Incels and Misogyny

Incels is the portmanteau of Involuntary Celibates. They are primarily young men furious about being excluded from romantic and sexual relations with women. Perhaps surprisingly, the movement wasn’t inaugurated by frustrated young men. In fact, the term was coined in 1993 when a Canadian woman calling herself ‘Alana’ launched the ‘Involuntary Celibacy Project’ online. Four years later, she introduced a mailing list for people interested in addressing the problems associated with not being in a romantic or sexual relationship. By the time she discontinued the website in 2000, her benign, self-help movement had been annexed by angry young men, who claimed that their physical unattractiveness and relative financial impoverishment meant that they were spurned by women. Incels have come to public awareness by the multiple murders committed by Elliott Rodger (2014), Chris Harper Mercer (2015), and Alex Minassian (2018).  

Although most self-identified incels are non-violent,[1] they flourish in a highly misogynistic and homophobic manosphere. They are incredibly diverse, but share an ideology that denigrates women (typically dehumanized as ‘foids’ or female humanoids) and insists on men’s entitlement to women’s bodies. They claim that women are only interested in LMS, or Love, Money, and Status.

The great enemy of inceldom is feminism. Incels argue that, by encouraging women’s self-esteem, increasingly their independence, and insisting on sexual autonomy, feminism has stripped men of their rightful power. Crucially, their hatred of women derives not from a sense of male supremacy, but rather male subordination or victimhood. As scholar Sara Brzuszkiewicz put it,

With incels, instead of hating women from a position of alleged superiority, hatred derives from a position of perceived inferiority [of ‘Beta’ men], since they believe that all levers of sexuality are controlled by women.[2]

She points out that Incels ‘distance themselves from hegemonic masculinity while simultaneously reproducing it through their nostalgic narratives of a utopian pre-feminist past’.[3]

They also despise Alpha males, known as ‘Chads’ who have sex with ‘Stacys’, that is, allegedly stupid and promiscuous women who reject ‘Beta’ males, who lack dominant, ‘alpha’ characteristics such as obvious masculinity, power, and a ‘sporty’ persona. Incels often believe that it is pointless attempting to attract women since they will inevitably choose Alpha males over themselves, thus inflicting further emotional injury. The highest level of incels are KTHHFV, or kissless, touchless, hugless, handholdless, friendless, and virgin, and there is much disdain for ‘fakecels’ or men who are voluntarily celibate.[4]

Incels draw on concepts taken from the 1999 film ‘The Matrix’ in which Neo is offered two pills: a blue one which will allow him to be happy but ignorant of the ‘real world’ and a red one that reveals the truth. Incels are ‘Red Pilled’, that is, they have been enlightened about the reality of gendered relations. Those who are ‘Black Pilled’ take this further by accepting inceldom as a permanent status. For them, ‘it’s over…. It never began’.[5] Amongst many other pills is the ‘Rape Pill’, taken by ‘rapecels’ who believe that because women are easily swayed by ‘love’ from Chads, rapecels have a right to use force.[6] For rapecels, women can only be coerced into sex with them because women are irrational and only respond to brutal submission. Misogyny is posited as a legitimate response to being emasculated by women.  

Many incels engage in cyber-bullying and trolling of women online, often using platforms like 4chan, 8chan, Reddit, and X. They often threaten women with rape. Indeed, incels routinely deny that rape actually exist, insisting either that women are always ‘asking for it’ or that women use accusations of rape as part of their emasculating agenda. Their hated of women is overwhelming. They believe women should always be sexually available to men but castigate sexually liberated women as ‘sluts’. Women in well-paid employment are ‘taking men’s jobs’ or ‘castrators’; while those who dedicate their labour to domestic sphere are ‘gold-diggers’. If a woman wears make-up, she is attempting to ‘trap’ men; but, if she does not, she is ‘letting herself go’.

Myth and fairytale narratives play a major, albeit masked, role in the rhetoric of incels. They adhere to a ‘Beauty and the Beast’ narrative, populated by innocent young men and monstrous women.  Men, who are assumed to be owed affection and the domestic as well as sexual labour of women in order to confirm their status as desirable mates, are foiled by women who refuse to play their naturally ordained role in a patriarchal order. In the words of Shannan Palma, ‘There are natural princes – the alpha males – and there are beta males who use manipulation or the lure of wealth to get women into bed. And then there are incels, men whose physiognomy precludes alpha-male status and relegates them to the status of beasts without the hope of a Beauty’.[7] Palma contends that

According to black-pill reasoning, these men [incels] will never triumph by following the traditional gendered happiness script. It is useless for them to try. Women will not allow them to succeed. The potential for violence crystallizes in fairy-tale logic when the only way to move one’s story forward is to punish the villain.[8]

Incels don’t exist in isolation. They are part of a broader network of male supremacy known as the manosphere where a sense of aggrieved masculinity flourishes. The term for this is gynocracy, or the establishment of a social system organised to systematically disadvantage men. As Michael Kimmel explains in Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, the grievance stems from the belief that they have permanently loss the social and economic privileges that they, as men, are entitled to.[9] The manosphere is important because it brings together a daunting range of different communities: pick-up artists, incels, men’s rights, father’s rights, misogynists, white supremacists and other right-wing extremists. They resent the existence of women who act as though they are autonomous agents, instead of accepting their subordination to white men.

There are minority versions of the manosphere, most notably the MRAsians or Men’s Rights Asians, who claim to be responding to the feminization and desexualization of Asian men in American society.[10] Believing themselves to be the most disadvantaged racial, gendered, and social class in contemporary America, their chief victims are Asian American feminists, who they regard as emasculating them. They are inspired by the writings of Frank Chin, a playwright and the ‘founder’ of MRAsians movement, who argues that the ‘true’ Asian American is ‘non-Christian, nonfeminine, and nonimmigrant’.[11] He espouses a hypermasculine ethnonationalism. A central tenet of MRAsianism is the need for greater visibility as masculine and therefore sexually desirable and, most importantly, dominant. In contrast, MRAsians resent the perceived sexual desirability of Asian American women and believe that the power that this gives women is both unfair and humiliating. The ‘race-caste system’ is leading to the extinction of Asian American men because Asian American women suffer from racial self-hatred by preferring white sexual partners rather than them. Asian women are ‘race traitors’. As this implied, MRAsians are hostile to white men leading some sections of MRAsians to disparage the manosphere more widely, on the grounds that it is ‘white supremacist’ and cannot acknowledge that Asian American men are victimized more than other men. As Chris Jesu Lee put it in ‘What If Asian Men Fall to the Alt-Right?’, ‘We will inevitably be tagged as sexists, racists, or some permutation of the alt-right. That only means we are on the right track’.[12]

In order to understand such movements, we need to place them within the context of conspiracy theories and cultural paranoia more generally. The threats to the white, male subject come from the usurpation of power by women, especially feminist ones, as well as sexual, gendered, and racialized ‘others’ who have benefitted from ‘diversity initiatives’.  The debate has seen a revival of eugenics, racist population science, and social Darwinism, in which competition and men’s survival itself – notably, the ‘survival of the fittest’ – are loudly trumpeted. The paranoia is fuelled by four narratives, according to Casey Ryan Kelly in Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood (2020):

The white man has been duped and doped into unthinkingly accepting the simulated reality created by progressive feminist narratives; this false reality makes it impossible for white men to recognize their estrangement from each other and their victimhood; by shocking and raising the consciousness of white men, the manosphere helps them see the bleak but true reality of their existence; together in cyberspace, and eventually irl, white men will be a liberated multitude that will ‘overthrow the evil autocratic rule of feminism’.[13]

Social media is crucial in the rise of the manosphere. According to one estimate, the loosely connected sites and messageboards that make up the manosphere engages around 1.5 million users.[14] Lisa Sugiura has rightly called their forums ‘networked misogyny’.[15] Indeed, they would not exist without online forums and chat rooms. It offers a safe and relatively cheap (anyone with a computer or smart phone) place where people with extreme views can meet to discuss their fears and responses to the forces ‘oppressing’ them. Because participants can invent anonymous profiles, use pseudonyms, or create avatars, they are freed from many of the usual social constraints on their behaviour. Other important affordances include algorithms that curate what is visible (often pushing users to more extreme opinions), giving voice (allowing users to express their views through self-publishing posts, thus avoiding traditional gatekeepers, who have themselves been accused of discriminating against ‘men’), metavoicing (that is, the amplification of posts through ‘likes’ or retweeting), and association (allowing geographically or socially distant people to connect with each other, which helps create a strong sense of a ‘mass movement’).[16] Numerous scholars have pointed out that such forums provide an ‘echo chamber’, meaning that participants are only exposed to the views of likeminded people: critique is absent; participants come to feel that they are part of a larger movement. In other words, these online platforms have in-built design that can be used to facilitate anti-feminist ideas. The forums are important in creating community, venting anger, and countering feelings of isolation. By favouring emotional extremism and conflict, the online manosphere is an effective conduit for a politics of free-floating anxiety, even panic. The result is violence, both online and in-person, as an attempt to recoup control and power.

Trump was able to effectively ‘speak to’ the manosphere with his promise of ‘Making America Great again’. This has been explained by Casey Ryan Kelly who contends that MAGA ‘hailed a melancholic subject beseeched by an intoxicating fantasy of return to an imaginary past before feminism, the Black freedom struggle, and queer activism fundamentally questioned cisgender heterosexual white men’s primacy in all aspects of public and private life’.[17]

[1] Anne Speckhard, Molly Ellenberg, Jesse Morton, and Alexander Ash, ‘Involuntary Celibates’ Experiences of and Grievance Over Sexual Exclusion and the Potential Threat of Violence Among Those Active in an Online Incel Forum’, Journal of Strategic Security, 14.2 (2021), 89.

[2] Sara Brzuszkiewicz, Incel Radical Milieu and External Locus of Control, (The Hague: International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, November 2020), 5.

[3] Sara Brzuszkiewicz, Incel Radical Milieu and External Locus of Control, (The Hague: International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, November 2020), 5.

[4] Sara Brzuszkiewicz, Incel Radical Milieu and External Locus of Control, (The Hague: International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, November 2020), 3.

[5] Sara Brzuszkiewicz, Incel Radical Milieu and External Locus of Control, (The Hague: International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, November 2020), 6.

[6] Sara Brzuszkiewicz, Incel Radical Milieu and External Locus of Control, (The Hague: International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, November 2020), 7.

[7] Shannan Palma, ‘Entitled to a Happy Ending: Fairy-Tale Logic from “Beauty and the Beast” to the Incel Movement’, Marvels and Tales, 33.2 (2019), 323.

[8] Shannan Palma, ‘Entitled to a Happy Ending: Fairy-Tale Logic from “Beauty and the Beast” to the Incel Movement’, Marvels and Tales, 33.2 (2019), 333.

[9] Michael Kimmel, Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era.

[10] Angela Liu, ‘MRAsians: A Convergence between Asian American Hypermasculine Ethnonationalism and the Manosphere’, Journal of Asian American Studies, 24.1 (February 2021), 93-112.

[11] Angela Liu, ‘MRAsians: A Convergence between Asian American Hypermasculine Ethnonationalism and the Manosphere’, Journal of Asian American Studies, 24.1 (February 2021), 96.

[12] Angela Liu, ‘MRAsians: A Convergence between Asian American Hypermasculine Ethnonationalism and the Manosphere’, Journal of Asian American Studies, 24.1 (February 2021), 99.

[13] Casey Ryan Kelly, Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020), summarised in Frida Beckman, ‘Paranoid Masculinity, Or, Toward a New Identity Politics’, sympoke, 29.1-2 (2021), 242.

[14] Manoel Horta Ribeiro et al, ‘From Pick-Up Artists to Incels: A Data-Driven Sketch of the Manosphere’, (2020), at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.07600v1.

[15] Lisa Sugiura, cited in Amelia Tait, ‘Rise of the Women Haters: Inside the Dark World of the British Incels”’, The Telegraphy (18 August 2018), at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/rise-women-haters-inside-dark-world-british-incels/.

[16] For discussions, see Malin Holm, ‘Beyond Antifeminist Discourses: Analyzing How Material and Social Factors Shape Online Resistance to Feminist Politics’, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, States, and Society, 30.2 (summer 2023), 422-43.

[17]  Casey Ryan Kelly, Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020), 2.