Incel
An incel is a member of an online subculture of mostly male and heterosexual people who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one. They often blame, objectify, and denigrate women and girls as a result. The term inspired a subculture that rose to prominence during the 2010s, after being influenced by and associated with misogynist terrorists such as Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian.
The incel subculture's online discourse has been characterized by resentment, hostile sexism, anti-feminism, sexual objectification and dehumanization of women, misogyny, misanthropy, self-pity and self-loathing, racism, a sense of entitlement to sex, nihilism, rape culture, and the endorsement of sexual and non-sexual violence against women and the sexually active.
Incels tend to blame women and feminism for their inability to find a partner; their romantic failures are often attributed to biological determinism, where women's preference for mating with high-status males is seen as innate and unchangeable.
Incel communities have been criticized by scholars, government officials, and others for their misogyny, endorsement and encouragement of violence, and extremism. Over time the subculture has become associated with extremism and terrorism, and since 2014 there have been multiple mass killings, mostly in North America, perpetrated by self-identified incels, as well as other instances of violence or attempted violence.
The Southern Poverty Law Center describes incels as "part of the online male supremacist ecosystem" that is included in their list of hate groups. The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism states that "the incel community shares a misogynistic ideology of women as being genetically inferior to men, driven by their sexual desire to reproduce with genetically superior males, thereby excluding unattractive men such as themselves" which "exhibits all of the hallmarks of an extremist ideology"; GIFCT states that incel beliefs combine a wish for a mythical past where all men were entitled to sex from subordinated women, a sense of predestined personal failure, and nihilism, making it a dangerous ideology. Estimates of the overall size of the subculture vary greatly, ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands of individuals.
History and organization
Background
The first website to use the term "incel" was Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project, a blog and mailing list founded in 1997 by a female university student living in Toronto known as Alana, in order to write about and discuss her own experiences of celibacy with like-minded people. The blog was intended as a supportive and inclusive site for people who had difficulty forming romantic relationships, and was used by people of all genders and sexual orientations to share their thoughts and experiences in order to overcome social barriers such as shyness. Alana originally used the abbreviation "invcel" for "involuntarily celibate", later shortening it to "incel". Her website was intended for "anybody of any gender who was lonely, had never had sex or who hadn't had a relationship in a long time". She later said, "I was trying to create a movement that was open to anybody and everybody."During her college years and afterward, Alana realized she was bisexual and became more comfortable with her identity. As her own dating life improved, Alana stopped maintaining the website, passing the site's contents on to someone else she did not know around the year 2000. In 2018, Alana said of her project: "It definitely wasn't a bunch of guys blaming women for their problems. That's a pretty sad version of this phenomenon that's happening today. Things have changed in the last 20 years".
After learning that the perpetrator of the 2014 Isla Vista killings was being glorified by parts of the incel subculture, Alana wrote: "Like a scientist who invented something that ended up being a weapon of war, I can't uninvent this word, nor restrict it to the nicer people who need it". She expressed regret at the change from her original intent of creating an "inclusive community" for people of all genders who were sexually deprived due to social awkwardness, marginalization, or mental illness.
Forums
In 2003, the message board love-shy.com was founded as a place for people who felt perpetually rejected or were extremely shy with potential partners to discuss their situations. It was less strictly moderated than its counterpart, IncelSupport, which was also founded in the 2000s. While IncelSupport welcomed men and women and banned misogynistic posts, love-shy.com's userbase was overwhelmingly male. Over the next decade, the membership of love-shy.com and online fringe right-wing communities like 4chan increasingly overlapped.In the 2000s, incel communities became more extremist as they adopted behaviors common on forums such as 4chan and Reddit, where extremist posts were encouraged as a way to achieve visibility. According to Bruce Hoffman and colleagues writing in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, as "edgy" and extremist statements became more prevalent in incel communities, so too did extremist trolling and "shitposting".
The r/incels subreddit later became a particularly active incel community. It was known as a place where men blamed women for their inceldom, sometimes advocated for rape or other forms of violence, and were misogynistic and often racist. Reddit banned the r/incels subreddit in 2017 following a new policy that prohibited "content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people", adopted in October 2017. At the time of the ban, the community had around 40,000 members.
The incel community continued to inhabit Reddit in other subreddits, such as on the subreddit r/braincels. Although the tone of the subreddit was similar to r/incels, moderators of the r/braincels forum said that they did not endorse, support, or glorify violence or violent people, a distinction they made from the subject matter of its predecessor that resulted in its being banned from Reddit. On September 30, 2019, the r/braincels subreddit was banned after Reddit again broadened its banning policy. Incel communities began to migrate away from shared platforms and instead use their own closed forums dedicated specifically to the subject.
In the 2010s, the subculture came to wider public notice with the banning of r/incels, and when a series of mass murders were committed by men who either identified as members of the subculture or shared similar ideologies. Increased interest in incel communities has been attributed to feelings of "aggrieved entitlement" among some men who feel they are being denied rights they deserve and blame women for their lack of sex.
Since around 2019, some self-identified incels have attempted to redefine their views to appear more mainstream, by writing blog posts and articles on subject-specific wikis and forums. These reject the more open expressions of misogyny within other segments of the subculture, highlighting the heterogeneity of incel communities, and reframing incels not as an online subculture but as those experiencing a life circumstance that applies even to individuals who are not members of the subculture. In 2021, M. Kelly wrote for the Political Research Associates think tank that these attempts to redefine themselves contradicted the communities' self-identifications and moderation strategies, where members regularly challenge other users' "legitimacy" as incels, but have accepted as members individuals with sexual experience who nonetheless shared similar political ideologies.
In 2017, the largest incel forum was founded by a previous moderator of the r/incels subreddit. The forum had almost 15,000 members as of 2022. It is composed of public and registered message boards for self-described incels to discuss their personal experiences. Moderators ban women and LGBTQ individuals from joining, stating that the forum is oriented towards straight men. In 2020, Talia Lavin in her book Culture Warlords, described the site's culture as one of "one-upmanship", "barroom boast-off" and shock content. In 2023, Rolling Stone described a vindictive site culture, giving an example of an ex-moderator who entered a romantic relationship and was subsequently rejected by site members as a "fake incel". In 2019, Vox stated that the site has a culture of praising mass killers, which is treated lightly by the site's admins.
The site has used several top-level domains since its creation, after being suspended by one domain registry due to violence and hate speech and denied renewal by another. The site owners also operate a wiki, which has been described by researchers publishing in New Media & Society as cherry picking academic papers to promote misogynistic points.
Connection to suicide forums
In September 2022, the UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate published a report about the largest dedicated incel forum, based on monthly visits, and a network of other sites run by the same two pseudonymous individuals. The Washington Post, New York Times, and the CCDH identified them as Uruguay-based Diego Joaquín Galante and United States–based Lamarcus Small. In December 2021, the New York Times reported that it had identified 45 people, individually, who died in connection to a website called Sanctioned Suicide, and estimated that the true number was likely much higher. The Times reporters discovered that Galante and Small created and operated the suicide website, in addition to their several incel forums. The CCDH reported that Galante and Small also maintained forums for online communities dedicated to body image and unemployment.Ideology
Incel rhetoric invokes an idealized patriarchal society in which couples adhered to traditional gender roles, married early, and were strictly monogamous. During this mythologized "golden age", incels imagine that all men had nearly unencumbered access to women as romantic partners, thereby reducing the competition for sex. Incels often disagree about precisely when this golden age occurred, but they concur that it was gradually destroyed by feminism, the sexual revolution, women's liberation, and technological progress. As a result, incels tend to blame both women and the feminist movement for their inability to find a partner.Incel discourse is characterized by resentment and hatred, self-pity, hostile sexism, anti-feminism, racism, sexual objectification and dehumanization of women, misogyny, misanthropy, and nihilism.
Discussions often revolve around the belief that men are entitled to sex from women. In the incel worldview, the only solution to male sexlessness is a rigidly patriarchal social structure encompassing enforced monogamy and the elimination of women's rights, thereby increasing women's dependency on men. Some incels also advocate for sexual slavery, legalized rape, punishment for female promiscuity, redistribution of women, and violence against feminists.
Other common topics include idleness, loneliness, unhappiness, suicide, sexual surrogates, and prostitution, as well as attributes they believe increase one's desirability as a partner such as looks, income or personality. The incel community has a shared victimhood identity in which individuals fatalistically celebrate their failures and discourage each other from seeking romantic success.