It’s about their proprietary violence
The CBC points out that men who think they are owed sexual access to women are a large and threatening group. Quite a few of them are murderous.
Involuntary celibates or incels are an online brotherhood of men who say they are unsuccessful in their romantic attempts with women.
Romantic attempts? Sexual attempts, mostly. They want access a lot more than they want cozy evenings in front of the fireplace.
Incels interact in forums online, like 4chan, Reddit and a few public incel boards, and even on popular social media platforms including Facebook and YouTube. They often express extreme feelings of misogyny and hatred.
In the worst cases, their online misogyny turns to violent fantasies, where many online encourage rape, violence and in some cases, killing.
Experts interviewed by The Fifth Estate have identified 120 instances of extreme violence in Canada by right-wing groups, including incels, in the past 30 years. This is compared to only seven by Islamist-inspired extremists.
There is some overlap though, which is interesting. Islamists are also very focused on getting total control over women.
“It’s about their proprietary violence, that they think they have some sort of inborn inherent right and privilege to access women and women’s bodies and so that is the bit that animates them,” Barbara Perry, a criminologist specializing in hate crime at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, told The Fifth Estate.
I’ve known a few men who did think exactly that. It’s not unusual.
The term “incel” gained more prominence in 2014, when a 22-year-old man in Isla Vista, Calif. killed six people and injured 14 others before killing himself. It was discovered Elliot Rodger had an extensive online presence, including a series of YouTube videos he made and posted — reuploading as they were banned and removed.
He also left behind a 137-page manifesto he wrote titled “My Twisted World.” The last video he posted was called “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution.”
“Tomorrow is the day of retribution — a day of which I will have my revenge against all of humanity,” Rodger said in one video. “I will slaughter every single spoiled stuck-up blonde slut…. You will finally see I’m the superior one. The true alpha male.”
Like Revenge of the Nerds but with guns.
Elliot Rodger was an inspiration to Alek Minassian.
In the past four years, there have been several killings by people who either self-identified as incels or who mentioned incel-related names and writings in their internet postings.
Nikolas Cruz, the man who is charged with killing 17 people and attempting to kill 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., last year, praised Rodger online, saying “Elliot Rodger will not be forgotten.”
On Oct. 1, 2015, Chris Harper-Mercer killed nine people and injured eight others in a shooting at the Umpqua Community College campus in Roseburg, Ore., before killing himself. Harper-Mercer posted online about being involuntarily celibate.
All because women are not a public utility like water, but autonomous human beings with their own choices and plans.
The Fifth Estate spent months infiltrating incel forums to get a sense of what goes on in these dark corners of the internet. Self-proclaimed incels often blame society and their genetics for not being successful in romantic endeavours. Using the term “involuntary,” experts say, indicates that incels have little self-awareness.
Incels believe women owe them sex, and in some cases people active on incel forums advocate for government-sanctioned girlfriends and sexual encounters.
Here’s a quick tip: government-sanctioned girlfriends are not actually girlfriends. Slavery and friendship are quite different things, even opposite things.
It’s great to see the problem being addressed (at last). Telling, though, isn’t it, how little attention it’s gotten? The incel community has been around for years, and they’ve acted out their murderous fantasies more than once, but mainstream media rarely discuss them, criminologists have dismissed them, and skepticbros scoff at the notion that the killers they’ve spawned were anything more than mentally ill lone wolves.
It’s almost as if there were a sort of overarching attitude of male entitlement to control over women and access to women’s bodies, one that’s been around for a long time. But what am I saying? Males? Women’s bodies!?
I’ll be in my room checking myself.
The most worrying part of all is that there are several very large communities, which consider themselves almost entirely distinct and yet they overlap on… no, I don’t want to spoil it for you. You’ll never guess.
Really? “I can’t fuck you so I hate you”? WTF??
GIANT METEOR–WHERE ARE YOU?
Oh yes. I’m a lifelong nerd and don’t get out much, but even I have known a good many men who see it exactly that way. “If you say no to me you’re a bitch.” It’s just that complicated.
Much easier to lash out at others than to do the hard work (and likely therapy) necessary to become a decent human being. Far easier to say that (and maybe go off on a shooting/driving/killing spree) than to admit to oneself that you just might be an entitled asshole.
Incels are a regular target of David Futrelle at We Hunted The Mammoth, and whenever I’ve read his posts about them I’ve come away with the feeling that for most their celibacy is not involuntary at all, it’s the inevitable consequence of a combination of their sense of entitlement, their vile misogenistic fantasies, and their completely unrealistic demands and expectations when talking of the women (or girls) they believe they deserve and indeed should be allocated to them by law.
The ‘acceptable’ women must be some or most of the following; under 25 (no specific minimum age but it seems that at least they require a girl to have started regular menstruation; white or at a push East Asian (obedience trained, y’see); minimum 6/10 score for looks; not a feminist or liberal; preferably virgin but definitely no more than one-or-two previous sexual partners; not overweight (nobody over a US size 10); must not have children; absolutely no black former sexual partners; educated to high school level at most; totally compliant and subservient to the man.
That list is by no means exhaustive, and is only the requirements for a woman to have sex with, so what they would expect of a long-term partner is anyone’s guess.
AoS, I haven’t checked out the Incel types for a while. Last time I did I was left with such a negative basket of emotions I haven’t been inclined to do more than write them off as both dangerous and deluded, while at the same time pathetic. Your partial list is a pretty good start. Frankly the whole bunch need to be knocked into a cess pit by a smack around the head with a week old haddock.
Ophelia, are you suggesting that women are actually people? Gasp!
Hmm, last I checked, the true alpha males actually ends up leading the pack. The dipshit actually ended up dead. By his own hand. Too bad he didn’t start the rampage with himself. As for involuntary in incel? Ain’t nothing involuntary about it. More like inept, incompetent, inactive, inadaptible, inadvertent, inane, etc. And voluntarily so.
These mooks are utterly invested in pop-psych notions of ‘natural’ patriarchy. They very system that marginalizes the majority of young men while showering financial and social rewards on the Trumps and Kavanaughs of the world.
All that fury, steered away from the actual institutions and individuals that are ‘winning’ the system of class and sex hatred. The interwebs have harvested a generation of ignorant, unsocial, foot-soldiers for the Far Right.