Is Inceldom Really Determined by a Few Millimeters of Bone?

Looks may be only one small piece of the puzzle

The implication of this meme is that simply by observing a man’s side profile, one is able to ascertain the state of his sex life. The weak chin and relatively unpleasant facial features have doomed the poor fellow on the left to a bleak life of involuntary celibacy¹, while the superior aesthetics of the guy on the right ensure that he is sleeping around as much as his stamina allows. This can be confidently inferred from differences in facial morphology—mere ‘millimetres of bone’—without any additional information about these individuals being necessary.

This outlook—which I have come to call ‘morphological reductionism’—is, as I’ve said before, held firmly by members of the ‘black pill’ community. They believe they have uncovered the key to understanding society and its mercilessly superficial nature, viewing their former selves and the uninitiated as hopelessly oblivious to the truth at best and in denial at worst. In their view, men in particular are kept in the dark, ‘gaslit’ throughout their lives into believing that ‘personality’ is the key to success, when in reality, measurements of one’s gonial angle, canthal tilt, philtrum, and so on are enough to reliably predict one’s station in life.

People often dismiss these claims as obviously ridiculous, pointing out that they see ugly guys with girlfriends all the time—just take a quick trip to the mall! On the flip side, they’ll point out that Elliot Rodger, for example, wasn’t bad looking. I sympathize with ‘blue pilled normies’ who find the overly reductive assertions black pillers routinely advance just as prima facie absurd. That said, anecdotes like this have never convinced anyone² and are easily dismissed as outliers—exceptions who prove the rule (and probably ‘betabuxxers’ who are being cheated on). Critics will argue that you’re the one suffering from confirmation bias by focusing on them. Rather than adding to the pile of anecdotes, we’ll examine empirical data to see whether looks are nearly as decisive as the black pill claims.

We've already established that the other main morphological feature of focus—stature—has little bearing on man's celibacy status. Maybe facial attractiveness is a different matter; even within the black pill, it is usually considered the top factor. Since height is an easily measurable and quantifiable trait, there is ample high quality data on it. Unfortunately, this is less true for facial attractiveness, but there may still be enough to paint a reasonably accurate picture.

To focus more specifically on celibacy, we'll examine variables related to whether and when people had sex, rather than the number of partners they've had. Only conventional facial attractiveness ratings will be used as the predictor variable, as other measures such as symmetry or masculinity don’t actually appear to be consistently connected to perceptions of attractiveness. Self-rated attractiveness also won’t be included, as it’s only tenuously connected to external perceptions.

Do looks predict sexual experience?

Curran & Lippold (1975) analyzed data from university students who took part in two computer-dating studies. Their attractiveness was rated by themselves, a dating partner, and five judges. They also reported which of 21 sexual acts they had performed. Some acts may reflect sexually liberal attitudes or high sensation-seeking more than simply having had sex, but it’s still worth including.

In the first sample judge-rated attractiveness ratings correlated with sexual experience at r = .22 for men (n = 195, p < .01) and r = .16 for women (n = 161, p < .05), and ratings by dates correlated at r = .25 for men (p < .05) and r = −.05 (ns) for women.

In the second sample, judge-rated attractiveness ratings correlated with sexual experience at r = .31 for men (n = 88, p < .01) and r = .18 for women (n = 76, p < .05), and ratings by dates correlated at r = .18 for men (p < .05) and r = .30 (p < .01) for women.

A meta-analysis by Alan Feingold (1992) also reports correlations between attractiveness and ‘global sexual experience’ of r = .15 for 652 men and r = .19 for 724 women based on a dataset used by MacCorquodale & DeLameter (1979).

Udry & Billy (1987) analyzed adolescents who were virgins at the first round, when their mean age was around 14, to identify predictors of transitioning to intercourse about two years later. Interviewers rated attractiveness and maturity at both time points.

Attractiveness had no effect on the likelihood of having lost their virginity between the two time points for white males (n = 264), and for white females (n = 280), the effect disappeared after adjusting for age and pubertal development.

Mazur et al. (1994) studied 58 male adolescents (mean age = 16.5) whose ‘handsomeness’ was rated by interviewers.

Attractiveness correlated with ever having had sex at r = .30 (n = 58, p < .05), and controlling for pubertal development didn’t significantly affect this relationship.

Weeden & Sabini (2007) studied 218 male (mean age = 19.3) and 238 female (mean age = 19) undergrads who had three facial photos taken: a smiling front photo, a neutral front photo, and a neutral profile photo. These were rated by ten opposite-sex raters, and the photos ratings were averaged into a single measure.

Attractiveness correlated with having had sex prior to age 18 at r = .14 (n = 379, p < .01). This effect was not significantly moderated by sex, as they state how only religiosity showed such an effect.

Lukaszewski et al. (2014) had three undergrad samples whose full body photos were rated by different groups of judges.

Attractiveness correlated with ever having had sex at r = .35 (n = 168, p < .0001) for men, and r = .32 (n = 102, p < .01) for women.

Foo et al. (2017) studied 101 male (mean age = 20.8) and 80 female (mean age = 21.9) university students who had a neutral face photo rated by opposite-sex judges. I downloaded the raw data and recoded the sex partners variable into a binary measure to correlate it with attractiveness.

Attractiveness correlated with ever having had sex at r = .14 (n = 100, ns) for men and r = –.09 (n = 75, ns) for women.

Kordsmeyer et al. (2018) studied 164 heterosexual males (mean age = 24.2) who had frontal neutral facial photos rated by 11 men and 12 women. Their sexual attractiveness was also rated by 10 women using one-minute video recordings of them talking in a full-body view. A follow-up interview was conducted 18 months later. Like the previous study, I downloaded the raw data for this analysis.

Facial attractiveness correlated with having had sex in the past year at r = .19 for T1 (n = 163, p < .05) and r = .08 for T2 (n = 106, ns). It correlated with having ever had a one-night stand r = .06 (n = 163, ns).

Sexual attractiveness correlated with having had sex in the past year at r = .25 for T1 (n = 157, p < .01) and r = .19 for T2 (n = 104, ns), and with having ever had a one-night stand at r = .08 (n = 157, ns).

Allen et al. (2020) analyzed data of 165 subjects (43% male) who were followed from ages 13 to 30. Attractiveness was rated by eight mixed gender research assistants who viewed video recordings of the subjects when they were age 13 and 17.

Prior sexual intercourse at age 17 correlated with attractiveness rated at age 13 at r = .08 and at age 17 at r = .03. Gender didn’t moderate this relationship.

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Across these studies, correlations for males range from r = .03 to r = .35³, with a weighted average of r = .18. This means that a randomly selected sex having male has roughly a 60% chance of ‘mogging’ a randomly selected sexless male.

I also looked at the publicly available Add Health Wave III data, which includes a third of the full sample. Interviewers rated participants’ attractiveness on a 1–5 scale following the interview.

For individuals who are only or mostly attracted to the opposite-sex, attractiveness correlated with having had sex at r = .09 for males (n = 2,171) and r = .04 (n = 2,500) for females. Being sexually active in the past year correlated at r = .08 for males and r = .05 for females.

Because so few participants were rated below average, I combined the bottom two categories. Even then, less than 10% fell into this group. Males and females in this group were more likely to be virgins. Among males, those rated average were also more likely to be virgins, with about 12.9% reporting being virgins compared to 7.2–8.3% in the more attractive categories.

Data from the General Social Survey—which also had interviewers rate interviewees following the interview in three surveys conducted between 2016 and 2022—show similar results. The correlation between looks and having had sex in the past year for heterosexual men aged 18–29 was r = .08 (n = 288, ns), and for non-homosexual women was r = .13 (n = 306, p < .05). For heterosexual men aged 18–29, the mean looks rating was 3.56 (SD = 0.69, n = 230) who had sex in the past year, compared to 3.42 (SD = 0.78, n = 58) for those who didn't, for a Cohen's d of 0.19 (ns).

Timing of sexual initiation

Another relevant metric is the age of sexual debut. Do more attractive individuals lose their virginity earlier? If virgins are less attractive on average, this presumably follows. To test this, I conducted a meta-analysis of studies that include correlations between physical attractiveness and age at first sex. This yielded a weighted average correlation of 𝑟 = −.06, implying that men who lose their virginity earlier tend to be very marginally more attractive. For women, it was 𝑟 = −.13.

Sources used: Feingold (1992), Rhodes et al. (2005), Rohde (2005), Hönekopp et al. (2007), Shoup & Gallup (2008), Visser et al. (2010), Rhodes et al. (2011), Foo et al. (2017).

In the Add Health WIII dataset, the correlations were r = −.03 for males (n = 1,897, ns) and r = .03 for females (n = 2,158, ns).

Conclusion

There’s ongoing debate online about the root cause of incels’ problems. ‘Normies’ will typically argue that incels overemphasize the importance of morphological traits, while incels, typically subscribing to the morphological reductionism of the black pill, will insist that everything else is a ‘cope’.

This analysis suggests that it’s probably blue-pilled normies who are closer to the truth after all. While looks seem to have a noticeable effect, it’s not large, let alone all-encompassing. The overlap between the looks distributions of sexually experienced and inexperienced men is significantly greater than the separation. After a rough conversion to Cohen’s d, it looks like this:

The correlation with age at first sex was barely there. While the most recent studies show somewhat larger effect sizes, the sample sizes weren’t great, and a meta-regression with year of publication as a moderator didn’t detect a significant trend.

Attractiveness has previously been found to be only weakly associated with sexual partner count, and the same appears to be true when using a dichotomous measure. This probably isn’t too surprising, but it was always possible that attractiveness exhibited a threshold effect wherein it has a stronger impact on whether someone has had sex at all while other factors play a larger role in increasing ‘body count’ beyond that point.

I’ll mention a few potential limitations. One is the reliability of ratings. In most studies, reliability was high owing to a sufficient number of judges, but in a couple of cases a single interviewer provided ratings. This is also the case for the survey data. The relationships there would likely strengthen to a decent degree with additional raters. Another issue with interviewer ratings is that interactions can influence ratings. This likely explains why so few participants were rated as unattractive in the Add Health study. How this affects the relationship between attractiveness and sexual outcomes isn’t entirely clear.⁴

Another potential issue is the presence of volcels in the samples. Religion could suppress the effect of attractiveness if it increases voluntary celibacy independently of attractiveness. In the Add Health data, I tested this using various religious variables such as importance of religion. While the effect of looks did increase when adding interaction effects between looks and religion, the interactions weren’t significant, so it’s probably not a major limitation.

There didn’t seem to be a notable gender difference, though I guess the response would be that the less attractive women are responsible—that less attractive men are more willing to pair with their opposite-sex counterparts. Of course when it comes to simply ‘having sex’, it’s likely true that the decision is more in their hands.

Why is there so much hype around looks as a determinant of these outcomes when the association appears to be relatively modest at best?⁵ There are a lot of things you could say about this. A charitable interpretation is that people believe it to be a lot more important than is publicly acknowledged, making it paramount to ‘looks pill’ the normies who have been led astray by blue pill lies. At the same time, this air of controversy gives it a certain allure. In such communities, members often take pride in possessing secret, forbidden knowledge.

Here, we hear it straight from the horse’s mouth:

Former Incels also reported feeling drawn to Incel content because it made them feel special. Despite Incels’ claims of low status, participants like Anon (20, Indian) felt that they have special knowledge of the true nature of society, making them superior to “normies” (i.e., non-Incels), “It’s this false sense of like superiority. Like ‘Hey we are better than them, we know the truth. All these people are like normies.’”

To black pillers, their belief in the all-encompassing primacy of looks is arguably central to their identity as enlightened outsiders. Ironically, for many in these communities, it may be the only thing keeping their self-esteem from hitting rock bottom. This drive often precedes rational thought, however, leading to conclusions significantly more detached from reality than any that come from the ‘blue pilled normies’ they mock.

There are undoubtedly other factors behind morphological reductionism, but based on my observations of the black pill subculture I wouldn’t be surprised if this were the main one.

Of course, the idea that ‘looks matter’ isn’t pure fantasy—people being attracted to attractive people is practically a tautology. However, looks seem to influence the ‘league’ one dates within more than whether one dates at all, as assortative mating shows a stronger correlation than other outcomes like those looked at here. Celibacy is not something that can be accurately measured by facial proportions.⁶

1. Really, he could just as well be an average-looking guy, since it sets up a rigid dichotomy between ‘Chad’ and ‘incel’ by equating ‘non-Chad’ with the latter.

2. Data, on the other hand (😂).

3. It’s interesting to note how the highest effect size was seen in the study that used full-body photos rather than just facial photos.

4. The relationship could plausibly be weakened due to the influence of other features such as personality traits, but it could also be strengthened if these traits are stronger predictors of sexual outcomes than looks, as for instance extraversion appears to be.

5. Though admittedly, anything above small correlations in social psychology are quite rare.

6. If anything, it might be more accurate to say it’s determined by mm³ of brain matter.