Incel

Incel (a portmanteau of "involuntary celibate") refers to a predominantly online subculture of individuals (racially diverse, but primarily white, male and heterosexual who perceive themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite their desire for one. As a consequence, they may blame, objectify, and denigrate women and girls. The incel ideology is marked by a hatred of women (misogyny), often expressed through hate speech or, in some instances, violence against women.

Originally coined as "incel" around 1997 by a queer Canadian student, the spelling shifted to "incel" by 1999, and the term rose to prominence in the 2010s following the misogynistic terrorist acts of Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian.

History and organization

The first website to use the term "incel" was "Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project, " founded in 1997 by a Canadian university student known only by her first name, Alana, to discuss her sexual inactivity with others. Some media outlets have incorrectly dated it to 1993, which is when a personal interaction inspired her to create the page. The site was utilized by people of all genders and sexual orientations to share their thoughts and experiences. In 1997, she started a mailing list on the topic that used the abbreviation INVCEL, later shortened to "incel, " referring to "anybody of any gender who was lonely, had never had sex, or who hadn't had a relationship in a long time. "

During her collegiate years and subsequent to them, Alana came to the realization that she identified as bisexual and grew increasingly comfortable with her identity. Approximately in the year 2000, she ceased her involvement in her online project and transferred the management of the site to an unfamiliar individual. In an introspective reflection in 2018 regarding her project, Alana remarked, "It certainly was not merely a scenario of men attributing their issues to women. That represents a rather unfortunate interpretation of this phenomenon that persists today. The circumstances have evolved significantly over the past two decades. "

When she read about the 2014 Isla Vista killings and how parts of the incel subculture glorified the perpetrator, she 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 over the shift in usage 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.

In 2003, the message board love-shy.com was founded as a space for individuals 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 established in the 2000s. While IncelSupport welcomed both men and women and prohibited misogynistic posts, love-shy.com's user base was predominantly 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 grew increasingly extremist as they adopted behaviors prevalent on forums like 4chan and Reddit, where extremist posts were encouraged to gain visibility. According to Bruce Hoffman and colleagues writing in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, as "edgy" and extremist statements gained traction in incel communities, so did extremist trolling and "shitposting. "

The r/incels subreddit, a forum on Reddit, later became a notably active incel community. It was recognized as a place where men blamed women for their inceldom, sometimes advocated for rape or other forms of violence, and exhibited misogynistic and often racist views. On November 7, 2017, Reddit banned the r/incels subreddit 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, " which was adopted in October 2017. At the time of the ban, the community had approximately 40,000 members.

The incel community continued to inhabit Reddit within other subreddits, such as r/braincels. Although the tone of r/braincels was similar to that of r/incels, moderators of the r/braincels forum stated that they did not endorse, support, or glorify violence or violent individuals, distinguishing themselves from its predecessor, which led to its ban from Reddit. On September 30, 2019, the r/braincels subreddit was banned after Reddit once again broadened its banning policy. Incel communities began to migrate away from shared platforms, opting instead for their own closed forums dedicated specifically to the subject.

In the 2010s, the subculture gained wider public attention with the banning of r/incels and the occurrence of mass murders carried out by men who identified as part of the subculture or shared similar ideologies. Increased interest in incel communities has been linked to feelings of "aggrieved entitlement" among some men who believe they are denied the rights they deserve and blame women for their lack of sexual relationships.

Since about 2019, some self-identified incels have tried to reshape their views to seem more mainstream by writing blog posts and articles on subject-specific wikis and forums that reject the more overt expressions of misogyny found in other segments of the subculture. They highlight the diversity within incel communities and reframe incels not as an online subculture but as individuals experiencing a life circumstance that can also apply to those outside this subculture. In 2021, M. Kelly wrote for the Political Research Associates think tank that these attempts to redefine themselves contradict the communities' self-identifications and moderation strategies. Members frequently challenge other users' "legitimacy" as incels, yet they have accepted individuals with sexual experience who still share similar political ideologies.

Extremism

The attitudes of the incel subculture can be characterized by extremist resentment, hostility, sexual objectification, misogyny, misanthropy, self-pity and self-loathing, racism, a sense of entitlement to sex, and the blaming of women and the sexually successful for their situation, which is often viewed as predetermined due to biological determinism, evolutionary genetics, or a rigged game. Additionally, it encompasses nihilism, rape culture, and the endorsement of both non-sexual and sexual violence against women and the sexually active. Incel communities have faced increasing criticism from scholars, government officials, and others for their misogyny, endorsement and encouragement of violence, and extremism. Over time, this subculture has become associated with extremism and terrorism. Since 2014, there have been multiple mass killings, primarily in North America, committed by self-identified incels, along with other incidents of violence or attempted violence.

In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) characterized the subculture as "an integral component of the online male supremacist ecosystem," which is featured on their designated list of hate groups. The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism asserts that "the incel community espouses a misogynistic ideology, perceiving women as genetically inferior to men, motivated by their sexual desire to procreate with genetically superior males, thereby sidelining unattractive men, including themselves." This ideology, which "displays all the characteristics of an extremist viewpoint, " arises from a confluence of a longing for a utopian past where all men were purportedly entitled to sexual access to subjugated women, a pervasive sense of inescapable personal failure, and nihilism, rendering this worldview particularly perilous.

Estimates of the overall size of the subculture vary greatly, ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands of individuals. Incel communities became more extremist and focused on violence from the late 2010s. This has been attributed to factors including influences from overlapping online hate groups and the rise of the alt-right and white supremacist groups. The misogynistic and violent rhetoric of some members of these communities has led to numerous bans from websites and web hosts.

Incel communities persist on more lenient platforms such as 4chan, 8chan, and Gab, as well as on web forums dedicated specifically to the topic. More extremist self-identified incels have increasingly migrated to obscure locations, including gaming chat services like Discord and the dark web, to avoid shutdowns and the self-censorship that has developed among some incel communities in an effort to evade scrutiny from law enforcement or website service providers.

Beginning in 2018 and continuing into the 2020s, the incel ideology has been characterized by North American governments and researchers as a terrorism threat, prompting law enforcement to issue warnings about this subculture. In May 2019, an American man was sentenced to up to five years in prison for making terrorist threats, posting on social media, "I'm planning on shooting up a public place ... killing as many girls as I see. " In September 2019, the U.S. Army cautioned soldiers about the possibility of violence at movie theaters showing the Joker film, following the discovery of "disturbing and very specific chatter" among self-identified incels on the dark web.

A January 2020 report by the Texas Department of Public Safety warned that the incel movement represented an "emerging domestic terrorism threat" that "could soon match, or potentially eclipse, the level of lethality demonstrated by other forms of domestic terrorism. " A 2020 paper published by Bruce Hoffman and colleagues in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism concluded that "the violent manifestations of the ideology pose a new terrorism threat, which should not be dismissed or ignored by domestic law enforcement agencies. "

John Horgan, a psychology professor at Georgia State University, who received a $250,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2019 to study the incel subculture, explained why the incel ideology equates to terrorism: "The fact that incels aspire to change things in a broader ideological sense is, for me, what makes it a classic example of terrorism. I'm not saying that all incels are terrorists, but violent incel activity is, unquestionably, terrorism in my view. "

In February 2020, an attack in Toronto, allegedly motivated by incel ideologies, became the first such act of violence to be prosecuted as terrorism. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police stated that they consider the incel subculture to be an "Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremist (IMVE)" movement. In 2021, Jacob Ware wrote in Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses that analysis of incels has primarily focused on the United States and Canada due to the concentration of incel-motivated attacks in those countries. In March 2022, the United States Secret Service's National Threat Assessment Center published a case study titled "Hot Yoga Tallahassee: A Case Study of Misogynistic Extremism" to draw attention to "the specific threat posed by misogynist extremism."

Forums

In 2017, the largest incel forum was established by a former moderator of the r/incels subreddit. As of October 2022, the forum had nearly 15,000 members. It consists of public and registered message boards where self-identified incels discuss their personal experiences. Moderators exclude women and LGBT individuals from joining, justifying this by stating that the forum is aimed at straight men.

In 2020, Talia Lavin, in her book " Culture Warlords, " described the site's culture as one characterized by "one-upmanship, " "barroom boast-off," and shock content. In 2023, Rolling Stone portrayed a vindictive site culture, citing an example of an ex-moderator who entered a romantic relationship and was subsequently labeled a "fake incel" by site members. In 2019, Vox reported that the site has a culture of praising mass killers, which is overlooked by the site's administrators.

The site has utilized several top-level domains since its inception, having been suspended by one for reasons of violence and hate speech and denied renewal by another.

The site owners also manage a wiki,[35][36] which researchers publishing in New Media & Society have described as cherry-picking academic papers to promote misogynistic viewpoints.[34]

Connection to suicide forums

In September 2022, the UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) published a report on the largest dedicated incel forum, based on monthly visits, alongside a network of other sites operated by the same two pseudonymous individuals. The Washington Post, New York Times, and 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 individuals who died in connection with 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 managed the suicide website, as well as their various incel forums. The CCDH stated that Galante and Small also maintained forums for online communities focused on body image and unemployment.

External links

More information is available at [ Wikipedia:Incel ]

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