The Out-of-Touch Adults’ Guide to Child Culture: Incels and the 80/20 Rule
The true 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle , is a statement that states that 80% of results come from 20% of all causes. You can use it to organize your to-do list , among other things. But for many young people, 80/20 means something completely different.
Young people are not okay. Masculinity is becoming more toxic every day. Online incel communities are growing, and the most susceptible audience to toxic ideas about gender seems to be children. This week’s column isn’t going to be fun: I explain one of the guiding principles of the incel movement and discuss a TikToker dedicated to changing her red pill son’s mind. And I can’t talk about toxic masculinity without mentioning Elon Musk!
Spray on some deodorant and let’s dive into the dank, unsettling world of incel beliefs.
What is the 80/20 rule?
Netflix’s Teen is currently the most talked about series on streaming. This is a heartbreaking exploration of the inner world of an angry boy accused of murdering one of his classmates, the girl who rejected him. One of the teenage characters mentions the “80/20 rule” as a way to explain the incel/Red Pill culture that is central to the murder plot. Simply put, the 80/20 rule is an axiom that states that 80% of women are attracted to only 20% of men, and understanding the prevalence of this belief is essential to understanding misogyny online.
Different communities of toxic guys believe in different strange things: many “appearance maximizers” think that by breaking your facial bones you can make yourself more attractive; Red Pillists believe that men have to psychologically manipulate women to get them to like them, but the 80/20 rule is almost universally accepted.
The idea appears to have originated from a Medium post written 10 years ago. The article itself is a rather interesting, if methodologically flawed, look at the distribution of “likes” on the dating site Tinder. Incel types have ignored the research issues, ignored context (we’re just talking about Tinder likes), and accepted the 80/20 rule as a hard-to-understand truth about how women relate to men. Even though a post on Medium concluded that most men who want to meet women are “better off just going to a bar or joining some co-ed sports team” than using Tinder, Incels decided that the 80/20 rule meant something like “all women are superficial” and/or “it’s not my fault that no woman wants to hang out with me.”
For 10 years, incels and incel-adjacent incels have expanded the theory and repeated it to each other so many times that it is rarely questioned in these spaces. If someone you’re talking to mentions the 80/20 rule in an affirmative context, you know you’re talking to someone who has a specific set of (wrong) beliefs and doesn’t have a large enough social circle to compare what they read online with how people act in real life. But can anything be done about it? May be.
Viral Video of the Week: Depilling with the Red Pill, Son
The creator of this week’s viral video, IAmRchlPrkr , is a mother trying to deprogram her teenage son. He has adopted some of the beliefs of the Red Pill community, a branch of incels, and she doesn’t like it.
She first saw the problem when her child told her, “All women are gold diggers.” There are many things associated with this phrase. Despite the bristling and cries of “not all men!” when someone generalizes about their gender, the toxic male community is dominated by the idea that women are all the same: a Borg-like collective that seeks out the most attractive 20% of men, or the men who have the most gold to mine.
This is not new. In her 1998 book Communication , Andrea Dworkin could have described the incels of 2025 by writing: “The first tenet of male supremacy ideology is that men have a self, and women, by definition, must not.” The difference is how sexist ideas that were once relegated to obscure corners of society have permeated the mainstream to the point where children are literally repeating them to their mothers. (As with most social ills, we can thank the Internet for this.)
This TikToker mom might have the right approach to regaining her sanity: When her son tells her, “All women are gold diggers,” she responds, “What kind of women?” and “name at least one woman who is engaged in gold mining.” Of course he can’t. Because the incel philosophy falls apart in the face of real relationships with real people.
What is a “serious Soyjack hat”?
An appropriate response to my Andrew Dworkin quote in a serious post about online masculinity would be a serious Soyjak hat :
Serious Hat, created by DevianArt userSoyGemArt , is a Wojak posted to comment on people who are too serious on the Internet.
(If you’re asking, “What is a wojak?” I ‘ve covered this topic before .)
Elon Musk’s gaming drama continues
Speaking of toxic men: Elon Musk! If you’re an adult, you probably know Musk best as the CEO of an electric vehicle company or as a dedicated government employee with creative ideas about how plugs work . But children know another Elon Musk: Elon the Gamer. Gamer Elon is considered the greatest ever , and gamer Elon recently confused it on X with the official Assassin’s Creed video game account and got fried like a Costco chicken.
The online spat started when former game developer @grummz posted about streamer Hassan Picker, whom he called a terrorist (because that’s what you do on X when you disagree with someone about public policy):
This tweet is currently unavailable. It may be downloading or has been deleted.
This prompted Musk, who is now an adult, to write:
This tweet is currently unavailable. It may be downloading or has been deleted.
And then:
This tweet is currently unavailable. It may be downloading or has been deleted.
At this moment, the official account of the video game at the center of the battle , Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, poured gasoline into the flames of war.
This tweet is currently unavailable. It may be downloading or has been deleted.
The Assassin’s Creed post has been viewed more than 52 million times. It mentions a nearly confirmed rumor that Elon Musk, an adult in an important position in the United States government, is paying someone to make gamers think he’s really good at Path of Exile 2 , a video game where you pretend to be an elf.
What does “come eat lobster with a monster” mean?
I don’t want to leave you with all these toxic men, so let’s end with a funny meme.
Back in 2020, then-Twitter @blanketm9 changed the world forever when he tweeted:
This tweet is currently unavailable. It may be downloading or has been deleted.
Their post remained dormant until 2023, when a user (whose original post and name were lost to history) added the context of a text conversation with a “straight guy.”
Things were quiet for a couple of years, then, for reasons unknown, the meme started to really take off this month. I think it’s time to write the following posts:
This tweet is currently unavailable. It may be downloading or has been deleted.
This tweet is currently unavailable. It may be downloading or has been deleted.
This tweet is currently unavailable. It may be downloading or has been deleted.
This tweet is currently unavailable. It may be downloading or has been deleted.