News A look inside the spine-chilling incel subculture

[AsiaCel]

original​

MSN

​

A look inside the spine-chilling incel subculture​

Nearly five years ago, on April 23, 2018, a man in his 20s drove a rented van down a crowded Toronto street, jumping the curb, killing 10 people (of which eight were women) and injuring 16. The day of the massacre, the attacker, Alek Minassian, wrote in a Facebook post, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” The killings, for which Minassian was convicted in June 2022 faced an automatic life sentence, focused international attention on the incel, or involuntary celibate, community. Let’s find out more about this subculture.

Not every celibate person is an incel​

Encyclopedia Britannica defines “celibacy” as “the state of being...sexually abstinent, usually in association with the role of a religious official or devotee.” It “has existed in one form or another throughout history.” Studies show that young people, especially young men, are “having less sex than previous generations.” People end up celibate for a variety of reasons, including religious commitment, asexuality (when a person doesn’t experience sexual attraction) or a desire to focus on other things in life. A person who is involuntarily celibate wants to experience sexual intimacy, but doesn’t have a partner.

The original incel forum was created by a woman​

The first known internet forum for the “involuntary celibate” community was created in 1997 by a Canadian woman, as a support group for people “struggling to form loving relationships,” according to the BBC. The forum’s founder, Alana, who didn’t share her last name, described the site as “a friendly place” where women and men could vent about loneliness. Forum users coined the word “incel” after realizing it was easier to say than “involuntary celibate.” Alana says, “The word [incel] used to mean anybody of any gender who was lonely, had never had sex or who hadn’t had a relationship in a long time, but we can’t call it that anymore.” Alana says she drifted away from the community in 2000, after she began dating. “I did my best to create a healthy and positive movement,” she says, adding that she has felt guilty about what the movement has become.

An online “manosphere” gave rise to today’s incel culture​

Over the past decade, the incel community has been linked to an amorphous male empowerment subculture known as “the manosphere.” According to the MIT Technology Review, the online “manosphere” can be divided into four broad groups: men’s rights activists (MRAs) who believe that social and legal institutions discriminate against men; “men going their own way” (MGTOW) who consciously avoid women; “pickup artists” who get enjoyment out of flirting with, dating and harassing women; and “then there are the incels, the most potentially violent of the group,” the magazine states. “Incels [believe] women use their sexual power to dominate men socially. For that, incels want revenge.”

Many incels believe women owe them sex​

The Grinnell College Subcultures and Scenes portal has a detailed entry on incels, which cites a Reddit thread popular in the community; the thread defines an incel as a person who is at least 21 years old and who has gone at least six months without a romantic partner without choosing to do so. “While many people of all genders may fit this category, predominantly heterosexual male incels that frequent the subreddit almost all agree that the world (women) owes them sex and that they are oppressed for being sexless men,” the portal explains.

Instances of incel-linked terror have killed as many as 50 people in North America​

According to The Guardian, violence linked to the incel movement had “killed as many as 50 people in the US and Canada” as of early 2021. In Toronto in 2018, Alek Minassian, a self-described incel in his 20s, drove a rented van down a crowded street, killing 10 people, including eight women. In February 2020, one woman was killed and two other people (one woman and one man) were injured in a series of stabbings at a Toronto massage parlour by a 17-year-old self-described incel, according to CBC. Between 2014 and 2021, at least five instances of mass murder in the United States have been linked to people identifying as incels, killing a total of 31 people, CBC found.

The Isla Vista Massacre was the first widely reported incident of incel terror​

The first widely reported act of terror linked to a self-identified incel occurred in 2014 in Isla Vista, California. Elliot Rodger, 22 at the time, killed two women and four men, all between the ages of 19 and 22, before taking his own life. A memorial service for the victims is pictured here. Before his death, Rodger posted an online manifesto where, according to the BBC, he “described himself as the ‘ideal magnificent gentleman’ and could not comprehend why women would not want to have sex with him.” After the massacre, Rodger became an incel folk hero. Alek Minassian, the self-described incel convicted in the Toronto van attacks, wrote a Facebook post the day of the massacre that ended with the phrase, “All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” According to Southern Poverty Law Center research analyst Keegan Hankes, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, many incels consider Rodger a “patron saint” and “refer to potential copycat violence as ‘going ER.’”

Many self-described incels have a history of bullying and isolation​

Many people who become incels have experienced bullying and rejection by their peers during childhood or at work. According to the Toronto Sun, Toronto van attacker Alek Minassian was “bullied and tormented as a special needs student” in high school and “ridiculed and isolated” during a short stint in the military. Jack Peterson, an American former incel podcaster who left the movement as it became increasingly violent, told The Guardian that he experienced bullying and grew up with “a strong sense of rejection.” Peterson says the incel mindset “is kind of like this: ‘I’ve been bullied and rejected my whole life so because of all the suffering I’ve experienced, now the world owes me s*x, it owes me friends, it owes me success, because of all the failures I’ve had.’” According to a Vice story, 78 per cent of incels report experiencing extreme loneliness, and 82 per cent have considered taking their lives.

Incel culture has its own dictionary​

Like many online subcultures, the incel movement has developed a vocabulary all its own. The terms “Chads” and “Stacys” refer to conventionally attractive men and women, respectively. The term “femoid” is used to describe women as subhuman robots. “Average” people outside the incel universe are referred to as “normies.” “Going ER” refers to an Elliot Rodger-inspired act of violence. Attempts by incels to improve their physical appearance (more on this later) are referred to as “looksmaxing.” “Ragefuel” is any information that contributes to an incel’s state of mind. Violent incels who act on their impulses are sometimes referred to as hERos, a play on Rodger’s initials. The Anti-Defamation League has a more complete list of incel vocabulary.

Some incels support a state-distributed girlfriend program​

Some members of the incel community take literally the idea that the world owes them sex or female companionship, or that providing men with no-strings-attached s*x is the only solution to incel violence. “If the Canadian government implemented a state distributed girlfriend program I guarantee these attacks would stop,” one incel wrote on Twitter shortly after the Toronto van attacks, according to The Walrus. As a 2018 Vice story shows, the idea of enforced monogamy has gotten much more traction in the manosphere than one isolated tweet. Shortly after Minassian’s rampage, according to Vice, George Mason University economist Robin Hanson suggested that involuntary celibacy “could be fixed...if we as a society set out to redistribute sex more equally.” Controversial author Jordan Peterson has suggested that incel violence could be solved by “some form of enforced monogamy.”

Incel violence is increasingly considered a terror threat​

After Alek Minassian’s van rampage, Canada’s public safety minister at the time, Ralph Goodale (pictured), declared that the attack wasn’t linked to terror. However, two years later, in May 2020, a self-identified incel who fatally stabbed a woman in Toronto was charged with terror-related offences. According to Newsweek, the case “mark[ed] the first time in Canada that an individual has been charged with a crime connected to the incel movement.” The Royal Canadian Mounted Police acknowledged that the suspect, whose name was not released because he was a minor when the stabbings occurred, “was inspired by the ideologically motivated violent extremist movement commonly known as INCEL.” In June 2020, the RCMP announced plans to add incel terror to its updated terrorism awareness guide. Potential incel-inspired terror is also a concern in the United States; Newsweek cites a report from the Texas Department of Public Safety which describes the incel movement as being “thrust into the realm of domestic terrorism.”

Incel terror predates the internet​

On Dec. 6, 1989, Marc Lépine walked into a classroom at Montreal’s École Polytechnique, ordered the men present to leave the room at gunpoint and began shooting the women. Fourteen women were killed; 10 women and four men were injured. “He told us that we [the trapped female students] were there because he was against feminists,” survivor Nathalie Provost told The Guardian. Provost and others see a clear connection between Lépine and present-day violent incels like Alek Minassian. “Lépine was not the last of the dinosaurs—it’s the opposite,” says researcher and campaigner Mélissa Blais.

Male incels tend to blame women for their own existential angst​

As a recent New Yorker story explained, the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s, growing mainstream acceptance of feminist ideals and the idea of individual self-worth, and (much later) the rise of social networking and online dating have widened the sexual, romantic and social opportunities available to women. “Most American women now grow up understanding that they can and should choose who they want to have sex with,” Jia Tolentino writes in the magazine. “Distinct cultural changes have created a situation in which many men who hate women do not have the access to women’s bodies that they would have had in an earlier era.” Incel mass shooter Elliot Rodger was open about his “hatred of women,” blaming a woman for “making him feel ‘worthless’” in an online manifesto cited in The Walrus. Tolentino cites one self-described incel who wrote on an online forum: “Women are the ultimate cause of our suffering.”

Incel culture has thrived on Reddit​

The first online incel gathering place, established by a Canadian woman in the 1990s, was “a simple, all-text website” with a mailing list. In later years, incels gravitated to Reddit, which banned the largest incel reddit thread in 2017. Unsurprisingly, another reddit sprung up to take its place, before it was banned in turn in 2019, along with other, smaller incel-linked reddits and subreddits. Despite Reddit’s attempts to crack down on the groups and tighten its own policies on acceptable content, new incel reddits keep appearing—“just like a family of cockroaches that you can’t get rid of” as Australian internet culture website GOAT puts it. According to the MIT Technology Review, some users of the banned reddits found a home on Gab, a site favoured by the far right; others have formed new reddits or gathered on 4chan or on standalone websites.

A growing number of incels seek out cosmetic surgery​

A 2019 story in The Cut takes a close look at the incel practice of “looksmaxing,” or investing extensive time, money and effort in one’s physical appearance in the hopes of becoming more attractive. The Cut describes an incel forum where participants “hated Chad [incel-speak for any conventionally attractive, successful man] but were convinced their lives would improve significantly if they could somehow become Chad.” Members were into bodybuilding, steroid use, p*nis-stretching and jaw muscle-building exercises. Others went further, deciding on reconstructive surgery: “The difference between a Chad and an incel is literally a few millimeters of bone,” one meme circulating in the group read. In the United States, cosmetic surgery among men “rose 325 percent between 1997 and 2015,” according to data from the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery cited in The Cut, although there’s no way of knowing how many of those patients identify with the incel worldview.

As many as 60,000 people around the world are active in incel forums​

Tens of thousands of people around the world are active in incel forums. When the main incel reddit was shut down in 2017, it had around 40,000 members. An investigation by Canadian public broadcaster CBC found that “at least 60,000 people” were active in three major incel forums. An informal poll of Braincels, a large incel group banned from Reddit in 2019, found that about 80 per cent of members were based in Europe or North America, and 55 per cent were white, with “significant percentages of posters who self-identify as East Asian, South Asian, Black and Latino.”

In Canada, more recent deaths have been linked to incel ideology than other forms of extremism​

In Canada, the Toronto van attack focused attention on the threat posed by incel radicalization. An investigation by the CBC program The Fifth Estate found that 120 instances of alt-right violence, including gender-motivated violence, had occurred in the last 30 years in Canada; during the same period, there were seven incidents of Islamist-inspired extremism. “How is this not an attack on national security?” criminologist Barbara Perry, whose research the statistics were drawn from, told the program. “There's a real and present threat associated with the far right.… I think we make a dangerous mistake thinking about it as only ... a fringe movement."

Self-declared incels tend to be young people​

Most self-declared incels are young adults. An informal poll of the Braincels reddit, cited by Vox, found that about 90 per cent of members were under 30. According to another poll analyzed by the Anti-Defamation League, the “average” incel is “in his mid-20s, of average height, white and European or North American.” Furthermore, the MIT Technology Review observed, “Over the past 10 years, the population of men identifying as men’s rights activists...traditionally older and less violent—is falling while younger, more toxic [pickup artist] and incel communities have seen a spike.”

Most incels don’t engage in offline violence​

Not all incels engage in offline violence—in fact, people who have been part of the forums suggest that those who do are rare exceptions. “An incel is someone who wants to have s*x but can’t,” one 24-year-old self-identified incel from New York told Vice. “We don’t all hate women, we’re not all white, and we’re not all homicidal maniacs. We’re also not all right-wing.” Jack Peterson, an American former incel podcaster, denounced violence within the movement. “I don’t condone violence,” he said, according to The Guardian, maintaining that “most of us feel that way.” Although Peterson is no longer active in the incel movement, he has said he still doesn’t think most incels are violent. A report by Canada’s Organization for the Prevention of Violence, cited in the National Post, would seem to back him up: “While the violent fringe of the incel movement is being recognized as a threat, it is important to acknowledge the majority of incels are not violent and may be at a higher risk of self-harm than the general population,” the report says.

Deradicalization groups are increasingly focusing on incels​

Since the Toronto van attack, deradicalization experts—people who specialize in preventing political and religious extremism or supporting people who try to leave extremist movements—have turned their attention to incels. “Counter violent extremist programming is about trying to prevent the escalation of those who are engaged with some kind of ideology that promotes violence from deciding to get up one day and do something about it—like [Toronto van attacker Alek] Minassian getting into a van,” deradicalization expert John McCoy of the Organization for the Prevention of Violence (OPV) told the National Post. One major barrier to these efforts, according to the National Post, is that incel stend to reject assistance.

Femcels exist​

Although early incel forums were open to people of any gender, current mainstream incel groups tend to be almost entirely male. However, women who identify as involuntarily celibate have created their own online universe, referring to themselves as femcels. Femcels, like incels, often have experience with bullying or rejection by the opposite sex; they “define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one,” according to the profile of a femcel online space in Huck magazine. “Like [male] incels, ‘Femcels’ have their own ideology, with terms such as ‘mascoids’ for men, and a lot of detailed theories about men ignoring women because of their looks,” Metro UK explains.

 

[depressedblackcel]

surgery wont help me, I'd have to spend damn near a million dollars to see success.

 

[Rixinuj]

JFL "spine chilling"??? We're just a bunch of losers on the internet venting

 

[weaselbomber]

Truly spine-chilling
Also femcels aren't real why are people forcing them so hard

 

[sultryloser]

Femcels exist

----->

 

[avoidthefoid]

enjoy giving the chills to cucks in the media

 

[Lonelyus]

original​

MSN

​

A look inside the spine-chilling incel subculture​

Nearly five years ago, on April 23, 2018, a man in his 20s drove a rented van down a crowded Toronto street, jumping the curb, killing 10 people (of which eight were women) and injuring 16. The day of the massacre, the attacker, Alek Minassian, wrote in a Facebook post, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” The killings, for which Minassian was convicted in June 2022 faced an automatic life sentence, focused international attention on the incel, or involuntary celibate, community. Let’s find out more about this subculture.

Not every celibate person is an incel​

Encyclopedia Britannica defines “celibacy” as “the state of being...sexually abstinent, usually in association with the role of a religious official or devotee.” It “has existed in one form or another throughout history.” Studies show that young people, especially young men, are “having less sex than previous generations.” People end up celibate for a variety of reasons, including religious commitment, asexuality (when a person doesn’t experience sexual attraction) or a desire to focus on other things in life. A person who is involuntarily celibate wants to experience sexual intimacy, but doesn’t have a partner.

The original incel forum was created by a woman​

The first known internet forum for the “involuntary celibate” community was created in 1997 by a Canadian woman, as a support group for people “struggling to form loving relationships,” according to the BBC. The forum’s founder, Alana, who didn’t share her last name, described the site as “a friendly place” where women and men could vent about loneliness. Forum users coined the word “incel” after realizing it was easier to say than “involuntary celibate.” Alana says, “The word [incel] used to mean anybody of any gender who was lonely, had never had sex or who hadn’t had a relationship in a long time, but we can’t call it that anymore.” Alana says she drifted away from the community in 2000, after she began dating. “I did my best to create a healthy and positive movement,” she says, adding that she has felt guilty about what the movement has become.

An online “manosphere” gave rise to today’s incel culture​

Over the past decade, the incel community has been linked to an amorphous male empowerment subculture known as “the manosphere.” According to the MIT Technology Review, the online “manosphere” can be divided into four broad groups: men’s rights activists (MRAs) who believe that social and legal institutions discriminate against men; “men going their own way” (MGTOW) who consciously avoid women; “pickup artists” who get enjoyment out of flirting with, dating and harassing women; and “then there are the incels, the most potentially violent of the group,” the magazine states. “Incels [believe] women use their sexual power to dominate men socially. For that, incels want revenge.”

Many incels believe women owe them sex​

The Grinnell College Subcultures and Scenes portal has a detailed entry on incels, which cites a Reddit thread popular in the community; the thread defines an incel as a person who is at least 21 years old and who has gone at least six months without a romantic partner without choosing to do so. “While many people of all genders may fit this category, predominantly heterosexual male incels that frequent the subreddit almost all agree that the world (women) owes them sex and that they are oppressed for being sexless men,” the portal explains.

Instances of incel-linked terror have killed as many as 50 people in North America​

According to The Guardian, violence linked to the incel movement had “killed as many as 50 people in the US and Canada” as of early 2021. In Toronto in 2018, Alek Minassian, a self-described incel in his 20s, drove a rented van down a crowded street, killing 10 people, including eight women. In February 2020, one woman was killed and two other people (one woman and one man) were injured in a series of stabbings at a Toronto massage parlour by a 17-year-old self-described incel, according to CBC. Between 2014 and 2021, at least five instances of mass murder in the United States have been linked to people identifying as incels, killing a total of 31 people, CBC found.

The Isla Vista Massacre was the first widely reported incident of incel terror​

The first widely reported act of terror linked to a self-identified incel occurred in 2014 in Isla Vista, California. Elliot Rodger, 22 at the time, killed two women and four men, all between the ages of 19 and 22, before taking his own life. A memorial service for the victims is pictured here. Before his death, Rodger posted an online manifesto where, according to the BBC, he “described himself as the ‘ideal magnificent gentleman’ and could not comprehend why women would not want to have sex with him.” After the massacre, Rodger became an incel folk hero. Alek Minassian, the self-described incel convicted in the Toronto van attacks, wrote a Facebook post the day of the massacre that ended with the phrase, “All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” According to Southern Poverty Law Center research analyst Keegan Hankes, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, many incels consider Rodger a “patron saint” and “refer to potential copycat violence as ‘going ER.’”

Many self-described incels have a history of bullying and isolation​

Many people who become incels have experienced bullying and rejection by their peers during childhood or at work. According to the Toronto Sun, Toronto van attacker Alek Minassian was “bullied and tormented as a special needs student” in high school and “ridiculed and isolated” during a short stint in the military. Jack Peterson, an American former incel podcaster who left the movement as it became increasingly violent, told The Guardian that he experienced bullying and grew up with “a strong sense of rejection.” Peterson says the incel mindset “is kind of like this: ‘I’ve been bullied and rejected my whole life so because of all the suffering I’ve experienced, now the world owes me s*x, it owes me friends, it owes me success, because of all the failures I’ve had.’” According to a Vice story, 78 per cent of incels report experiencing extreme loneliness, and 82 per cent have considered taking their lives.

Incel culture has its own dictionary​

Like many online subcultures, the incel movement has developed a vocabulary all its own. The terms “Chads” and “Stacys” refer to conventionally attractive men and women, respectively. The term “femoid” is used to describe women as subhuman robots. “Average” people outside the incel universe are referred to as “normies.” “Going ER” refers to an Elliot Rodger-inspired act of violence. Attempts by incels to improve their physical appearance (more on this later) are referred to as “looksmaxing.” “Ragefuel” is any information that contributes to an incel’s state of mind. Violent incels who act on their impulses are sometimes referred to as hERos, a play on Rodger’s initials. The Anti-Defamation League has a more complete list of incel vocabulary.

Some incels support a state-distributed girlfriend program​

Some members of the incel community take literally the idea that the world owes them sex or female companionship, or that providing men with no-strings-attached s*x is the only solution to incel violence. “If the Canadian government implemented a state distributed girlfriend program I guarantee these attacks would stop,” one incel wrote on Twitter shortly after the Toronto van attacks, according to The Walrus. As a 2018 Vice story shows, the idea of enforced monogamy has gotten much more traction in the manosphere than one isolated tweet. Shortly after Minassian’s rampage, according to Vice, George Mason University economist Robin Hanson suggested that involuntary celibacy “could be fixed...if we as a society set out to redistribute sex more equally.” Controversial author Jordan Peterson has suggested that incel violence could be solved by “some form of enforced monogamy.”

Incel violence is increasingly considered a terror threat​

After Alek Minassian’s van rampage, Canada’s public safety minister at the time, Ralph Goodale (pictured), declared that the attack wasn’t linked to terror. However, two years later, in May 2020, a self-identified incel who fatally stabbed a woman in Toronto was charged with terror-related offences. According to Newsweek, the case “mark[ed] the first time in Canada that an individual has been charged with a crime connected to the incel movement.” The Royal Canadian Mounted Police acknowledged that the suspect, whose name was not released because he was a minor when the stabbings occurred, “was inspired by the ideologically motivated violent extremist movement commonly known as INCEL.” In June 2020, the RCMP announced plans to add incel terror to its updated terrorism awareness guide. Potential incel-inspired terror is also a concern in the United States; Newsweek cites a report from the Texas Department of Public Safety which describes the incel movement as being “thrust into the realm of domestic terrorism.”

Incel terror predates the internet​

On Dec. 6, 1989, Marc Lépine walked into a classroom at Montreal’s École Polytechnique, ordered the men present to leave the room at gunpoint and began shooting the women. Fourteen women were killed; 10 women and four men were injured. “He told us that we [the trapped female students] were there because he was against feminists,” survivor Nathalie Provost told The Guardian. Provost and others see a clear connection between Lépine and present-day violent incels like Alek Minassian. “Lépine was not the last of the dinosaurs—it’s the opposite,” says researcher and campaigner Mélissa Blais.

Male incels tend to blame women for their own existential angst​

As a recent New Yorker story explained, the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s, growing mainstream acceptance of feminist ideals and the idea of individual self-worth, and (much later) the rise of social networking and online dating have widened the sexual, romantic and social opportunities available to women. “Most American women now grow up understanding that they can and should choose who they want to have sex with,” Jia Tolentino writes in the magazine. “Distinct cultural changes have created a situation in which many men who hate women do not have the access to women’s bodies that they would have had in an earlier era.” Incel mass shooter Elliot Rodger was open about his “hatred of women,” blaming a woman for “making him feel ‘worthless’” in an online manifesto cited in The Walrus. Tolentino cites one self-described incel who wrote on an online forum: “Women are the ultimate cause of our suffering.”

Incel culture has thrived on Reddit​

The first online incel gathering place, established by a Canadian woman in the 1990s, was “a simple, all-text website” with a mailing list. In later years, incels gravitated to Reddit, which banned the largest incel reddit thread in 2017. Unsurprisingly, another reddit sprung up to take its place, before it was banned in turn in 2019, along with other, smaller incel-linked reddits and subreddits. Despite Reddit’s attempts to crack down on the groups and tighten its own policies on acceptable content, new incel reddits keep appearing—“just like a family of cockroaches that you can’t get rid of” as Australian internet culture website GOAT puts it. According to the MIT Technology Review, some users of the banned reddits found a home on Gab, a site favoured by the far right; others have formed new reddits or gathered on 4chan or on standalone websites.

A growing number of incels seek out cosmetic surgery​

A 2019 story in The Cut takes a close look at the incel practice of “looksmaxing,” or investing extensive time, money and effort in one’s physical appearance in the hopes of becoming more attractive. The Cut describes an incel forum where participants “hated Chad [incel-speak for any conventionally attractive, successful man] but were convinced their lives would improve significantly if they could somehow become Chad.” Members were into bodybuilding, steroid use, p*nis-stretching and jaw muscle-building exercises. Others went further, deciding on reconstructive surgery: “The difference between a Chad and an incel is literally a few millimeters of bone,” one meme circulating in the group read. In the United States, cosmetic surgery among men “rose 325 percent between 1997 and 2015,” according to data from the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery cited in The Cut, although there’s no way of knowing how many of those patients identify with the incel worldview.

As many as 60,000 people around the world are active in incel forums​

Tens of thousands of people around the world are active in incel forums. When the main incel reddit was shut down in 2017, it had around 40,000 members. An investigation by Canadian public broadcaster CBC found that “at least 60,000 people” were active in three major incel forums. An informal poll of Braincels, a large incel group banned from Reddit in 2019, found that about 80 per cent of members were based in Europe or North America, and 55 per cent were white, with “significant percentages of posters who self-identify as East Asian, South Asian, Black and Latino.”

In Canada, more recent deaths have been linked to incel ideology than other forms of extremism​

In Canada, the Toronto van attack focused attention on the threat posed by incel radicalization. An investigation by the CBC program The Fifth Estate found that 120 instances of alt-right violence, including gender-motivated violence, had occurred in the last 30 years in Canada; during the same period, there were seven incidents of Islamist-inspired extremism. “How is this not an attack on national security?” criminologist Barbara Perry, whose research the statistics were drawn from, told the program. “There's a real and present threat associated with the far right.… I think we make a dangerous mistake thinking about it as only ... a fringe movement."

Self-declared incels tend to be young people​

Most self-declared incels are young adults. An informal poll of the Braincels reddit, cited by Vox, found that about 90 per cent of members were under 30. According to another poll analyzed by the Anti-Defamation League, the “average” incel is “in his mid-20s, of average height, white and European or North American.” Furthermore, the MIT Technology Review observed, “Over the past 10 years, the population of men identifying as men’s rights activists...traditionally older and less violent—is falling while younger, more toxic [pickup artist] and incel communities have seen a spike.”

Most incels don’t engage in offline violence​

Not all incels engage in offline violence—in fact, people who have been part of the forums suggest that those who do are rare exceptions. “An incel is someone who wants to have s*x but can’t,” one 24-year-old self-identified incel from New York told Vice. “We don’t all hate women, we’re not all white, and we’re not all homicidal maniacs. We’re also not all right-wing.” Jack Peterson, an American former incel podcaster, denounced violence within the movement. “I don’t condone violence,” he said, according to The Guardian, maintaining that “most of us feel that way.” Although Peterson is no longer active in the incel movement, he has said he still doesn’t think most incels are violent. A report by Canada’s Organization for the Prevention of Violence, cited in the National Post, would seem to back him up: “While the violent fringe of the incel movement is being recognized as a threat, it is important to acknowledge the majority of incels are not violent and may be at a higher risk of self-harm than the general population,” the report says.

Deradicalization groups are increasingly focusing on incels​

Since the Toronto van attack, deradicalization experts—people who specialize in preventing political and religious extremism or supporting people who try to leave extremist movements—have turned their attention to incels. “Counter violent extremist programming is about trying to prevent the escalation of those who are engaged with some kind of ideology that promotes violence from deciding to get up one day and do something about it—like [Toronto van attacker Alek] Minassian getting into a van,” deradicalization expert John McCoy of the Organization for the Prevention of Violence (OPV) told the National Post. One major barrier to these efforts, according to the National Post, is that incel stend to reject assistance.

Femcels exist​

Although early incel forums were open to people of any gender, current mainstream incel groups tend to be almost entirely male. However, women who identify as involuntarily celibate have created their own online universe, referring to themselves as femcels. Femcels, like incels, often have experience with bullying or rejection by the opposite sex; they “define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one,” according to the profile of a femcel online space in Huck magazine. “Like [male] incels, ‘Femcels’ have their own ideology, with terms such as ‘mascoids’ for men, and a lot of detailed theories about men ignoring women because of their looks,” Metro UK explains.

They failed to mention how men were also killed at the opening scene where 10 holes were murked

 

[AsiaCel]

JFL "spine chilling"??? We're just a bunch of losers on the internet venting

I like how we generate fear for normies. Makes me feel powerful.

 

[AsiaCel]

enjoy giving the chills to cucks in the media

Based I.N.C.E.L terrorist

 

[Lonelyus]

Elliots memory lives rent free in theyre heads lolz

 

[SoycuckGodOfReddit]

MY SPINE IS CHILLED

 

[PLA1092]

chills me

 

[SoycuckGodOfReddit]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA THE INKWELLS ARE COMING AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

 

[RandomGuy]

 

[PersonalityChimp]

Femcels exist

Literally the dumbest section of the entire article

 

[Epedaphic]

offline violence

Fucking kek, come on

 

[Govid_Dorious]

View attachment 861882
Literally the dumbest section of the entire article

that part got me KEK

 

[mcmoohyun]

----->

 

[Adûnâi]

For every incel living in Occidental shitholes without his right to free speech, I will say...
_Je suis Alek Minassian_

Because I'm Jewkrainian and I doubt the local SBU boomers even know what an incel is.

criminologist Barbara Perry

Can someone paraphrase that quote by Goebbels about finding a Jew worm in every filthy place you look? Can't find it.

 

[Incline]

View attachment 861882
Literally the dumbest section of the entire article

HOW TO STOP BEING A FEMCEL TUTORIAL

 

[ilieknothing]

They conveniently forgot to mention that the female judge said that St Alek wasn’t motivated by inceldom and ER wasn’t a self identified incel

 

[Stupid Clown]

"femcels exist"

 

[PersonalityChimp]

ER wasn’t a self identified incel

ER did identify himself as an incel on PUAhate iirc

 

[mcmoohyun]

"femcels exist"

Incel : Femcel ratio must be like 10^102848261 : 1

 

[Indari]

they will never run out of scary adjectives to describe inklers

 

[VλREN]

original​

MSN

​

A look inside the spine-chilling incel subculture​

Nearly five years ago, on April 23, 2018, a man in his 20s drove a rented van down a crowded Toronto street, jumping the curb, killing 10 people (of which eight were women) and injuring 16. The day of the massacre, the attacker, Alek Minassian, wrote in a Facebook post, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” The killings, for which Minassian was convicted in June 2022 faced an automatic life sentence, focused international attention on the incel, or involuntary celibate, community. Let’s find out more about this subculture.

Not every celibate person is an incel​

Encyclopedia Britannica defines “celibacy” as “the state of being...sexually abstinent, usually in association with the role of a religious official or devotee.” It “has existed in one form or another throughout history.” Studies show that young people, especially young men, are “having less sex than previous generations.” People end up celibate for a variety of reasons, including religious commitment, asexuality (when a person doesn’t experience sexual attraction) or a desire to focus on other things in life. A person who is involuntarily celibate wants to experience sexual intimacy, but doesn’t have a partner.

The original incel forum was created by a woman​

The first known internet forum for the “involuntary celibate” community was created in 1997 by a Canadian woman, as a support group for people “struggling to form loving relationships,” according to the BBC. The forum’s founder, Alana, who didn’t share her last name, described the site as “a friendly place” where women and men could vent about loneliness. Forum users coined the word “incel” after realizing it was easier to say than “involuntary celibate.” Alana says, “The word [incel] used to mean anybody of any gender who was lonely, had never had sex or who hadn’t had a relationship in a long time, but we can’t call it that anymore.” Alana says she drifted away from the community in 2000, after she began dating. “I did my best to create a healthy and positive movement,” she says, adding that she has felt guilty about what the movement has become.

An online “manosphere” gave rise to today’s incel culture​

Over the past decade, the incel community has been linked to an amorphous male empowerment subculture known as “the manosphere.” According to the MIT Technology Review, the online “manosphere” can be divided into four broad groups: men’s rights activists (MRAs) who believe that social and legal institutions discriminate against men; “men going their own way” (MGTOW) who consciously avoid women; “pickup artists” who get enjoyment out of flirting with, dating and harassing women; and “then there are the incels, the most potentially violent of the group,” the magazine states. “Incels [believe] women use their sexual power to dominate men socially. For that, incels want revenge.”

Many incels believe women owe them sex​

The Grinnell College Subcultures and Scenes portal has a detailed entry on incels, which cites a Reddit thread popular in the community; the thread defines an incel as a person who is at least 21 years old and who has gone at least six months without a romantic partner without choosing to do so. “While many people of all genders may fit this category, predominantly heterosexual male incels that frequent the subreddit almost all agree that the world (women) owes them sex and that they are oppressed for being sexless men,” the portal explains.

Instances of incel-linked terror have killed as many as 50 people in North America​

According to The Guardian, violence linked to the incel movement had “killed as many as 50 people in the US and Canada” as of early 2021. In Toronto in 2018, Alek Minassian, a self-described incel in his 20s, drove a rented van down a crowded street, killing 10 people, including eight women. In February 2020, one woman was killed and two other people (one woman and one man) were injured in a series of stabbings at a Toronto massage parlour by a 17-year-old self-described incel, according to CBC. Between 2014 and 2021, at least five instances of mass murder in the United States have been linked to people identifying as incels, killing a total of 31 people, CBC found.

The Isla Vista Massacre was the first widely reported incident of incel terror​

The first widely reported act of terror linked to a self-identified incel occurred in 2014 in Isla Vista, California. Elliot Rodger, 22 at the time, killed two women and four men, all between the ages of 19 and 22, before taking his own life. A memorial service for the victims is pictured here. Before his death, Rodger posted an online manifesto where, according to the BBC, he “described himself as the ‘ideal magnificent gentleman’ and could not comprehend why women would not want to have sex with him.” After the massacre, Rodger became an incel folk hero. Alek Minassian, the self-described incel convicted in the Toronto van attacks, wrote a Facebook post the day of the massacre that ended with the phrase, “All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” According to Southern Poverty Law Center research analyst Keegan Hankes, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, many incels consider Rodger a “patron saint” and “refer to potential copycat violence as ‘going ER.’”

Many self-described incels have a history of bullying and isolation​

Many people who become incels have experienced bullying and rejection by their peers during childhood or at work. According to the Toronto Sun, Toronto van attacker Alek Minassian was “bullied and tormented as a special needs student” in high school and “ridiculed and isolated” during a short stint in the military. Jack Peterson, an American former incel podcaster who left the movement as it became increasingly violent, told The Guardian that he experienced bullying and grew up with “a strong sense of rejection.” Peterson says the incel mindset “is kind of like this: ‘I’ve been bullied and rejected my whole life so because of all the suffering I’ve experienced, now the world owes me s*x, it owes me friends, it owes me success, because of all the failures I’ve had.’” According to a Vice story, 78 per cent of incels report experiencing extreme loneliness, and 82 per cent have considered taking their lives.

Incel culture has its own dictionary​

Like many online subcultures, the incel movement has developed a vocabulary all its own. The terms “Chads” and “Stacys” refer to conventionally attractive men and women, respectively. The term “femoid” is used to describe women as subhuman robots. “Average” people outside the incel universe are referred to as “normies.” “Going ER” refers to an Elliot Rodger-inspired act of violence. Attempts by incels to improve their physical appearance (more on this later) are referred to as “looksmaxing.” “Ragefuel” is any information that contributes to an incel’s state of mind. Violent incels who act on their impulses are sometimes referred to as hERos, a play on Rodger’s initials. The Anti-Defamation League has a more complete list of incel vocabulary.

Some incels support a state-distributed girlfriend program​

Some members of the incel community take literally the idea that the world owes them sex or female companionship, or that providing men with no-strings-attached s*x is the only solution to incel violence. “If the Canadian government implemented a state distributed girlfriend program I guarantee these attacks would stop,” one incel wrote on Twitter shortly after the Toronto van attacks, according to The Walrus. As a 2018 Vice story shows, the idea of enforced monogamy has gotten much more traction in the manosphere than one isolated tweet. Shortly after Minassian’s rampage, according to Vice, George Mason University economist Robin Hanson suggested that involuntary celibacy “could be fixed...if we as a society set out to redistribute sex more equally.” Controversial author Jordan Peterson has suggested that incel violence could be solved by “some form of enforced monogamy.”

Incel violence is increasingly considered a terror threat​

After Alek Minassian’s van rampage, Canada’s public safety minister at the time, Ralph Goodale (pictured), declared that the attack wasn’t linked to terror. However, two years later, in May 2020, a self-identified incel who fatally stabbed a woman in Toronto was charged with terror-related offences. According to Newsweek, the case “mark[ed] the first time in Canada that an individual has been charged with a crime connected to the incel movement.” The Royal Canadian Mounted Police acknowledged that the suspect, whose name was not released because he was a minor when the stabbings occurred, “was inspired by the ideologically motivated violent extremist movement commonly known as INCEL.” In June 2020, the RCMP announced plans to add incel terror to its updated terrorism awareness guide. Potential incel-inspired terror is also a concern in the United States; Newsweek cites a report from the Texas Department of Public Safety which describes the incel movement as being “thrust into the realm of domestic terrorism.”

Incel terror predates the internet​

On Dec. 6, 1989, Marc Lépine walked into a classroom at Montreal’s École Polytechnique, ordered the men present to leave the room at gunpoint and began shooting the women. Fourteen women were killed; 10 women and four men were injured. “He told us that we [the trapped female students] were there because he was against feminists,” survivor Nathalie Provost told The Guardian. Provost and others see a clear connection between Lépine and present-day violent incels like Alek Minassian. “Lépine was not the last of the dinosaurs—it’s the opposite,” says researcher and campaigner Mélissa Blais.

Male incels tend to blame women for their own existential angst​

As a recent New Yorker story explained, the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s, growing mainstream acceptance of feminist ideals and the idea of individual self-worth, and (much later) the rise of social networking and online dating have widened the sexual, romantic and social opportunities available to women. “Most American women now grow up understanding that they can and should choose who they want to have sex with,” Jia Tolentino writes in the magazine. “Distinct cultural changes have created a situation in which many men who hate women do not have the access to women’s bodies that they would have had in an earlier era.” Incel mass shooter Elliot Rodger was open about his “hatred of women,” blaming a woman for “making him feel ‘worthless’” in an online manifesto cited in The Walrus. Tolentino cites one self-described incel who wrote on an online forum: “Women are the ultimate cause of our suffering.”

Incel culture has thrived on Reddit​

The first online incel gathering place, established by a Canadian woman in the 1990s, was “a simple, all-text website” with a mailing list. In later years, incels gravitated to Reddit, which banned the largest incel reddit thread in 2017. Unsurprisingly, another reddit sprung up to take its place, before it was banned in turn in 2019, along with other, smaller incel-linked reddits and subreddits. Despite Reddit’s attempts to crack down on the groups and tighten its own policies on acceptable content, new incel reddits keep appearing—“just like a family of cockroaches that you can’t get rid of” as Australian internet culture website GOAT puts it. According to the MIT Technology Review, some users of the banned reddits found a home on Gab, a site favoured by the far right; others have formed new reddits or gathered on 4chan or on standalone websites.

A growing number of incels seek out cosmetic surgery​

A 2019 story in The Cut takes a close look at the incel practice of “looksmaxing,” or investing extensive time, money and effort in one’s physical appearance in the hopes of becoming more attractive. The Cut describes an incel forum where participants “hated Chad [incel-speak for any conventionally attractive, successful man] but were convinced their lives would improve significantly if they could somehow become Chad.” Members were into bodybuilding, steroid use, p*nis-stretching and jaw muscle-building exercises. Others went further, deciding on reconstructive surgery: “The difference between a Chad and an incel is literally a few millimeters of bone,” one meme circulating in the group read. In the United States, cosmetic surgery among men “rose 325 percent between 1997 and 2015,” according to data from the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery cited in The Cut, although there’s no way of knowing how many of those patients identify with the incel worldview.

As many as 60,000 people around the world are active in incel forums​

Tens of thousands of people around the world are active in incel forums. When the main incel reddit was shut down in 2017, it had around 40,000 members. An investigation by Canadian public broadcaster CBC found that “at least 60,000 people” were active in three major incel forums. An informal poll of Braincels, a large incel group banned from Reddit in 2019, found that about 80 per cent of members were based in Europe or North America, and 55 per cent were white, with “significant percentages of posters who self-identify as East Asian, South Asian, Black and Latino.”

In Canada, more recent deaths have been linked to incel ideology than other forms of extremism​

In Canada, the Toronto van attack focused attention on the threat posed by incel radicalization. An investigation by the CBC program The Fifth Estate found that 120 instances of alt-right violence, including gender-motivated violence, had occurred in the last 30 years in Canada; during the same period, there were seven incidents of Islamist-inspired extremism. “How is this not an attack on national security?” criminologist Barbara Perry, whose research the statistics were drawn from, told the program. “There's a real and present threat associated with the far right.… I think we make a dangerous mistake thinking about it as only ... a fringe movement."

Self-declared incels tend to be young people​

Most self-declared incels are young adults. An informal poll of the Braincels reddit, cited by Vox, found that about 90 per cent of members were under 30. According to another poll analyzed by the Anti-Defamation League, the “average” incel is “in his mid-20s, of average height, white and European or North American.” Furthermore, the MIT Technology Review observed, “Over the past 10 years, the population of men identifying as men’s rights activists...traditionally older and less violent—is falling while younger, more toxic [pickup artist] and incel communities have seen a spike.”

Most incels don’t engage in offline violence​

Not all incels engage in offline violence—in fact, people who have been part of the forums suggest that those who do are rare exceptions. “An incel is someone who wants to have s*x but can’t,” one 24-year-old self-identified incel from New York told Vice. “We don’t all hate women, we’re not all white, and we’re not all homicidal maniacs. We’re also not all right-wing.” Jack Peterson, an American former incel podcaster, denounced violence within the movement. “I don’t condone violence,” he said, according to The Guardian, maintaining that “most of us feel that way.” Although Peterson is no longer active in the incel movement, he has said he still doesn’t think most incels are violent. A report by Canada’s Organization for the Prevention of Violence, cited in the National Post, would seem to back him up: “While the violent fringe of the incel movement is being recognized as a threat, it is important to acknowledge the majority of incels are not violent and may be at a higher risk of self-harm than the general population,” the report says.

Deradicalization groups are increasingly focusing on incels​

Since the Toronto van attack, deradicalization experts—people who specialize in preventing political and religious extremism or supporting people who try to leave extremist movements—have turned their attention to incels. “Counter violent extremist programming is about trying to prevent the escalation of those who are engaged with some kind of ideology that promotes violence from deciding to get up one day and do something about it—like [Toronto van attacker Alek] Minassian getting into a van,” deradicalization expert John McCoy of the Organization for the Prevention of Violence (OPV) told the National Post. One major barrier to these efforts, according to the National Post, is that incel stend to reject assistance.

Femcels exist​

Although early incel forums were open to people of any gender, current mainstream incel groups tend to be almost entirely male. However, women who identify as involuntarily celibate have created their own online universe, referring to themselves as femcels. Femcels, like incels, often have experience with bullying or rejection by the opposite sex; they “define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one,” according to the profile of a femcel online space in Huck magazine. “Like [male] incels, ‘Femcels’ have their own ideology, with terms such as ‘mascoids’ for men, and a lot of detailed theories about men ignoring women because of their looks,” Metro UK explains.

Despite all those words, not a single shred of truth was said

 

[VλREN]

 

[1337hikki]

Based I.N.C.E.L terrorist

Proud I.N.C.E.L battalion member

 

[1337hikki]

Damn even the (((ADL))) is giving us attention now
At least they're more up to date with our lingo

 

[1337hikki]

Waaaaa Chad doesn't look in my direction, only MTN

Femcels r literally a fucking joke kek
I remember I ventured onto crystal.cafe once just to see how it compared to wizchan
They do use the term moid there sometimes but literally 1/2 the threads were foids complaining about their RELATIONSHIPS
The other 1/2 is prob just trannies

 

[Asgard]

This is not spine-chilling to me.

What actually does scare me is not being considered an average male. I never had the opportunity to behave as a normal teenager.

 

[Mentally lost cel]

JFL "spine chilling"??? We're just a bunch of losers on the internet venting

 

[Mentally lost cel]

They do use the term moid there sometimes but literally 1/2 the threads were foids complaining about their RELATIONSHIPS

rip

 

[gymletethnicel]

The Grinnell College Subcultures and Scenes portal has a detailed entry on incels, which cites a Reddit thread popular in the community; the thread defines an incel as a person who is at least 21 years old and who has gone at least six months without a romantic partner without choosing to do so. “While many people of all genders may fit this category, predominantly heterosexual male incels that frequent the subreddit almost all agree that the world (women) owes them sex and that they are oppressed for being sexless men,” the portal explains.

Just cite Reddit threads theory

 

[Jotasso]

JFL "spine chilling"??? We're just a bunch of losers on the internet venting

 

[Govid_Dorious]

Waaaaa Chad doesn't look in my direction, only MTN

 

[SociallyStupid]

I won't rule out femcels exist, but still think that like 99% of the "femcels" are volcels, often with comments like "should I really have to settle for a loser?" and similar things. Honestly, if a women is extremely deformed and mentally disabled I could imagine here to be a trucel, but the others are pretty much certainly volcels.

 

[depressedmanlet]

>incels believe women owe them sex
Bollocks of bullshit

We just primarily believe that women choose guys who have good height and face. And so people like us who have neither of these are here to give support to each other.

 

[turbosperg]

Femcels exist

 

[war_with_myself]

spine chilling

 

[WuhanFriedPuppies]

>incels believe women owe them sex
Bollocks of bullshit

We just primarily believe that women choose guys who have good height and face. And so people like us who have neither of these are here to give support to each other.

Women believe men owe them money.

 

[Antorian]

Members of the I.N.C.E.L revolutionary force.

 

[kuslus]

enjoy giving the chills to cucks in the media

Proud I.N.C.E.L battalion member

 

[Slut_Annihilator298]

original​

MSN

​

A look inside the spine-chilling incel subculture​

Nearly five years ago, on April 23, 2018, a man in his 20s drove a rented van down a crowded Toronto street, jumping the curb, killing 10 people (of which eight were women) and injuring 16. The day of the massacre, the attacker, Alek Minassian, wrote in a Facebook post, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” The killings, for which Minassian was convicted in June 2022 faced an automatic life sentence, focused international attention on the incel, or involuntary celibate, community. Let’s find out more about this subculture.

Not every celibate person is an incel​

Encyclopedia Britannica defines “celibacy” as “the state of being...sexually abstinent, usually in association with the role of a religious official or devotee.” It “has existed in one form or another throughout history.” Studies show that young people, especially young men, are “having less sex than previous generations.” People end up celibate for a variety of reasons, including religious commitment, asexuality (when a person doesn’t experience sexual attraction) or a desire to focus on other things in life. A person who is involuntarily celibate wants to experience sexual intimacy, but doesn’t have a partner.

The original incel forum was created by a woman​

The first known internet forum for the “involuntary celibate” community was created in 1997 by a Canadian woman, as a support group for people “struggling to form loving relationships,” according to the BBC. The forum’s founder, Alana, who didn’t share her last name, described the site as “a friendly place” where women and men could vent about loneliness. Forum users coined the word “incel” after realizing it was easier to say than “involuntary celibate.” Alana says, “The word [incel] used to mean anybody of any gender who was lonely, had never had sex or who hadn’t had a relationship in a long time, but we can’t call it that anymore.” Alana says she drifted away from the community in 2000, after she began dating. “I did my best to create a healthy and positive movement,” she says, adding that she has felt guilty about what the movement has become.

An online “manosphere” gave rise to today’s incel culture​

Over the past decade, the incel community has been linked to an amorphous male empowerment subculture known as “the manosphere.” According to the MIT Technology Review, the online “manosphere” can be divided into four broad groups: men’s rights activists (MRAs) who believe that social and legal institutions discriminate against men; “men going their own way” (MGTOW) who consciously avoid women; “pickup artists” who get enjoyment out of flirting with, dating and harassing women; and “then there are the incels, the most potentially violent of the group,” the magazine states. “Incels [believe] women use their sexual power to dominate men socially. For that, incels want revenge.”

Many incels believe women owe them sex​

The Grinnell College Subcultures and Scenes portal has a detailed entry on incels, which cites a Reddit thread popular in the community; the thread defines an incel as a person who is at least 21 years old and who has gone at least six months without a romantic partner without choosing to do so. “While many people of all genders may fit this category, predominantly heterosexual male incels that frequent the subreddit almost all agree that the world (women) owes them sex and that they are oppressed for being sexless men,” the portal explains.

Instances of incel-linked terror have killed as many as 50 people in North America​

According to The Guardian, violence linked to the incel movement had “killed as many as 50 people in the US and Canada” as of early 2021. In Toronto in 2018, Alek Minassian, a self-described incel in his 20s, drove a rented van down a crowded street, killing 10 people, including eight women. In February 2020, one woman was killed and two other people (one woman and one man) were injured in a series of stabbings at a Toronto massage parlour by a 17-year-old self-described incel, according to CBC. Between 2014 and 2021, at least five instances of mass murder in the United States have been linked to people identifying as incels, killing a total of 31 people, CBC found.

The Isla Vista Massacre was the first widely reported incident of incel terror​

The first widely reported act of terror linked to a self-identified incel occurred in 2014 in Isla Vista, California. Elliot Rodger, 22 at the time, killed two women and four men, all between the ages of 19 and 22, before taking his own life. A memorial service for the victims is pictured here. Before his death, Rodger posted an online manifesto where, according to the BBC, he “described himself as the ‘ideal magnificent gentleman’ and could not comprehend why women would not want to have sex with him.” After the massacre, Rodger became an incel folk hero. Alek Minassian, the self-described incel convicted in the Toronto van attacks, wrote a Facebook post the day of the massacre that ended with the phrase, “All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” According to Southern Poverty Law Center research analyst Keegan Hankes, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, many incels consider Rodger a “patron saint” and “refer to potential copycat violence as ‘going ER.’”

Many self-described incels have a history of bullying and isolation​

Many people who become incels have experienced bullying and rejection by their peers during childhood or at work. According to the Toronto Sun, Toronto van attacker Alek Minassian was “bullied and tormented as a special needs student” in high school and “ridiculed and isolated” during a short stint in the military. Jack Peterson, an American former incel podcaster who left the movement as it became increasingly violent, told The Guardian that he experienced bullying and grew up with “a strong sense of rejection.” Peterson says the incel mindset “is kind of like this: ‘I’ve been bullied and rejected my whole life so because of all the suffering I’ve experienced, now the world owes me s*x, it owes me friends, it owes me success, because of all the failures I’ve had.’” According to a Vice story, 78 per cent of incels report experiencing extreme loneliness, and 82 per cent have considered taking their lives.

Incel culture has its own dictionary​

Like many online subcultures, the incel movement has developed a vocabulary all its own. The terms “Chads” and “Stacys” refer to conventionally attractive men and women, respectively. The term “femoid” is used to describe women as subhuman robots. “Average” people outside the incel universe are referred to as “normies.” “Going ER” refers to an Elliot Rodger-inspired act of violence. Attempts by incels to improve their physical appearance (more on this later) are referred to as “looksmaxing.” “Ragefuel” is any information that contributes to an incel’s state of mind. Violent incels who act on their impulses are sometimes referred to as hERos, a play on Rodger’s initials. The Anti-Defamation League has a more complete list of incel vocabulary.

Some incels support a state-distributed girlfriend program​

Some members of the incel community take literally the idea that the world owes them sex or female companionship, or that providing men with no-strings-attached s*x is the only solution to incel violence. “If the Canadian government implemented a state distributed girlfriend program I guarantee these attacks would stop,” one incel wrote on Twitter shortly after the Toronto van attacks, according to The Walrus. As a 2018 Vice story shows, the idea of enforced monogamy has gotten much more traction in the manosphere than one isolated tweet. Shortly after Minassian’s rampage, according to Vice, George Mason University economist Robin Hanson suggested that involuntary celibacy “could be fixed...if we as a society set out to redistribute sex more equally.” Controversial author Jordan Peterson has suggested that incel violence could be solved by “some form of enforced monogamy.”

Incel violence is increasingly considered a terror threat​

After Alek Minassian’s van rampage, Canada’s public safety minister at the time, Ralph Goodale (pictured), declared that the attack wasn’t linked to terror. However, two years later, in May 2020, a self-identified incel who fatally stabbed a woman in Toronto was charged with terror-related offences. According to Newsweek, the case “mark[ed] the first time in Canada that an individual has been charged with a crime connected to the incel movement.” The Royal Canadian Mounted Police acknowledged that the suspect, whose name was not released because he was a minor when the stabbings occurred, “was inspired by the ideologically motivated violent extremist movement commonly known as INCEL.” In June 2020, the RCMP announced plans to add incel terror to its updated terrorism awareness guide. Potential incel-inspired terror is also a concern in the United States; Newsweek cites a report from the Texas Department of Public Safety which describes the incel movement as being “thrust into the realm of domestic terrorism.”

Incel terror predates the internet​

On Dec. 6, 1989, Marc Lépine walked into a classroom at Montreal’s École Polytechnique, ordered the men present to leave the room at gunpoint and began shooting the women. Fourteen women were killed; 10 women and four men were injured. “He told us that we [the trapped female students] were there because he was against feminists,” survivor Nathalie Provost told The Guardian. Provost and others see a clear connection between Lépine and present-day violent incels like Alek Minassian. “Lépine was not the last of the dinosaurs—it’s the opposite,” says researcher and campaigner Mélissa Blais.

Male incels tend to blame women for their own existential angst​

As a recent New Yorker story explained, the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s, growing mainstream acceptance of feminist ideals and the idea of individual self-worth, and (much later) the rise of social networking and online dating have widened the sexual, romantic and social opportunities available to women. “Most American women now grow up understanding that they can and should choose who they want to have sex with,” Jia Tolentino writes in the magazine. “Distinct cultural changes have created a situation in which many men who hate women do not have the access to women’s bodies that they would have had in an earlier era.” Incel mass shooter Elliot Rodger was open about his “hatred of women,” blaming a woman for “making him feel ‘worthless’” in an online manifesto cited in The Walrus. Tolentino cites one self-described incel who wrote on an online forum: “Women are the ultimate cause of our suffering.”

Incel culture has thrived on Reddit​

The first online incel gathering place, established by a Canadian woman in the 1990s, was “a simple, all-text website” with a mailing list. In later years, incels gravitated to Reddit, which banned the largest incel reddit thread in 2017. Unsurprisingly, another reddit sprung up to take its place, before it was banned in turn in 2019, along with other, smaller incel-linked reddits and subreddits. Despite Reddit’s attempts to crack down on the groups and tighten its own policies on acceptable content, new incel reddits keep appearing—“just like a family of cockroaches that you can’t get rid of” as Australian internet culture website GOAT puts it. According to the MIT Technology Review, some users of the banned reddits found a home on Gab, a site favoured by the far right; others have formed new reddits or gathered on 4chan or on standalone websites.

A growing number of incels seek out cosmetic surgery​

A 2019 story in The Cut takes a close look at the incel practice of “looksmaxing,” or investing extensive time, money and effort in one’s physical appearance in the hopes of becoming more attractive. The Cut describes an incel forum where participants “hated Chad [incel-speak for any conventionally attractive, successful man] but were convinced their lives would improve significantly if they could somehow become Chad.” Members were into bodybuilding, steroid use, p*nis-stretching and jaw muscle-building exercises. Others went further, deciding on reconstructive surgery: “The difference between a Chad and an incel is literally a few millimeters of bone,” one meme circulating in the group read. In the United States, cosmetic surgery among men “rose 325 percent between 1997 and 2015,” according to data from the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery cited in The Cut, although there’s no way of knowing how many of those patients identify with the incel worldview.

As many as 60,000 people around the world are active in incel forums​

Tens of thousands of people around the world are active in incel forums. When the main incel reddit was shut down in 2017, it had around 40,000 members. An investigation by Canadian public broadcaster CBC found that “at least 60,000 people” were active in three major incel forums. An informal poll of Braincels, a large incel group banned from Reddit in 2019, found that about 80 per cent of members were based in Europe or North America, and 55 per cent were white, with “significant percentages of posters who self-identify as East Asian, South Asian, Black and Latino.”

In Canada, more recent deaths have been linked to incel ideology than other forms of extremism​

In Canada, the Toronto van attack focused attention on the threat posed by incel radicalization. An investigation by the CBC program The Fifth Estate found that 120 instances of alt-right violence, including gender-motivated violence, had occurred in the last 30 years in Canada; during the same period, there were seven incidents of Islamist-inspired extremism. “How is this not an attack on national security?” criminologist Barbara Perry, whose research the statistics were drawn from, told the program. “There's a real and present threat associated with the far right.… I think we make a dangerous mistake thinking about it as only ... a fringe movement."

Self-declared incels tend to be young people​

Most self-declared incels are young adults. An informal poll of the Braincels reddit, cited by Vox, found that about 90 per cent of members were under 30. According to another poll analyzed by the Anti-Defamation League, the “average” incel is “in his mid-20s, of average height, white and European or North American.” Furthermore, the MIT Technology Review observed, “Over the past 10 years, the population of men identifying as men’s rights activists...traditionally older and less violent—is falling while younger, more toxic [pickup artist] and incel communities have seen a spike.”

Most incels don’t engage in offline violence​

Not all incels engage in offline violence—in fact, people who have been part of the forums suggest that those who do are rare exceptions. “An incel is someone who wants to have s*x but can’t,” one 24-year-old self-identified incel from New York told Vice. “We don’t all hate women, we’re not all white, and we’re not all homicidal maniacs. We’re also not all right-wing.” Jack Peterson, an American former incel podcaster, denounced violence within the movement. “I don’t condone violence,” he said, according to The Guardian, maintaining that “most of us feel that way.” Although Peterson is no longer active in the incel movement, he has said he still doesn’t think most incels are violent. A report by Canada’s Organization for the Prevention of Violence, cited in the National Post, would seem to back him up: “While the violent fringe of the incel movement is being recognized as a threat, it is important to acknowledge the majority of incels are not violent and may be at a higher risk of self-harm than the general population,” the report says.

Deradicalization groups are increasingly focusing on incels​

Since the Toronto van attack, deradicalization experts—people who specialize in preventing political and religious extremism or supporting people who try to leave extremist movements—have turned their attention to incels. “Counter violent extremist programming is about trying to prevent the escalation of those who are engaged with some kind of ideology that promotes violence from deciding to get up one day and do something about it—like [Toronto van attacker Alek] Minassian getting into a van,” deradicalization expert John McCoy of the Organization for the Prevention of Violence (OPV) told the National Post. One major barrier to these efforts, according to the National Post, is that incel stend to reject assistance.

Femcels exist​

Although early incel forums were open to people of any gender, current mainstream incel groups tend to be almost entirely male. However, women who identify as involuntarily celibate have created their own online universe, referring to themselves as femcels. Femcels, like incels, often have experience with bullying or rejection by the opposite sex; they “define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one,” according to the profile of a femcel online space in Huck magazine. “Like [male] incels, ‘Femcels’ have their own ideology, with terms such as ‘mascoids’ for men, and a lot of detailed theories about men ignoring women because of their looks,” Metro UK explains.

Wow these cucks are geniunely scared of us. Kinda feels nice knowing they fear us. They know our wrath is powerful and unstoppable (until the Five-0 shows up)

 

[GhostedPhantom]

spine-chilling

Yes exactly like the androids' spine-chilling request to be treated like human beings instead of like subhuman trash:

View: https://youtu.be/RBbnAqre8EA?t=1117

 

[Spice]

Shivers me

 

[iRespectWoman]

Some incels support a state-distributed girlfriend program​

Some members of the incel community take literally the idea that the world owes them sex or female companionship, or that providing men with no-strings-attached s*x is the only solution to incel violence. “If the Canadian government implemented a state distributed girlfriend program I guarantee these attacks would stop,” one incel wrote on Twitter shortly after the Toronto van attacks, according to The Walrus. As a 2018 Vice story shows, the idea of enforced monogamy has gotten much more traction in the manosphere than one isolated tweet. Shortly after Minassian’s rampage, according to Vice, George Mason University economist Robin Hanson suggested that involuntary celibacy “could be fixed...if we as a society set out to redistribute sex more equally.” Controversial author Jordan Peterson has suggested that incel violence could be solved by “some form of enforced monogamy.”

This is the ONLY way our problems will be solved. Some kind of fascist enforcement must be imposed so we each get a girlfriend to quench our thirst. A look into muslim countries, that borderline enslave women for the benefit of the male's standard of living, is proof that this idea isn't far fetched at all.

 

[slashER]

 

[Aquiline]

>incels believe women owe them sex
Bollocks of bullshit

We just primarily believe that women choose guys who have good height and face. And so people like us who have neither of these are here to give support to each other.

Yes, this is what this is all about. Everything else is a formality.

 

[theautismcel]

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dating in 2024