[CW: distasteful ideologies, misogyny, fat-shaming.]
It’s a familiar story, one we all know:
our protagonist, a young white man, can’t find a sexual partner because of feminism, his weak chin, his poor muscle tone…
Oh no, not that story: that’s misognynistic, objectivifying nonsense. But that narrative, regressive as it is, has given us something novel, a new libfix.
The story begins with two closely-related coinages. The first, according to Wikipedia, is the creation of a semi-anonymous Canadian college student who created a blog, “Alana’s Invo to discuss her sexual inactivity. The title: “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project”. Involuntary celibacy, in the community that arose, was first shorted to invcel, then incel. (The author, as is happened, ultimately realized she was queer and abandoned the community she’d created.)
In the years since, a community of men gathered on Reddit (and specifically the subreddit “r/incels”), blaming women for their celibacy, and in some cases advocating for sexual violence to recoup their imagined losses. They call themselves incel (n.).
Not all the celibate are aggreviedly so; some have chosen their lot voluntarily, and they, in the jargon of the incel community, are termed volcel (n.). It is not immediately clear that this is a widely-used term of self-identification (though it has its own subreddit, too), and it doesn’t seem to satisfy a lexical need that wasn’t already being served by more-precise, in-community terms like asexual or aromantic. But, it does pair nicely with incel, and it’s fun to apply this plunky neologism to the private lives of historical asexuals like Virgil, James Buchanan, or H. P. Lovecraft.
So far, what we’ve seen looks like a standard type of word formation: clipping or (i.e., truncation) of both parts of a compound expression, which are then joined together to form a single word. In this case, the first syllable [1] of the both words is perserved. This is not particularly novel: consider Amex (< American Express) or op-ed (< opinion editorial).
But as is often the case, the clipping in incel and volcel appears to have spawned a libfix, an affix-like formative extracted from the compound. Witness the recently coined heightcel, an involuntarily celibate short person, presumably one whose involuntarily celibacy can be attributed to their diminuitive stature. Here, -cel attaches not to a clipping like in- or vol-, but to a free stem, the noun height. Libfixation, at least as it should be defined, has begun.
There are many more. (I’m not linking to any “manosphere” sources.) A marcel is an married incel; a baldcel is a bald(ing) incel; a currycel is an incel of South Asian descent; a ricecel is an incel of East- or Southeast Asian descent; a gingercel is a red-headed incel; and so on. There’s (ugh) fatcel, though there’s debate (in the incel community, at least) whether that’s more incel or volcel. And there’s even ironycel, someone (non-celibate, I suppose) who mocks incels.
Some of these -cel types foreground features that seem totally orthogonal to the sexual marketplace, suggesting some sort of gallows humor for outsiders, and for the mods: are we really to believe that some young man, somewhere, thinks he’d have a shot with Stacy if his wrists were just a bit thicker? But yet they keep coming.
[1] In volcel, it’s technically the first syllable plus the onset of the following unstressed syllable: [vɑl] < [vɑ.lənˌtɛ.ɹi].
[Some of my prior coverage of libfixation: Defining libfixes • Your libfix and blend report for May 2016 • Your libfix and blend report for February 2018]
[Thanks to Twitter folks for some minor corrections.]