remains associated with sexual capacity and responsibility, even in a culture that is increasingly uncomfortable acknowledging this fact.
What has changed is not the definition of adulthood, but the reliability of the pathways leading into it. Sexual maturity is now widespread, yet the social, economic, and relational structures that once integrated young people into adult roles have eroded. The result is a growing population of sexually mature individuals who are unable, or unwilling, to cross the threshold into adult responsibility.
This is the context in which incel withdrawal must be understood, not as a rejection of adulthood, but as a stalled transition into it.
Mirror Images From the Far East: Hikikomori
Japan, and increasingly South Korea, has witnessed the emergence of a growing population of socially withdrawn young adults, the vast majority of them male. They are not known as incels, yet in nearly every meaningful respect, they fit the description. These men are typically in their mid-20s to early 30s, no longer in school, not meaningfully attached to the workforce, and absent from the dating market. Many continue to live with their parents, and their social lives exist almost entirely online.
In Japan, this phenomenon is known as hikikomori, literally pulling inward or being confined. Rather than being framed as a political threat or a moral failure, hikikomori are generally understood as socially withdrawn individuals who have disengaged from the expectations of adulthood. The emphasis is not on hatred or entitlement, but on retreat.
This framing persists even though, on rare occasions, hikikomori-associated individuals have committed acts of violence. These incidents, such as isolated family killings or attacks linked to extreme social withdrawal, are treated as tragic exceptions rather than defining features of the phenomenon. They are not understood as evidence of an organized ideology, nor are hikikomori broadly cast as a security threat. The overwhelming majority remain nonviolent, inward-facing, and disengaged rather than radicalized.
The parallels to the Western incel phenomenon are difficult to ignore. In both cases, we observe sexually mature young men withdrawing from social participation, romantic relationships, and productive labor. In neither case does this withdrawal arise from ideological rebellion. Instead, it emerges where the transition from adolescence to adulthood has become fraught, unreliable, or humiliating.
Crucially, hikikomori did not emerge in a cultural vacuum. Their rise closely followed Japan’s financial collapse in the early 1990s and the subsequent employment ice age, a prolonged period in which stable, entry-level jobs for young people largely disappeared. For a generation of Japanese men, the traditional pathway into adult responsibility, secure employment, social status, and marriage, collapsed. Withdrawal was not chosen out of entitlement, but adopted as a response to blocked progression.
This pattern would repeat itself in the West following the 2008 financial crisis and the so-called jobless recovery. As economic precarity became normalized and adult milestones were delayed or rendered unattainable, a similar population of withdrawn young men emerged, this time labeled incels. The difference lies less in behavior than in interpretation. Where Japan medicalized and socialized the problem, Western societies moralized and securitized it.
Seen in this light, incels are not an aberration of Western culture, nor are they uniquely dangerous. Like hikikomori, they represent a population responding, often poorly, sometimes destructively, but usually quietly, to a social order that has made the transition into adulthood structurally unreliable. The fixation on rare acts of violence obscures the far more common reality, mass withdrawal in the absence of viable alternatives.
The Jobless Recovery and the Rise of Andrew Tate
The Western incel phenomenon did not emerge in a vacuum. It followed closely on the heels of the 2008 financial crisis and the so-called jobless recovery that defined the decade that followed. While headline economic indicators eventually stabilized, stable, entry-level employment for young men did not. Secure wages, predictable career ladders, and the institutional pathways that once carried young people into adulthood steadily eroded.
In their place emerged a labor market defined by precarity. Gig work, short-term contracts, and algorithmically managed employment became the norm for a growing segment of the population. This shift disproportionately affected young men, who historically relied on early labor market attachment as a foundation for social status, independence, and family formation. The promise of adulthood remained culturally intact, but the material means of achieving it quietly disappeared.
At the same time, winner-take-all dynamics intensified across the economy. A small minority captured outsized rewards, while the majority competed over diminishing returns. Visibility replaced stability. Success stories became spectacular but rare, reinforcing the perception that ordinary effort no longer reliably led to ordinary adulthood. For young men already struggling to translate effort into progress, this produced not ambition but disorientation.
It is within this economic landscape that figures like Andrew Tate gain traction. Tate’s appeal does not lie primarily in his misogyny, but in his promise of restored agency. He offers a narrative in which masculinity, wealth, and sexual access are still attainable if one adopts the correct mindset, strategy, or hustle. For men facing blocked pathways and eroded institutions, this message functions less as ideology than as compensation for systemic failure.
Hustler’s University and similar schemes thrive in this environment precisely because legitimate opportunities are scarce. These programs do not create desperation. They monetize it. When traditional routes to economic security are unreliable or humiliating, the appeal of shortcuts, insider knowledge, and pseudo-entrepreneurial identities becomes understandable. The fact that many of these offerings are exploitative or illusory does not negate the conditions that make them attractive.
Crucially, the popularity of such figures is often misdiagnosed as evidence of moral decay or radicalization. In reality, it reflects the absence of credible, practical alternatives. When institutions no longer offer young men a realistic path to competence, independence, and social adulthood, charisma and spectacle fill the void.
What emerges, then, is not a generation radicalized by entitlement, but one caught between sexual maturity and economic irrelevance. Withdrawal, whether into online subcultures, grievance narratives, or dubious hustle schemes, is less a rejection of adulthood than a response to its material inaccessibility.
Policy Solutions Must Treat Inceldom as a Social Failure, Not a Moral One
If the incel phenomenon is understood as a form of withdrawal rather than entitlement, then the appropriate response is neither demonization nor moral panic. It is institutional repair. Japan’s experience with hikikomori offers a useful contrast, not because Japan has solved the problem, but because it has largely resisted the impulse to frame socially withdrawn men as ideological enemies.
In Japan, hikikomori are generally treated as a social and developmental failure rather than a moral or political one. Public policy responses have focused on reintegration rather than punishment. Community outreach programs, gradual re-entry into education or work, vocational training detached from prestige signaling, and family support structures are designed to reduce shame rather than amplify it. The emphasis is not on forcing participation, but on rebuilding the conditions under which participation becomes viable.
Crucially, these interventions acknowledge that withdrawal often follows humiliation, blocked progress, and repeated failure to meet adult expectations. The goal is not to shame individuals into adulthood, but to reconstruct the pathways that once made adulthood attainable. While imperfect, this approach recognizes that prolonged adolescence and social retreat are symptoms of structural breakdown, not evidence of collective moral collapse.
Western societies, by contrast, have largely chosen moralization over remediation. Incels are treated as threats to be surveilled rather than citizens to be reintegrated. The language of extremism substitutes for economic reform. Stigma replaces institutional accountability. Yet decades of evidence, from Japan and elsewhere, suggest that social withdrawal does not resolve through condemnation. It hardens under it.
If adulthood is dying, it is not because young men refuse responsibility, but because responsibility has been severed from realistic opportunity. Reversing this trend requires policies that restore dignity to work, stability to early adulthood, and credible transitions from dependence to independence. This means investing in vocational pathways, rethinking labor precarity, lowering the barriers to housing and family formation, and treating social withdrawal as a public health and developmental issue rather than a security threat.
The question, then, is not how to eradicate incels, but whether modern societies are willing to rebuild adulthood itself. Until they do, withdrawal will remain a rational, if tragic, response to a world that demands maturity while withholding the means to achieve it.
