AsiaCel
[AIDS] ACCELERATIONIST INCEL DEATH SQUAD
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- Nov 24, 2017
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I like this article. It portrays that incels are scarier than we realize.
theboar.org
The Boar
The term “incel” was first coined in 1997 by Alana, a 20-year-old Canadian woman who created a website for single people struggling to find meaningful relationships. Alana aimed to create a platform where singles could exchange dating advice and share personal experiences. Originally, “incels” stood for involuntary celibates of all genders, but its meaning has evolved into something more sinister. Incels now refer to online communities of angry and resentful men who blame women for their inability to have sex.
There now exist dozens of incel forums and websites, some recording more than 40,000 members and hundreds of thousands of visits.
On these forums, incels express their frustration and anger towards women, believed to be the root cause of their misfortune. Incels also blame “Chads”, the attractive male group minority, for hoarding all of the foids, female humanoids (women), who hold the power in sexual relations and willingly withhold sex from unattractive men. In recent years, incel discourse has become increasingly violent and anti-women, correlated with a rise in the proportion of offenders adhering to incel ideology and committing crimes against women.
It is clear that, despite being a clear feminist issue, there is a failure to adequately address the needs of the women it affects.
The term “incel” was first coined in 1997 by Alana, a 20-year-old Canadian woman who created a website for single people struggling to find meaningful relationships. Alana aimed to create a platform where singles could exchange dating advice and share personal experiences. Originally, “incels” stood for involuntary celibates of all genders, but its meaning has evolved into something more sinister.
Incels now refer to online communities of angry and resentful men who blame women for their inability to have sex.
There now exist dozens of incel forums and websites, some recording more than 40,000 members and hundreds of thousands of visits. On these forums, incels express their frustration and anger towards women, believed to be the root cause of their misfortune. Incels also blame “Chads”, the attractive male group minority, for hoarding all of the foids, female humanoids (women), who hold the power in sexual relations and willingly withhold sex from unattractive men. In recent years, incel discourse has become increasingly violent and anti-women, correlated with a rise in the proportion of offenders adhering to incel ideology and committing crimes against women.
Incels rely on the generalisation and dehumanisation of women to vent their frustration, often expressed through the development of their own vocabulary. The term “rapecels” refers to men that advocate for rape as the solution to their loneliness and lack of sexual relations. “Rapecels” believe rape is the tool by which they can return to the “top of the food chain”.It is clear that, despite being a clear feminist issue, there is a failure to adequately address the needs of the women it affects.
Research on incels primarily focuses on the men that make up the movement and the potential responses society should implement. There is a significant gap, however, in research regarding the impact of the incel community on young women. Few authors seek to un- derstand how incels affect young women or consider the incels’ perspective from a woman’s point of view.
Given the violent rhetoric of incels, it’s understandable that women would feel unsafe in response to this discourse. Nevertheless, the presence of such hostile hate speech against women is bound to have broader consequences, such that it could negatively impact young women by exposing them to violent hate speech.
It is striking that, despite being a clear feminist issue, there is a failure to adequately address the needs of the women it affects.
Some argue that incels are deeply troubled men who require society’s assistance and that their current “demonisation” is counterproductive.
Newman’s study for Swansea University concludes that the best response to incels would be to help them, rather than condemn them. He argues that condemning incels could further ostracise them from society, reinforce negative beliefs, and potentially worsen their mental health. However, the prescribed approach could potentially alleviate responsibility from incels, and the negative impact of what they write and promote online.
The current demonisation of incels is not unfounded. Incels promote a violent ideology, which can lead to the radicalisation of some of their members. It is estimated that incels have killed 59 people worldwide.
That said, assessing their threat level solely based on the number of incel-related murders is misleading. 55% of femicides are committed within relationships: the victim often knows the perpetrator. The threat incels represent lies more in their influence on online social discourse rather than their crime rate in the real world.
For young women – of whom 50% reported being online “almost constantly” – violent, anti-women incel discourse cannot be without consequence. Young women’s view of men has changed for the worse, especially for radicalised incels who committed gender-based crimes, receiving acclaim within the incel community.
The media often shies away from linking the act of the individual to the online community, even when there exists extensive proof of their ties, such as violent posts and active participation on incel forums. Depicting incel-led crimes, media news outlets tend to use the same technique; portraying criminals as lone unstable killers, with few acknowledging how their involvement in incel forums sheds light on the gender-based nature of their violence. This tendency may stem from the contested concept of “stochastic terrorism” – the use of dehumanising rhetoric or hate speech that indirectly incites supporters to commit acts of violence. Social media exacerbates this phenomenon by creating echo chambers that reinforce and amplify users’ extremist beliefs.
The radicalising potential of incel forums is often underestimated.
Stochastic terrorism can lead to “lone wolves”, individuals not officially associated with terrorist organisations but who commit acts of violence. This narrative of the “lone wolf ” is similar to that of the “lone rapist”. As Laura Bates, an English feminist writer, argues, the media conveys the “lone rapist” by depicting rapes as individual acts, seldom addressing rapes as systemic acts of violence against women. In 2022, police in England and Wales reported the highest number of rapes in 20 years.
The threat was such that the MET chief issued a public statement earlier this year, demanding that violence against women to be treated as terrorism, to properly tackle the rising number of gender-based crimes. The radicalising potential of incel forums is often underestimated, leading media outlets to fall short in portraying the broader context of crimes committed by incel-affiliated individuals.
In the summer of 2024, a debate on social media revealed young women’s views on men’s capacity for violence against women. The man vs bear debate, started by a TikTok video that now has approximately 16.7 million views, asks people whether they would rather be stuck in the woods with a man or a bear. The response on social media was overwhelming, with the majority of women preferring the bear. Justifications vary, but most answers centred on gender-based violence, with responses such as: “You know what to expect from a bear”, “at least people would believe I got attacked by a bear”, and “humans are so much worse than bears”.
Some may argue this debate is unfounded as bears are unpredictable wild predators, whereas humans are civilised and incapable of the same physical violence as bears.
Yet, the overwhelming response hints that the debate is not so much about the bear, but more about the danger of men, and the lack of attention paid to gender-based violence. In this case, women do not (literally) mean they prefer the bear, instead they have a strong distrust of men. Women categorically expressed their distrust of men, sparking outrage on social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), as users argued that the debate was misandrist. Journalist Hazel Guieb argues that such responses miss the point of the debate: women who are victims of sexual violence often risk not being believed, which is the primary fear preventing them from reporting it to official authorities.
How do incels play into this debate?
Incels openly express violent views, advocating for sexual violence against women as a means of retribution and control. The recent man vs bear debate highlights young women’s distrust of men, who are believed to be untrustworthy and overly prone to violence. Women’s level of distrust of the opposite sex is in many ways comparable to that expressed by incels online. Both cases employ a generalised view, revealing a troubling divide in online culture, where each sex increasingly generalises and distrusts the other. Furthering this issue, online spaces that facilitate meaningful interaction between men and women are rapidly diminishing. The shrinking of shared spaces may further exacerbate the growing divide in how each gender perceives the other, rupturing online culture.
