*Editorial note: this piece contains references to suicidal ideation, false rape accusations,  body image issues, and violence against women*

I was fifteen years old when the news broke about Elliot Rodger: on 23 May 2014 the twenty-two-year old killed six people and injured fourteen others in Isla Vista, California. During his rampage he stabbed three men to death in his apartment, attempted to break into a sorority house, shot three women and another male student, and drove through Isla Vista, shooting at pedestrians and striking several others with his car until he finally shot himself in the head. I read the news as it happened – “Suspect in California rampage blamed aloof women”, read one headline – and watched the footage from the video Rodger had uploaded to YouTube earlier that day. In the video, “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution”, Rodger outlined his motives for the planned attacks: “For the last eight years of my life, ever since I hit puberty, I’ve been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection and unfulfilled desires all because girls have never been attracted to me […] I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. I can’t wait to give you exactly what you deserve. Utter annihilation.” Rodger self-identified as an ‘incel’ online – a term which has grown in popularity in the last number of years – and his motivations were fuelled by the ideology of this group.

 

I remember the horror I felt watching the seven-minute video, his chilling monologue punctuated by bursts of laughter. Until then my experience of misogyny consisted of ‘get back in the kitchen’ jokes from male classmates or getting catcalled. These experiences filled me with anger and shame, and I knew that these everyday experiences of sexism weren’t okay. But until that moment I had never heard a man speak so plainly of his hatred for women. What I didn’t know was that Rodger was not alone. That he was part of a group that promotes extreme misogyny, racism, self-loathing, and violence. I also didn’t know that one of my friends would end up becoming one of them. 

 

Incel is a portmanteau for ‘involuntary celibate’. Incels share the ‘Red Pill’ worldview with the rest of the manosphere – pickup artists, men’s rights activists, and the voluntary celibate community known as Men Going Their Own Way, abbreviated as MGTOW. This is a metaphor derived from The Matrix, and in this context taking the ‘Red Pill’ means becoming aware of the reality that feminism has given women too much power and that this is to the detriment of men. These groups use a lot of the same terminology, much of which has become mainstream due to memes online, such as ‘Chad’ (a sexually active and conventionally attractive male), ‘Stacy’ (an attractive but shallow woman who only dates Chads), and they have an obsession with their place in the alpha-beta-omega hierarchy attributed to wolves, though ironically this has since been widely debunked in studies of wild wolf packs.

 

 The majority of modern incels are heterosexual men, and are predominantly white, which is notable given the echoes of so-called ‘race science’ evident in the incel belief system – namely the shared belief in the importance of bone structure and skull shape in determining intrinsic characteristics of certain groups. For many years the belief that certain races were intellectually inferior was justified by eugenicists and so-called ‘scientists’ by pointing at the shape of a skull and explaining that it’s just nature, there’s nothing that can be done to change it. This form of thinking informs incel views about love and celibacy, with many obsessing over the cut of their jawlines or the girth of their wrists, and blaming their involuntary celibacy on these fixed physical features. There are some subsections of the community, such as Incels Without Hate, that act as a support group where self-improvement tips are shared and constructive advice is given. However, for the majority of the movement, they believe that there is nothing that can be done. For incels the most shameful thing you can do is have hope that things will improve, and those who express any optimism about their chances of having a romantic relationship, or ‘ascent’, are labelled ‘hopecels’. They are the lowest of the low. Posts on the forum Incels.Co are regularly marked as ‘Suicide Fuel’ and ‘BlackPill’ and are intended to drive members to suicide. This is a seemingly logical conclusion for them, since hopelessness is the logical conclusion of the black pill worldview. One’s possibility of happiness is determined by the genetics of height, frame, and facial bone structure, and if you don’t have these gifts then there’s no way out.

 

For many people it is difficult to understand why anyone would subscribe to this bleak worldview. I have suffered from depression throughout my life, and I know how easy it is to fall into a spiral of self-loathing and hopelessness. The idea that you are doomed to a life of loneliness and that nothing will ever get better can be appealing when the idea of self-improvement is terrifying. It’s easy to joke about how these men should exercise, get better clothes, get a nice haircut, and practice better personal hygiene, but actually doing those things can be extremely difficult. Therefore the worldview promoted by incels, one that legitimises self-loathing, feelings of hopelessness, and tells its followers that there is no point in trying to change anything, can become extremely comforting. This can be especially appealing to teenagers, who generally feel insecure and misunderstood by the world around them anyway, and who are going through the lengthy uncomfortable process of puberty that heightens insecurities. Male body issues are also still widely ignored in discussions around body positivity, despite adolescent cis boys increasingly worry about their height, their muscle mass, and skin problems.  Most people grow into their bodies eventually, but it’s easy to see how vulnerable, oftentimes introverted, young men seeking support might be more susceptible to this worldview.  The exclusive terminology plays a role in reinforcing the sense of belonging new adherents feel like part of a community, and while the incel ideology legitimises teenage self-loathing, it also dangerously promotes a sense of superiority among its followers. Having taken the Red Pill they see the world as it ‘truly is’ ,unlike those of us who are blinded by the Blue Pill. This is, I believe, what drew my friend to this ideology. 

 

Initially he was just another teenage boy who enjoyed ‘edgy’ or ‘dark’ (or more accurately, bigoted) humour on 4chan and reddit. Our friendship mainly took place online, as we’d met at a Gaeltacht, and I was concerned by some of the stuff I saw him share – though he insisted it was all ‘ironic’. We had a couple of arguments over feminism and political correctness, during which I would try to be understanding, sending resources and links to videos I thought were informative. This constant to-and-fro became exhausting, and I tried to pull back. This was a few years before the idea of the ‘alt-right pipeline’ and the dangers of the YouTube algorithm were better understood by the general public. It’s clear to me now that this so-called ‘edgy’ humour he was exposed to online served as a gateway drug into the incel ideology.

 

He started dating one of our mutual friends. She broke up with him after a couple of months. I decided to reach out to him, to see how he was. I was expecting sadness, but what I got instead was anger. He was unflinchingly cruel about her and made demeaning comments about her appearance. He asked me if she was seeing someone else, and said that if she wasn’t he didn’t see why she wouldn’t just suck it up and stay with him.  He saw her in town with another guy and sent me messages about how disloyal and shallow she was. This soon spiraled into a rant about how all women were encouraged to act like this because of feminism. He talked about the girl he’d liked for years who was newly single but still not interested in him romantically. In his eyes this was because she was shallow, only interested in dating attractive ‘masculine’ guys. I was concerned by his attitude, but largely because I was worried about his self-esteem. He wasn’t unattractive. His ex-girlfriend had been the one to make the first move, so obviously she saw something she liked. This was when his misogyny, which was previously sparked by ‘Feminist Cringe!’ compilations online, started to echo the incel ideology.  Almost all incels take as their starting point the idea of a feminist conspiracy that encourages women to be hypergamous in a rigged sexual marketplace that leaves all but the top 1% of men lonely. The ways this mindset manifests is contradictory – women who sleep with men are reviled and crudely referred to as ‘Roasties’, but the women who refuse to sleep with incels are hated. This of course is an escalation of the ‘slut/prude’ dichotomy that has been a tenant of misogyny for centuries. 

 

As the weeks went by, it became harder and harder to talk to my friend. He started regularly talking about false-rape accusations, the fact that he couldn’t trust women in case they got angry with him and ‘made something up’. This should have been a red flag, but I was still shocked when another friend confessed to me that he’d assaulted her. That was the final straw and I ceased all further contact with him. The process was that quick. 

 

In recent years incels have increasingly become the subject of ridicule online, from men and women like. Arguably, this does more harm than good. However, I do not think it is fair to blame people for resorting to humour when faced with such violent misogyny – especially women, who are directly affected by the content of many these forums – descriptions of rape fantasies, calls for female sex slavery, and arguments that “Women are not sentient. All women are whores”. Sometimes all you can do is use humour as a coping mechanism. While the jokes about ‘wristcels’ and virgin vs chad memes might be hurtful, this does not excuse the violence committed by incels. At least six mass murders, resulting in a total of 44 deaths, have been committed since 2014 by men who have either self-identified as incels or who had mentioned incel-related names and writings in their private writings or Internet postings. Many were inspired by Rodger, who in the time since his killings, has been revered online as a ‘true incel hero’ and a ‘martyr’. By putting the responsibility on women to be unflinchingly nice in the face of this, blaming them for the growth of the incel movement, we risk doing exactly what the incels themselves are doing. 

 

Even if the twisted fantasies of the incel community came true today, and they were all given a government-assigned female partner in the morning, their worldview would probably not change. Too often we are told that the love of a woman will heal a broken man. This belief is not exclusive to incels, but is taught to women from a very young age. We are told that a man can be ‘changed’ as long as women are patient, kind and essentially ‘suck it up’. This is what I tried to do for my friend, because even though he said bigoted and hurtful things to and about me, I thought that if I was kind to him he’d realise the error of his ways. He didn’t.