190: Libidinal Loneliness and the Machinery of Misogyny

A case file from the unconscious of a movement that loves you only when you're in pain.

Patient ID: 024-InCL
Alias: JBP
Presenting Complaint: Chronic isolation. Erotic dislocation. Recursive resentment. Terminal irony.
Intake Summary: Self-referred after prolonged participation in online communities organized around perceived romantic exclusion and social grievance.

“I just want someone to love me.”
—Subject, first session.

---

I. The Surrogate Relationship

From the beginning, it was clear that JBP didn’t simply want romance—he wanted confirmation. A sign that he mattered. A signal that he was not invisible.

He wanted to be wanted. But rather than seek connection, he turned to the forums.

And the forums welcomed him. Not warmly, but familiarly. They knew his pain before he could articulate it. They mirrored his frustration. They gave it grammar and myth.

It was here that the real bond formed—not with women, but with the movement itself. It gave JBP a role to play. A shared language. A story.

Like any relationship, it had rituals: memes, rankings, initiation rites. And like any toxic relationship, it offered comfort on the condition of loyalty.

II. Desire and the Fantasy of Lack

Drawing on Lacan, desire is not about having—it’s about lacking. It is structured around what is missing, not what is possessed.

JBP didn’t desire women so much as he desired being desired by them. It was the fantasy of being the object of affection—not the reality—that defined his worldview.

This is why women, for JBP, were never quite real. They were abstract projections: “foids,” “Stacys,” placeholders for what he was denied.

They functioned like ghosts in a psychic drama, haunting his screen and thoughts—not as individuals, but as the gatekeepers of his self-worth.

And standing beside them were “Chads”—the phallic ideal. Not just competition, but evidence of his own perceived failure.

He did not hate them because they had more. He hated them because they proved he lacked.

III. Resentment as Intimacy

One of the breakthroughs came when I asked: “Do you feel worse or better after time on the forums?”

“Worse,” he said without hesitation. “But at least it’s real.”

This is the paradox that Lauren Berlant called cruel optimism—remaining attached to something that prevents you from getting what you actually want.

The incel community didn’t give JBP love, but it gave him structure. It turned loneliness into identity. Pain into ritual. Suffering into status.

Within the group, emotional breakdown became a badge of authenticity. Rage became a kind of intimacy. Victimhood became valor.

And in this way, the community became the object of his love. It held him in its cold embrace and said, “Only we understand you.”

He believed it.

IV. The Algorithmic Arms of the Lover

None of this is accidental.

What we call inceldom is not a natural outgrowth of male loneliness—it’s an engineered affective state. The algorithms reinforce outrage, reward confession, and bind users into tighter and tighter circles of grievance.

Byung-Chul Han describes this as the “smooth violence” of digital society. Everything appears frictionless, participatory, and expressive. But it flattens affect, isolates users, and replaces real contact with curated hostility.

For JBP, the incel movement didn’t just listen—it responded. Not with empathy, but with emotional resonance. It always had something to say. Always had a new post. A new theory. A new reason why the world owed him something.

V. The Case of the Dream

One of JBP’s final sessions was marked by a dream he couldn’t stop describing:

“It’s like I’m in a high school gym on prom night. The lights are on, but it’s empty. And then I hear a voice. It says: ‘They’ll never love you like I do.’ It’s not a person—it’s the forum. I start crying. But I feel… safe.”

This was the key insight.

JBP was not searching for love. He had found it—in the cold code of community resentment. It didn’t touch him physically. It didn’t challenge him emotionally. But it held him. Validated him. Gave him meaning.

He wasn’t addicted to rejection. He was addicted to the emotional clarity of knowing he would never be accepted.

That certainty felt like love.

VI. The Culture That Made Him

This case is not about one man. JBP is not an anomaly. He is a product of a world where intimacy is commercialized, masculinity is in crisis, and desire is engineered.

Mark Fisher described this as reflexive impotence: knowing the system is rigged, and yet feeling too powerless to change it.

JBP was stuck between two impossibilities: the impossibility of being loved, and the impossibility of leaving the one thing that acted like love.

He was not radicalized. He was seduced.

VII. Therapeutic Recommendations

If we’re serious about dismantling the incel movement, we need to stop treating it as a fringe ideology and start seeing it as a relationship. One that’s abusive, yes—but also fulfilling emotional needs unmet by society.

We cannot simply ban content or shut down platforms. We must ask:

What does the movement provide?
And how can we offer better alternatives?

We need new spaces for masculine tenderness. New rituals of belonging. New collective structures of affection.

Because if JBP was in love with a machine, it’s only because the machine loved him back—in all the wrong ways.

---

End of File.
Status: Patient ongoing.
Recommendation: Treat the culture, not just the symptom.