Beyond Salon Courtesy: Psychoanalytic & Materialist Dissection of the 21st-Century “Gender War”

“The Legionary cannot have anything in common with this world. (…) A new legionary chivalry—one of decency and respect, without excessive hand-kissing and fawning—must replace the old knights, who, beneath the veil of elegant manners, brought society more harm than good.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu’s 1937 onition – that the legionnaire rejects empty salon courtesy in favor of sober, sincere respect – resonates ironically with today’s self-styled “Gender War.” We begin with his words as a frame: Western culture’s current gender conflicts often revolve around etiquette versus authenticity. Modern commentary is peppered with macho codes of respect for women and knee-jerk political correctness, but beneath these “courtesy rituals” lies deep cynicism and distrust. In both manosphere forums and online feminist circles, men and women accuse each other of hypocrisy and cruelty, just as Codreanu railed against fops who “waste time courting ladies” with no real respect. Our task is to pry under these performative veneers and analyze how incels, femcels, and their antagonists are shaped by unconscious drives and material forces – all the while pursuing genuine understanding.

Psychoanalytic and Schizoanalytic Perspectives on Incel/Femcel Identities

From a Freudian-Lacanian vantage, the self-identification as involuntary celibate (incel) or female incel (femcel) reflects deeply repressed psychic conflicts. Freudian theory would note an underlying “lack” or narcissistic wound: incels often feel entitled to sex and project their sexual frustration onto an external “Other.” Lacan’s concepts suggest incels fixate on an objet petit a – the lost promise of fulfillment – while blaming women as “castrators.” Feminist Lacanians might note parallel women’s anxieties: some radical feminists or lonely women may experience sexual difference as a painful real, acting out through resentment or self-victim narratives. Jungians would point to shadow projections: incels externalize their inner aggression onto stereotyped “evil women” (the ‘Stacy’), while some misogynistic narratives cast females as monolithic anima figures.

Alfred Adler’s ideas are especially pertinent. Adler described the “masculine protest”: a man’s reaction to feelings of inferiority by overcompensating with exaggerated toughness. In clinical examples, a young male facing paternal preference often “develops an inferiority complex … elaborating an ideal virile model” and growing hostile toward women. This hostility is exactly what we observe among many incels: rivalry with other men for status and a superiority posture as armor against inner shame. One Adlerian notes: “A conflictual relationship with the mother … leads to a hostile attitude to women. Sexual and aggressive instincts … in masculine behavior that rivals with men”. In other words, the adolescent boy angry about maternal love deficits or sibling comparison may lash out by idolizing an impossible masculine ideal and denigrating all women as unworthy.

From the other side, women who identify as femcels (often younger or physically marginalized women frustrated with dating) may experience a kind of feminine protest or neurosis. Some have described analogies to penis envy or maternal alliance: if an adolescent girl internalizes that her femininity was devalued (e.g. a mother favoring sons), she may revolt by rejecting “being a woman.” Though Adler framed that as girls seeking the male role, the psychodynamics can be inverted: femcels often lament not being seen as desirable “feminine” subjects at all. They may harbor deep envy of sexually successful women and feel unjustly blamed (“women are supposed to always have men”). This can lead to an internalization of toxicity: either despising “normie” women as superficial or clinging to an idealized purity of femininity.

Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis reframes these psychic investments as social flows rather than family Oedipal bindings. Schizoanalysis views subjects (incels, femcels) as nodes in libidinal-economic networks. Desires become desiring-machines hooked into capitalism and media. Incels and femcels post on forums, swapping fantasies like abstract machines. In this view, the anger is not merely personal but a deterritorialization from family and reterritorialization into a new tribe. The incel forum itself is a rhizome of resentment, an assemblage producing new kinds of subjectivity. Unlike psychoanalysis’s lack-driven “cure,” schizoanalysis would decode the shared “desiring-production”: incels decode sexual marketplace norms (e.g. the 80/20 rule below) and produce a new albeit perverse “body without organs” (BwO) community around entitlement. This highlights how unconscious investments in these online spaces override individual identity.

Finally, from an Althusserian perspective, both genders are interpellated into ideological roles from birth. The family, school, media – the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) – hail boys as “future manhood” and girls as “future womanhood,” presenting these as natural. As Michel Lee writes, “Ideologies ‘call out’ or ‘hail’ people and offer a particular identity, which they accept as ‘natural’”. Thus a boy is said to belong to “good providers” and a girl to “good mothers,” with rigid traits implicitly attached. When modern youths fail to meet these or find them hollow, they flip the ideology into resentment. Incels and femcels each accept a model of masculinity/femininity as obvious (via sports, schools, pop culture) but then feel betrayed by it. In sum, psychoanalytic frameworks expose the inner dramas (inferiority, fantasy, envy) behind incel/femcel rage, while schizoanalysis and Althusser point to how those feelings are woven into broader social flows and ideologies.

Hypergamy, Pills, Lookism, and Purity: Manosphere Ideologies

The online manosphere employs a lexicon of to rationalize its worldview. One key concept is hypergamy – borrowed from evolutionary lore to mean “mating upwards.” In manosphere usage, it claims (without evidence) that women will always seek higher-status men, abandoning current partners (“branch-swinging” or “vine-swinging”) for the next alpha. This just-so story justifies incel grievance: if a woman picks a richer or better-looking man, it’s because nature (and feminism) conspire against the frustrated man. Connected to hypergamy is lookism – the belief that appearance is the sole social currency. Incels rigidly divide humanity into photographic hierarchies: at the top are “Chads” (idealized Alpha males) and “Stacys” (supreme hot girls), at the bottom are the “subhuman Incels.” As one study notes, “society is rigidly… structured into three groups: ‘Alphas,’ ‘Normies,’ and ‘Incels.’ Incels believe…the primary criterion of classification is the outer appearance of people (‘lookism’). ‘Alpha’ males… are tall, …the epitome of masculinity… ‘Alpha’ females… are ideally beautiful… Incels are at the bottom… excluded from sexual relationships due to their physical appearance”. This pseudo-biological 80/20 myth (e.g. “80% of women chase the top 20% of men”) is taken as fact.

Closely related is the Red Pill/Black Pill metaphor (inspired by The Matrix). “Taking the red pill” in the manosphere means awakening to the supposed truth that modern feminism has subjugated men – that men are inherently victims of a gynocentric world. Red-pill ideology can actually motivate self-improvement (work out, hustle) as a hopeful path out of inceldom. But the black pill is fatalistic: it proclaims that the situation is completely hopeless, that one’s genetics and hierarchy placement are fixed. Black-pilled men often wallow in despair or glorify nihilistic violence. There is even a pink pill – a female analog – used by some girls who believe no amount of effort will make them desirable to men.

Another trope is purity culture, imported from reactionary conservatism. In online tradwife and incel talk, ideal women must be chaste princesses or devoted mothers; any hint of sexual autonomy brands a woman as a “slut” or “roastie.” For men, purity manifests in rejection of any softness: the “new masculinity” is supposed to be ruthless and impervious. In short, the manosphere often recasts religious sexual mores in secular-sounding , while scapegoating those who don’t conform.

Each of these concepts is a rationalization. They give incels and allies an ideological structure for blame. Women’s rights → women’s choice to hypergamy → incel grievance. Dating inequality → lookism and blackpills → hopelessness. Puritan sexual ideals → slut-shaming or misogyny to channel anger. None of this is evidence-based sociology; it is a self-generated mythos, buttressed by cherry-picked anecdotes and quasi-evolutionary talk. The effect is to freeze the discourse: if you’re “redpilled” you absolve yourself of agency (“they’re the problem”), and if “blackpilled,” you dispense with even struggle (“I might as well die”). In either case, these pills and labels form a self-victimizing ideology, rather than a path to actual connection or change.

Intersectionality, Toxicity, and Infantilization of Gender

The gender war is often framed as a simple man-vs-woman narrative, but in reality intersectional forces (class, race, economy) are at play – though rarely acknowledged by pundits. Many incels are young white men facing stagnant wages, high housing costs, and absent communities. Their resentment of “elites” and “foreigners” parallels right-wing populism. In fact, research shows the manosphere overlaps with white supremacism. Extremist sites like the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer propagate, for example, the abhorrent slogan “women are the Jews of gender”. In effect, some manosphere thought perceives feminism’s gains as a plot by liberal elites and minorities to disempower “real” men. This racialized scapegoating must be noted: the identity of “King Chad” is by default imagined as white and affluent, while “sub-8 Incels” internalize that they are dispossessed. But hip is not monolithic – there are black incels, gay incels, and women who hate feminists too – reminding us that gender resentment intersects with many axes of identity.

Both sides accuse the other of moral corruption while often reinforcing their own hidden prejudices. For example, liberal feminism’s critique of patriarchy is sometimes caricatured (even by itself) into a moralizing purity culture: women must be empowered yet chaste, caring yet careerist, assertive yet nurturing. This can produce a form of toxic femininity – internalized misogyny – where women police each other’s femininity (“no makeup means body-positive!” vs “nice girl syndrome”). Conversely, toxic masculinity – the rigid, violence-prone ideal of manhood – is denounced in many media, and yet many incels celebrate those very traits (dominance, aggression) as the solution. Both “toxins” stem from the same patriarchal soil: they infantilize adults by holding them to childish binaries (bad/good men, pure/impure women).

This infantilization also appears culturally. Men are often depicted as perpetual adolescents (“Netflix and video games instead of relationships”), women as either eternal girls or embittered crones. Dating apps and porn transform sex into a juvenile spectacle (swipe left/right like a candy aisle). Under late-stage surveillance capitalism, our identities are commodified: people market themselves as dating-profile avatars or “influencers” rather than full persons, reinforcing immature self- and other-objectification. In these schemes, it’s safer to protest victimhood than to act like fully responsible adults.

The Dialectic of Celibate Despair – Incel and Femcel as Asymmetric Symptoms of Libidinal Collapse

“The soul of modernity lies not in its success, but in the machinery of its exclusion.”

— Paraphrased from Althusser, through the lens of neurocapitalist libidinal economy

In the algorithmic dust of late-stage neurocapitalism, the battlefield of desire has collapsed into a spectacle of impossible standards, filtering mechanisms, and pathologized individuation. The so-called "Gender War" produces its most neurotic and broken-footed soldiers not among the normatively attractive and sexually fulfilled, but among those exiled from the libidinal economy itself: the incels and the femcels. These two categories, often lazily grouped under a shared umbrella of “sexual disenfranchisement,” are not equivalent—neither structurally nor psychoanalytically. They are dialectical contraries, not symmetrical mirrors.

The incel—involuntarily celibate male subject—emerges primarily as a psychological and ideological formation. His alienation is real, but it is mediated by a fantasmatic misreading of the socio-sexual order. Grounded in classist resentment and lookist fatalism, the incel identifies his failure not in of inner insufficiency, but in the belief that external forces—hypergamy, feminist conspiracies, racialized sexual hierarchies—have erected impossible barriers. However, the most dangerous and misleading of his assumptions is the belief in intersectional standards of desirability that he himself has hallucinated, usually through the echo chambers of digital reactivity and cultural grievance. These “standards” are not structural in the Marxist sense; they are cultural mirages, shaped by consumerist semiotics and the predatory-manipulative coding of salon courtesy.

Let us revisit Codreanu’s critique:

"…excessive displays of politeness, behind which, however, lies not a shred of respect for women…"

The incel has internalized this hollow salonarism, not as a mode of critique, but as a structure of expectation. He projects a fantasy of reward—believing that performative politeness or aesthetic status should yield affection, sex, or love. His bitterness stems from a misunderstanding: he sees the symbolic mask of the society but not its void, blaming others for a system he neither understands nor investigates with critical depth. His lack of introspective and retrospective metacognition—the ability to think about one’s thinking—renders him tragically incapable of escape.

Instead of confronting the Lacanian lack at the heart of subjectivity, he externalizes it onto the female Other—casting women as gatekeepers of desire, or worse, as malevolent actors in a rigged game. Deleuzo-Guattarian would describe him as a desiring-machine short-circuited by coded expectations, unable to produce flows of authentic eros, because his libidinal economy is overcoded by capitalist simulacra: six-pack abs, jawlines, Tinder hierarchies, and a reduction of love to algorithmic logic. He is a victim—but not of women. He is the autistic node of a failed symbolic integration, where masculinity has no stable coordinates, and so collapses into ressentiment, spectacle, and ideological regression.

In sum: the incel is not excluded by women so much as he is incapable of symbolically and emotionally engaging with women in a world where masculinity has become performative, fragile, and commodified. His crisis is tragic, but not innocent.

Meanwhile, the femcel—the involuntarily celibate woman—exists within a structurally distinct terrain. Unlike the incel, she rarely externalizes blame onto an abstracted, enemy class. More often, she possesses introspective clarity about her social position—sometimes even to the point of painful over-awareness. Her condition is not primarily one of narcissistic injury, but of intersectional compression. She is subjected to the gaze, but not desired within it. She is seen, but not seen-as-human. She exists within the symbolic, but as a non-preferred node—the “wrong” shape, the “wrong” race, the “wrong” vibe.

This is not a result of her attitude or psychological disposition, but of systemic objectification, infantilization, and commodification. She is not rejected for failing to perform identity correctly, but for failing to be the object fantasy demands. In the algorithmic agora of dating apps and pornified visual culture, she is offered up for judgment, and found wanting—not by one man, but by the collective libidinal unconscious of the male-coded machine. Her exclusion is not neurotic. It is structural. And the tragedy is that those who most often approach her are the very incels who both loathe and desire her—men who see her not as person, but as a preparatory trial, a consolation, or a fetish.

The result is a bifurcation of celibate despair: incels implode into ideology, while femcels implode into melancholia. Where incels seek explanation in the external world (Redpill logic, Blackpill fatalism, conspiratorial cosmologies), femcels often absorb blame into the self, even when they rationally know the standards are unjust. This internalization produces a paradox: femcels often blame themselves for being undesired, even while understanding that they are structurally excluded from desirability through no fault of their own.

It is here, at the intersection of libidinal erasure and predatory attention, that the Pick-me girl arises—not as a caricature of betrayal, but as a structural casualty of the feminized libidinal battlefield. The Pick-me is not empowered. She is a survivalist. She navigates the sexual economy with the same despair as the femcel, but with a strategic capitulation: if the erotic order demands commodified submission, then let me become what it rewards. She is not merely complicit in patriarchy; she is swallowed by it, embodying a hyper-adaptive femininity designed to simulate desirability under brutal conditions. In many cases, she is simply a femcel attempting to escape femcelhood by mimicking the aesthetic and ideological codes of those who are rewarded.

This is not opportunism. It is reactive libidinal mimicry—a desperate effort to gain visibility in a world where women are either made sacred (the impossible virgin ideal), made profane (the disposable sex object), or made invisible (the unwanted).

To comprehend this dynamic fully, we must return to salon courtesy—as Codreanu scathingly diagnosed it. Beneath its facade of civility lies a predatory-manipulative structure. It performs "respect" for women but in truth encodes a transactional seduction mechanism, thinly veiled in florid language and empty gesture. It is from this world that the modern incel draws inspiration, without even realizing it. His complaint—that women now seek only “Chads,” that they no longer value “nice guys,” that feminism has ruined dating—is not a critique of structural alienation, but a mourning of the collapse of salonarist compensation. He longs for a world where performative politeness might yield him a woman, as though kindness were a sexual currency.

But the world he desires never truly existed. The “gentlemanly” exchange was always corrupt—a form of aestheticized coercion. What the incel mourns is not lost morality, but lost transactional dominance disguised as charm.

The femcel, however, sees through this. She feels the crushing weight of expectation without reward. She is told to be confident, then told she’s arrogant. To be modest, then overlooked. To be sexual, then shamed. She is subjected to a libidinal double bind: hypervisibility without legitimacy. In this respect, her condition cannot be solved by simple self-transformation. No amount of gym, fashion, or self-help content will reformat the erotic code of a neurocapitalist society that fetishizes the extremes and discards the ordinary.

If the incel’s issues are largely internal and ideological—a matter of neurotic fixation, arrested development, and narcissistic rage—then the femcel’s are material, demographic, and ontological. She is not neurotic for being undesirable. She is made undesirable by systemic libidinal norms—a process that crosses race, class, weight, neurodivergence, and cultural coding.

Let us not misunderstand this: incel issues could, in theory, be resolved through metacognitive restructuring. But most incels will never reach the point of sufficient psychic flexibility or dialectical self-awareness to do so. They are prisoners not of women’s choices but of their own ideological rigidity—a rigidity reinforced by echo chambers of Blackpill nihilism and Redpill misogyny. In a cruel twist, it is often these very incels who harass, degrade, or objectify femcels, contributing to the very conditions they claim to suffer under.

In contrast, the femcel cannot simply “fix herself” because she is not broken. She is an emergent figure of sexual-material contradiction in a society where the erotic is governed not by intimacy, but by scarcity, performativity, and algorithmic aesthetics. Her refusal of both commodified sex and romantic tokenism makes her radically subversive, even if she herself does not articulate it as such.

Finally, both figures are symptoms—not just of failed dating culture, but of a collapsed symbolic order, where sex is both everywhere and impossible, where connection is profaned by choice-paralysis, and where liberal individualist-consumerist ideology has replaced communal rites of age with marketized rituals of self-branding. This is the cruelest irony: we are told we are freer than ever, yet loneliness festers in every inbox.

In the end, incels and femcels are two failed integrations into a broken libidinal system. One misreads the map and blames the Other. The other reads the map correctly and finds herself outside it. In this dialectic, there is no easy synthesis—but there is clarity: the incel must change himself to re humanity; the femcel reveals how humanity has failed to change.

Surveillance Capitalism and Porno-Consumerism

The gender strife is magnified by surveillance capitalism – the monetization of intimate life by tech platforms. Dating apps and hookup sites epitomize this: they harvest our preferences and hook us into gamified loops. As one analyst notes, endless swiping on an app feels like browsing Amazon for the “perfect socks”. App architecture privileges appearance over substance, turning people into commodities. s “objectify themselves and each other,” risking loss of empathy. In this sexual marketplace, hot faces and torsos are “products for sale,” enticing us to filter and discard human beings. The result is a utilitarian hookup culture: if people are products, sex is just the currency. Many young people report feeling dehumanized by this – a reaction that feeds into incel/femcel resentment (“I’m not a sale item, I’m a person”) as well as feminist critique of exploitation.

Pornography is another facet of this commodification. Mainstream porn normalizes extreme fantasies under the guise of “sexual liberation.” Studies of incel forums highlight how porn discourse and incel discourse merge. As Tranchese and Sugiura summarize, both portray women as objects for violent pleasure: “Imagery present women as objects who deserve and enjoy sexual abuse… [the men] have in common the wish to see women suffer through sex, while drawing pleasure and satisfaction from it”. In simpler , many incels see porn and misanthropy as two chapters of the same book: pornography encourages the image of the dominant male (the “pornographic Chad”), and incels rage at both women (for being “easy” yet unattainable) and Chads (for having what they want). This porn-infused misogyny flips traditional morality: virgins are glorified, adulterous devils are condemned – echoing a twisted purity cult. Simultaneously, women exposed to the same consumer porn culture experience confusion and exploitation. In sum, both hookup apps and pornography feed a porno-consumerism: they promise sexual access but often deliver alienation.

Feminism vs. Manosphere: Dialectical Antagonisms

Viewed dialectically, the clash between 21st-century feminism and the manosphere can be analyzed through critical theory. From a Žižekian perspective, each side hides a symptom of the same antagonism: how to organize sexual life under late capitalism. Slavoj Žižek and his colleague Alenka Zupančič have argued that true feminist politics arises by acknowledging sexual difference as a political problem, placed within broader social struggles. As Zupančič puts it:

“True feminism depends on positing sexual difference as a political problem… Feminism did not start from affirming [a] female identity… but from the fact that roughly half of the human species were systematically excluded”.

This means feminism’s emancipatory core is recognizing that everyone (in practice, half the population) was denied full subjecthood – not simply “winning” equality within existing patriarchal structures. The manosphere’s reactionary narrative, however, often claims “no, men have been oppressed by feminism all along”. From a Hegelian view, this is an ideological mirror stage: one side declares a false triumph (we won equality), the other a false defeat (we became victims). Both ignore underlying antagonisms: class conflict, economic precarity, the decline of community, and the impossibility of perfect parity in desire. In Žižek’s , feminism and anti-feminism form a dual fantasy that sustains the status quo by excluding deeper questions (e.g. “What if neither market nor state satisfactorily serves our needs for love and recognition?”). Each side supplies a scapegoat: patriarchy or misandrist elite, while praising its own purity of intent.

Althusser would note how both movements rely on ideological state apparatuses. Schools, churches, mass media, and even social media hashtags “hail” individuals with gender roles as obvious. Thus a college campus sings “believe women” as an unquestioned truth, while an incel forum preaches “women are hypergamous” as gospel. In either case, people “accept [these] identities as ‘natural’ or ‘obvious’”. The flip side is that disagreement is not just debate, but a moral wrongdoing: a feminist who questions privilege is branded a “traitor,” and a man questioning violence is called a “virtue-signaler.” This dynamic is very Althusserian: the dominant ideology enforces itself not by guns, but by making dissent unthinkable. The result is polarization: feminism and its imitators create a “no-platform” culture, while the manosphere builds online “safe spaces” against censorship. Both shield themselves from criticism by denouncing it as part of the other side’s oppressive ideology.

In critical materialist , then, the gender war is less about objective oppression or liberation than about which fantasy will dominate. It distracts from material issues: crumbling social bonds, alienating labor, surveillance technologies shaping our desires. Still, the antagonism is real enough for its participants. Both sides tout “empowerment”: feminists for women’s autonomy, manosphere men for reclaiming “traditional” masculinity. But this empowerment often means entrenching tribal identities rather than transcending social atomization.

Hookup Culture, Tribalism, and the Liberal-Individualist Context

Hookup culture and neoliberal individualism form the backdrop of these clashes. After decades of sexual liberation, we ostensibly live in a “free love” era: casual sex is common and the stigma of solo life is reduced. But this freedom is double-edged. Under hyper-individualism, love and sex become personal commodities. The modern subject is told: you can have sex or be single on your own – but this means you alone must craft a fulfilling romantic life out of the buffet of choices. In practice, that promotes anxiety and egoism: each person feels responsible for their own misery or success in love.

In the absence of stable traditional structures (extended family, village community), many young people seek a new sense of belonging – often in the very subcultures that pit men against women. Here we see a kind of tribalism: lonely men band together in incel forums as a surrogate tribe, adopting its memes, heroes (Elliot Rodger as martyr), and enemies. Conversely, some women form insular identity groups online (e.g. “tradwives,” radical feminist blogs) where men are villains. These online tribes resemble ethnic or political sects: strict in-group rules, demonized out-group, and a narrative of persecution. Studies of extremist behavior show that if one feels socially excluded, tribal identity can become intoxicating. Indeed, one analysis notes that incel narratives “frame incels as a collective and agentic threat to women,” much like traditional tribal warfare rhetoric.

Dating and hookup apps magnify this by turning partner-selection into a marketplace. As noted earlier, apps reduce interpersonal connection to endless scrolling of options. Even when people self-brand on social media or dating profiles, they do so as individuals yet always in reference to a (quasi-tribal) aesthetic: hipster, gamer, feminist, metrosexual, whatever. The paradox is that liberal individualism preaches uniqueness but the algorithms reward fitting into market segments. So while “hearts” flash on the screen, the ’s subjectivity is being carved into data points. Under this regime, it’s easy to blame a nameless “system” when love fails – whether that system is “surveillance capitalism” or “feminism” depending on one’s lens.

In summary, 21st-century dating is at once hyper-communal (we network in tribes of shared grievance) and hyper-individualized (every failure is “my personal problem”). This fuels identity politics on both ends: incels cling to their umbrella term, femcels to theirs, and accuse the other of betraying human nature.

Alienation and Mutual Self-Victimization

Finally, we consider the psychological, social, and material roots of incel/femcel emergence, and why both demographics adopt narratives of self-victimization. Sociologists and psychologists point to loneliness, mental health issues, and disconnection as common factors. A survey of self-identified incels finds high rates of depression, anxiety, and even autism spectrum traits. Many incels report a deep-seated distrust of women and a feeling of victimhood expressly linked to the changes brought by feminism. One researcher notes that incel misogyny “stems from … a feeling of victimisation linked to the feminist movement”. On the other hand, women in femcel communities express anger and exclusion because the social presumption is “any woman could have a man if she really wanted.” As Pizzimenti & Penna found, society “disregards the recognition of the Femcel figure as a legitimate identity,” denying women permission to see themselves as involuntary virgins. In other words, both incels and femcels struggle with being written out by broader culture – incels as “privileged” men who should be happy, femcels as women who shouldn’t legitimately lack partners.

Each side therefore adopts a self-victimizing narrative. Incels declare “women have all the power” and that society privileges women’s desires over men’s “natural” rights to sex. Femcels, by contrast, insist “no one cares that we suffer too” and that they too are casualties of hookup culture. Both cast themselves on the moral high ground: “I’m the real victim here.” This mutual grievance blinds them to a common truth: both groups respond to the same underlying alienations – isolation, failure of intimate bonds, economic frustration – but they externalize blame onto each other.

From a critical-materialist angle, this mirrors how capitalism fractures people. We are atomized by labor and consumer debt; young people struggle to find stable jobs, housing, or community. Facing these structural strains, some turn personal when they seek answers. Incels say “it’s women’s fault I’m lonely”; some urban young women say “it’s men’s fault I have no husband.” In both cases, systemic issues like widening inequality or digital disconnection are obscured by interpersonal hatred. Ideologies on each side then mystify reality: blaming feminism or the “sexual marketplace” serves as a compensation for these deeper insecurities.

Toward a New Ethics of Respect

Invoking Codreanu’s words, his critique of false courtesy was a warning. Modern Western culture must indeed replace hollow civility with authentic regard for one another. In Codreanu’s parlance, society needs "a new chivalry… of decency and respect" – a new chivalry of authenticity – shorn of bigotry or authoritarianism.

This means rejecting both the virtue-signaling platitudes on one side and the entitlement-driven insults on the other. It means men treating women not as projectable fantasies or conveniences, and women treating men not as oppressive oppressors by birth. Practically, it would involve rebuilding communities where young people find purpose and affection outside romantic conquest – akin to Codreanu’s call for the “legionary” to live in disciplined brotherhood, but reimagined in pluralistic . Men could practice a chivalry rooted in solidarity with women and other men (for instance, by ing parental leave or challenging rigid norms), rather than paternalistic domination or grievance. Women could claim agency without demonizing all men or idealizing purity.

Academically, our analysis suggests that overcoming the gender war requires addressing the real antagonisms it masks: economic precarity, social fragmentation, and the commodification of intimacy. Ideologies (be they hypergamy myths or radical gender identities) will persist until these material issues are resolved. Implicitly echoing Codreanu’s spirit of authenticity – an “I refuse to kneel to a broken world” attitude – we conclude that genuine respect between sexes must come from common struggle and community, not from posturing or victim-blaming. Only then can we transcend the empty courtesy of the “old cavaliers” and create relationships based on reciprocity, empathy, and shared purpose – a truly new respect for woman and man alike, free of fanaticism and cynicism.