Paradise lost? How incel presentations of the past are used to justify ideology

Examining presentations of history in incel online discussions, this paper analyses how ideas about the past are used to justify misogynist beliefs, and to reinforce a narrative of collective incel victimhood. In extreme conservative movements, the past is often evoked to justify political ideologies. This is particularly evident in far-right and incel narratives about gender, in which patriarchy and male supremacy are presented as a "natural" order. Discussions of the past abound in incel communities, often lamenting men’s increasing victimisation under feminism, or harkening back to an idealised version of a 1950s patriarchal society. This has contributed to an idea that incel nostalgia largely aligns with far right ideas about a "golden age" to which society needs to return. To date however, there has been no research focusing on the phenomenon of incel nostalgia. This research is the first to take a more systematic approach to analysing presentations of the past in incel communities. Is incel nostalgia indeed similar to nostalgia observable among the far right? How is nostalgia employed to justify misogyny and victimhood? To answer these questions, a mixed methods approach was employed. First, nearly eight million posts, shared between 2018 and 2023, were scraped from incels.is, the largest and most active incel forum online. This dataset was examined using computational methods. An extensive list of keywords relating to memories, the past, and nostalgia was used to capture threads in which the past was discussed, and common themes and rhetorical patterns were identified. In the second part of this research, discourse analysis was used to unpack these common themes from which incels draw, and to demonstrate how ideas about the past (both real and imagined) are used to justify ideology. Theoretically, this research builds on Svetlana Boyms conceptualisation of two distinct kinds of nostalgia, each with different political implications. Restorative nostalgia (the form of nostalgia commonly associated with far right movements) is concerned with reviving traditions of the past, returning to an idealised "golden age", and rejecting aspects of modernity deemed as corrupting, while reflective nostalgia, accepting that the past cannot be meaningfully recreated, is more politically concerned with using memories of the past as a means for understanding and critiquing the present. Differing from far-right discourses, our findings suggest that a more personal, introspective, and less explicitly political form of nostalgia pervades incel discourse, and appears to be becoming increasingly popular over time. We demonstrate that this seemingly apolitical nostalgia, the subject of which is often shared cultural artefacts from the last 30 years, is more political than it initially appears, as it feeds into an affective, antagonistic identification with a collective victimhood, in which politics are discreetly embedded via the broad, pessimistic idea that culture and society are in decline, and that there are no actions incels can take to prevent this from continuing.