Kent Academic Repository
Cottee, Simon (2020) Incel (E)motives: Resentment, Shame and Revenge.
Studies in Conflict & Terrorism . ISSN 1057-610X.
Incel (E)motives: Resentment, Shame and Revenge
ABSTRACT
This article provides a framework for thinking about incels and incel-inspired terrorism. Incels are part of a fringe online subculture that trades in misogyny, victimhood and fatalism. The aim of the article is to describe these aforementioned orientations and the emotions associated with them. Only a tiny minority of incels commit acts of incel-inspired terrorism. Research on shame and revenge provides a useful starting-point for understanding these acts.
Why is it the assholes get all the beautiful young chicks?
Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver
(London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 44.
The aim of this article is to describe the incel subculture and the constellation of beliefs, values and emotions that animate it. It is divided into five sections: the first addresses some definitional issues and summarizes the incel worldview; the second provides an account of the “life-situation”of incels,focusing on argot and performativity; the third describes three core orientations of the incel subculture; the fourth explores the possible overlaps between incels and other extremists; and the fifth and final section focuses on the centrality of shame and revenge in incel-inspired terrorism.
Research on incels is still in its infancy, although notable contributions include a recent paper by Bruce Hoffman, Jacob Ware and Ezra Shapiro and a qualitative study of the self-understandings of incels. This article draws on this emergent body of research, as well on more established work on deviancy and subcultures; stigma and performativity; language and hermeneutics; the “manosphere”; and the criminology of shame, humiliation and violence. In addition to this, the article is based on a close reading of 50 discussion threads from the incel online forum “INCELS.CO”.
Incels and Terrorism
An incel is someone who identifies as “involuntary celibate” and invokes this as a masterstatus. “Inceldom” refers to the state of being an incel. Incels thus define themselves in reference to a deficit, and that deficit is a sexual relationship with a woman. Incels interpret and experience this deficit not just as a private source of sexual frustration, but as a shameinducing moral wrong inflicted on them by women and genetics. This perceived wrong forms the basis of the incel worldview, which serves to rationalize the sexual deficit of incels and justify hostility against women and sexually active men.
It is well-meaning but mistaken to suggest that “incel” is a gender-neutral term. It is not. Incels are exclusively male and the incel ideology is by definition anti-women. While violent incels have targeted men in their attacks, their primary target is women, who are the main source of their resentment and frustration. (The reason that violent incels have targeted men is not because they are men, but rather because of their perceived proximity to women – because they have been “feminized” or because they are coupled with and thus “contaminated” by women.)
There are no female incels: women who invoke a master status based on the claim that men deprive them of sex and are inherently demonic. This is not, of course, to say that women cannot, or do not, suffer from the pains of sexual frustration. In his 1979 study of single parents in America, Robert S. Weiss found that although the female divorcees he interviewed seemed more diffident in reporting sexual need, some were surprisingly emphatic on the matter, describing it as a visceral emotion over which they had no control.
One interviewee told him, “Oh, God, I’ve felt sexual frustration. I was, like, climbing the walls…The feeling was through my – well, say my stomach – just a yearning, but very bad.” Another relayed: “I can feel me getting frustrated. I can feel my stomach getting tight. I can feel it building up. I get short-tempered with my kids. And I say to myself, ‘You just need a good screw. Right now you don’t have a good screw’.”
These women may have been lonely and sexually frustrated, but they were not the forerunners of a female inceldom, since they did not seek to politicize their sexual frustration into a master status rooted in misandry (hatred of men). And while there is no shortage of women today who report feelings of sexual frustration and loneliness, and who even self-identify as “femcells”, none of these women have sought to mobilize politically against men nor subjected them to gender-based harassment or violence.
Incel Subcultural Values
What are the core values or approved ways of life at the heart of the incel subculture? I suggest there are three: (1) misogyny; (2) victimhood and (3) fatalism.
Misogyny
Misogyny is both a form of male hostility toward women and a way of acting that ensures male dominance over women.
As an emotion, it is the animating focal point of the incel subculture, whereby hatred of women is not merely deeply felt and expressed among incels, but elevated into the status of an identity. Some incels explicitly deny that they hate women, but the tone and substance of incel online communication would suggest that misogyny is rife in the incel subculture.
Among incels the roots of misogyny lie in resentment. According to Thomas Cushman, “Resentment is a particular kind of emotion, in which the object toward which resentment is directed, though specified as something that is undesirable is, in fact, perhaps desired, yet unobtainable”.
This is a useful way of thinking about incels, whose hatred toward women is best understood as a form of resentment, since for incels women are the desired but unobtainable object.
The patriarchal belief that they are entitled to women and the perception that women are having sex with everyone but them only serves to heighten the resentment of incels toward women. Resentment is further intensified by the conviction shared by incels that they are intellectually and morally superior to the women they crave and the men they envy.
Victimhood
The incel subculture is a brotherhood of the shipwrecked and the defeated. Incels portray themselves as accursed victims who are triply wronged: first, by genetics (they lament that they are not tall enough, that they are not good looking enough, that they are not fit enough etc.); second, by women, who they blame for rejecting them; and third, by society at large, for the contempt and indifference it exhibits toward incels.
These wrongs are described by incels in catastrophic language as deep wounds and traumas to the self. Indeed, the incel subculture is first and foremost a wound culture that thrives, indeed engorges, on the psychological suffering of its members. Mark Seltzer suggests that wound culture is “the public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and open persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma and the wound.”
Incel forums are assuredly an unmistakable product of this culture, where lonely and desperate men gather to expose their personal traumas to other lonely and desperate men, sharing their “sad tales” about how they got into their sorry state and how bad it is. This seems to serve a cathartic function, helping incels unburden their frustrations to others who are in the same situation and to appreciate that they are “not the only one”.
It is easy to dismiss incel sad tales as the mawkish emoting of entitled and attentionseeking adolescent men, but this would be unfair. While many such tales take this form, many more express deeply considered feelings of social and psychological inadequacy and pain. Let us recall that nearly 70 percent of incels in the “INCELS.CO” 2020 survey claimed to suffer from depression.
Not a few incels have committed suicide as a result of their depression. This is a prominent point of discussion on incel online forums, where some incels ponder, in the words of one topic-post, “the quickest and easiest way to commit suicide” and invite reflection on, in the words of another topic-post, whether “It’s selfish to talk an incel out of suicide”.
It is ironic that while the incel subculture is so intolerant toward the victimhood culture of other groups, particularly minorities, it is more than a little vocal in making its own claims to victimhood.
Fatalism
The Swedish theologian Krister Stendahl once observed that if one is seeking to console a mother grieving for the death of a child, it helps to believe in the Devil: the blows of fate are somewhat easier to bear if one sees them as beyond one’s control.
For incels, there is a Devil, and he is manifest in two forms: bad genes and bad women. “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist,” says Roger “Verbal” Kint in The Usual Suspects.
Incels know better: they know not only that the Devil exists, but that he cannot be defeated - that “lookism” is systemic and cannot be breached, and that women are a lost cause. But the Devil can be resisted in acts of symbolic defiance and withdrawal. This is the “delinquent solution” of the incel subculture
According to Albert Cohen, since our really hard problems do not permit perfect solutions, it follows that ‘‘an effective, really satisfying solution must entail some change in the frame of reference itself.’’ A person may give up pursuit of some unattainable goal, “but it is not a ‘solution’ unless he can first persuade himself that the goal is, after all, not worth pursuing; in short, his values must change.” For incels, this means rejecting the goal of sexual intimacy with women.
It means recognizing that, however hard he tries, the incel will never be able to have sex with a woman (outside of prostitution). And for the incel there is a sort of pride to be had in coming to this recognition (in “seeing the light” and “manfully” acknowledging unpleasant facts), and a relief in knowing that by quitting the chase he no longer has to suffer the humiliating and futile rigors of self-improvement as well as the myriad indignities of being continually rejected by women.
As one moderator of a now banned incel online forum explained to journalist Aja Romano, “It is liberating…You can stop worrying about improving yourself, stop worrying about the years passing by and your chances getting slimmer, stop worrying about what will happen in the future, because you are certain of your place in the world and what is going to happen.”In the language of subcultural theory, this is reaction-formation: rejecting in order not to be (further) rejected.
In arriving at this “solution” the incel is not thereby healed; he still feels the pains of a life without sexual intimacy and must constantly strive to commit to his rejection of sexual intimacy, which he all the while secretly craves. But he can achieve a certain kind of redemption in that he is (in his eyes) no longer hostage to the negative judgement of other women nor shackled to the secondary miseries of false hope (i.e. the belief that at some unspecified point in the future he might be able to break out of his inceldom and find a female sexual partner).
Incels resemble what Robert K. Merton calls “retreatists”: namely, deviants who reject both the means and the goals of conventional society, for not only have they abandoned trying to make themselves attractive to women (i.e. the “conventional means” specified by society for achieving sexual success); they have also given up on the actual prescribed goal itself (i.e. sexual intimacy).
In doing so, incels fatalistically condemn themselves to a life devoid not just of sexual intimacy but of all meaningful interaction with women. Indeed, the whole incel subculture can be understood as a veritable counsel of despair that facilitates the self-damnation of those who participate in it. However, and paradoxically, this damnation is experienced as an existential state of true (“blackpilled”) consciousness and authentic existence.
By rejecting both the goal of sexual intimacy and the means of male self-improvement incels transform their shame and inferiority into a form of resistance against the “normie” status quo
The above process is by no means a static one, and it is likely that some incels lurch between stoic resignation and quiet optimism that their fortunes might change for the better. It is also important to emphasize that a small number of incels reject the stoic attitude outright, dismissing it as a cowardly form of capitulation to the forces that oppress and demean them. For these men, it is impossible to passively accept the reality of their social mortification; for these few, only violence – against others or themselves – will solve their problems.
“Gone ER”: Shame and Dehumiliation
Terrorism is commonly understood as a form of coercion. Igor Primoratz, for example, writes that terrorism is “intimidation with a purpose: the terror is meant to cause others to do things they would otherwise not do. Terrorism is coercive intimidation”. According to the UK Terrorism Act 2000, terrorism is “the use of serious violence against persons or property, or the threat to use such violence, to intimidate or coerce a government, the public, or any section of the public for political, religious or ideological ends.” The FBI similarly defines terrorism as the “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government or civilian population in furtherance of political or social objectives.”
But not all terrorism can be understood as a tactic of coercive intimidation and need not be part of a coercive strategy at all. For example, and as C. A. J. Coady remarks, terrorists may want to cause anger more than fear, “believing that an angry population and government would act foolishly and play into their hands”. Or they may want to use spectacular violence as a means of publicizing their cause or grievances. Or they may want to use violence as a way of getting even – as a form of punitive revenge so as get justice for perceived wrongs. In all of these cases, the aim is not to coerce, but to provoke, publicize or punish.
Jeremy Waldron points to three further possibilities. First, “violent action might be viewed as a form of therapy for the perpetrator, particularly where the perpetrator has suffered for a long time in the ignominy and humiliation of some oppressive form of subordination”.94 This is exactly how Frantz Fanon saw the matter, notoriously observing that “violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction, it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect”.
Second, “terrorist acts might be intended as acts of expression, to send a message of some sort to the targeted population or to the world at large”. The message, for example, may involve a denunciation: “You are despicable and deserve this.” Or it may express a demand to be heard: “You need to recognize my pain/that we exist.” Or it may convey a message of self-aggrandisement: “I will no longer take it anymore.”
Third, “terrorism may aim at the inculcation of terror…in a population for ethical reasons, either for its own sake, or in order to bring about some sort of further ethical transformation in the mentality or attitudes of the targeted population”. Waldron is careful to note that in using the term “ethical terrorism” he means “only to categorize the strategy, not endorse it”. Elaborating, he writes:
The idea, as I understand it, is this. The populations of prosperous countries are often perceived to languish in complacency and self-satisfied indifference to what happens in less prosperous parts of the world: their mentality is inauthentic and irresponsible, they give little thought to the predicament of anyone other than themselves and their fellow-countrymen. Their mental state…is offensively inappropriate to the reality of the world in which they live, but of which they seem blithely and viciously unaware…So – the terrorist reckons – these mental states…ought to be changed…It would be good, the terrorist reckons, for U.S. citizens to be become less arrogant and complacent; or it would be good for the British or the Israeli citizenry to experience the fear and insecurity that their subject populations have to live with every day. And so the terrorist considers various means by which this could be accomplished – public education and leaflets, for example – and he concludes that there might be nothing so effective as a few atrocities – bombings, murders, spectacular acts of destruction – calculated to generate widespread terror, [or] panic.
Incel-inspired terrorism, I wish to argue, is primarily a non-coercive form of political violence that serves four interrelated purposes: 1) to punish women and the specified categories of men (“Chads” and “Faggots”); 2) to therapeutically de-humiliate the perpetrator; 3) to communicate a message of hurt and visibility; and 4) to attack what is seen as the complacency and self-satisfied indifference of mainstream (“normie”) society.
Conclusion
Incels, although alone and lonely, are part of a fringe online subculture that provides an identity and source of meaning and solidarity for those who identify as incels. While the incel subculture sizzles with hateful rhetoric against women, feminists and their male supporters, it would be a mistake to categorize it as a form of violent extremism, since it does not advocate the use of violence as a necessary remedy for in-group defence.
By portraying incels as the maligned victims of demonic women and a hostile society, the incel worldview serves to minimize acts of incel-inspired terrorism. But it does not ideologically justify these acts or affirm violence against women and other enemies as a sacred duty incumbent on all incels.
Indeed, the prevailing condition among incels is one of apathy, not violent rebellion. Of the few who have committed acts of terrorism, at least part of their motivation was to awaken other incels from their passivity and to provoke them into rising up against their perceived tormentors.
“I was thinking that I would inspire future masses to join me in my uprising,” said Minassian in his interrogation, echoing Harper-Mercer, who wrote in his memoir, “I hope to inspire the masses with this [attack], at least enough to get their passions aroused”.
Indeed Minassian was contemptuous of other incels who remained resigned to their sad, lowly state. “I would consider them too cowardly to act on their anger,” he said. Rodger was similarly disdainful of like-minded incels on PUAHate.com, a website dedicated to discrediting pick-up artists. “Many of them share my hatred of women, though unlike me they would be too cowardly to act on it,” he wrote.
None of this implies that the incel subculture is benign. It is far from benign for all the obvious reasons. It is replete with hatred and conspiracy thinking. But is it dangerous? More research needs to be done on this.
How does active participation in incel online spaces affect the mental well-being of those who so participate? Does it help them by offering a community of like-minded souls with whom they can bond and “vent”? Or does it hinder them by normalizing hateful attitudes toward women, making them even less likely to “ascend” from their incel status? Perhaps it both helps and hinders.
Moreover, what is the relationship between incel online spaces and actual incel-inspired terrorism? Does active participation in the former have any bearing on the latter, and if so, how should we understand and measure this? The consensus among scholars of jihadism is that exposure to jihadist propaganda, while not itself a cause of jihadist radicalization, serves to reinforce preexisting assumptions and beliefs that are already tending toward the extreme.
Does sustained exposure to incel online spaces function in much the same way? Rodger certainly hinted as this in his comments about PUAHate.com: “The posts on that website only confirmed many of the theories I had about how wicked and degenerate women really are.” Rodger also wrote how “most of the people on that website have extremely stupid opinions that I found very frustrating,” implying that he was far from some dupe who had been tricked or seduced into accepting the views he encountered on it.
Incel-inspired terrorism follows a non-coercive logic, whereby the primary purpose is to punish women for their supposed sins against incels. This urge to punish, I have suggested, is rooted in shame, where chronic sexual rejection at the hands of women is experienced as a grave personal insult that must be avenged so as to restore a sense of male honor.
Further research is needed to support and develop this line of analysis, drawing on a wider range of case-studies.
One crucial step forward for understanding incels would be to conduct life-history interviews with them, probing how they became incels, what this status means to them and how being an incel shapes their lives and interactions with others, especially women. The journalist Naama Kates, who has interviewed many incels, has shown that recruiting incels for this purpose can be done and that a great deal can be learned from interviewing them, including much of interest about their motivations, psychological traits and mental health.
Incels attract considerable attention across different forms of media, some of it prurient and drenched in contempt. Incels are often tarnished as white supremacists or as terrorists - or terrorists-in-the-making. One thing that terrorism studies can do is to act as a coolant to these more hysterical impulses and narratives in the broader culture by offering a sober, dispassionate and empirically-driven analysis of incels and the threat they pose. But it can also draw on a broader range of interdisciplinary tools for better understanding the subculture to which incels belong and the emotions that animate it, as I have tried to do in this article.
Cottee, Simon (2020) Incel (E)motives: Resentment, Shame and Revenge.
Studies in Conflict & Terrorism . ISSN 1057-610X.
Incel (E)motives: Resentment, Shame and Revenge
ABSTRACT
This article provides a framework for thinking about incels and incel-inspired terrorism. Incels are part of a fringe online subculture that trades in misogyny, victimhood and fatalism. The aim of the article is to describe these aforementioned orientations and the emotions associated with them. Only a tiny minority of incels commit acts of incel-inspired terrorism. Research on shame and revenge provides a useful starting-point for understanding these acts.
Why is it the assholes get all the beautiful young chicks?
Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver
(London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 44.
The aim of this article is to describe the incel subculture and the constellation of beliefs, values and emotions that animate it. It is divided into five sections: the first addresses some definitional issues and summarizes the incel worldview; the second provides an account of the “life-situation”of incels,focusing on argot and performativity; the third describes three core orientations of the incel subculture; the fourth explores the possible overlaps between incels and other extremists; and the fifth and final section focuses on the centrality of shame and revenge in incel-inspired terrorism.
Research on incels is still in its infancy, although notable contributions include a recent paper by Bruce Hoffman, Jacob Ware and Ezra Shapiro and a qualitative study of the self-understandings of incels. This article draws on this emergent body of research, as well on more established work on deviancy and subcultures; stigma and performativity; language and hermeneutics; the “manosphere”; and the criminology of shame, humiliation and violence. In addition to this, the article is based on a close reading of 50 discussion threads from the incel online forum “INCELS.CO”.
Incels and Terrorism
An incel is someone who identifies as “involuntary celibate” and invokes this as a masterstatus. “Inceldom” refers to the state of being an incel. Incels thus define themselves in reference to a deficit, and that deficit is a sexual relationship with a woman. Incels interpret and experience this deficit not just as a private source of sexual frustration, but as a shameinducing moral wrong inflicted on them by women and genetics. This perceived wrong forms the basis of the incel worldview, which serves to rationalize the sexual deficit of incels and justify hostility against women and sexually active men.
It is well-meaning but mistaken to suggest that “incel” is a gender-neutral term. It is not. Incels are exclusively male and the incel ideology is by definition anti-women. While violent incels have targeted men in their attacks, their primary target is women, who are the main source of their resentment and frustration. (The reason that violent incels have targeted men is not because they are men, but rather because of their perceived proximity to women – because they have been “feminized” or because they are coupled with and thus “contaminated” by women.)
There are no female incels: women who invoke a master status based on the claim that men deprive them of sex and are inherently demonic. This is not, of course, to say that women cannot, or do not, suffer from the pains of sexual frustration. In his 1979 study of single parents in America, Robert S. Weiss found that although the female divorcees he interviewed seemed more diffident in reporting sexual need, some were surprisingly emphatic on the matter, describing it as a visceral emotion over which they had no control.
One interviewee told him, “Oh, God, I’ve felt sexual frustration. I was, like, climbing the walls…The feeling was through my – well, say my stomach – just a yearning, but very bad.” Another relayed: “I can feel me getting frustrated. I can feel my stomach getting tight. I can feel it building up. I get short-tempered with my kids. And I say to myself, ‘You just need a good screw. Right now you don’t have a good screw’.”
These women may have been lonely and sexually frustrated, but they were not the forerunners of a female inceldom, since they did not seek to politicize their sexual frustration into a master status rooted in misandry (hatred of men). And while there is no shortage of women today who report feelings of sexual frustration and loneliness, and who even self-identify as “femcells”, none of these women have sought to mobilize politically against men nor subjected them to gender-based harassment or violence.
Incel Subcultural Values
What are the core values or approved ways of life at the heart of the incel subculture? I suggest there are three: (1) misogyny; (2) victimhood and (3) fatalism.
Misogyny
Misogyny is both a form of male hostility toward women and a way of acting that ensures male dominance over women.
As an emotion, it is the animating focal point of the incel subculture, whereby hatred of women is not merely deeply felt and expressed among incels, but elevated into the status of an identity. Some incels explicitly deny that they hate women, but the tone and substance of incel online communication would suggest that misogyny is rife in the incel subculture.
Among incels the roots of misogyny lie in resentment. According to Thomas Cushman, “Resentment is a particular kind of emotion, in which the object toward which resentment is directed, though specified as something that is undesirable is, in fact, perhaps desired, yet unobtainable”.
This is a useful way of thinking about incels, whose hatred toward women is best understood as a form of resentment, since for incels women are the desired but unobtainable object.
The patriarchal belief that they are entitled to women and the perception that women are having sex with everyone but them only serves to heighten the resentment of incels toward women. Resentment is further intensified by the conviction shared by incels that they are intellectually and morally superior to the women they crave and the men they envy.
Victimhood
The incel subculture is a brotherhood of the shipwrecked and the defeated. Incels portray themselves as accursed victims who are triply wronged: first, by genetics (they lament that they are not tall enough, that they are not good looking enough, that they are not fit enough etc.); second, by women, who they blame for rejecting them; and third, by society at large, for the contempt and indifference it exhibits toward incels.
These wrongs are described by incels in catastrophic language as deep wounds and traumas to the self. Indeed, the incel subculture is first and foremost a wound culture that thrives, indeed engorges, on the psychological suffering of its members. Mark Seltzer suggests that wound culture is “the public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and open persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma and the wound.”
Incel forums are assuredly an unmistakable product of this culture, where lonely and desperate men gather to expose their personal traumas to other lonely and desperate men, sharing their “sad tales” about how they got into their sorry state and how bad it is. This seems to serve a cathartic function, helping incels unburden their frustrations to others who are in the same situation and to appreciate that they are “not the only one”.
It is easy to dismiss incel sad tales as the mawkish emoting of entitled and attentionseeking adolescent men, but this would be unfair. While many such tales take this form, many more express deeply considered feelings of social and psychological inadequacy and pain. Let us recall that nearly 70 percent of incels in the “INCELS.CO” 2020 survey claimed to suffer from depression.
Not a few incels have committed suicide as a result of their depression. This is a prominent point of discussion on incel online forums, where some incels ponder, in the words of one topic-post, “the quickest and easiest way to commit suicide” and invite reflection on, in the words of another topic-post, whether “It’s selfish to talk an incel out of suicide”.
It is ironic that while the incel subculture is so intolerant toward the victimhood culture of other groups, particularly minorities, it is more than a little vocal in making its own claims to victimhood.
Fatalism
The Swedish theologian Krister Stendahl once observed that if one is seeking to console a mother grieving for the death of a child, it helps to believe in the Devil: the blows of fate are somewhat easier to bear if one sees them as beyond one’s control.
For incels, there is a Devil, and he is manifest in two forms: bad genes and bad women. “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist,” says Roger “Verbal” Kint in The Usual Suspects.
Incels know better: they know not only that the Devil exists, but that he cannot be defeated - that “lookism” is systemic and cannot be breached, and that women are a lost cause. But the Devil can be resisted in acts of symbolic defiance and withdrawal. This is the “delinquent solution” of the incel subculture
According to Albert Cohen, since our really hard problems do not permit perfect solutions, it follows that ‘‘an effective, really satisfying solution must entail some change in the frame of reference itself.’’ A person may give up pursuit of some unattainable goal, “but it is not a ‘solution’ unless he can first persuade himself that the goal is, after all, not worth pursuing; in short, his values must change.” For incels, this means rejecting the goal of sexual intimacy with women.
It means recognizing that, however hard he tries, the incel will never be able to have sex with a woman (outside of prostitution). And for the incel there is a sort of pride to be had in coming to this recognition (in “seeing the light” and “manfully” acknowledging unpleasant facts), and a relief in knowing that by quitting the chase he no longer has to suffer the humiliating and futile rigors of self-improvement as well as the myriad indignities of being continually rejected by women.
As one moderator of a now banned incel online forum explained to journalist Aja Romano, “It is liberating…You can stop worrying about improving yourself, stop worrying about the years passing by and your chances getting slimmer, stop worrying about what will happen in the future, because you are certain of your place in the world and what is going to happen.”In the language of subcultural theory, this is reaction-formation: rejecting in order not to be (further) rejected.
In arriving at this “solution” the incel is not thereby healed; he still feels the pains of a life without sexual intimacy and must constantly strive to commit to his rejection of sexual intimacy, which he all the while secretly craves. But he can achieve a certain kind of redemption in that he is (in his eyes) no longer hostage to the negative judgement of other women nor shackled to the secondary miseries of false hope (i.e. the belief that at some unspecified point in the future he might be able to break out of his inceldom and find a female sexual partner).
Incels resemble what Robert K. Merton calls “retreatists”: namely, deviants who reject both the means and the goals of conventional society, for not only have they abandoned trying to make themselves attractive to women (i.e. the “conventional means” specified by society for achieving sexual success); they have also given up on the actual prescribed goal itself (i.e. sexual intimacy).
In doing so, incels fatalistically condemn themselves to a life devoid not just of sexual intimacy but of all meaningful interaction with women. Indeed, the whole incel subculture can be understood as a veritable counsel of despair that facilitates the self-damnation of those who participate in it. However, and paradoxically, this damnation is experienced as an existential state of true (“blackpilled”) consciousness and authentic existence.
By rejecting both the goal of sexual intimacy and the means of male self-improvement incels transform their shame and inferiority into a form of resistance against the “normie” status quo
The above process is by no means a static one, and it is likely that some incels lurch between stoic resignation and quiet optimism that their fortunes might change for the better. It is also important to emphasize that a small number of incels reject the stoic attitude outright, dismissing it as a cowardly form of capitulation to the forces that oppress and demean them. For these men, it is impossible to passively accept the reality of their social mortification; for these few, only violence – against others or themselves – will solve their problems.
“Gone ER”: Shame and Dehumiliation
Terrorism is commonly understood as a form of coercion. Igor Primoratz, for example, writes that terrorism is “intimidation with a purpose: the terror is meant to cause others to do things they would otherwise not do. Terrorism is coercive intimidation”. According to the UK Terrorism Act 2000, terrorism is “the use of serious violence against persons or property, or the threat to use such violence, to intimidate or coerce a government, the public, or any section of the public for political, religious or ideological ends.” The FBI similarly defines terrorism as the “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government or civilian population in furtherance of political or social objectives.”
But not all terrorism can be understood as a tactic of coercive intimidation and need not be part of a coercive strategy at all. For example, and as C. A. J. Coady remarks, terrorists may want to cause anger more than fear, “believing that an angry population and government would act foolishly and play into their hands”. Or they may want to use spectacular violence as a means of publicizing their cause or grievances. Or they may want to use violence as a way of getting even – as a form of punitive revenge so as get justice for perceived wrongs. In all of these cases, the aim is not to coerce, but to provoke, publicize or punish.
Jeremy Waldron points to three further possibilities. First, “violent action might be viewed as a form of therapy for the perpetrator, particularly where the perpetrator has suffered for a long time in the ignominy and humiliation of some oppressive form of subordination”.94 This is exactly how Frantz Fanon saw the matter, notoriously observing that “violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction, it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect”.
Second, “terrorist acts might be intended as acts of expression, to send a message of some sort to the targeted population or to the world at large”. The message, for example, may involve a denunciation: “You are despicable and deserve this.” Or it may express a demand to be heard: “You need to recognize my pain/that we exist.” Or it may convey a message of self-aggrandisement: “I will no longer take it anymore.”
Third, “terrorism may aim at the inculcation of terror…in a population for ethical reasons, either for its own sake, or in order to bring about some sort of further ethical transformation in the mentality or attitudes of the targeted population”. Waldron is careful to note that in using the term “ethical terrorism” he means “only to categorize the strategy, not endorse it”. Elaborating, he writes:
The idea, as I understand it, is this. The populations of prosperous countries are often perceived to languish in complacency and self-satisfied indifference to what happens in less prosperous parts of the world: their mentality is inauthentic and irresponsible, they give little thought to the predicament of anyone other than themselves and their fellow-countrymen. Their mental state…is offensively inappropriate to the reality of the world in which they live, but of which they seem blithely and viciously unaware…So – the terrorist reckons – these mental states…ought to be changed…It would be good, the terrorist reckons, for U.S. citizens to be become less arrogant and complacent; or it would be good for the British or the Israeli citizenry to experience the fear and insecurity that their subject populations have to live with every day. And so the terrorist considers various means by which this could be accomplished – public education and leaflets, for example – and he concludes that there might be nothing so effective as a few atrocities – bombings, murders, spectacular acts of destruction – calculated to generate widespread terror, [or] panic.
Incel-inspired terrorism, I wish to argue, is primarily a non-coercive form of political violence that serves four interrelated purposes: 1) to punish women and the specified categories of men (“Chads” and “Faggots”); 2) to therapeutically de-humiliate the perpetrator; 3) to communicate a message of hurt and visibility; and 4) to attack what is seen as the complacency and self-satisfied indifference of mainstream (“normie”) society.
Conclusion
Incels, although alone and lonely, are part of a fringe online subculture that provides an identity and source of meaning and solidarity for those who identify as incels. While the incel subculture sizzles with hateful rhetoric against women, feminists and their male supporters, it would be a mistake to categorize it as a form of violent extremism, since it does not advocate the use of violence as a necessary remedy for in-group defence.
By portraying incels as the maligned victims of demonic women and a hostile society, the incel worldview serves to minimize acts of incel-inspired terrorism. But it does not ideologically justify these acts or affirm violence against women and other enemies as a sacred duty incumbent on all incels.
Indeed, the prevailing condition among incels is one of apathy, not violent rebellion. Of the few who have committed acts of terrorism, at least part of their motivation was to awaken other incels from their passivity and to provoke them into rising up against their perceived tormentors.
“I was thinking that I would inspire future masses to join me in my uprising,” said Minassian in his interrogation, echoing Harper-Mercer, who wrote in his memoir, “I hope to inspire the masses with this [attack], at least enough to get their passions aroused”.
Indeed Minassian was contemptuous of other incels who remained resigned to their sad, lowly state. “I would consider them too cowardly to act on their anger,” he said. Rodger was similarly disdainful of like-minded incels on PUAHate.com, a website dedicated to discrediting pick-up artists. “Many of them share my hatred of women, though unlike me they would be too cowardly to act on it,” he wrote.
None of this implies that the incel subculture is benign. It is far from benign for all the obvious reasons. It is replete with hatred and conspiracy thinking. But is it dangerous? More research needs to be done on this.
How does active participation in incel online spaces affect the mental well-being of those who so participate? Does it help them by offering a community of like-minded souls with whom they can bond and “vent”? Or does it hinder them by normalizing hateful attitudes toward women, making them even less likely to “ascend” from their incel status? Perhaps it both helps and hinders.
Moreover, what is the relationship between incel online spaces and actual incel-inspired terrorism? Does active participation in the former have any bearing on the latter, and if so, how should we understand and measure this? The consensus among scholars of jihadism is that exposure to jihadist propaganda, while not itself a cause of jihadist radicalization, serves to reinforce preexisting assumptions and beliefs that are already tending toward the extreme.
Does sustained exposure to incel online spaces function in much the same way? Rodger certainly hinted as this in his comments about PUAHate.com: “The posts on that website only confirmed many of the theories I had about how wicked and degenerate women really are.” Rodger also wrote how “most of the people on that website have extremely stupid opinions that I found very frustrating,” implying that he was far from some dupe who had been tricked or seduced into accepting the views he encountered on it.
Incel-inspired terrorism follows a non-coercive logic, whereby the primary purpose is to punish women for their supposed sins against incels. This urge to punish, I have suggested, is rooted in shame, where chronic sexual rejection at the hands of women is experienced as a grave personal insult that must be avenged so as to restore a sense of male honor.
Further research is needed to support and develop this line of analysis, drawing on a wider range of case-studies.
One crucial step forward for understanding incels would be to conduct life-history interviews with them, probing how they became incels, what this status means to them and how being an incel shapes their lives and interactions with others, especially women. The journalist Naama Kates, who has interviewed many incels, has shown that recruiting incels for this purpose can be done and that a great deal can be learned from interviewing them, including much of interest about their motivations, psychological traits and mental health.
Incels attract considerable attention across different forms of media, some of it prurient and drenched in contempt. Incels are often tarnished as white supremacists or as terrorists - or terrorists-in-the-making. One thing that terrorism studies can do is to act as a coolant to these more hysterical impulses and narratives in the broader culture by offering a sober, dispassionate and empirically-driven analysis of incels and the threat they pose. But it can also draw on a broader range of interdisciplinary tools for better understanding the subculture to which incels belong and the emotions that animate it, as I have tried to do in this article.
