"Clickbait", misogyny, the internet and Incel

Jason Wilson reporting for the Guardian Wed 25 Apr 2018

Shortly before a rented van ploughed into a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto, killing 10 and wounding 14 others, a short and cryptic message was posted on the Facebook account of Alek Minassian, the man accused of carrying out the attack. The post referred to another mass killer – Elliot Rodger, who shot dead six people and wounded 13 others in Isla Vista, California, in 2014 – and said that the “incel rebellion has already begun. We will overthrow all the Chads and the Stacys”.

Incel stands for “involuntary celibate”, and the people who identify with the label are almost exclusively male. On incels.me, the subculture’s leading online forum, an incel is described as someone who “can’t have sex despite wanting to”, and is thus also denied the pleasures of relationships. (In incel lingo, sexually successful men are known as “Chads”, and attractive women are called “Stacys”).

Self-identified incels have used the internet to find anonymous support and develop an ideology whose central belief is that the modern world is unfairly stacked against awkward or unattractive heterosexual men. Incel websites argue that society is set up so that some men have numerous sexual partners, others have none and women get to take their pick in what is often described as a “sexual marketplace”.

Such theories are often buttressed with half-understood theories about evolution, psychology and genetics. And at their heart is a belief that denying men sex is unjust.

At the webpage margin The Guardian provides a link from this news story to an investigation into Reddit. and modern misogyny.

Stephen Marche writes (Thu 14 Apr 2016) in The web we want - Gender page:

Swallowing the Red Pill: a journey to the heart of modern misogyny

How shitty are men really? The question hung in the air, invisible but omnipresent, like the smell of a garbage fire from a nearby town. By 2016, a series of catchphrases had come to dominate the chaotic state of gender politics – “male privilege”, “rape culture”, “men’s rights” – but confusion reigned. And in the middle of this confusion, a group of anonymous men retreated to The Red Pill, an online community hosted on Reddit, to revel in their loathing.

The name derives from a scene in the 1999 film The Matrix, in which Laurence Fishburne offers Keanu Reeves a choice: “You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

The rabbit hole, in this case, is the “reality” that women run the world without taking responsibility for it, and that their male victims are not permitted to complain. This makes The Red Pill a continuous, multi-voiced, up-to-the-minute male complaint nestled at the heart of the so-called manosphere – a network of websites preoccupied with both the men’s rights movement and how to pick up women.

The woman who coined the term ‘involuntary celibate’ says she intended it as a community for lonely people, and is shocked by its misogynistic turn, as reported in this story.

Ashifa Kassam in Toronto (Thu 26 Apr 2018)

This week the movement that eventually grew out of that term burst into public view, after a man ploughed into a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto, killing 10 people and wounding 14 others.

Minutes before the attack, the suspect allegedly posted a short, cryptic message celebrating the “Incel Rebellion”, according to police in Canada.

The connection left the woman who invented the term reeling“It’s not a happy feeling,” said Alana, who asked that her last name not be published. “It feels like being the scientist who figured out nuclear fission and then discovers it’s being used as a weapon for war.”

A self-described late bloomer, she coined the term involuntary celibate in the late 1990s to describe her own experience of not having sex and not being in a relationship.

Soon after her social life began to blossom and she handed off the site to someone she didn’t know. It would be years before she would hear the term incel again – this time as she was browsing through an issue of Mother Jones in a bookstore.

The magazine had covered the story of Elliot Rodger, who in 2014 killed six people and wounded 14 others in California. In online posts that raged at women for rejecting his romantic advances, Rodger had described himself as an incel.

“Holy shit,” Alana thought. “Look what I started.”

The term – and the friendly community of lonely people she had once fostered – had morphed into a deeply misogynistic online subculture that at times called for rape or other violence. Thousands were now on incel forums, united in their belief that the modern world is unfairly stacked against heterosexual men who are awkward or unattractive.

The term incel catapulted back into the headlines this week – this time closer to home for Alana. Toronto police said a Facebook page belonging to Alek Minassian, the accused in the Toronto van attack, appeared to connect him to incels.