Trigger warning: This article contains mentions of suicide, rape and torture.
At least that’s the simplest way to explain the new and rapidly growing incel subculture
Many people, from what I encountered are unfamiliar with the term ‘incel’ or at least the full extent of who they are. Calling them a group of lonely men who can’t find a girlfriend doesn’t cut it, not anymore. The so-called ‘inceldom’ has become a dangerous ideology far more widespread than people realise, and the number of people killed by it grows each year.
So, what is an incel? Simply the name “incel” is a portmanteau of two words: involuntary celibate and by the definitions it describes someone – mostly male – frustrated by their lack of romantic and sexual experience. That description, however, doesn’t do incels the justice they deserve.
I mean, what would you imagine under those words? A teenage boy jealous of his friends who all have had a girlfriend just not him? An awkward introverted man who struggles talking to girls? Both of those are right, and yet just the tip of the incel iceberg. Beneath the image of lonely men who are just trying to find love, hides a wicked truth of violent misogynistic and racist ideals that have already claimed its victims.
Beneath the image of lonely men who are just trying to find love, hides a wicked truth of violent misogynistic and racist ideals that have already claimed its victims.
As God’s greatest irony, incels have taken a lot of terminology from the groups they hate and ridicule. The idea of involuntary celibacy was created by a woman named Alana in the late 1990s with her Involuntary Celibacy Project. Now, the people identifying with this label largely claim that women actually cannot ever be lonely.
Well, at least to put it in a nice way. In incels spaces, such as incels.is, which is a very popular incel forum with almost 28, 000 members, words such as ‘woman’ don’t exist. Woman suggest a person, a human being with her own thoughts and feelings. Instead, there is a much more creative word used to describe us. In the incel dictionary, women are almost exclusively addressed as ‘foids’ meaning ‘female humanoid’, or most recently, just ‘toilets’.
On incels.is, Nazi symbols are used as profile pictures and in between angry rants about people having a consensual relationship, violent fantasies of how they would punish women for existing or not having sex with them and yet another discussion on how they would solve the issue of inceldom (which results in a heated debate on whether legalised rape or setting up a system of sexual slavery is better) one can see the occasional posts sharing their thoughts about an anime or a video game.
Highlights from some of the recent posts include a rant about the proper punishment for women for everything they’ve done, like subjecting them to hard physical labour and if they refuse “[dragging them] down into the darkest of torture chambers and subjected to the worst medieval torture”, a video of a woman getting punched, news about a man beating a woman to death under the category ‘LifeFuel’, or a lengthy rant about why this person hates women and why they “don’t deserve to breathe the same air”.
Hiding in the only place they feel accepted and understood are emotionally vulnerable men groomed towards hate, radicalised in their beliefs and convinced that somehow, there is a big conspiracy against them with women as the masterminds.
Women are the ones to be blamed for all their problems – their loneliness and most of the world’s problems. Their looks? Their mother’s fault. Their lack of confidence? Women’s rejection. Their loneliness? Women not willing to have sex with them. In this community, they support themselves in each other’s misery and victimhood, despite their belief of women being weak and stupid animals driven by only their need to get with a “Chad” (or, in normal terms, an attractive man) they are the collective mastermind behind the everything and need to be put back in their places – or in simpler words, they just shouldn’t have rights or the ability choose, then it would be perfectly fair.
Still, buried under the extensive hate both towards themselves and other people, there are people genuinely wishing to just have someone in their lives. Posts about struggling with finding friends, or longing to experience teen love that will never happen because that part of their life is over. Hiding in the only place they feel accepted and understood are emotionally vulnerable men groomed towards hate, radicalised in their beliefs and convinced that somehow, there is a big conspiracy against them with women as the masterminds. Instead of therapy, they are told that there is nothing to be done, that they might as well commit suicide because the loneliness they feel is forever and nothing can be done about it, or they are being mocked for wanting to do something about their situation or not agreeing with the violence and extremism by the very people that, as they say, help them feel less alone.
One thing both me and the entire incel community can agree on is that this is a problem far bigger than people might think, and that begs the question – can there be something done about it?
