Incels: Violent Misogyny in Sheep’s Clothing
**Trigger warnings: rape, murder, violence against women
The word “incel” is an abbreviation of the phrase, “involuntary celibates,” meaning that people who describe themselves as such believe they have never had sex because they are misunderstood. This is not a means of self-reflection, or admittance to shyness, but rather a term one self-proclaims in order to justify their violent thoughts and desires. Despite the term “incel” originating from a woman seeking community and understanding in an online space, “incel” gradually became usurped by insecure, misogynistic men who feel entitled to sex, female affection, and the justification to rape and murder the women who won’t comply.
How could the definition of a word change so drastically? With the dawn of the internet came a flooding of men who hid their identities behind computer screens, breeding a false sense of confidence and fueling an existent hatred of women. In 1997, when online chat rooms were fairly new and social media platforms hadn’t yet been created, a Canadian woman in her mid-20’s made a website for other self-identifying “late bloomers.” She named the website Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project, which was designed as a communal space for people who had not dated in their teenage years to express their feelings on romance and hopefully find long-lasting love in adulthood.
In the early years of the website, Alana was happy with the community of men and women sharing their experiences. She knew that she wasn’t the only person who felt this specific loneliness and was relieved to build a space where people like her could come together. She even said that a man and woman who met on the site later got married. Alana ran a mailing list and posted articles, and remembers the website as “a friendly place” where people could speak aloud about their romantic concerns.
However, after only a couple of years, some of the men on the website became what Alana described as “stuck in anger.” She noted how everyone felt a sense of anger or frustration at times, but that some men remained angry and spoke exclusively about their anger to other men. They were angry that women didn’t find them attractive, didn’t want to date them, didn’t want to have sex with them. They festered in their anger, spreading it online to other sexually-repressed men. In the last 20 years, the “incel community” has radically transformed from the friendly, social space Alana had created, to a hostile tide of disillusioned sexists seeking “revenge” on the women of the world.
But is incels “taking revenge” a modern concept? Absolutely not. The 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds is every incel’s fantasy. A group of male geeks are ridiculed and harassed by a group of fraternity brothers, literally called the Alpha Betas, and begin to plot their revenge. This idea that “frat bros” and “alphas” are the real villains is believed by incels to this day. In the film, a beautiful young woman is dating one of these “alphas,” and one of the nerd-protagonists lusts after her. She instantly becomes a sexual object who the nerds plot to have this protagonist rape.
Of course, this was not perceived by the audience or anyone involved in the film as rape. This woman is portrayed as nothing more than a vessel for the nerd’s gratification. This rape is considered an accomplished step in their master plan of revenge. He got to fuck the pretty girl and upset the “alpha.” In the nerds’ minds, this was an extra level of revenge, and a pat on the back for the nerd who “got” the girl.
The scene unfolds when the protagonist wears a helmet to disguise himself as the young woman’s boyfriend. Having successfully deceived her, he rapes her, to the cheering applause of his friends. This applause was materialized in the real world by the incels watching the film, who believed the nerd the champion of the story for taking what he wanted, because he is a nice guy.
Incels always refer to themselves as “nice guys.” In situations where they lust after a woman who is not interested in them and has many times told them so, they say that they’re “stuck in the friendzone.” What is the friendzone? It’s an imaginary place inside of incels’ minds; a purgatory where one day the woman will see him as the real man in her life and choose him. Because again, incels see women as sexual objects while fooling themselves into thinking that they’re gentlemen. “I didn’t fuck you and leave you, so I’m the good guy. I’m a nice guy. No one ever wants to fuck the nice guy.” In reality, nice guys will comfort their female friend, not look at her as a damsel in distress who is ultimately a warm vagina and a babymaker.
Every Hollywood interpretation of a “nice guy” is an average-looking man who gets the beautiful woman. She’s gorgeous, kind, and funny. She never looks like an average girl. Incels base their actions on not being perceived as good enough because they don’t look like “Chads,” or traditionally attractive men. Yet, they only are interested in female Chads, or who they refer to as “Stacys.” Their arguments and beliefs are baseless, hypocritical, narcissistic, dangerous, and violent. But we’re taught not to think that they’re dangerous because they look like the lonely kid sitting in the back of class.
We’re conditioned to think of evil men as those who will use their physical strength to overpower and take advantage of us. While we are on the defense from these men, incels hide in the shadows. They lurk, plot, and wait. They use our fear of what they describe as “alpha men” against us. They feed into our insecurities and take advantage of our vulnerability while we’re afraid. They have ulterior motives and pretend to be our friends. You may realize that you know some of them.
And if your first thought is, “I could never be friends with someone like that,” they know this too. They know that they aren’t perceived as a threat because why would they be? The creeps of the world are strangers in the dark, not our friends who we know and love.
Many incels become mass shooters. Men who think they are entitled to be the hero of their story, an ego inflated by toxic masculinity and a societal belief that women exist to serve men. A mass shooter who is viewed as a hero by the incel community is Elliot Rodger.
Elliot Rodger was a college student who took the lives of six innocent women before taking his own. You could misinterpret this fact solely from the disturbing title of an article by The New York Times: “Before Brief, Deadly Spree, Trouble Since Age 8.” His murders are defended before we read a single sentence. The “nice guy” phenomenon of victimizing men who inflict violence against women has poisoned our way of thinking. In other words, who cares how many people he killed? He killed them in such a brief time, and he was bullied for such a long time. Maybe if he wasn’t bullied, he wouldn’t have murdered six women who had never bullied him.
The article opens up with details of Elliot’s parents’ divorce, his psychological issues, and notes from his doctor about mental illness. As we have seen with many mass shooters and sexual predators, we’re made to sympathize with and pity them. I wonder how many psychological issues and mental illnesses the friends and families of the six deceased women suffer from. I wonder how many men have been bullied since childhood and have never murdered innocent women. It’s almost as if mental health issues and violence against women are unrelated in nature.
This NYT article is a short saga of Elliot’s various emotional problems, providing any reason the writers could dig up to victimize this mass murderer. The first thing the reader sees under the revolting title is a picture of Elliot in fifth grade, a reminder that he was once an innocent child. There are no childhood photos of the six victims. After about a dozen paragraphs detailing Elliot’s so-called emotional trauma, the writers finally begin reporting the vile acts he committed. If you have an ounce of human decency in your body, avoid this article.
Elliot Rodger killed six female classmates and then himself on May 23, 2014. He drove through his college campus of UC-Santa Barbara in his black BMW, stocked with knives and handguns. He used his vehicle and his weapons to injure 13 people, murder six women, and kill himself afterwards. For years leading up to this day, he had been posting descriptive video diaries online about his disgust with women, often filming himself read aloud entries from his journal. He called attractive girls “big titted-bitches” and “stupid sluts,” and while doing so, professed his confusion over why these same women didn’t find him desirable. He said that they were too dumb to understand what a catch he is, and that they needed to pay. One excerpt from his journal reads, “This is the story of how I, Elliot Rodger, came to be…It is a story of a war against cruel injustice…this tragedy did not have to happen…but humanity forced my hand.”
The tragedy Elliot refers to is mass murder he planned, which he named “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution.” His self-proclaimed “retribution” is one he had been plotting with other incels online in order to exact their revenge against women. This video was accompanied by a 137-page written manifesto Elliot entitled, “My Twisted World.” Elliot and other incels planned for him to “fight back” against the women of the world, and he encouraged fellow incels to do the same. After his mass killing, he quickly became a hero of the incel community. A few days after the mass murder, a fellow incel was inspired by Elliot to drive a van through a crowd, killing 10 people. Who knows how many lives have been destroyed because of Elliot Rodger’s influence. Who knows how many lives were destroyed before he became the face of a movement.
Elliot Rodger is the pinnacle of a successful incel. He cultivated support online, created a community of like-minded followers, exacerbated the anger and entitlement felt by these men, actively planned his violence against women and encouraged others to follow suit, and then murdered women. He succeeded in his revenge. He killed members of the opposite sex who wouldn’t sleep with him, and for that alone, they deserved to die.
The incels who dream of becoming the next Elliot Rodger are who we need to focus on. Recognize their speech, their attitudes, their actions. How they speak about women, how they speak to women, how entitlement and misogyny drips from everything they say and do. They are not the strong, muscular men who drug our drinks and take advantage of us. They are the men who watch silently, who wait, who perceive themselves as “nice.”
Since the inception of Alana’s well-intentioned website, social media has replaced this space and provided expansion for this slew of repressed sexists to exponentially grow. Not only has it produced multiple platforms for these men to communicate through, but it also has provided them the ability to harass women incessantly and anonymously. Social media also gives them the opportunity to create several accounts on each platform, where they can comment on posts and directly message unsuspecting women without these women even knowing who is contacting them.
Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms have amplified and unified incels. The platforms’ respective community guidelines--or restrictions on posted content--cater more to what can make their owners money rather than what can endanger the safety of their users. Especially on Twitter, thousands of women have reported death threats and rape threats sent to them by incels, with little to no action taken by the platform to protect them. These men respond by claiming free speech, when in actuality, they are in violation of any protection because their words incite violence. “You shouldn’t have posted it,” is the online “You were asking for it.” And in many cases, when women retaliate, incels will literally respond with “you were asking for it.”
Look at the men in your life through this lens: do they actively support me? Do they encourage me to find someone better, or wait for me to choose them? Do they tell me that I’m good enough, or imply that I can’t see what’s in front of me? Do they tell me to try dating nice guys? Do they think of themselves as nice guys? Would nice guys ever collaborate, plan, and plot for the mass rape and mass murder of women?
Incels are people who we need to stop seeing as harmless and start seeing as dangerous. They use our insecurities and fears to their advantage. We must learn how to protect ourselves and each other against them. This may sound overwhelming, until you think about all the men you’ve already encountered in life-- in-person and online-- and realize how many of them are incels. They are hiding in plain sight. We just need to know how to find them.
Stefania D'Andrea is a prose and comedy writer from Queens, NY. She is one of the original staff readers for the literary magazine Cagibi, where she edits and reviews works of fiction and non-fiction. Her first short story, In Her Head, is published in the 12th issue of Newtown Literary. Many of her comedy sketches have been performed at the People's Improv Theatre (PIT) in New York City in 2018 and 2019. Stefania received her B.A. in English, with a concentration in Creative Writing, from the Macaulay Honors College at CUNY Hunter in 2017.
