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Welcome to Fair Play, a column exploring the shifting dynamics of sex, dating and culture by Playboy Senior Editor Magdalene Taylor.
Introduce the topic of “hip dips” in most company and the vast majority of people will have no clue what you’re talking about. Ask them if they’ve noticed the indentation between the upper portion of your anterior superior iliac spine and your greater trochanter of femur and they will probably think you are having a stroke. Most men — especially when looking at someone in person — have never noticed this physiological trait, common among women, at all. And yet the term “hiplet”—for women with hip dips, as they’re called—is the latest “insult” favored by incels.
Incels and the incel-adjacent are using hiplet in retaliation for the some women supposedly referring to short men as “manlets.” Is this real? Instagram, X and Twitter, at least, are awash in men using the term. In one video, a man responded to a clip of a woman saying that she was embracing her hip dips by saying “I was eating, hiplet,” followed by a green-faced nauseous emoji.
“Hiplet” is mostly ragebait. The guys using it know that hip dips are an inconsequential and not even unappealing physical feature. Treating it ridiculously, like a fatal flaw, is the point. The more women protest the term, the more satisfied these guys are in the fact that they’ve successfully annoyed someone. It’s all a psyop to make women as angry and insecure as the incels themselves are.
If women, the idea goes, are “allowed” to prefer taller men and make fun of shorter ones, men should be able to make fun of women of hip dips. The reality is that most men don’t even know what hip dips are. The men throwing “hiplet” around probably aren’t even getting the chance to see hips dips in real life.
The women falling into this trap are, in turn, being accused of “hiplet rage.”
“In addition to their low birthing potential, hiplets are also undateable due to hiplet rage resulting from their hipolean complex,” one person commented on the “I was eating, hiplet” video.
These men are rejecting women before they can be rejected. But making women mad and getting likes from fellow incels is all they have going for them.
“Manlet,” of course, is as dumb and mean as “hiplet.” Shout out to my short kings. Plenty of women do indeed have unrealistic expectations of men’s height, only swiping right on guys who are six feet or taller. In posting about “hiplets,” men are attempting to make a broader point about how “dehumanizing” it is to be rejected on a seemingly arbitrary physiological basis. There is indeed some truth to that idea. But when men like this only know how to express themselves through ragebait, they do little to spread any sort of meaningful message. Instead, they show themselves for what they are: spiteful and insecure.
