There’s a new misogynist online trend in town, and it was, accidentally, started by a woman.
The involuntary celibates, or incels as they call themselves, have been lurking the world for a while now, they just didn’t have a name that represented them, nor they had become a movement.
We all know human attraction is based on personality factors, economic stability, and even body odors; but how much of our appearance matters when attracting others? What happens if we are not attractive enough to our social standards?
There are many answers to those questions, but to incels, publicly hating women and a couple of mass shootings seemed to be the most fitted.
Incel definition
This goes a little more far away from the well-known “friend zone”, incels are members of an online community that define themselves as incapable of finding a sexual partner, specifically, female partners.
It all started with men gathering on Reddit to talk about how much society has hurt them, simply for not being attractive enough. The often blame genetics and social “ridiculous” beauty standards; it was a support group that got out of hand.
If we go back in time to the 90s, we find a surprising fact: the incel community actually began with a woman. Alana, a 20-year-old woman from Toronto was having a hard time finding a boyfriend, she thought it was because of her looks: she was short, had eczema blemishes, and was slightly overweight.
Alana only wanted to share her experience and hoped to find others like her so she created the “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project”, a webpage were men and women had the opportunity to talk about their feelings of rejection by the opposite sex, members were called “invcels”, but later changed to “incel”.
The project didn’t stay with her for too long, she gave up the page to someone else and forgot about it until 2014, when she read the about the Isla Vista shooting perpetrated by Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old boy who shot and stabbed people because he was a virgin and girls did not want him.
Elliot wasn’t an incel, but he became a sort of hero for many incels that had flooded Reddit’s forums. The /r/incels was full of misogynist posts; 40.000 people were in and had claimed to be involuntary celibates.
Incels banned from Reddit
That incels forum was banned last year because things were getting out of control, most of the popular posts were about calling women sluts, nothing but trash who use men, and that they were the embodiment of evil.
Those post titles sound like a tacky stand-up setlist, but things got serious when a member asked for legal advice pretending to be a woman, he wanted to know how rapists usually get caught, how a woman who was drugged and raped could trace back her attacker.
Reddit’s policy got updated and banned forever all discussions that encourage, glorify, incite or called for any kind of violence against an individual or group of people, so no more hating women for incels, at least on that forum.
How are incels described?
If you visit incels.me, you can find several forum topics with titles such as “having to date a non-white woman as a white man is absolutely disgusting and repulsive”, “You’re are a rapist because you’re ugly”, “Albanian bitches are demonic whores and need to get exterminated”, and many other terrible subjects.
Of course, this is a site that’s supposed to work as a shelter for people who feel sexually and romantically rejected by the opposite sex, but their hatred towards females, good-looking people, and, pretty much everyone who is not like them, it’s incredibly obvious.
Involuntary celibates are mostly young men, they describe themselves as physically unappealing to women, claim to be virgins (most of them at least), and have a resented, socially awkward and violent rhetoric on women, and how they owe them pleasure.
They even have their own lingo, words like “black pill” (memes about women being egocentric, shallow, cruel, etc.), “Chad” (the regular handsome schoolboy), “Stacy” (the stereotype of an attractive high school girl.”)
Recent murders
This incel’s situation has got out of the internet and stained the streets with blood. The first one was Elliot Rodger’s idea (2014), who wrote his manifesto about hating women and was the responsible one of bringing the attention to the incels movement.
Then in 2015, Chris Harper-Mercer killed 9 people and injured some others at the Umpqua Community College in Oregon; he also left a manifesto explaining that he praised Elliot’s killings and that he was also in pain for not having a girlfriend.
William Atchison (2017). Nikolas Cruz (2018), and Alek Minassian (2018) killed each around 10 people for the same reasons, they all shot themselves too, but not before leaving traces of incel’s clues.
They all praised Rodger and even mention that “The Incel Rebellion has already begun.”
Not all incels are dangerous people, they even discuss these matters on their forums and some try to take some distance from that violence, but where are the moderators of this sites? Why aren’t they banning the same topics Reddit did? How do we stop this misogynist revolution attempt?