Incels - society’s Frankensteinian monsters

The incel community is well known for its vicious attacks on women, online and in real life. Indeed, the modern day woman threatens what incels believs is their birthright: unrestricted access to female bodies, alongside unlimited access to jobs, money and power - basically being ‘top Gs’, to borrow that well-known phrase. After all, how dare women live outside of traditional male expectations?

But when incels cannot satisfy their sense of entitlement (shocker), violence ensues and ‘top G’ status instead becomes measured by the amount of women abused and murdered - no longer such a funny phrase, right? How is this violent and egotistical sort of man created? Is being the primary beneficiary of our patriarchal society not enough for these men?

The question of the incel, and their violent entitlement, ultimately circles round to masculine identity itself. For incels, this violent ideology and the community that has formed around it, arguably aims to attain that elusive idea of ‘manliness’. And, indeed, what does it mean to ‘be a man’ in a world where concepts of gender are constantly evolving? In actuality, it appears that everything else is constantly shifting whilst toxic masculinity remains stubbornly constant. For example, female identity has been able to evolve through the never-ending fight for equal rights, whilst male identity has experienced no such revolution; why fight to change a system where everything is served to you on a silver platter?

Rather, their identity, in the toxic traditional sense, has been left behind. Where men used to be the bread-winners, the head of the household, women are now able to threaten that identity, making it redundant (thankfully). And yet, hetero-normative stereotypes remain ingrained within our society: that men should have power, and women should be an accessory to that power, preventing that concept of masculinity from being able to change. In short, masculine identity is being torn in two; immured in the toxicity of ‘being a man’ whilst being expected to fight against that very toxicity.

Out of this chasm springs the incel, fully-formed and armed with the anger of denied patriarchal entitlement, unable to connect their sense of self with the reality of our slightly-less patriarchal world. Where critical introspection and self-awareness is required, resentment takes hold, fed by a seething community of men, online and in person, unable to find a place for themselves in this world. Instead of renegotiating their own personal views and confronting their perpetuation of damaging masculinity, blame and violence becomes the easy option, the slaughter of women's livelihoods much more preferable to questioning their small-minded reality.

And so who is the real culprit of the incel’s creation? Society - for forcing toxic stereotypes down the throats of men whilst simultaneously expecting their survival in a world that no longer permits this sort of existence. Society is indeed Frankenstein, the incel is the monster, and it is, unfortunately, alive.