A look inside the world of incels, or involuntarily celibate men, who believe fixing their bone structure will fix their dating lives
Illustration: Eddie Guy Truth4lie was 27, depressed, and living in a student apartment after a year in a psychiatric hospital on suicide watch when a friend showed him Neil Strauss’s pickup-artist guidebook, The Game. Together they practiced lines from the book, planning to use them on girls in nightclubs. “Would you like to kiss me? I didn’t say you could.”
“The difference between a mirror image and non-flipped image of myself drives me crazy,” he typed one night, after spending hours comparing his phone’s selfies to his reflection. “I see all my asymmetries … How can it only be my brain?” “Truth4lie” was an early user name; over the next few years, he’d use others. His depression lingered well into his 30s. He started an online editing business and moved into his parents’ house in a small village in the Netherlands, where he knew almost no one.
Truth4lie’s friends hated Chad, but they were also convinced their lives would improve significantly if they could somehow become Chad. They tried “gymceling” and “steroidmaxxing” . They tried jelqing and mewing . They tried pulling on their faces to reshape them. They got into skin care. Naturally Occuring Chads : David Gandy, Jordan Barrett, and Lucky Blue Smith. Photo: Mike Marsland/Getty Images ; Clint Spaulding/Patrick McMullan ; Sylvain Gaboury/PMC .. Naturally Occuring Chads : David Gandy, Jordan Barrett, and Lucky Blue Smith. Photo: Mike Marsland/Getty Images ; Clint Sp... more Naturally Occuring Chads : David Gandy, Jordan Barrett, and Lucky Blue Smith. Photo: Mike Marsland/Getty Images ; Clint Spaulding/Patrick McMullan ; Sylvain Gaboury/PMC ..
He performed his first custom facial implant in 1997 while on the faculty at Indiana University, practicing plastic surgery at the hospital there. A machinist from Terre Haute had wanted his jawline augmented — and wanted to design it himself. He and Eppley worked together, carving a model out of clay. Eppley now designs custom jaws with CAD, the software used by architects and engineers.
Eppley’s not sure exactly why a patient would want testicles of dinosaur-egg size. But that’s true of many of his procedures, which he tends to design in response to patients’ requests. If his practice had a slogan, it would be “We don’t care why you want it,’’ he tells me. “And I suspect patients seek me out because they know I won’t ask them. I don’t see it as my job to cast a judgment.”
“What makes a head shape manly?” I ask. Turns out it depends on whom it belongs to. One recent patient asked for a more angular skull with a peak at the top; another requested the exact inverse, to have his naturally peaked skull rounded. The first patient was black, and the second was white; Eppley suspected cultural standards were at the root of the difference.
Matthew has striking blue eyes with pale lashes, and, thanks to the procedures, a wide jaw and jutting chin. “I’m definitely more happy with the way I look now,” he tells me, although his life is far from transformed. He lives with his parents and works at Best Buy, an arrangement he originally conceived to help save up for surgery. He’s now planning new procedures, including one to fix what he describes as a bump on the tip of his nose, although I don’t notice it.
“Indianapolis is not a hotbed of plastic surgery,” says Eppley. “This practice is only possible because people really do a tremendous amount of research, and typically patients have been on many, many forums.” His staff regularly posts dispatches from the operating room on the practice’s YouTube and Instagram, and the surgeon spends hours every week answering emailed questions from patients and transforming the results into SEO-optimized blog posts.
More Photoshopped selfies from Lookism. “Nature isn’t fair,” Truth4lie, who is half-Dutch and half–North African, tells me. “Some races are more attractive than others,” and biology, he says, determines beauty, not cultural norms. The more Truth4lie read about Eppley, the more the doctor seemed capable of turning even Truth4lie into a Chad. He remembers one widely shared photo showing what it said was an Eppley patient with a new chin, a new jaw, a new forehead, new temples, and a new skull. “It was like Eppley created a whole new person,” Truth4lie recalls. “Incels have this idea of an ideal superman, and Eppley is the one who does that crazy stuff.
The operation would include a rhinoplasty revision. Truth4lie had his first cosmetic surgery when he was 19 from a local surgeon who transformed his naturally concave “Arabic” nose into a bunny ski slope, a result Truth4lie had come to see as a botch. Eppley would give his nose a shape that Truth4lie considered “more masculine” — aquiline or Roman, straight with a slight curve at the tip.
“I hope everything goes well and this will be a real change,” he wrote on the forum. “But where do I need to begin? I need women, lots of women, to make up for my miserable life. I need a new social circle, a new identity, a new life. I’ve been thinking of leaving my country. I want to live in hotels in tropical countries and live a playboy life there, only fucking hot blonde European girls. I have the money, I have the freedom.
“Getting treated better after surgery feels sickening,” wrote one user, LegendOfBrickTamland. Brick had gotten a new jaw, nose, and cheekbones from a surgeon in California, costing him around $30,000, and still he was furious at women and the world. “It’s like, I am the same fucking person, and yet I am somehow better because I spent some money and had a man cut my face up. Might as well just go with prostitutes. At least it’s an honest exchange.
But in a way, PostSingularityVirgin is an exception. He recently found himself questioning why a girl in his life didn’t seem to fit the descriptions of women he’d read about on incel forums. They met a few months ago on the webcam service Omegle. Every night, they talk on Skype, trading Futurama and SpongeBob references and concocting an imaginary family: He has a stuffed pig named Billy, and his girlfriend pretends she’s its mom.
“How is it living as a hot/normal woman knowing you can order a hot fuckboi from Tinder whenever you want? Do you see it like that?” Mike asked me. His obsession over sleeping with ever-hotter women reminded me of pickup artistry: This was sex as a game to win, in which the other person was the chump. Incels weren’t always seeking love or acceptance as much as conquest.
“I feel ashamed about everything,” he told me. “I’m talking to a woman, and I said bad things about them. I’m actually a nice person in real life.” He declined to speak further, preferring not to be reminded of this dark chapter in his past. He would come back to Indianapolis three more times that year, staying at the same Holiday Inn off the side of the interstate near Eppley’s office for weeks at a time. For the first revision, in January 2017, Eppley shaved off part of the original silicone implant that Truth4lie thought was too big.
He says he doesn’t hate women anymore. But he hasn’t left behind most of the theories about life that he was exposed to on incel forums. Sometimes when he notices a woman making eye contact with other men in the street, the entire world seems to narrow to a harsh, suffocating plane of power dynamics, in which sexual attraction determines all. “Every time I try to talk myself out of things I used to believe, of the black pill, it feels like I am moving away from the truth,” he tells me.
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