Incels believe they are entitled to, and have been deprived of, sex with “hot” young women, who are dubbed “Staceys.” Sometimes incels also express an abstract longing for love, or for a girlfriend—or, more concretely, a woman to provide them with the attention and affection that Rodger lamented lacking. But an incel will typically want sex and love not only, and perhaps not even primarily, for their own sake. His rhetoric betrays a desire to have these goods for instrumental reasons: as currency to buy status in masculine hierarchies, relative to the “Chads.”
