Borderline personality disorder

Borderline personality disorder is a personality disorder characterized by mental instability, warped perceptions of oneself and others, and impulsive and dangerous behavior. Borderline personality disorder is diagnosed much more often in women than men, with a 3:1 ratio of women to men in terms of diagnoses. Women with this disorder are often slutty, unstable and histrionic, being prone to chaotic behavioral patterns such as engaging in self-harm, having short and intense relationships, and organizing cyber bullying campaigns, among other things.

Relationships with BPD girls are often described as 'hot and cold', with BPD individuals constantly vacillating between extreme displays of affection and coldhearted, callous acts. This behaviour in people labelled BPD is often driven by intense fears of abandonment, with BPD individuals generally having an insecure attachment style. This insecure attachment style effectively means that women with BPD fear abandonment, likely a standard fixture throughout their lives, leading to them lashing out in anger towards their romantic partners, thereby sabotaging the relationship in question. This insecurity harms pair-bonding ability, and as such, there is an overlap between sluts (self-identified or not) and those women labelled borderline.

This vulnerability in terms of attachment style lends a distinctive aspect of femininity to those with BPD. Indeed, research has shown that psychopathy and BPD traits overlap heavily in women, leading to the conclusion that BPD is essentially a form of psychopathy that is expressed in a fashion congruent with a female gender role. Other evidence has linked BPD to a fast life history strategy (adaption to a 'live fast, die young' unstable ecology), as BPD has been linked to lower investment in offspring and an earlier age of sexual debut, both fast life history traits.

BPD girls and incels

In the incelosphere, many participants argue that BPD girls are more sexually open towards men who would otherwise be incel than neurotypical women. The problem with this is that said women will often dump their partners or cheat on them, and engage in all sorts of other destructive behavior, generally making dating these women more trouble than it's worth. Supposed 'incel groupies' (women who participate in incel spaces online) seem to often fall into this broad category of women.

Although these claims have (obviously) not been formally evaluated, there is evidence that 'ruthless' looking women tend to pair disassortatively with 'quiet' men. Assuming these perceived facial traits are associated with actual dispositions, this could imply that shy, quiet, essentially incel type men, tend to pair up with women with psychopathic traits above what one would expect by chance.

This anecdata could imply that BPD girls are attracted to incels, or conversely, that incels are attracted to BPD girls. Women with BPD could be especially prone to seek out incels for long-term relationships for several reasons. One reason could be that this attraction is in line with a general trend of assortative mating (like seeking like), vulnerable dark triad traits could be linked to inceldom as they are likely less socially adaptive than more overt and dominant manifestations of said traits. Hence, these women could be simply seeking out men that are like themselves. Another theory is that, since BPD women fear rejection, they seek out 'domesticable' and docile men they can easily control, men they believe will be less likely to abandon them, thereby plunging them into emotional chaos. Another idea is that due to their instability and promiscuity, BPD women are low long-term mate value women seeking out low mate value and sexually naive men (incels), potentially as 'beta providers'.

Incels (and men in general) could be attracted to BPD women because they are seen as sexually available. Supporting this hypothesis, Blanchard et al. (2020) conducted a study where women and men were presented with personality vignettes depicting a character either high or low in BPD and physical attractiveness and requested to indicate their attraction to these profiles for both long and short term relationships. The results indicated that while men do not prefer women with BPD, they will tolerate them in long-term and short-term relationships as long as they are physically attractive. The authors of this study further indicated that this lack of a sharp decline in attractiveness for the high attractive-high BPD profile in a long-term relationship context among the male subjects could be explicable by a general male orientation towards short-term mating.

As men generally tend to be higher in sociosexuality (more open to casual sex) than women, this finding may indicate that men who are particularly attracted to BPD women are generally fast-life history strategists, which is also linked to sociosexuality. Therefore, it is possible that the incel men drawn towards BPD women are 'failed fast life history strategists' who care mainly about short-term mating and attractiveness in their female partners, and not traits that indicate a willingness and ability to nurture offspring on behalf of the woman, as the evolutionary psychologist Edward Dutton has claimed.

Incel forum groupies

Most incel forum admins have dated women who fit BPD criteria, including but not limited to Master, William, Rebecca, and Nathan Larson.

Incelistan once renamed their forum to "Nice guys for BPD girls" for a day as a joke. Some women, excited by the prospects of such a forum, complained after the name changed back to 'Incelistan'.

Arguments about people labeled BPD

MRAs

Men's advocates such as Paul Elam strongly recommend against men ever dating someone labeled BPD. This advice would likely extend to incels as well. Other notable MRAs chose to work in men's rights advocacy simply because of experiences with women labeled BPD.

Anti-psychiatry

Other people, in a more anti-psychiatric manner, assert BPD is simply female nature. Or they argue it is run of the mill predatory behaviour that shouldn't be pathologized in a way that makes the BPD labeled person feel justified in their actions due to having a 'brain disease'.

Pop psychology

Pop psychology often says women with BPD traits tend to seek out nice guys, and the reason they do this is so they get less pushback for what they often know themselves as predatory or emotionally damaging behaviour. Many incels who have only had 1-2 women interested in them in their entire lives have relayed those women self-admitting to a BPD diagnosis or that the women exhibited BPD traits after getting to know them.

Political movements

The anti-Gamergate movement arguably had a pro-borderline disorder tinge.

See also

• Femoid
• Slut
• Dark triad
• Psychopathy
• Psychiatry
• Incelophile
• Fake depression