A popular incel YouTube personality, who's trying to become the first incel rapper, wrote a song glorifying Minassian's attack.
|
|
Please don't associate two people who claimed being incel, Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian, as being representative of the whole incel community, because they are not.
|
|
Its r9k section contains incel-like ideas in addition to the site's generalized ethos of racism and trolling, and remains an active source of incel recruitment.
|
|
This is where the idea of the "Incel Rebellion" that Minassian referenced comes from — sometimes called "Beta Uprising" on incel forums, a reference to beta males.
|
|
The incel community is well known on the internet, and is much larger than the Bowl Gang (there are about 60,000 subscribers to the main incel subreddit).
|
|
Minassian was a partisan of the "incel rebellion," incel being short for "involuntary celibates," used by an online community of misogynists who feel women owe men sex.
|
|
Larson does not see himself as an incel — he claims to have raped his ex-wife — but has nonetheless been a well-known presence in the incel community.
|
|
Some members were active on the main incel community on Reddit, r/Braincels, while at least one member was active on the incel-watch community geared toward non-incels, r/IncelTears.
|
|
But the dominance of the blackpill ideology in the current incel community has the opposite effect: It takes the intrinsic negativity of an incel community and turns it up to 2000.
|
|
While incel communities do vary — the posters on incels.
|
|
I've spoken with more than a dozen current and former incel forum posters, including two site administrators, and acquired logs of an incel chat room from around the time of the Toronto attack.
|
|
Rodger is treated as a hero in the incel community.
|
|
The attacks were a turning point for the incel community.
|
|
Incel forums, ReformedIncel believes, necessarily tend in a toxic direction.
|
|
You could look at Jud and say he's an incel.
|
|
"I have sluts for managers," one poster on the incel.
|
|
In April, an "incel" ("involuntary celibate") murdered ten people in Toronto.
|
|
Here's a glimpse into its dark corners: What does 'incel' mean?
|
|
But there's scant evidence of similar introspection in current incel forums.
|
|
Far Right + Incel + what seems like a significant mental health issue.
|
|
The post references the "Incel Rebellion," with "incel" meaning "involuntary celibate," or slang from an online community who hate women and advocate for sexual violence against them as revenge for them not wanting to have sex.
|
|
"Stacy," the incel term for the most attractive women, will only consent to sex with Chad, Tyrone (the incel word for a black Chad), Chang (East Asian Chad), Chadpreet (South Asian Chad), or Chaddam (Arab Chad).
|
|
Some members had lauded Rodger as a hero of the incel movement.
|
|
He is a proud incel and listens to Jordan Peterson's podcast religiously.
|
|
Members of the incel community—including the official Twitter account for incels.
|
|
The driver, Alek Minassian, identified himself as an incel in online posts.
|
|
I don't want to identify as an incel, but I am one.
|
|
"Women are crooked by nature," Swetnam wrote, sounding like a proto-incel.
|
|
There's no centralized planning, no incel equivalent to of Osama bin Laden.
|
|
Scar has gone from being creepy to some kind of beta incel.
|
|
This is what makes the incel subculture so poisonous to everyone it touches.
|
|
It still wasn't enough to stymie the spread of incel-aggrandizing murder pics.
|
|
Gaslighting, incel, techlash, gammon, cakeism, overtourism, orbiting and of course, Big Dick Energy.
|
|
Most of us had never heard the term "incel" before the Toronto massacre.
|
|
"Even Incel spaces have attracted young men who felt like misfits," said Trott.
|
|
Both are positioned as unattainable: The Chad is the masculine ideal, one incel men cannot emulate for reasons of poor genetics, while the Stacy is whom every incel man wants to sleep with but cannot because they aren't a Chad.
|
|
Since Monday, the incel and 4chan communities have attempted to distance themselves from Manissian.
|
|
Blackpill: The embrace of any belief even more bleak than the incel redpill, a.k.a.
|
|
Greenblatt analyzes Richard III as an incel who blames women for not wanting him.
|
|
Incel (referring to men who are involuntary celibates) is a fringe phenomenon, hardly mainstream.
|
|
Like a lot of online subcultures, incel communities are steeped in irony and trolling.
|
|
Reddit shuttered its own incel forum in 2017 over concerns about its extremist content.
|
|
Beyond their shared frustration with not having sex, the incel community is not monolithic.
|
|
But then when this incel thing happened in Toronto, he started talking more about it.
|
|
As in most other incel communities, women are "banned on sight, no exceptions," on Incels.co.
|
|
Heidecker posted the song, appropriately titled "Ballad of the Incel Man," on his Bandcamp Sunday.
|
|
High, forward-projecting cheekbones can be a particular point of fixation in the incel world.
|
|
PSL: This stands for PUASluthateLookism, an umbrella term for various subsets of incel-related worldviews.
|
|
He fell into a funk, a dark period during which he came across incel forums.
|
|
" Beierle also seemed to identify himself as an "incel," or someone who is "involuntarily celibate.
|
|
It even spawned its own watchdog community r/inceltears, which remains to chronicle incel extremism.
|
|
The incel turn toward violence is a unique phenomenon, at least in the modern era.
|
|
Before the attack, Minassian posted a Facebook status message talking about the "Incel Rebellion" (incel stands for "involuntarily celibate"), a movement of men who are fixated on their inability to get women to sleep with them and are consequently furious with women as the cause.
|
|
The incel equivalent of taking the red pill is called "blackpilling," and it's much, much darker.
|
|
He has also previously revealed on Reddit that he owns both the incel and suicide forums.
|
|
An "involuntary celibate," or incel, is arrested over a Toronto van attack that kills ten people.
|
|
Then in 2014, a self-identified incel went on a killing spree in Isla Vista, California.
|
|
You'd think there should have been some kind of reckoning in the incel community since then.
|
|
He says that the incel community thinks that rape is a social construct, and he agrees.
|
|
Some incels are part of the troubling trend in which toxic hatred online manifests itself in the physical world: Men have killed in the name of an "incel rebellion" or in homage to an incel shooter who murdered six people in Isla Vista, California, in 2100.
|
|
A lot of incel culture has been very infected by weird, more esoteric, national socialist racial theory.
|
|
We see it in her latest video, too — a meaningfully fresh take on so-called "incel" communities.
|
|
As someone who has been monitoring the incel subculture for years, I'm not surprised by this response.
|
|
Ascending: The process of going from being an incel to a "normie," or a "Chad" (see below).
|
|
That's clearly sexist claptrap; Dany isn't a militant incel committing mass violence because she can't get laid.
|
|
The nascent incel community became divided between two online forums: one called IncelSupport and another called LoveShy.
|
|
Bentley is one of the clearest examples of an incel taking out his rage on another individual.
|
|
Another self-described "incel" is awaiting trial for the murders of 10 people in Toronto earlier this year.
|
|
Unlike many of the incel victims, the vast majority of those women were murdered by someone they knew.
|
|
There are a ton of explainers out there on the dog-whistle language of racists and incel subcultures.
|
|
And while Mello never explicitly identified as an incel himself, his dogma certainly appeared consistent with the worldview.
|
|
The way Misato is treated here at the end is like the end of the fucking incel post.
|
|
But despite that, experts on mass violence are deeply concerned by what they see from the incel community.
|
|
His hands in his jacket pockets, he walks away into the night, just another incel, just another rake.
|
|
My boyfriend pulls up this really interesting video on incel culture, and I fall asleep before it's over.
|
|
On the one hand, there is a real terrorist threat from incel communities; it's clearly not all talk.
|
|
In this heartland of incel rage and misogynist vitriol, female privilege is a justification for declaring war on feminism.
|
|
One member of Supportcel noted that within incel spaces, lines like "there's no therapy for your face" are frequent.
|
|
These can increase when considering risk factors like social phobia and anxiety — both traits found within the incel community.
|
|
Soon after Minassian's attack, Wired writer Nicole Kobie criticized "breathless" and over-detailed coverage of incel terminology and beliefs.
|
|
The incel community on 214Chan, Reddit, and other websites are actively attempting to put distance between themselves and Minassian.
|
|
Incel thinking is based on the idea that women are commodities—that they are objects that owe men sex.
|
|
Gymcel: An incel who is trying to ascend (see above) by going to the gym as much as possible.
|
|
I've spent some time reading incel sites, out of pure horrified fascination, before they became a hot-button issue.
|
|
How about Elliot Rodger, the young Californian whose demented "incel" manifesto preceded a killing spree near a college campus?
|
|
The incel focus on the modern sexual marketplace, in particular, speaks to the specific anxieties today's young men feel.
|
|
That advocacy for violence is where Mr. Rodger, a self-described incel who left behind misogynistic ramblings, fits in.
|
|
Yes, the world's fourth most valuable company can trace its origins to the frustrated misogyny of an ur-incel.
|
|
On the surface, PUA communities and incel communities have a lot of generic appeal: The PUA lifestyle emphasizes self-esteem and confidence building along with physical health, while the incel community allows men to bond over their struggle to achieve all of the above in spite of their sour luck with women.
|
|
You need do little more than glance at the front pages of incel subreddits to find ample evidence of this.
|
|
He claimed that the suicide and incel websites were on "separate corners" of the internet and were treated as such.
|
|
Alex said, however, that he was banned from the forum for asking questions about its link to the incel communities.
|
|
Alek Minassian drove through a crowd of people in Toronto and his Facebook posts suggested a connection to incel activity.
|
|
Rodger has become an icon of the incel community and seems to have inspired Minassian to mimic his entitled violence.
|
|
Details: 40-year-old Scott Beierle, who killed himself before being arrested, reportedly identified as an "incel," or involuntary celibate.
|
|
Self-declared incels encourage violent acts, including the "incel rebellion" in Toronto that killed 10 people and injured 20 more.
|
|
The incel movement regards men who believe that the reason they can't get laid is women and is incredibly misogynistic.
|
|
These men appropriated the term "incel" for themselves and their idea, outcompeting the IncelSupport community for ownership of the term.
|
|
In an interview, Mr. Donnelly said the comments were essentially mocking the online "incel" community that frequently promotes misogynistic messages.
|
|
Rory Spillane is a comic standout as Charles, her awkward young colleague (and is equally fine as Ethin the incel).
|
|
We wanted to talk to an incel on camera, someone who could explain this subculture and where it came from.
|
|
Since the banning of r/Incels, the worst and most violently misogynistic members of the incel culture have gravitated to Incels.
|
|
Over time, this idea solidified into the dark "reality" behind the black pill and became a unifying theme across incel communities.
|
|
Reddit banned the Incel community from its website last year after updating its policy to ban glorification and incitement of violence.
|
|
Before the attack, Minassian expressed his support for incel, short for "involuntary celibate," on a Facebook account believed to be his.
|
|
Reddit removed the Incel community from its website last year after updating its policy to ban glorification and incitement of violence.
|
|
Rodger, who wrote a "manifesto" blaming women for not having sex with him, is seen by some as an incel hero.
|
|
" In response, one user asked, "I left this subreddit after my brief stint because it was a toxic incel driven shithole.
|
|
Posts following the attack on major online hubs for the incel community expressed disbelief that Minassian's Facebook post could be authentic.
|
|
More recently, the festering online wound of the incel community has begun to express itself in the form of mass murder.
|
|
He is the primary incel "saint"; forums are full of memes with his face photoshopped onto old paintings of Christian icons.
|
|
Everywhere you turn on an incel forum, there's an expression of rage or hatred, typically but not exclusively directed at women.
|
|
"That's in the nature of incel communities: It's a community you don't want to be a part of," he tells me.
|
|
"Incel boards tend to be so toxic [now] because they're basically venting and posting all of their frustrations online," he says.
|
|
What began as pure backlash evolved into a community that reinforced its users' grievances in a similar fashion to incel sites.
|
|
Police inspect the van used by alleged killer Alek Minassian in an incel attack in Toronto, Canada on April 8003, 2800.
|
|
Other members jumped in to offer advice to this man about his attractive roommate, a so-called Chad in incel speak.
|
|
It's also hard for many people outside the incel community to see the value in outreach, given the community's virulently misogynistic overtones.
|
|
Incel, the online community of "involuntarily celibate" men radicalized by their shared mistrust of women, has existed on the internet for years.
|
|
Beierle is the latest of several men to have connected with "incel" or "involuntary celibate" communities online before going on violent rampages.
|
|
Give "Ballad of the Incel Man" a listen above, and then head over to Bandcamp, where you can buy it for $1.
|
|
In online message boards like Reddit and 210chan where incels would commiserate, the act of an incel killing women had a phrase.
|
|
Central to incel ideology is the notion that members have been unfairly denied sex by women because they're unattractive or socially awkward.
|
|
The committed incel is one who believes that the sexual (and thus social) world is determined by rigid genetic and biological hierarchies.
|
|
The word "femoid" has become the preferred incel term for (human) women, on the grounds that all women are basically robots anyway.
|
|
He found incel communities on Reddit, ones that helped reaffirm his belief that his looks were responsible for his terrible dating experience.
|
|
His growing obsession with taking revenge on a world that's unfair is the stuff of mass shootings and incel message board culture.
|
|
It's this embrace of helplessness, of their certainty of their own sexual doom, that makes the more extreme incel communities so dangerous.
|
|
Several Supportcel community members I spoke with did suggest that the incel sphere's overall attitude toward mental health and treatment had improved somewhat.
|
|
It means less debate each time platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit consider banning accounts that deal in specifically incel-related misogyny.
|
|
Alek Minassian killed 10 people in a van attack in Toronto after writing "the Incel Rebellion has already begun" on his Facebook page.
|
|
All or Nothing: The idea here is that you're either an incel or someone who can have sex with almost anyone you want.
|
|
The incel community faced intense online pushback, with one subreddit dedicated to the group (their main gathering point) being taken down in 2017.
|
|
On Tuesday, the incel subreddit disappeared from the internet forum and was replaced with a symbol of a gavel on a red background.
|
|
The van's driver was a self-described incel — but the community today would not be recognizable to those who built it decades earlier.
|
|
What makes the incel world scary is that it takes these universal experiences and transmutes the pain they cause into unbridled, misogynistic rage.
|
|
The founding irony of the incel community is that it was created by a woman — and a politically progressive queer one at that.
|
|
Feeling both futile and a bit like she'd grown out of the incel world, she ceased her involvement in the forums around 2000.
|
|
In a Facebook post written shortly before the attack, he described himself as a foot soldier in a broader incel war on society.
|
|
The attacker, Tobias Rathjen, left behind a racist manifesto, in which he called for the extermination of nonwhites and identified as an incel.
|
|
One post on an incel subreddit compared their worldview to Marxism, with incels playing the part of the proletariat and Chad the bourgeoisie.
|
|
Whether Minassian's feelings towards women or his apparent activity in incel communities had any specific bearing on his motives yesterday is not presently known.
|
|
Divorced of all the concerns about possible theater violence, or an anarchic incel uprising, this film feels a lot more like empty, nihilistic provocation.
|
|
I think people in the media are inaccurately conflating incel culture with all of alt-right culture and, to some extent, all of Gamergate.
|
|
YouTube videos, purportedly recorded by Beierle, in which he rails against women and people of color, and identified with violent "incel" (involuntary celibate) ideology.
|
|
He explained how he found incel forums and decided he must be one too because he was also lonely and hadn't had sex yet.
|
|
" The article concluded that "the logic of commerce and technology will be consciously harnessed, as already in pornography, to address the unhappiness of incel.
|
|
Why would anyone put themselves through that many hours of watching Ross Geller being an emotional-if-not-literal incel this side of 2010?
|
|
He spends his time posting near daily on Reddit, frequenting subreddits like r/Braincels (currently one of two main incel forums) and r/ForeverAlone.
|
|
Houellebecq, whose work is saturated with brutality, resentment and sentimentality, understood what it meant to be an incel long before the term became common.
|
|
But it lives on in the form of r/Braincels and adjacent forums like r/ForeverAlone, as well as the currently dominant incel website Incels.
|
|
Among the incel community, "Chads" is used to refer to men who are successful with women, while "Stacys" refers to the women who reject incels.
|
|
In the last six months, three men tied to the "incel" — or "involuntarily celibate" — community of men's rights activists carried out extreme acts of violence.
|
|
And "tfw no gf," while glibly written, eerily echoes the rise of incel extremism that has become more common since the 2014 Isla Vista massacre.
|
|
These incel murders are related to violence against women in the US broadly, said Katie Ray-Jones, the CEO of the National Domestic Violence Hotline.
|
|
That's not me guys, that's all of you who said, 'fuck the incel narrative' and soldiered forward with positive posts, proud selfies, and uplifting stories.
|
|
"I think a lot of people conflate my book title and my relationship status with me being, like, an incel," says Roberson with a laugh.
|
|
If it's "over," the incel is deemed incapable of ever "ascending" to become a normie, and may even be encouraged to "rope," or commit suicide.
|
|
Incel Tears: Abbreviated as IT, this is the cringe subreddit for incels, where screenshots of incels saying ridiculous things are posted for others to mock.
|
|
I'm sure somebody who identifies as an incel has done something stupid at some point," reads one Reddit theory calling the attack a "Trojan Horse.
|
|
The killer's posts on PUAHate, a popular online forum among incels frustrated that pickup artist techniques weren't working for them, rendered the term "incel" toxic.
|
|
This is why Rodger, more than any of the other killers who targeted women, became the inspiration for the radical turn in the incel community.
|
|
ReformedIncel certainly believes so: The Toronto van attack is what caused him to start documenting incel history, to try to figure out what went wrong.
|
|
His incel incarnation invites us to accompany him 'through certain half-considered tweets,' and he measures his life not in coffee spoons, but Reddit posts.
|
|
It's difficult not to think of the incel community's divvying up of men and women into 'muscular, popular' Chads, 'attractive' Stacys and 'average looking' Beckys.
|
|
Befrienders Worldwide The incel community I spoke to for this article is Supportcel, a Discord server formed from a largely dormant subreddit by the same name.
|
|
Alek Minassian, the man behind the April 24th attacks in Toronto was engaged in a community of men online who call themselves "incel" — or involuntary celibates.
|
|
Most can agree that women can be incel in some rare situations such as extreme disfigurement, but their numbers do not come close to male incels.
|
|
"The blackpill for me is acknowledging that the whole 'we love you anyway' and 'everybody is worthy of love' is BS," an incel named Sinbad told me.
|
|
A frequent incel mantra is "stop coping," encouraging one another to give up and accept that the way most people deal with problems won't work for them.
|
|
An "incel" is someone who can't have sex, date or build relationships with women, despite wanting to, and blames women for denying them their "right" to sex.
|
|
Speaking with a detective, perpetrator Alek Minassian — who now faces multiple charges of murder and attempted murder — described a process of being "radicalized" by incel ideology online.
|
|
And when we look at the intellectual problem, you know, people are worried about the Joker movie within the context of incel and white supremacist terror groups.
|
|
Several years ago, on a blog originally called Government Get Girlfriends, a young Croatian incel demanded that the government pay women to date sexless men like him.
|
|
In April, a 25-year-old Canadian who said he was a soldier in an "incel" rebellion used a rented van to kill 10 people in Toronto.
|
|
The incel community has recently faced intense pushback, with one subreddit dedicated to the group (their main gathering point at the time) being taken down in 2017.
|
|
In this way, he feels related to the incel (short for "involuntary celibate"), the guy who has crafted a whole online persona around his nonexistent sex life.
|
|
He is a proto-incel, and his story builds to a disturbing scene in which the narrator urges him to murder a woman who has rejected him.
|
|
Mr. Minassian, 25, also wrote of an "incel rebellion," referring to a term, shorthand for "involuntary celibates," used online by a community of misogynists to describe themselves.
|
|
To better understand how "self-help" works in a community that is obsessed with hopelessness, I spoke to five members of the incel community — including two women, for women surprisingly form an increasingly vocal part of the incel community, whether as incels themselves or allies who seek to create a community of support within a culture that often teaches its members that support is a hopeless pipe dream.
|
|
The answer might have surprised him — and most people — because incel culture is inherently built around the rejection of the idea that one's unhappiness can ever be remedied.
|
|
Reddit's main incel community, r/Incels, was permanently banned last year for "violent content" as part of a recalibrated commitment to moderating the toxic subcultures in its midst.
|
|
Matthew Ezzell, a sociologist at James Madison University, cautioned that while the incel belief system might seem like it's all just rooted in self-loathing, it's really not.
|
|
Marquis provided screenshots to BuzzFeed News showing his email address linked to the management panel of a domain registrar that listed several incel sites and the suicide forum.
|
|
The incel forum — which currently has more than 9,50 members — gets modest revenue from donations and by selling ad space, Marquis said, which is used for site maintenance.
|
|
The 25-year-old's cryptic message, since taken down but confirmed by Facebook to be authentic, has those familiar with the "involuntary celibate," or "incel," subculture taking note.
|
|
The incel universe is extremely black-and-white—if you're undesirable to be around, it's the result of something innate or that happened to you, not personal failure.
|
|
Once that is secure, the overlap from incel to 4chan to neckbeard to mom's basement is heavy, and this overlap will be used to silence all the above.
|
|
Another poster praised his fellow incels who assaulted women as "low-inhib legends," suggesting it's impressive if an incel can overcome inhibitions that warn him against hurting women.
|
|
Elliot Rodger, an incel hero who killed six people in a 2014 rampage, wrote repeatedly about his rage at the sight of white women socializing with black men.
|
|
A 40-year-old man reportedly involved with the "incel community" opened fire at a hot yoga studio in Tallahassee and killed two women and injured four others.
|
|
Demanding a return to patriarchy — as many in the alt-right, incel, and men's rights activists communities have done, and as Peterson himself has done — aren't particularly transgressive behaviors.
|
|
Aja: I think the biggest surprise for me was how slight the connections seemed to be between this film and any hint of modern white supremacy or incel culture.
|
|
In the incel community, it amounts to embracing the idea that women are predisposed to only be attracted to certain types of body types, skin tones, and facial structures.
|
|
In the aftermath of the Rodgers massacre, Erin Gloria Ryan, a writer from Jezebel, did a deep dive into the incel community, which can best be described as harrowing.
|
|
But where the incel acts entitled to a relationship with a woman, the wife guy seems to expect to be congratulated for entering into one, sometimes with literal rewards.
|
|
Combining this data with my interviews of incels like Abe (all of whom I've quoted under pseudonyms) has helped me put together a rough picture of your ordinary incel.
|
|
A small radical fringe believes that violence, especially against women, is an appropriate response — that an "Incel Rebellion" or "Beta [Male] Uprising" will eventually overturn the sexual status quo.
|
|
This manifests in a deep and profound hatred for women as a group, which shows up on a very brief scan of some of the more extreme incel communities.
|
|
He doesn't identify as "incel" per se, although he certainly meets the baseline qualification of being involuntarily celibate, which is how he found himself asking the braincels community for advice.
|
|
It included "gaslighting" (trying to make someone doubt their own memory or even sanity) and "incel" (self-described "involuntarily celibate" men, an increasing number of whom have taken to violence).
|
|
In the Spectator, a few days later, columnist Toby Young seconded the sexbot solution, arguing that "robot girlfriends" could be a "workable" cure for "sexual inequality" and incel mass murders.
|
|
There are just men on various online forums celebrating violence and forming a mutually supportive echo chamber that justifies harming others, especially women, in the name of the incel uprising.
|
|
Even while readership of incel sites surged, as "normies" trying to figure out what could have sparked such senseless violence went to the sites, some users were celebrating the killing spree.
|
|
Houellebecq is able to give such a convincing portrait of incel-thinking because at some level he seems to share its core assumption, representing sex as something that women owe men.
|
|
Minassian's reference to an "incel rebellion" refers to the internet's self-described movement of the "involuntarily celibate" — men who are angry, often at women, because they've failed to find sexual partners.
|
|
When I told him to be himself, he explained that was an incel meme—Chad thinks it's not his muscles or money that let him glide through life, but his personality.
|
|
The incel rebellion has a much more amorphous endpoint; there's no worked-out vision for what success looks like, nor is there a chief ideologue working to come up with one.
|
|
The "incel rebellion" refers to the involuntarily celibate community—people, though almost exclusively men, distraught with their lack of sexual experiences, and often expressing this disappointment as anger towards women writ large.
|
|
The Santa Barbara and Toronto attackers were heavily involved in and influenced by incel communities, where "involuntary celibates," usually men, gather to opine on their inability to attain love and sexual fulfillment.
|
|
But then as part of dismantling the ideology, he began to think the opposite of the incel ideology and that he didn't want to make a woman feel intimidated by eye contact.
|
|
Both men had aligned themselves with Elliot Rodger, who became something of an "incel" hero after he killed six people and injured 14 in a shooting in Isla Vista, California, in 2014.
|
|
There is one problem with the Telegraph's definition: Mewing is not only not new, it's also been popular for quite some time, on incel forums and hyper-masculine fringes of the internet.
|
|
Last November, a 40-year-old man who reportedly found solidarity within the "incel community" opened fire at a hot yoga studio in Tallahassee and killed two women and injured four others.
|
|
As J.M. Berger, an analyst of the intersection between radical ideology and social media and author of the forthcoming book Extremism explained, the incel community is still relatively new, small and understudied.
|
|
The incel movement — a politically radicalized form of misogyny in which "involuntarily celibate" men envision taking vengeance on the virile "Chads" and shallow "Stacys" they believe are contributing to their sexual poverty.
|
|
The incel community that Mr. Minassian paid homage to, for example, was banned from Reddit last year because, among other issues, some adherents advocated rape as a means to end their celibacy.
|
|
"His manifesto and videos display a very wild mixture of conspiracy theories, racism, and incel ideology," Daniel Koehler, director of the German Institute on Radicalization and De-Radicalization Studies, told VICE News.
|
|
But what's undeniable is its impact on language, with each side forming its own set of distinct terminology: problematic, microaggressions, virtue signaling, toxicity, gaslighting, safe spaces, triggered, red pilled, Q-anon, incel.
|
|
But in fact incel culture, the "men's rights" movement, and their focus on what they perceive as belittled masculinity have more in common with the broader alt-right than you might think.
|
|
His own definition of masculinity, or hyper-masculinity as he described it, had been shaped because he had spent a lot of time in Reddit groups that had catered to the incel community.
|
|
The word "cuck," for example, from the old French word for "cuckoo" ("cucu"), has become a go-to insult that captures toxic masculine behaviours and incel anxieties that define the alt-right today.
|
|
The incel community is known for its toxic misogynistic views, identifying themselves as "single without choosing to be so," and blaming women as well as men in relationships for their own sexual failures.
|
|
The post states that the "Incel Rebellion has already begun" and alludes to "Chads" and "Stacys" which is slang in many online corners, including the alt-right, for attractive non-socially awkward people.
|
|
My dearest:A brief skirmish yesterday against the 24th Kek Company, 20183rd Incel Batallion ended in a terrible slaughter, though their commander sent a Gab post warning us that he had studied the blade.
|
|
The idea that "incels" might (or should) seek companionship from sex dolls is not a new one in incel discourse, particularly as sex robot technology gets increasingly advanced and sex dolls more lifelike.
|
|
While there is no rigorous scientific study on incel demographics — the community is deeply hostile to outsiders, particularly researchers and journalists — their forums have conducted informal surveys on the demographics of their users.
|
|
The connection between Cruz and Rodger led to a more mainstream awareness of incel, or "involuntary celibate," culture, which had festered in the margins of the internet for years, mingling with white supremacy.
|
|
One year ago, a self-described "incel" drove a van into a group of pedestrians in Toronto as part of a "war" against the society that he felt had deprived him of sex.
|
|
Marquis, who appears to be the media-savvy spokesperson for the communities, informed members of the suicide forum that he and Serge were incels who owned incel sites before BuzzFeed News published this story.
|
|
The word "incel" was, however, originally created more than two decades ago by a Canadian woman named Alana, who intended it to refer to a community of lonely people unable to find sexual partners.
|
|
While the topic has been newly mainstreamed for the first time since Rodger's mass shooting, the incel ideology has been incubating on forums like 4chan and 8chan and "Men's Rights" message boards for years.
|
|
"For the benefit of the incel community, sometimes I imply that maybe I raped her (and I wouldn't necessarily feel bad if I had), but that didn't actually happen," Larson said in an email.
|
|
Incels have and still do post on Reddit, though the site, one of the world's most popular online gathering places, barred its incel community in November, citing a policy against hateful and violent speech.
|
|
That list includes r/Braincels, a major forum for the virulently misogynist incel movement, which is currently in the news after the US Army speculated that members might target screenings of the film Joker.
|
|
While "toxic" is an old and very common word that has expanded in usage, "incel" — short for "involuntarily celibate" — is an example of jargon used by a limited group that suddenly enters widespread usage.
|
|
The perpetrator wasn't taking revenge on a specific woman who wronged him; he wanted to instill terror in society writ large as a means of furthering the incel rebellion against the sexual status quo.
|
|
We're better acquainted with the "manosphere" now because of a few key moments: Incel hero Elliot Rodger murdered six people near the University of California, Santa Barbara campus, because women wouldn't have sex with him.
|
|
There's a ban on "Nazi discussion" as per the board's rules, and it's less overtly hateful than other, ideologically adjacent forums, such as the now-defunct one, PUAHate, that incubated incel mass murderer Elliot Rodger.
|
|
All it took was the opening of a venue uninterested in heavily policing its users for this real-world anger to become a defining feature of the virtual incel world — and that's what LoveShy provided.
|
|
For instance, from r/ForeverAlone: And from r/Braincels: It's tempting to pass off some of this as self-deprecating humor, but incel culture is teeming with the kind of self-deprecation that gets dangerous fast.
|
|
The consequences of doing nothing are potentially fatal; not only can incels become deeply suicidal through their participation in incel culture, but as we've seen, they can also become inspired to commit violent attacks against others.
|
|
He wrote on Facebook that he was part of the "Incel Rebellion," a movement of sexually frustrated young men who believe the only solution to their perceived inherent inability to attract women is to kill them.
|
|
These desires aren't necessarily hollow: Alek Minassian, the man accused of the Toronto van attack on April 23 that killed ten people, warned of an "Incel Rebellion" in a Facebook post the day of the attack.
|
|
The philosophies underpinning incel culture, men's rights activists, pickup artists, Alex Jones-variant libertarianism, the intellectual dark web, evolutionary psychology, and prosperity-gospel evangelism all have in common a model of individualism defined by hierarchical struggle.
|
|
Alek Minassian, who drove his van into a crowded sidewalk in Toronto, killing 10, was a member of the "incel" (or "involuntarily celibate") community, an online misogynist hate group with roots in white supremacist male entitlement.
|
|
In fact, questions about how to meaningfully help men mired in incel culture before they become radicalized or violent reflect larger cultural questions about how we're serving the mental health needs of all men in modern society.
|
|
Women are being killed as a result of saying no to men's advances, and a cornerstone of the fast-growing online "incel," or "involuntary celibate," community is seeking revenge against women believed to have "unfairly" rejected men.
|
|
He insists that he and Serge did not have any "malicious intentions" when starting the suicide forum — and there's no public link between them, the woman who killed herself, or any incel activity on the suicide forum.
|
|
Since then, it's all come to pass, in the form of comparisons between this Joker and others, questions about "incel culture" and mass shootings, and musings on whether the film reflects "society" as it is right now.
|
|
Another poster, who identifies himself as a "25 year old virgin," describes his "massive incel experiment," a complex, years-long plan to transform himself into an attractive man through hair transplants, steroid use, and leg-lengthening surgery.
|
|
But it's also entirely possible that Larson's sites have radicalized some members of the incel community, men who may have started off like Abe or John or Andreas but went all the way down the rabbit hole.
|
|
ReformedIncel and a few other veterans of the early incel forums are assisting with research, trying to recreate the spirit of the original boards and figure out some way to detoxify the internet for sad young men.
|
|
The "incel," or involuntarily celibate, community began as an open-minded support group for men and women with dating troubles — one where people could make virtual friends, commiserate, or work to overcome shyness in the real world.
|
|
On an extremely misogynistic site called PUAHate, the "incel" first took form as a self-deprecating, bitter loner who rejected the idea that self-help mantras — like Reddit's frequent advice to "hit the gym" — could work for him.
|
|
The incel movement was heavily shaped by Elliot Rodger, a young man who killed six people in the town of Santa Barbara in 2014 and wrote a manifesto blaming his attack on women's lack of attention to him.
|
|
What makes the attack different from many other forms of terrorism is that incel isn't an organized militant group united by political or religious beliefs — its main grievance is with women's ability to choose their own sexual partners.
|
|
Like many in the online incel community, the Toronto suspect had praised another woman killer, who murdered several people — including two women outside a sorority house — near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2014.
|
|
Suddenly, Michael realized, he had a proper term for what he now calls his "condition," and when he plugged "incel" into Google, he ended up on subreddits that provided an entire vocabulary around which to order his existence.
|
|
If your online tribe leans feminist, then you probably follow people who have already condemned this bit of incel-ebration, while the reverse will be true for comics superfans who seek to protect their fiefdom from SJW sniping.
|
|
If the change sounds eye-rolly — a little too on-the-nose Gen Z — consider that the messages received by the women are reminiscent of something out of an incel forum or a particularly awful troll's Twitter account.
|
|
The man accused of killing 10 people in a Toronto van attack told police he had communicated with two incel mass killers online, and hoped his attack would inspire a wave of killings by other sexually frustrated misogynists.
|
|
Obviously, the real issue with ideology is that it's not all talk, and it doesn't stay behind a computer screen, like mass shooter Elliot Rodger who killed six people and identified as an incel in his notorious manifesto.
|
|
Members of r/IncelTears, a subreddit for redditors who want to monitor the activities of incels, describe these encounters as frequently ending with the incel member accusing the "normie" of having ulterior motives or wanting to be secretly cruel.
|
|
In April, a young man who'd pledged allegiance on Facebook to the "Incel Rebellion"— a name for an online community dedicated to involuntary celibacy and misogyny — killed 10 people by driving a van down a busy street in Toronto.
|
|
"There is, unfortunately, overlaps and points of connection between the seduction industry and what I would call 'incel ideology'—essentially the idea that women are the guardians of sex, and they are denying this to specific men," O'Neill says.
|
|
The campaign drew attention to simmering toxic masculinity in the online gaming community, and has been described as a precursor to the fomentation of incel or modern men's-rights movements, which are defined by their deep resentment of women.
|
|
As a woman online (and I mean deep in the bowels of Discord and 8chan levels of online), watching the rest of the world Google "what is an incel" in real-time has been a weeks-long atomic cringe.
|
|
What it really is: You'd think that, with /r/incel getting banned for going too far off the virginal reservation with its hatred of women, the nearly identical pluralized version of the sub would dial it back a bit.
|
|
Early reviews of the movie have been varied, with some calling it a "masterpiece" and warranting Oscar buzz while others have said that it too closely mirrors and even empathizes with the deluge of white nationalist and incel terrorism.
|
|
Some of these moderate incels actively police the extremists in their midst; in a sympathetic 2015 profile, the Washington Post's Caitlin Dewey reported that some incel forums were set up to automatically delete any posts referencing the California shooter.
|
|
David Futrelle, a journalist who follows the incel movement on his site We Hunted the Mammoth, took screenshots of some of the most extreme pro-Minassian posts, in which posters call for more "ERs" (attacks like the California shooter's).
|
|
This suggests that there may be a much more direct way to reach members of the incel community, and it's simultaneously much simpler and much harder than anything Douthat proposed, with his brief mentions of sex robots and liberated sex workers.
|
|
Out of all the factors that may be causing members of the community to seek movement away from toxicity, one of the biggest may simply be a growing awareness of how dark the incel rabbit hole is once you're inside it.
|
|
An online suicide forum that the family of a 250-year-old woman recently blamed for her killing herself is run by incels — or "involuntary celibates" — who own several other incel communities online, one of the founders disclosed to BuzzFeed News.
|
|
What's perhaps most revealing about the incel discussion is that no one's talking about the "redistribution of sex" from men to women who can't find sexual partners—plenty of whom are living involuntarily celibate lives, for a wide variety of reasons.
|
|
Although the entire incel community is based in large part on attributing the inability to get laid on some tiny perceived flaw, self-describing as a wrist-cel tends to garner some pushback, because even other incels perceive this as silly.
|
|
It was on the internet — on Facebook, to be exact — that Alek Minassian posted a pledge of allegiance to the "incel rebellion," which refers to the resentments of "involuntarily celibate" men who can't interest the women around them in sex.
|
|
While the incel content was closed this week, some of it has been tracked by a watchdog online community called IncelTears, which posted screenshots of old posts to call out derogatory slurs for women, examples of misogyny and comments justifying rape.
|
|
Currently, she's is trying to resurrect the spirit of the early incel movement: She has founded a new project, called Love Not Anger, that tries to support young people struggling with the unhappiness that can arise from an unfulfilling sex life.
|
|
Minutes before his attack, he posted a message on Facebook lauding the mass murderer Elliot O. Rodger and warned of an "incel rebellion" — a reference to an online community of "involuntarily celibate" men who believe women unjustly deny them sex.
|
|
It's a central part of countless reviews of the movie, which has folks worried that "lonely white boys" with a capacity for violence might relate to Phillips's almost loving portrayal of a character who resembles an incel with a murderous streak.
|
|
Carvin suggests that social outreach programs, focusing on countering the sense of isolation that draws young men to these communities in the first place, might be a better idea than standing up a potential counter-incel task force at the FBI.
|
|
There is significant overlap between the alt-right and incel forum user bases, and it's clear at the very least that the two groups have hit on the same tactic for radicalizing young men: turning a killer into a hero through memeing.
|
|
Online forums, in particular, have given rise to incel, a wannabe subculture in which men blame women for their inability to get laid, fostering toxic misogyny and vehement anti-feminism; many men who identify as incels often wish violence and rape upon women.
|
|
Regal Cinemas has issued a statement that they will be in constant contact with local law enforcement while the U.S. Army had previously notified military personnel to stay alert for potential incel violence linked to characters and their motivations in the film.
|
|
Many other theorists are focused on the cryptic post that appeared on a Facebook page associated with Minassian shortly before the attack which mentioned an "incel rebellion;" they claim the post was the work of 4chan in an attempt to discredit the media.
|
|
Instead of teaching them that their value has nothing to do with their sexual experience — or that they are simply not entitled to sexual attention no matter how badly they want it — "incel" forums tell boys that the real problem is women's freedom.
|
|
Critics who have seen the movie are divided roughly into two camps: Those who praise Phoenix's performance as a Travis Bickle–style virtuoso turn, and those who think Phillips has made a sympathetic movie about narcissistic male violence—about an "incel," perhaps.
|
|
Diagnosing Orsino an early modern "incel" — the term some misogynistic men use online to describe themselves as involuntarily celibate — and handing him a firearm may not square with the text, but it gooses the play's sometimes-narcotizing verse by hitting its grimmer notes.
|
|
Along the way, Ziggy peruses the internet for answers at length, coming across and joining the Red Pill subreddit, an area of the internet that brought us the now-ubiquitous term "incel," and that continues to terrorize feminists and queers, among others.
|
|
When several months later, Alek Minassian drove a van into a busy square in Toronto, killing 10 and injuring 16 in an "incel rebellion," there was more discussion about the violent ways men act on socially reinforced feelings of entitlement to sex.
|
|
Men are flocking to plastic surgeons, and a May 2019 New York Magazine feature chronicled the incel pilgrimage to one Dr. Barry Eppley, the reconstructive surgeon whose talents many men reportedly believe could gift them a better face and thus, a better life.
|
|
In the leadup to the shooting, the gunman posted a video and 24-page xenophobic manifesto on his website, identifying as an incel, pushing for nonwhites to be "completely destroyed," and even pointing fingers at President Donald Trump for stealing his ideas.
|
|
"Posts on social media have made reference to involuntary celibate ('incel') extremists replicating" the shooting "at screenings of the Joker movie at nationwide theaters," according to the notice from Army Materiel Command, which was sent to service members in an email last Wednesday.
|
|
With that in mind, here are some things Rules of the Game actually is: a time capsule, an RPG and strategy guide, a bog-standard self-help book, a pro-magician propaganda document, a catalyst for the incel community, and a short story collection.
|
|
The following are some facts about incel: - On a Facebook account linked to Minassian, a posting praised Elliot Rodger a 22-year-old who killed six people in 2014 in California and who posted YouTube videos saying he was motivated by rage against women.
|
|
In an effort to be supportive, Christian invites Dani on a trip with the guys — exchange student Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), borderline incel, forever vaping Mark (Will Poulter), and fellow anthropologist Josh (William Jackson Harper) — to attend a midsummer folk festival in Pelle's Swedish commune hometown.
|
|
Manne extensively discusses Elliot Rodger, the angry young incel who, in 2014, killed six people and injured 14 others in a shooting near Santa Barbara, an act that he explained as the result of his rage at having been sexually rejected throughout his life.
|
|
He also left a trail of internet posts suggesting his motivation had to do with his status as an "incel," or involuntary celibate — a label adopted by men who are unable to form sexual relationships with women, and who often respond with virulent misogyny.
|
|
Where there's room today for open marriage, polyamory and apps that can yield instant sexual gratification with zero emotional investment, we witness the rise of seduction's antithesis: violent "incel" culture, in which involuntarily celibate young men — fueled by the online manosphere — kill people. Why?
|
|
What leads individuals to identify so powerfully as one thing ("white" or "liberal" or "incel") or with one group that they forget how to identify with fellow humans in other ways (as a parent, a sports fan, a jazz lover, a person of faith)?
|
|
A post on Minassian's Facebook page posted minutes before the van attack unfolded cited an "incel rebellion," and appeared to pledge allegiance to Elliot Rodger, the young man who killed six people and wounded others in a shooting spree in California in 2014 before killing himself.
|
|
Soph's scripts, which she says she writes with a collaborator, are familiar: a mix of hatred toward Muslims, anti-black racism, Byzantine fearmongering about pedophilia, tissue-thin incel evolutionary psychology, and reflexive misanthropy that could have been copied and pasted from a thousand different 4chan posts.
|
|
Fifty years later, the closest we have to widespread men's consciousness-raising sessions are in the annals of incel subreddits, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) forums, and YouTube comment threads under Jordan Peterson videos—many of them oozing with anger, resentment, and sometimes violence towards women.
|
|
People posting in incel-identified spaces say many, many things, including demanding the "rape count" of other men as a form of competition, and asking for solidarity in their dreams of committing mass murder because they have not gotten off as much as they had hoped.
|
|
The Interpreter The recent mass killing in Toronto by a man who once called for an "Incel Rebellion" has drawn attention to an online community of men who lament being "involuntarily celibate" and dream of a social order granting them access to the women of their choice.
|
|
"Posts on social media have made reference to involuntary celibate ('incel') extremists replicating" the shooting "at screenings of the Joker movie at nationwide theaters," according to the notice from Army Materiel Command, which was sent to service members in an email last month, Gizmodo first reported.
|
|
Minassian said he considered the Isla Vista killer, who framed his violence as an act of revenge against women for sexually rejecting him, as the "founding forefather" of the incel movement, and said his 2014 mass killing had inspired him to carry out his own attack.
|
|
Self-identified incel Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured 85033 others near the University of California, Santa Barbara campus in 2014, and Nikolas Cruz — who allegedly killed 17 people and injured 17 others last year's shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
|
|
Despite Reddit banning the main "incel" community in November for its violently misogynistic rhetoric, adherents have found new homes elsewhere on the site that effectively serve the same purpose: providing a sense of belonging for guys whose identity is constructed around the fact that they aren't sexually active.
|
|
We could talk about Eve; we could talk about property and voting rights; we could talk about forced sterilization; we could talk about Audre Lorde, or the incel movement, or Jeff Sessions' recent legislation barring victims of domestic and gang violence from attaining political asylum in our country.
|
|
While many reviewers have focused on Fleck as an "incel" hero -- his status as a sexless loner who turns to violence -- the true nature of the movie's appeal is actually broader: It's an insidious validation of the white-male resentment that helped bring President Donald Trump to power.
|
|
David Ehrlich of Indiewire called it "a toxic rallying cry for self-pitying incels," invoking the term for involuntarily celibate young men that jumped from the saddest corners of the internet to popular parlance in 2014, when a self-described incel killed six people in Santa Barbara, Calif.
|
|
"Posts on social media have made reference to involuntary celibate ('incel') extremists replicating" the shooting "at screenings of the Joker movie at nationwide theaters," according to the notice from Army Materiel Command, which was sent to service members in an email to service members last month, Gizmodo first reported.
|
|
These are the victims of the far-right mass shooting in Germany, including a pregnant mother, and 22-year-old who just finished studyingThe mass shooter who killed 9 in Germany published a racist manifesto where he identified as an incel and accused Trump of stealing his populist slogans
|
|
READ MORE: How the incel community is reckoning with the Toronto van attack Online message boards have also been under scrutiny following a recent string of white supremacist terror attacks in which the killers used the forum to post claims of responsibility and urge others to follow suit.
|
|
" When asked about the Toronto van attacks, Peterson suggested that the real solution to incel violence is some form of "enforced monogamy"—the exact mechanisms of which remain unclear, though in an attempted clarification posted on his website he insists it wouldn't involve the "arbitrary dealing out of damsels to incels.
|
|
The man who confessed to driving a van into a crowd of pedestrians on a busy Toronto sidewalk in April 2018 told police he wanted to spark an "uprising" after being inspired by incel ideology online and real-life violence perpetrated by men who harbor a deep-seated hatred for women.
|
|
CELIA RABINOWITZ KEENE, N.H. To the Editor: The whole time I was reading Adam Kirsch's essay on Michel Houellebecq (July 15), I was waiting for some sort of condemnation — not even of the author (rife with his own controversies, not limited to misogyny), but at least of the "incel" mentality.
|
|
"ADL considers misogyny a dangerous and underestimated component of extremism, and this report marks the start of an ongoing effort to investigate the ways in which people in the white supremacist, incel and [men's rights activism] orbits feed and inform one another's poisonous hatred of women," the ADL said in the report.
|
|
It has found its greatest purchase among a certain type of basement-dwelling incel edgelord, to whom it offers both an explanation for self-pitying personal circumstance and a set of convenient antagonists (roughly, the blame falls on race-betraying, sexually empowered women; immigrants; and the Jews said to control the whole system).
|
|
We also covered all the details on a bunch of new hardware Amazon showed off, why Netflix is struggling amid what feels like a million other streaming services, the history of the seven deadly sins, and how the U.S. military prepared for the possibility of incel uprisings as Joker screenings began this week.
|
|
The incel community is notorious for rampant misogyny, violent rhetoric, and fatalistic attitudes toward modern relationships — attitudes that frequently serve as a gateway to the alt-right — but it's also rife with depression, a nihilistic communal celebration of low self-esteem, and a widespread resistance to seeking therapy and getting treatment for mental illness.
|
|
First off, those who really picked it up and ran with it were members of the incel "looksmaxing" subculture—as per a 2018 VICE article: "The practice of trying to enhance one's appearance via methods ranging from buying nicer clothes to gym training to radical facial reconstruction through surgery"—desperate to get a square jaw.
|
|
According to ABC News, the film, co-written by Phillips (famous for helming bro comedies like The Hangover and Old School) and Scott Silver (already Oscar bait due to his 2011 Best Original Screenplay nod for The Fighter), has given rise to a subset of the incel population called "clowncels," per an FBI intelligence bulletin obtained by ABC News.
|
|
Photo: Getty ImagesAlek Minassian, the 22015-year-old man accused of killing 28255 people with a rented Ryder van in Toronto on April 23, 2018, told police that he's an involuntary celibate (incel) and that he was radicalized online through websites like Reddit and 4Chan, according to a police interrogation that took place shortly after the attack.
|
|
While being interrogated by Detective Rob Thomas hours after the attack, Minassian revealed that he frequently posted on incel — or involuntarily celibate — forums online, where men who believe they're entitled to sex and affection from women express their misogynistic views, complain about sexual rejection and having to compete with so-called alpha males, and threaten violence against women.
|
|
Men who say they're unable to find a sexual partner have committed multiple violent attacks under the banner of the "incel rebellion," while others have voluntarily abstained from sex and porn for a variety of reasons, whether they think "semen retention" will give them special powers or because they believe porn is a massive Jewish conspiracy.
|
|
Read: These racist robo-calls are targeting Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum ahead of the midterms And most recently, on Saturday – one day before Trump's back-to-back rallies in Macon – a man who engaged with nationalist and misogynistic or "Incel" content online opened fire on a yoga class in Tallahassee, leaving two dead and five injured.
|
|
The community of "involuntarily celibate" men on Reddit's r/incels subreddit has long been one of the internet's darkest underbellies: teeming with violent misogyny, it's a space where its members dramatically perform victimization at the hands of the women who've rejected them, members who view Santa Barbara shooter Elliot Rodger, a self-identified incel himself, as a hero.
|
|
But what I am surprised by—and frankly shocked by—is how many mainstream commentators have concluded that the best way to deal with incel terrorism—and terrorism is what it is—is by giving in to their absurd demands, as though the violence would stop if these hateful young men were somehow supplied with what they insist they need and deserve: sex.
|
|
The common understanding is that incel anger stems grow out of their perception that they do not receive the sexual gratification they are entitled to by virtue of their place on the social pyramid, largely because feminism and the sexual revolution and multiculturalism and cultural Marxism and blah blah have encouraged women and minorities to usurp the natural order of things.
|
|
Commenting on the recent terrorist violence in Toronto, in which a self-identified "incel" — that is, involuntary celibate — man sought retribution against women and society for denying him the fornication he felt that he deserved, Hanson offered this provocation: If we are concerned about the just distribution of property and money, why do we assume that the desire for some sort of sexual redistribution is inherently ridiculous?
|
|
READ: A lit fuse — how a far-right bombing campaign terrorized a German town Peter Neumann, director of London's International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, tweeted that he had read the gunman's letter, in which he called for the extermination of various ethnic groups, expressed eugenicist views and revealed himself to be an "incel" who had never been in a relationship with a woman.
|
|
Other terms used by incels include "truecel", referring to someone who has never had sex or been in a relationships despite trying; "mentalcel", someone whose mental health or insecurities has contributed to their inability to have sex or a relationship; "volcel", someone who is voluntarily abstinent for whatever reason; and "fakecel", someone who falsely claims to be an incel but has had sex or been in a relationship.
|
|
There was a van attack that happened in Toronto a little while ago--a man drove through a crowd, he killed ten people, he was possibly motivated by misogyny, he made some Facebook comments about the incel movement--which stands for involuntarily celibate--so there are these links to men's rights activist groups, white supremacist groups, Toronto and a lot of active hate crimes that are happening up here.
|
|
Veronica's a judgy person by nature, and her disdain toward Max's girlfriend Wendy gets nicely questioned by the framing here, so I think part of the episode works — but Wendy herself is a cardboard cutout of a character and her story is verging on a cliché, and Max is the kind of character who would 093 percent be portrayed as an incel if this episode were written in 2019.
|
|
Songs like "Incel Warfare" and "The Fetishization ov Asian Women Despite a Demand for a Pure White Race (Outro)" illustrate the collective's masterful grasp on the trope-filled subcultures of underground neo-fascist black metal and 4chan-based "SJW-triggering" internet trolls; their thunderous disdain for those who dwell at the crux of that Cheeto-dusted realm is a balm to the soul of anyone who's witnessed this particular strain of edgelord scum in action.
|
|
S. Military Issues Warning to Troops About Incel Violence at Joker Screenings [Updated]The U.S. military has warned service members about the potential for a mass shooter at screenings…Read more ReadThe Lighthouse Is a Manic, Weird Film and We Loved ItIf watching Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe fuck with each other for two hours in black and white …Read more ReadSome of Disenchantment Part 2&aposs Coolest Teasers, Nods, and Easter EggsDisenchantment is a different type of Matt Groening show.
|
|
Jessica Kiang, The Playlist And here is what is even more frightening than Phoenix' hacking cackle, or the moments of gruesome bloodiness, or the portrait of a society teetering on the brink of breakdown: "Joker," based on recognisable IP and now given the seal of critical and possible awards-consideration approval too, is so aesthetically impressive, effective and persuasive of its own reality that you see clearly how easily it could be (mis)interpreted and co-opted by the very 4Chan/Incel/"mentally ill loner" element it purports to darkly satirize.
|
|
Examples from the past two years include the threat of a mass shooting at a major public university because the university hosted Gamergate enemy Anita Sarkeesian; the many pro-rape statements made on PUA hubs and social media accounts by prominent pickup artists like the notorious internet troll Roosh V, who bragged about committing rape; and finally, the 2014 mass stabbing and shooting of six UC Santa Barbara students by Elliot Rodger, a man who fortified his misogyny and sense of alienation via the incel communities he frequented online.
|
|