Illustrations by https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=105600462 ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ )
The Increasing Incel Issue
It is extremely common in today’s world to hear about people using the internet to express ideas that they may not have the confidence to share in person. The example that tends to come to mind first is cyberbullying, which in a lot of cases can translate to real issues offline such as violence, in-person bullying, and mental effects on the victim. While this seems to happen primarily to school-aged kids who are bullied by their peers, there is another group where this happens on a much larger scale with much larger consequences: the incel community on the social media site Reddit.
The term “incel” stands for involuntary celibate, and the community consists of forums where self-proclaimed incels ask for advice, idolize other incels who have made the news, express their hatred towards “Stacys” and “Chads,” and even share their desires and plans to harm women. Though many people think this is just a harmless online bubble, the growing incel community on Reddit and other platforms contributes to real-world violence against women.
The incel community is part of the “manosphere,” which as described by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue as “an umbrella term that refers to a number of interconnected misogynistic communities. It encompasses multiple types and severities of misogyny.” The manosphere typically includes incels, Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), and Pick Up Artists (PUAs), which all have slightly different ideologies, but overlap in their misogynistic and anti-feminist beliefs. According to Robert Lawson’s Dictionary of the Manosphere: Five Terms to Understand the Language of Online Male Supremacist and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, the core belief of the incel community are that men are either an alpha, which is referred to as a “Chad”, who is naturally attractive and has women to their disposal, or a beta, who is weak and lacks masculinity. The beta males are referred to sometimes as “normies.”
On the other hand, women are referred to as “Stacy” or “Becky.” When a woman is called Stacy, she is being referred to as promiscuous and dumb; she is the stereotypical bimbo who only gives Chads a chance. Oftentimes, a Stacy embodies stereotypical features of a conventionally attractive woman, like blonde hair and tan skin. Becky refers to a woman who does not care about appearance and is a feminist. Both types of women are looked down upon by incels and are remarked as unattainable. This jargon is very unique to the incel community and the average person would not be able to easily decipher the conversations on these forums.
While the incel community spans across many different platforms, this research primarily revolves around Reddit because it is widely known and accessible to anybody online, even without a Reddit account, as Reddit allows users to follow communities, known as subreddits, and post threads, similar to Twitter, where anybody can add onto the discussion; making the incel community easy to stumble upon without directly looking for it.
In order to address the violence created by the incel community, it is critical to understand how the community is so captivating and persuasive to its audience. The incel community contributes to real world violence first by gaining members through indoctrination. This idea is explored in depth by Laura Bates, author of Men Who Hate Women (2020). Bates conducts a study by creating her own Reddit account under an alter ego, Alex, to understand the ins and outs of the incel community. Alex’s character was sexually frustrated and lonely, and after reading through some of the subreddits, Bates created an introduction post under Alex’s identity. The responses varied; in her book, she wrote, “within a day, he’d been indoctrinated into the ‘truth.’ Told that the world was stacked against men like him” (Bates 3). She continues to note the variety of responses she received as Alex, with some people suggesting suicide, others educating him on how the world really works, which in their eyes means that women are evil beings who are in control and men are the victims. While these responses seem intense, somebody in a vulnerable situation, such as Alex, might thrive off this newfound attention and feelings of belonging to this community being introduced to them. The forums were extremely persuasive, Bates describes, “they used facts and historical examples. . . it was seductive. . . they treated him like a compatriot” (Bates 3). As a user gets deeper into the subreddits, the indoctrination only intensifies. Another example is user u/CryEquivalent6742 on Reddit who created a post titled, “I feel totally inadequate, and this fuels my manosphere binge”, and wrote, “I fear I will never get married due to my low income and autism, height [sic] and general social introvertedness. So I binge watch manosphere videos to make me feel better.they [sic] show women saying they only want millionares [sic] and six figures and it’s like a constant loop that makes me feel really shitty and worthless” A common example, such as this, shows how the manosphere and incel rhetoric is appealing to somebody in a vulnerable situation who may be looking for answers or support in how they are feeling.
Furthermore, the incel community is able to successfully indoctrinate young men in vulnerable situations because it follows the structure of an institution. Though traditionally, the word “institution” usually refers to schools, churches, or even sports teams, the phrase can be applied to the incel world. Angela Hattery and Earl Smith book, titled, The Social Dynamics of Family Violence (2019), write, “we consider an institution to be any system that has a defined set of norms that organize social life. . . has a set or sets of rules, a hierarchical structure ” (342-343). Traditionally, institutions follow this definition strictly. For example, in a fraternity, a pledge is at the bottom of the hierarchy and has to withstand hazing or other initiation requirements in order to move up. They have a set of rules to follow and norms they adopt in order to be a part of the brotherhood. This model creates a sense of loyalty; those in these institutions feel like they proved themself and deserve to be there. The incel community fits into the structure of an institution in a very unique way; the incels have placed themselves at the bottom of the world’s hierarchical structure automatically. They believe that they are at the bottom of the social pyramid, with Chads and women above them. Incels become loyal to their institution because they finally feel accepted somewhere, into this brotherhood, which shows them an entirely new world, filled with incel-specific-jargon and a blossoming social community, which many of them have never experienced before.
Once indoctrination successfully creates loyal members for an institution, the fundamentals of institutions can directly relate to the allowance of violence within them. Though not every institution encourages this misogynistic behavior, Hattery and Smith note two important factors relating to incels: gender segregation and rape culture. Bates describes the demographic of the incel community in Men Who Hate Women, “the majority of the community seems mainly to consist of straight, white, educated, middle-class men” (Bates 11). Under gender-segregated institutions, hypermasculinity and “othering” flourish. Hypermasculinity is the most hostile form of masculinity, with emphasis on traditional “male” traits such as aggression, breadwinning, and sexual prowess. To incels, a Chad is the embodiment of hypermasculinity. They commonly express their jealousy of Chads, in all aspects, and striving to live up to a hypermasculine role model presents a dangerous situation. “Othering,” as defined by Hattery and Smith, is “when one group, in this case women, are designated as ‘other,’ it is easier to justify engaging in exploitation and violence against them.” (343). This presents itself in incels because there is an extreme lack of gender diversity, so it is easy to label anyone outside of the community as an “other,” resulting in an us-versus-them mindset. This divisive mentality further perpetuates harmful beliefs and behaviors—such as rape culutre—, particularly when it comes to gender relations.
Rape culture is noted as “a set of values and customs that minimize the impact of rape, limit the definition of rape, and relegate women to the status of sex objects” (Hattery and Smith 344). This is one of the core beliefs of incels in general and the issue is amplified by the like-mindedness and security of having a brotherhood within an institution. Average institutions, like sports teams and the military, may only have undertones of these issues present in gender-segregated institutions, but with incels, it is like adding fuel to a fire due to how these issues directly align with their ideology.
A common barrier to addressing incel violence is that many people do not fully understand what an incel is and how large the community has become; however, it is becoming a more mainstream concept. A survey titled “Knowledge of Incels” conducted at the University of Delaware aimed to address this. It is important to note that the survey’s results do not reflect the general population’s knowledge on incels; in many cases, college students have more of an online presence than older generations, which could contribute to the high number of people understanding incels within the survey. The survey pool included 50 anonymous college students in varying grade levels and asked three required multiple choice questions with an optional space for additional comments. When the respondents were prompted to answer if they understood what an incel was, 50% reported that they only knew a little bit about incel ideology, as opposed to 38% knowing a lot, 6% knowing very little, and 6% having never heard the term at all before. 74% of respondents reported that they view incels as a threat to women online and 82% felt as though incels posed a threat offline. These numbers show that a large portion of these college students can recognize incel violence as a serious problem; however, there are a few responses that reflect some of the misconceptions regarding incels. One anonymous response read, “incels are somewhat like ‘trolls’ in the sense that they ‘live in their moms [sic] basement’ and can’t pull [women]. . . they live behind a screen and therefore are not ballsy enough to actually carry out any acts of hate toward women or other minorities in the real world” and another writing, “they’re usually fat low testosterone losers.” In order to present incels as the threat they truly are, these misconceptions that incels are a small number of chronically online, socially inept, losers has to be squashed, when in fact, anybody is capable of succumbing to incel ideology. “Online Poll Results Provide New Insights into Incel Community” is a report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that showcases a survey conducted by incel.co, which is a website exclusively designated for incel discussion threads, on the demographics of their users. As ADL reports, 82% of respondents of the incel.co survey said they were between the ages of 18 and 30, with over one-third of that percentage being between the ages of 18 and 21, and approximately 8% said they were 17 or younger. This shows that the incel community is primarily young people, but they are not the losers that many people make them out to be; a lot of them are college aged or even high school students, who have tons of opportunities for social interaction with their classmates at those ages. In regards to race, only 55% of the respondents were white. The survey reports that only 38% of incels are based in North America, showing that this is an international phenomenon. Ellen Pao, the former CEO of Reddit, noted in her article “Ellen Pao Explains Why Incels Thrive at Tech Companies” that most incels on the platform occupy the tech and engineering industries, further proving that incels are not the deadbeats society makes them out to be, they are educated, diverse, and the majority are young adults.
To further address the misconceptions that incels are nothing to worry about, it is important to recognize the real world violence that has occurred in the name of the incel community. The most impactful is the case of Elliot Rodger who, after killing his male roommates, went to the Alpha Phi sorority of University of California, Santa Barbara and started shooting women nearby on May 23, 2014. Rodger left behind a 141-page manifesto and posted a YouTube video, which has been deleted, titled “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution,” which described in detail how he felt miserable and wanted women to feel the pain that they caused him. In his manifesto, he recorded his inner thoughts, like “I will punish all females for the crime of depriving me of sex. They have starved me of sex for my entire youth, and gave that pleasure to other men. . . I cannot kill every single female on earth, but I can deliver a devastating blow that will shake all of them to the core of their wicked hearts” (Rodger 132) and “women are like a plague. They don’t deserve to have any rights. Their wickedness must be contained in order prevent future generations from falling to degeneracy” (Rodger 136). This attack was huge for the incel community, they felt as though Rodger had the courage to carry out the noble act of punishing those who oppress them. Some incels even began to idolize Rodger, calling him the “Supreme Gentleman.”
The Elliot Rodger murders inspired many other incel attacks. The most notable criminals include Nikolas Cruz, Alek Minassian, and Cole Carini. Nikolas Cruz is notorious for the Parkland, Florida school shooting that took place on February 14, 2018. Cruz had murdered 17 people at the school and had an online presence in the incel community. According to Terry Spencer for AP News, “In posts on YouTube, Cruz wrote ‘I wanna kill people,’ ‘I’m going to be a professional school shooter,’ ‘I have no problem shooting a girl in the chest.’” Bates had also commented on Elliot Rodger’s YouTube video, commending him for his actions (Bates 40). In the case of Alek Minassian, he had killed 10 people in Toronto, Canada after driving a van through a crowd of people. EJ Dickson reported on this incident with Rolling Stone, noting that Minassian told police in an interview that this attack was supposed to target Chads and Stacys, he writes, “Minassian also told police that he intended the attack to serve as a call to arms for a ‘beta uprising.’” Both Cruz and Minassian were involved in the incel community and looked up to Elliot Rodger for his crime and used it as inspiration. In 2020, Cole Carini went to the emergency room in Virginia with injuries all over his body and a missing hand, which he claimed was the result of a gardening accident, but injuries were not consistent. According to Justin Rohrlich of The Daily Beast, police searched his home and found explosive materials, along with a note that he wrote about himself in the third person, which said, “tension that would come and go as he approached the stage of hot cheerleaders. . . A dead seriousness sank in as he realized he was truly passing the point of no return! He decided I will not back down. I will not be afraid of the consequences no matter what I will be heroic I will make a statement like Elliott Rodgers [sic] did he thought to himself.” Carini had planned to build this explosive and target cheerleaders at a mall in the name of Elliot Rodger. Aside from these three, there are many other cases of incels attempting to murder women for their cause which goes to show that the incel rhetoric online is far from harmless, it bubbles over into the real world and costs people their lives.
Overall, the incel community is a serious concern in today’s world and contributes to violence against women, both online and in-person. The incel community thrives on forums like Reddit where information and ideas can easily be spread by anonymous users across the world. It operates as an institution, preying on vulnerable young men to indoctrinate them into their misogynistic beliefs. Incel ideology has cost people their lives and continues to threaten the safety of women and the wellbeing of unstable men. Though awareness is increasing, it is imperative that people become educated on the risk incels pose.
Author: Kaitlyn Thurrott, Class of 2027
In Dr. Barua’s ENGL110 class, I was challenged to create a research paper on any topic of my choice. I bounced back and forth between a few other topics before deciding to focus on incels and violence against women festering on the internet. Initially, I was worried that it would be too controversial to write about, but as I began my research, I realized that this community is a growing threat. Incel violence is all around us and drives lots of tragedies, however it is not highlighted often in mainstream media. A prime example of this is Nikolas Cruz who was the shooter in Parkland, Florida; everybody knows who he is, but very few know that he idolized incel ideology.
I have always been extremely passionate about women’s rights, but I gained a deeper interest in it this past year during my Gender and Violence course with Lauren Camphausen. The course focused a lot on the roots of violence and what causes communities like this to form, which is why I chose to use the textbook from this course as one of my main sources for this paper. Along with books and news articles, I had also used Reddit for my research to get information on incels directly from the community itself.
Outside of my classes, I like to read and watch videos on topics like violence against women, narcissistic abuse, reproductive rights, and survivors of violent crimes, so I can definitely say that I was very passionate about doing a deep dive on this subject. Overall, incel violence is an increasing threat and I hope that my research paper shines light on some of the misconceptions associated with the community and sparks conversations to stop it.
Instructor: Mahasveta (Gitu) Barua
The theme for my ENGL110 section was Acting Out Culture. The class focused on various current, and controversial, topics, through the lens of cultural rules, norms, roles, and scripts. Students were asked to explore how beliefs, behaviors, and language were affected by technology, history, laws, etc. In the first half of the semester, students read essays grouped under headings such as how we Believe, how we Identify, how we Connect, etc., and wrote analysis and argument papers. Students then developed research paper topics based on one of the sub-topics. The research process included presenting a proposal with a working bibliography. This was followed by drafts, peer-editing workshops, and conferences. Kaitlyn approached me with the idea of doing research on a topic that fell within how people communicate and connect today, specifically Incels – a group that has introduced a completely new term to modern vocabulary. Her topic was original and timely, and she pursued it with rigor and enthusiasm to develop a paper about this growing misogynistic community, its cyberbullying, and the implications for the future. Her paper is not just well written; it investigates an issue that is current and important.
Works Cited
Bates, Laura. Men Who Hate Women : From Incels to Pickup Artists : The Truth about Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All. Naperville, Illinois, Sourcebooks, 2020.
CryEquivalent6748. “I feel totally inadequate, and this fuels my manosphere binge.” Reddit. 12 November, 2023. https://www.reddit.com/r/exredpill/comments/17u0to3/i_feel_totally_inadequateand_this_fuels_my/.
Dickson, EJ. “Alek Minassian, Toronto Van Attack Suspect, Linked to Incel Community.” Rolling Stone, 27 September 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/alek-minassian-toronto-van-attack-incels-891678/. Accessed 26 November 2023.
Hattery, Angela, and Earl Smith. “Institutionalized Violence.” The Social Dynamics of Family Violence, Routledge, New York, NY, 2020, pp. 342–384.
Last Name, First Name. “Knowledge of Incels.” Survey. 10 Nov. 2023.
Lawson, Robert. “A Dictionary of the Manosphere: Five Terms to Understand the Language of Online Male Supremacists.” The Conversation, 31 Aug. 2023, theconversation.com/a-dictionary-of-the-manosphere-five-terms-to-understand-the-language-of-online-male-supremacists-200206.
“The ‘Manosphere.’” Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 17 Apr. 2023, www.isdglobal.org/explainers/the-manosphere-explainer/.
“Online Poll Results Provide New Insights into Incel Community.” ADL, 10 Sept. 2020, www.adl.org/resources/blog/online-poll-results-provide-new-insights-incel-community.
Pao, Ellen. “The Perverse Incentives That Help Incels Thrive in Tech.” Wired, Conde Nast, 19 June 2018, www.wired.com/story/ellen-pao-the-perverse-incentives-that-help-incels-thrive-in-tech/#:~:text=Like%20many%20groups%20of%20young,groups%2C%20it%E2%80%99s%20a%20natural%20fit.
Rodger, Elliot. “Elliot Rodger Manifesto: My Twisted World.” DocumentCloud, www.documentcloud.org/documents/1173808-elliot-rodger-manifesto. Accessed 26 Nov. 2023.
Rohrlich, Justin, and James Poulos. “Cole Carini, Virginia Man Inspired by Incel Killer Elliot Rodger, Was Making Bomb: Feds.” The Daily Beast, 5 June 2020, https://www.thedailybeast.com/cole-carini-virginia-man-inspired-by-incel-killer-elliot-rodger-was-making-bomb-feds. 26 November 2023.
Spencer, Terry. “Jurors See Florida School Shooter’s Violent Internet Posts.” AP News, APNews, 27 July 2022, apnews.com/article/sports-education-florida-fort-lauderdale-parkland-school-shooting-f8e618be4dac517df9633eb6674b942b.