Chadfishing

Submission 43,015

Part of a series on Involuntary Celibacy / Incel. [View Related Entries]

About

Chadfishing is a form catfishing in which men within the incel community created a fake dating application profile by posing as a conventionally attractive male, known as a Chad. Screenshots of messages taken from Chadfishing chat conversations have often been shared online to mock and humiliate women.

Origin

Chad Thundercock

On January 9th, 2015, BodyBuilding Forums^[3] user oogahboogah submitted a post titled "Going on Tinder as Chad Thundercock is beyond depressing," featuring screenshots of Tinder chat sessions using a fake profile (shown below). In these chats, people would pose as "Chads" rather than themselves in an early version of chadfishing.

Chad Says Beta Things

In October 2015, /r9k/ user Beta Chad submitted a series of screenshots in which he uses a fake Tinder profile with a photograph of an athletic man to send women bizarre messages on the dating app. The thread was not archived. On October 10th, Beta Chad submitted a second batch of screenshots to /r9k/^[1] due to popular demand (shown below).

Spread

On June 14th, 2016, Body Building Forum^[2] user MigosMiscer posted the thread "Made a tinder as Chad. Results are unbelievable." They wrote, "Wow, brahs. I knew that Chad controlled the dating market.. But mind = fukked at the kind of monopoly he has over it. Girls LITERALLY wait until they match with a Chad and only have sex with him" (shown below, left).

On June 9th, 2017, Urban Dictionary ^[4] k4yfour defined Chadfishing as "catfishing but using pictures of chads" (shown below).

On May 30th, 2019, the /r/Chadfishing subreddit ^[5] launched. Within 24 days, the subreddit received more than 4,300 subscribers.

Less than one month later, the subreddit was banned for a violation of community standards. That day, Redditor^[6] Athelric posted in the /r/IncelTears subreddit "We did it guys! /r/Chadfish is banned!" The post received more than 12,000 points (89% upvoted) and 1,000 comments (screenshot below).

The following day, Mel Magazine^[7] published a report on the history and trends of Chadfishing. They criticized the practice writing that Chadfishing "is pointlessly bolstering the incel’s narrative that somewhere, somehow, a male model is fucking an ultra-hot woman who should be fucking him instead. He goes a step further here, literalizing the delusion with a fake instance of an already fictional rival." They continued:

In the end, though, he cannot be angry at Chads, because they do not exist as claimed, and to the extent that any such men are out in the wild, they are not obstacles to his interactions with women. Misogynistic hate is what keeps him in isolation, and it is the real purpose of chadfishing: The entire test is meant to show that with the right bone structure, you can treat women like shit, and they’ll love it… but the “and they’ll love it” part goes out the window almost immediately, because they typically don’t. What you’re left with is pure bile.