How incel culture and male rage are shaping a new generation

As male rage and incel culture seep further into mainstream conversations, how are these patterns shaping young minds in India, where masculinity has long been defined by rigidity and repression?

Male anger simmers silently. It surfaces in hostile comments under Instagram posts, traffic altercations, and casual cruelty that India knows too well. Netflix’s miniseries Adolescence (2025), digs sharply into this volatile territory, unraveling masculinity’s hidden triggers and exposing uncomfortable truths about power, vulnerability, and violence. It invites a necessary reckoning with this rage, often dismissed as ordinary. 

In one of the crucial scenes, detective Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) struggles to understand 13-year-old Jamie Miller’s (Owen Cooper) motivations to murder his classmate Katie Leonard until his son Adam Bascombe (Amari Bacchus) points out the cryptic emojis Katie left on Jamie’s Instagram posts. 

Here, the concept of ‘incel’ (involuntary celibate) emerges, highlighting a troubling subculture shaped by digital isolation, misunderstood emotions, and entrenched societal pressures around masculinity. Adolescence pushes the audience beyond surface-level explanations, compelling them to grapple with the unsettling ‘why’ behind the acts of male violence without offering the same itself. 

How repressed male vulnerability fuels gender-based violencein India

Krishna S., 33, a psychodynamically trained psychologist who specialises in therapeutic work with adults and adolescents, notes that young people “often lack the internal tools to process their complex emotional terrain, particularly feelings of anger and sadness. [And] anger is an authentic emotional response to perceived threats, injustice, conflicts, and loss. When experienced healthily, it is an expression of self and imbues vitality.”

However, she adds, psychoanalytically, violent expression of anger can be traced back to “maladaptive defence mechanisms” like projection, where “disavowed”  feelings or “judgements about oneself are transferred onto others.”

Krishna further highlights how “India’s rigid socio-cultural constructs of masculinity characterise emotional vulnerabilities as feminine.” Consequently, men face internal conflict when confronted with their own vulnerabilities, unconsciously wishing to safely experience emotions without violating masculine norms. This internalised shame is externalised in “aggression towards women and LGBTQIA+ individuals who challenge these rigid gender norms.”

She references a recent study by the International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW) and United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), noting that in India, “men with histories of childhood discrimination or harassment were four times more likely to become perpetrators of violence, because they had internalised such behaviour as an acceptable response to stress.” This internalised acceptance of aggression as a stress response is central to the theme of Adolescence.

Male rage and the new digital vocabulary is dividing parents and children

While this analytical response to male rage is worth mulling over, for the author of The Burnings (2025), Himanjali Sankar, 53, Jamie’s mother Manda Miller’s (Christine Tremarco) repetition, “we made him,” was a profound parenting moment, signalling the impossibility of striking the right balance “between accountability and parenting”. Sankar continues, “What we choose to do with this impossibility is up to us—where and when do I let off as a parent and start seeing my child as an individual, and what do I do with the person my child has become?” 

While some viewers focus intently on uncovering the motivation, Sankar considers the specific reasons for Jamie’s crimes less relevant than the larger systemic failure—education, adolescence itself, digitalisation of life—that the series addresses. Instead, she wants us to think “how does one find the vocabulary to deal with a behaviour that was mostly [a result of] instinct, lashing out with no understanding of what it was lashing out against?” 

Is male victimhood and incel culture an urban India phenomenon?

Sankar suggests, “Since masculinity is to do mainly with power [and] when we try to take it away or redistribute it, it will find ways to reinvent itself or resort to violence or loss of control when it is unable to do that. Today, masculinity is far more insidious in urban landscapes where we’ve taught ourselves wokeness.” 

Mumbai-based journalist and screenwriter Mayank Jain Parichha, too, highlights the urban lens typically used to discuss masculinity. Growing up in Shivpuri, Madhya Pradesh, “I never saw resentment over not having a girlfriend, largely due to the social taboo surrounding relationships. However, I did observe the gap between aspirations and realities.” 

For the 29-year-old, incel subculture is a discovery. “With access to multiple subcultures worldwide, nowadays, even boys in small towns have started perceiving this gap as significant, leading to increased frustration. For instance, conversations around the Atul Subhash case—where a man challenged the alimony settlement granted to his ex-wife—have become a reference point in small towns, even among those hearing the term ‘alimony’ for the first time,” submits Jain Parichha. 

He continues, “Growing up, gender roles revolved around [men] being the providers. Hating women for not liking us was never a cultural thing [for us]. Despite being patriarchal, rural societies never allowed such a subculture to flourish. Instead, masculinity was asserted through the ability to gather men to pick fights, wield influence in politics, and exert power—men didn’t want to look like victims of some plot, unlike today.” In his view, one of the reasons that rural communities never fostered subcultures like ‘incels’ is because personal attractiveness wasn’t a concern for men, for “everyone knew their parents would find someone for them.” 

The author of Indian Millennials: Who Are They, Really? (2024), A. M. Gautam, echoes these sentiments, noting, “Until a few decades ago, the accepted reality was that you grew up, your parents got you married, and you were guaranteed a lifetime of sex-on-demand, consent be damned. This reality has remained unchanged even though the expectations of young people have leapt ahead. It is this gap between aspirations and reality that causes discontent.”

The 31-year-old author, however, cautions against importing labels like ‘incels,’ emphasising that involuntary celibacy in India is widespread and typically resolved through the misogynist tradition of arranged marriage. 

While exploring the love lives of Indian millennials as part of the research for his book Gautam “met scores of discontented, disenchanted men who just cannot understand why girls get to choose who they talk to, date, and sleep with. Even the marginally updated status quo that we have today is in dissonance with the world they grew up in, and that’s what they lash out against, sometimes violently.”

What Gautam does appreciate is that Adolescence “doesn’t take the morally easier route of branding the killer an ‘animal,’ and chooses instead to focus on his barbed fragility. [Jamie] is very much the kid-next-door, which means that instead of dismissing him as a freak of nature, [there’s an attempt] to understand what went wrong with him in an otherwise normal, urban, middle-class childhood. In India, we are very fond of distancing ourselves from the ‘criminal types’—by which we generally mean those who rank lower than us on the socio-economic ladder.”

For Atharva Pandit, 28, a 2021 South Asia Speaks fellow and author of Hurda (2023)—a novel that fictionalises the mystery surrounding the murder of three minor siblings in Maharashtra’s Bhandara village—the so-called ‘crisis of masculinity’ that heterosexual men are said to be facing today isn’t entirely new.

Pandit observes that the incel subculture preys on a particular kind of hurt and rejection that young or adult men experience, convincing them they are victims of a larger conspiracy. "Conspiracy comforts such men and makes them feel more masculine, because otherwise they know they would be miserable. So, they choose to be miserable and misogynistic—and they think the latter actually negates their misery," he says. In his view, this sense of hurt and fragile ego has long been part of the culture; social media and the internet have only amplified it. Without these platforms, he believes, it might have manifested in other forms of physical communities or collectives that would further perpetuate harmful behaviours. 

Closing the generational gap: Understanding social media, masculinity, and young men in India

Bengaluru-based Aravind Jayan, 30, winner of the Toto Award for Fiction (2017) and author of Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors (2022), feels that having open channels of communication between children and parents can help avoid solidifying the hurt from a rejection, disincentivizing it to create a group based on hatred towards another gender.

According to him, there “will always be a translation issue between generations, and I think the best you can do, as a parent, is raise your child to be a willing translator rather than going around them and trying to understand their world without their cooperation. As I’m not a parent, this is just the perspective I have from writing a novel about the generation gap.” 

Associate professor at Sri Venkateswara College’s Department of English and author of Summer of Then (2024) Rupleena Bose, 44, observes how social media often “isolates people and allows one to live in a void.” It has also led to the rise of—and rendered legitimacy to—figures like Andrew Tate and Elon Musk who are “angry with the threat to patriarchy.”

In her view, “male rage has been simmering for the last century or so,” when male privilege started getting questioned vociferously. This “rage is generational, isolated, and has not negotiated with feminism or equality. It’s an entitlement, whose loss has led to a subculture of anger and hatred towards women.” 

Commenting on how the Covid-19 pandemic further exacerbated this issue, Bose notes how the replacement of “interpersonal relationships with virtual ones” made one witness that as “virtual envy is not seen till it erupts; the same could be said of male rage. People like Tate made it possible for entitled men to allow their opinions to be heard.” And “incel subculture is its outcome, where young men, seeing the anger of such men, are looking for a place to express the violence” they feel they’re subjected to. Moreover, the world over “people are unable to find a vocabulary to fight it collectively” on an equal footing.

Before canvassing support to fight it, it’s crucial to understand the scale of challenges we are faced with. Multiple studies show that approximately 50 per cent of students in schools across India experience bullying and violence. Gender-based violence in India has “increased by 12.9 percent between 2018 and 2022,” as per the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). Most incidents of road rage involve young drivers (age 19 or below). Of late, heated arguments on roads in Delhi especially have led to serious casualties—and deaths in some cases too. As more homegrown variants of Tate-like figures emerge—and what they stand for is increasingly gaining currency—it behoves us to understand male rage in all its complexity, and acknowledge its damaging effects on everyone, and not just men.  

Curated by Gaysi Family

Also Read: What makes women justify domestic violence?

Also Read: Is ‘male PMS’ real? Here’s what hormonal imbalance in men looks like

Also Read: Why are most men averse to seeking therapy?