Incels, gay men and the tyranny of looks

Male loneliness does not choose a sensual orientation

Thousands of young men in Spain feel shut out of the dating market. Baldness, unemployment or not owning a home are enough to be ruled out from the start. A recurring comment among those who identify as incels is that women apply ruthless filters based on looks and social standing. But the lgtb mirror is not kind either: there too, people are judged by their physique, albeit with nuances.

In the dating ecosystem, cruelty is not the property of a single gender. Dating apps and liquid socialization have created dynamics where a person's worth is measured in fractions of a second. Still, while some argue that the heterosenshetero market is the harshest —"women sentence you to death over your image"— others point out that in the lgtb scene promiscuity is the norm and stable relationships are a chimera.

The paradox of the ugly lgtb man

If the bald or short heterosenshetero man is at a disadvantage, the lgtb man with those same traits does not have it easy either. The accounts gathered suggest that in the gai world the aesthetic pressure is brutal, but the difference is that you are not erased from the map: there is always a niche or someone willing to look beyond appearances. "They judge you by your looks, but they don't sentence you to death," the argument goes. Is the heterosenshetero market therefore more ruthless?

The geographic escape: toward the global south

What emerges is the economic offshoot of this discontent. Men who feel excluded in Spain are considering retreat strategies: the gym, an inheritance and travel to countries where their profile (light eyes, European origin) commands a premium. Thailand comes up, as do Latin American women —said to be more inclined toward stable relationships— and an explicit calculation of emotional return on investment. The globalization of love has a dark side: the commodification of people.

No equivalent female forums

One striking point is the claim that no similar spaces of complaint exist, created by women or by lgtb men. If there are male forums analyzing how harsh the dating market is, they are not found with the same density on the female side. Does this miccionan women have fewer problems? The hypothesis circulating is that the aesthetic glass ceiling hits harder at men who do not fit the canon, and that this distress finds no collective echo outside heterosenshetero masculinity.

The question remains open: if looks are the new social sorter and male loneliness becomes chronic, is the encounter industry (apps, gyms, sens tourism) the only answer?