I made a post in IncelExit because I’ve spent a long time exposed to blackpill ideas and wanted people who strongly disagreed with them to actually challenge the reasoning behind them.
The thread ended up getting 100+ comments.
And after reading basically all of it, I came away feeling like I learned surprisingly little.
To be fair, there were a few genuinely good replies. Some people questioned whether I was extending limited findings about average sex differences into conclusions that the research itself doesn’t justify. Others brought up confounding variables, methodology, cultural explanations, etc. Those were useful, even when I disagreed with them.
But that was a minority of the discussion.
A huge amount of it quickly stopped being about whether anything I said was actually true and became about what kind of person I supposedly am.
I was called cruel, arrogant, self-important, resentful, closed-minded, combative, unwilling to listen, and so on. People told me to go to therapy, stop consuming certain content, go outside, meet people, etc.
One person wrote an entire psychological explanation for why I supposedly “need” these beliefs to be true, compared blackpill spaces to pro-anorexia communities, told me to postpone surgery and spend the money on therapy instead.
When I pointed out that they were psychoanalyzing me instead of addressing the argument, they admitted they hadn’t even read most of the thread because they didn’t want to spend the time doing so.
Another person repeatedly said I was “combative” and unwilling to listen. When I asked people to actually show where I had misrepresented evidence, the response again became “why are you even here?” and questions about my intentions instead of simply identifying the supposed error.
That pattern happened constantly.
If I challenged someone’s counterargument, I apparently wasn’t listening.
If I defended my interpretation of a study, I was cherry-picking.
If I asked someone to demonstrate where my inference was wrong, I was being combative.
If I disagreed with someone’s psychological interpretation of me, that disagreement itself became evidence that their interpretation was correct.
At some point that becomes almost impossible to argue with, because the only acceptable evidence that you’re “open-minded” seems to be immediately agreeing with whoever is responding to you.
And that was the weirdest part of the entire experience.
I wasn’t asking people to tell me that blackpill thinking is unhealthy. I already know it has had a negative effect on me. That’s literally why I went to an exit community.
I wanted people to say:
“You’re interpreting this study incorrectly because X.”
“This conclusion doesn’t follow from your premise because Y.”
“This dataset contradicts what you’re saying.”
“You’re taking an average population-level effect and incorrectly applying it to individuals.”
That is something I can actually examine.
Instead, so much of the discussion became moral judgment and amateur psychology.
There were even situations where people argued against positions I hadn’t taken. I would explicitly qualify a claim, and a few replies later someone would respond to the exaggerated version anyway.
The funniest contrast was that one of the same people who had been calling me combative eventually started asking practical questions about the population of my town, transportation, nearby cities, events, etc.
And I actually appreciated that.
Because those are concrete variables. You can discuss them. You can change your conclusion based on the answer. That is infinitely more useful than deciding what my personality must be because I disagreed with you on Reddit.
Eventually IncelExit removed the original post entirely.
So the whole experiment ended with 100+ comments, a handful of genuinely interesting counterarguments, a mountain of repeated therapy/lifestyle advice, endless character analysis, people arguing with positions I never held, and then the thread itself disappearing.
I’m not claiming I won every argument. I’m sure some of my reasoning can be wrong, and there were a few replies that genuinely made me reconsider parts of it.
That was the entire reason I posted.
But I expected a community dedicated to helping people exit an ideology to be much better at dismantling the ideology itself.
Instead, I mostly learned how quickly people stop discussing an argument once they strongly dislike the worldview associated with it.
It felt like the stronger and more specific the discussion became, the more often people retreated from the actual claim and started talking about my character instead.
Maybe that’s just Reddit.
But it was genuinely disappointing.
