Whatever the case, I had bought into the familiar incel talking point about how sex is reserved only for men in the top 1 percent of the attractiveness scale. (Whom incels call "Chads," if you were lucky enough to not know that already.) This is obviously ridiculous, as the species would have gone extinct if this was true (or we'd all be incredibly hot due to generations of Chad genes). Today, there are entire forums dedicated to "looksmaxing," with users critiquing each other's less-than-ideal facial features down to the smallest detail of jawline width or nose length in order to calculate the exact ratio that might grant you minimum access to the vagina lottery.

Now go look up some prominent incels on Google. Most of them look like pretty average guys, same as I was. Hell, Elliot Rodger, the poster boy of the incels, was a goddamn runway model compared to me. The problem isn't that they can't get sex; it's that they (like me back then) don't want to have sex with anyone who isn't a perfect 10. Which is, ironically, the exact accusation they throw at women. It's amazing what you can believe when you never look inward.

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The weirdest and most underrated effect of unrealistic cultural beauty standards is that to certain guys, average-looking women just become invisible. So much of the worst male behavior will start to make sense once you realize this. Those women are there, in the same way that background extras exist in a movie. They just don't register as people. Their opinions don't matter, their feelings don't matter, their attraction doesn't matter.

I didn't just shun romantic attention from average-looking women; their advances weren't even on my radar. I was waiting for the head cheerleader to hit on me, even if we had nothing in common, as far as I knew. I had decided that extremely attractive women should put my personality ahead of my physical appearance, even though I was utterly incapable of doing the same.

In modern incel terminology, the sexual war is fought between incels and "Chads," and it's fought over "Stacys" and "Beckys." In short, Stacy is the amazing-looking girl that incels want, but she's too busy boning Chad. Becky is the less attractive girl that incels would settle for, but she's too busy pining after Chad. There's rarely any mention of the comparatively ordinary-looking women who, you know, make up most of the population.

And why would there be? They're not even important enough to earn a nickname, because they don't exist. Elliot Rodger, in his manifesto, didn't talk much about how average girls treated him, but talked plenty about how "hot blonde women" ignored him.

Related: 5 Confessions Of A Female 'Nice Guy'

We didn't consider ourselves part of a movement, but it still empowered us, in a certain toxic way, to know that we had this in common. So instead of helping each other escape a tough situation, everyone in the group started feeding into one another's delusions. That's when you get the social phenomenon known as a "crab bucket." If you've never heard the term, just imagine a bucket full of crabs. Every time a crab makes a move to escape the bucket, another crab tries to climb up its body, pulling the first crab back down. Ultimately, although any single crab can easily escape, none of them ever do. Their inability to comprehend the bigger picture keeps all of them trapped.

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Whether you consider them to be ill or not, incels are also suffering under a delusion, and there is nothing worse for someone in that situation than to have that delusion reinforced on a daily basis. Psychology Today has written about this. The internet is stunning in its ability to lock delusional people into these feedback loops until this becomes central to their identity. History books may look back on this as the defining trait of our era, the mechanism by which radical movements were born and fed all over the globe. In fact ...

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As an Australian, my conservative pundit of choice during my incel years was Andrew Bolt, an aggressively anti-feminist right-winger who frequently publishes columns in Murdoch tabloids like The Herald Sun (also, as an Australian, I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to the entire human race for Rupert Murdoch). Once I started paying attention to Bolt's views on women, I started paying attention to his views on other things. Like black people. And Indians, Asians, and Jews.

From there, I tumbled even further down into right-wing thought by becoming a devout conservative voter and spouting talking points about how climate change is a lie. As an aspiring writer, the first book I attempted to put together was a mountain of dumbfuckery about how climate science was all a hoax, and thank Christ I never got around to writing it, though thousands of words of cherry-picked bullshit research are still sitting in a cabinet somewhere in my mother's house. (I instead wound up writing a book about goofy conspiracy theories.)

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I was fortunate enough that circumstances let me meet other people and learn about other points of view. I had decided to get my degree in philosophy, which in addition to broadening my viewpoint put me in contact with some of the dreaded SJWs who have supposedly turned the fields of the humanities and social sciences into politically correct Marxist echo chambers. I lost touch with most of my incel friends, but that's part of it; I got to a place where I could lose touch with them. For others, that would mean losing their entire social circle.

I remember that whenever one of my incel friends got lucky and lost their V-card, we weren't exactly high-fiving about it in celebration. After all, if they turned out to be capable of normal relations despite both their unattractiveness and the supposed shallowness of females, what did that say about the rest of us? Have you ever sat in a car and had a close friend insist you've been brainwashed by feminists? I have!

And even then, I was fortunate enough to get out before this became solidified as a vast international online movement, complete with layers of detailed literature and dogma -- a rabbit hole deeper than I could have ever imagined in the days before social media. It took a degree, years of study, and a whole new circle of friends to break me out of this, and it's not going to be easier for these guys. But we as a society have to figure out how to do it, because fringe groups like this sure as hell aren't going away on their own.

S Peter Davis wrote a whole book about conspiracy theories. You can buy it on Amazon here.

For more, check out How 'Friends' Invented The Friendzone - People Watching No. 5:

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