Underground Anti-Woman and Incel
Movements and their Connections to
Sexual Assault
Sara M. Abdulla
Contents
Introduction .......... ............................................................................. 2
The Development of the Manosphere: A Response to Women’s Empowerment ............... 3
The Manosphere: Men’s Rights Activists, Pick-up Artists, and MGTOW...................... 6
Incels in the Manosphere ......................................................................... 9
Terrorism Attracts Attention ...................................................................... 15
Discussion, Analysis, and Outlook ............................................................... 16
Key Points ........................................................................................ 19
Summary and Conclusion ........................................................................ 20
Cross-References ................................................................................. 20
References ........................................................................................ 21
Abstract
Anti-woman movements online are growing in influence and entering the mainstream over time. A loosely related coalition of far-right, anti-feminist online communities called the “manosphere” might be a gateway to increasingly extremist misogynistic and violent worldviews. The manosphere is associated with several recent terrorist acts, including Rodgers’ killing spree in Isla Vista in 2014 and Minassian’s massacre of numerous pedestrians in Canada in 2018. “Involuntary celibates,” aka incels, are a community of mostly young men characterized by their virulent resentment towards women and their inability to find consenting romantic and sexual partners. There is evidence that users in the manosphere migrate from less extreme anti-feminist subcultures to incel forums (Ribeiro et al., arXiv. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.07600.pdf, 2020), where they become increasingly radicalized in their beliefs and are encouraged to act violently towards women to intimidate women into behaving the way men want them to (e.g., Lilly, ‘The World is not a safe place for Men’: The representational politics of the manosphere. Theses, 2011. University of Ottawa. https://doi.org/ 10.20381/RUOR-5184, 2016). This chapter will provide a high-level analysis of the roots of the modern incel movement and examine putative effects, implications, and solutions regarding the incels.
Keywords
Incels · Manosphere · Terrorism · Sexual violence · Men’s rights · Online
harassment · Radicalization · Involuntary celibates · Masculinity · Backlash
Introduction
Online anti-woman movements are growing in influence and becoming more violent in rhetoric over time. The manosphere is a loosely related coalition of far-right and anti-feminist online communities and includes incels, men’s rights movements, pickup artist culture, and other forms of political activism in the pursuit of male hegemony (domination/leadership) (Lilly 2016). Users in the online manosphere migrate from less radical subcultures to more radical ones, such as incel forums (Ribeiro et al. 2020). There, they become radicalized and are encouraged to act violently towards women to achieve the goal of reversing feminist gains, returning to an era when women were subservient to men (e.g., Lilly 2016). Extreme examples of radicalization include domestic terrorist acts, such as Elliot Rodgers’ killing spree in Isla Vista in 2014 and Alek Minassian’s massacre of numerous pedestrians in Canada in 2018.
This chapter departs from the format and content of typical handbook chapters because it endeavors to explain a community and its dynamics that are not familiar to many social scientists, practitioners, or the lay reader. This chapter is not a comprehensive overview of the manosphere and its dynamics, but it provides a high-level overview and analysis of the roots of the modern online anti-woman, anti-feminist movement. The chapter includes many terms unknown to most readers. New terms will appear in italics and will be defined to facilitate comprehension.
The chapter first describes the historical development of the movement and clarifies differences between subcultures within the anti-woman movements with a main focus on incels. As certain subcultures in the manosphere contribute, condone, and encourage violence against women through social coercion, sexual violence, and terroristic acts to achieve their agendas (e.g., Ging 2019), this chapter further explores the movements’ relations to domestic terrorism and how the movement has infiltrated the mainstream. The chapter draws on a wide range of sources from social science literature, including psychology, political science, communication, and terrorism studies, directly from the online forums themselves, from journalists and social justice advocates. The chapter concludes with potential solutions.
As online anti-woman movements become more influential, subcultures in the manosphere can act as a gateway to extremist misogynistic and violent worldviews as an entry point to other far-right communities, such as white supremacists or white nationalists (Hoffman et al. 2020). Furthermore, manospheric movements condone and encourage violence against women in themselves (e.g., Gotell and Dutton 2016; Lilly 2016; Ging 2019). At the forefront of the manosphere are incels, who are responsible for a disproportionate number of domestic terroristic acts in the West (Hoffman et al. 2020). The danger has become salient enough to require US government monitoring. For example, in the autumn of 2019, the FBI and the US Army issued warnings of a potential mass shooting by one or more incels at the movie premier of the Joker movie premiere (Cameron 2019).
Unbeknownst to many, involuntary celibates like Rodgers and Minassian comprise a disproportionate proportion of domestic terroristic acts in the Western world (e.g., Baele et al. 2019; Hoffman et al. 2020). Also known as incels, these men form a community of mostly young, sexually abstinent men characterized by virulent resentment towards women and an inability to find consenting romantic and sexual partners. In this context, the term incels does not refer to all adults who have not ever had sex. Here, “incels” refers to individuals who do not choose to abstain from sex and subscribe to incel theory. This use of “incels” thereby excludes self-identified asexuals and those who eschew sex for religious or other personal reasons. In this chapter, the term also excludes individuals who are unable to find a consenting sexual partner but do not actively participate in anti-feminist movements, thus excluding most individuals who do not identify as “incels” with forethought.
The Development of the Manosphere: A Response to Women’s Empowerment
The manosphere is a reactionary movement, or a backlash, to feminism and specific feminist aims, such as anti-rape movements (e.g., Gotell and Dutton 2016). Backlash is an attempt by a hegemonic group to recoup lost power or influence – or even the threat of lost power or influence. Backlash can entail using violence or intimidation towards the movement that caused the group in question to lose dominance (e.g., Faludi 1991; Mansbridge and Shames 2008). It can follow gains in social movements – for example, gains enjoyed by women during the second wave of feminism in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s may have been the antecedent to a societal backlash wherein women were undermined continuously in the media and the workplace. Backlash during this era entailed techniques such as hypersexualizing women and girls in entertainment and propagating bad science that declared women could become infertile in their youth, which implied that if women ever wanted to have children, then it was in their interest to become pregnant in their early adulthood and forgo careers (Faludi 1991).
Anti-feminist movements as backlash are founded on two main premises: (a) that women are either equal or more privileged than men today and (b) that feminism has profound, unforeseen consequences that damage the female experience, resulting in fewer women marrying and having children. (Faludi 1991). Faludi theorized that anti-feminist backlash is a defensive response to the ostensible crumbling of traditional ideals of gender norms. This backlash is evident in numerous ways, such as typical anti-feminist characterizations of the modern American man who is emasculated for not engaging in archetypal male behaviors such as sexual dominance and breadwinning. In the manosphere, self-identified male feminists and men who care about women’s empowerment are labeled beta males or cucks, a pejorative term for a male partner of an adulterous wife or girlfriend or to identify a man who is not sufficiently “masculine” because they care about women’s rights (e.g., Ging 2019; Marwick and Caplan 2018).
This recoil against feminist supporters demonstrates an attempt to return to prefeminism dynamics of gender by mocking people who support progressive models of gender relations. It also alludes to the possibility that liberal educations are not in and of themselves enough to address manospheric believers, as they often believe feminist educations exist to emasculate and weaken men (e.g., Ging 2019; Marwick and Caplan 2018). Not only do underground online anti-feminists in the manosphere show resistance and general disregard for women, but they actively seek to promote male hegemony (e.g., Ging 2019; Lilly 2016).
Therefore, not only is there a form of backlash to women’s empowerment, but an operative movement to suppress the role of women and often in ways that are often violent. This violence manifests in several different ways: physical violence, such as in domestic abuse and mass shootings; sexual violence; stripping protections from women under the law; economic violence; and even forms of psychological violence like bullying and manipulation from partners, male peers, and the media. What these different methodologies have in common is that they are designed to make and keep women docile, frightened, and disenfranchised (Lilly 2016).
As women have become empowered with access to higher wages, better jobs, and, ultimately, the right to choose what she wants to do with her body and time, women are staying single longer and often not marrying at all (Wang and Parker 2014). Research spanning decades has revealed that a large proportion of single women, even in older demographics, are happy with being single (e.g., Mintel Press 2017). Other research has found that men benefit more from heterosexual marriage than women (Stronge et al. 2019). For postmenopausal women, transitioning into a heterosexual relationship is associated with adverse health habits like increasing problematic drinking habits and unwanted weight gain, while divorce is associated with improved health indicators and behaviors such as improving body mass indexes and exercising more frequently (Kutob et al. 2017).
Other studies have found that marriage is less beneficial for both men and women today than it was several decades ago (Stevenson and Wolfers 2009). These studies suggest that women are better off when they are empowered to choose whether or not they marry. This theory is buttressed by evidence that women residing in countries with strong stigma against being single do not benefit from being unmarried and often suffer as a result (e.g., Himawan et al. 2018).
Despite the robust data, there is pushback against women who choose to marry later or remain single. While social scientists suggest that the older marrying age is evidence that single women are flourishing, some traditionalists and manospheric users contend that marriage decline is a sign of a decaying society and that women are worse off as a result (e.g., Ging 2019; Lerxst 2017). Though many institutions have adapted to the later marrying age and fewer people marrying, some subcultures have displayed incredible resistance to these demographic changes decrying declining marriage rates and numbers of traditional families.
Those who express enmity to women marrying later in life frame the delay as “bad for women.” For example, Faludi (1991) recorded the remarkable reaction following poorly conducted studies in the late twentieth century that claimed women became infertile as young as 30. News outlets and anti-feminists cited these studies as evidence that feminism was to blame if women delayed childbearing after establishing a career and encountered fertility problems, leading to depression. Feminism remains the perceived fount of any consequence that delays heterosexual marriage or encourages women to work outside of the home (Charen 2018).
As fewer heterosexual women are marrying, fewer heterosexual men marry. Men have propelled entire social movements, subcultures, and communities revolving around their discontentment with women who choose to remain single longer, indefinitely, and otherwise on their terms (Lilly 2016). The immediate consequence for men that many manospheric subcultures identify is fewer opportunities for sex for most men, though this claim is dubious.
Indeed, sexlessness among young American men aged 22–35 appears to be at a high point relative to recent history. Over 20% of never-married men reported not having sex in the past year in 2016, nearly doubling from 2010. In contrast, sexlessness among never-married young American women has remained mostly stable since around 1990, with around 16% of never-married women reporting celibacy in the past year (e.g., Stone 2018; Wilcox and Stone 2019). The amount of sex young American women collectively have has remained comparatively stable since 2000, but never-married men have reported having fewer sexual encounters in the past year than never-married women (Stone 2018).
Some researchers attribute this phenomenon to poor economic prospects for millennial and Gen-Z men, as more are living with their parents and fewer have steady jobs than in generations past (Binder and Bound 2019). Some social scientists describe substandard unemployment among men to be part of a greater “shortage of marriageable men,” which we might also extend to “dateable” (Sawhill and Venator 2015). There are fewer unmarried, 25–44-year-old employed men compared to women, which researchers suggest contributes to risky behaviors like drug abuse and higher mortality among young men (Autor et al. 2019).
This apparent disenfranchisement among a growing subset of men may be especially alienating when paired with the rise of the “lonely American man,” as Shankar Vedantam of National Public Radio dubbed the problem of men lacking nurturing communities when compared to women (Cohen et al. 2018). Indeed, there is evidence that men rely more on their female partners and friends for emotional and social support, while women tend to rely on their friends (e.g., Hamlett 2019; Wade 2013). Manospheric subcultures may represent some men’s attempts at mitigating this loneliness, whether by finding communities in their fellow lonely men or by blaming feminism for their pain.
Movements and their Connections to
Sexual Assault
Sara M. Abdulla
Contents
Introduction .......... ............................................................................. 2
The Development of the Manosphere: A Response to Women’s Empowerment ............... 3
The Manosphere: Men’s Rights Activists, Pick-up Artists, and MGTOW...................... 6
Incels in the Manosphere ......................................................................... 9
Terrorism Attracts Attention ...................................................................... 15
Discussion, Analysis, and Outlook ............................................................... 16
Key Points ........................................................................................ 19
Summary and Conclusion ........................................................................ 20
Cross-References ................................................................................. 20
References ........................................................................................ 21
Abstract
Anti-woman movements online are growing in influence and entering the mainstream over time. A loosely related coalition of far-right, anti-feminist online communities called the “manosphere” might be a gateway to increasingly extremist misogynistic and violent worldviews. The manosphere is associated with several recent terrorist acts, including Rodgers’ killing spree in Isla Vista in 2014 and Minassian’s massacre of numerous pedestrians in Canada in 2018. “Involuntary celibates,” aka incels, are a community of mostly young men characterized by their virulent resentment towards women and their inability to find consenting romantic and sexual partners. There is evidence that users in the manosphere migrate from less extreme anti-feminist subcultures to incel forums (Ribeiro et al., arXiv. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.07600.pdf, 2020), where they become increasingly radicalized in their beliefs and are encouraged to act violently towards women to intimidate women into behaving the way men want them to (e.g., Lilly, ‘The World is not a safe place for Men’: The representational politics of the manosphere. Theses, 2011. University of Ottawa. https://doi.org/ 10.20381/RUOR-5184, 2016). This chapter will provide a high-level analysis of the roots of the modern incel movement and examine putative effects, implications, and solutions regarding the incels.
Keywords
Incels · Manosphere · Terrorism · Sexual violence · Men’s rights · Online
harassment · Radicalization · Involuntary celibates · Masculinity · Backlash
Introduction
Online anti-woman movements are growing in influence and becoming more violent in rhetoric over time. The manosphere is a loosely related coalition of far-right and anti-feminist online communities and includes incels, men’s rights movements, pickup artist culture, and other forms of political activism in the pursuit of male hegemony (domination/leadership) (Lilly 2016). Users in the online manosphere migrate from less radical subcultures to more radical ones, such as incel forums (Ribeiro et al. 2020). There, they become radicalized and are encouraged to act violently towards women to achieve the goal of reversing feminist gains, returning to an era when women were subservient to men (e.g., Lilly 2016). Extreme examples of radicalization include domestic terrorist acts, such as Elliot Rodgers’ killing spree in Isla Vista in 2014 and Alek Minassian’s massacre of numerous pedestrians in Canada in 2018.
This chapter departs from the format and content of typical handbook chapters because it endeavors to explain a community and its dynamics that are not familiar to many social scientists, practitioners, or the lay reader. This chapter is not a comprehensive overview of the manosphere and its dynamics, but it provides a high-level overview and analysis of the roots of the modern online anti-woman, anti-feminist movement. The chapter includes many terms unknown to most readers. New terms will appear in italics and will be defined to facilitate comprehension.
The chapter first describes the historical development of the movement and clarifies differences between subcultures within the anti-woman movements with a main focus on incels. As certain subcultures in the manosphere contribute, condone, and encourage violence against women through social coercion, sexual violence, and terroristic acts to achieve their agendas (e.g., Ging 2019), this chapter further explores the movements’ relations to domestic terrorism and how the movement has infiltrated the mainstream. The chapter draws on a wide range of sources from social science literature, including psychology, political science, communication, and terrorism studies, directly from the online forums themselves, from journalists and social justice advocates. The chapter concludes with potential solutions.
As online anti-woman movements become more influential, subcultures in the manosphere can act as a gateway to extremist misogynistic and violent worldviews as an entry point to other far-right communities, such as white supremacists or white nationalists (Hoffman et al. 2020). Furthermore, manospheric movements condone and encourage violence against women in themselves (e.g., Gotell and Dutton 2016; Lilly 2016; Ging 2019). At the forefront of the manosphere are incels, who are responsible for a disproportionate number of domestic terroristic acts in the West (Hoffman et al. 2020). The danger has become salient enough to require US government monitoring. For example, in the autumn of 2019, the FBI and the US Army issued warnings of a potential mass shooting by one or more incels at the movie premier of the Joker movie premiere (Cameron 2019).
Unbeknownst to many, involuntary celibates like Rodgers and Minassian comprise a disproportionate proportion of domestic terroristic acts in the Western world (e.g., Baele et al. 2019; Hoffman et al. 2020). Also known as incels, these men form a community of mostly young, sexually abstinent men characterized by virulent resentment towards women and an inability to find consenting romantic and sexual partners. In this context, the term incels does not refer to all adults who have not ever had sex. Here, “incels” refers to individuals who do not choose to abstain from sex and subscribe to incel theory. This use of “incels” thereby excludes self-identified asexuals and those who eschew sex for religious or other personal reasons. In this chapter, the term also excludes individuals who are unable to find a consenting sexual partner but do not actively participate in anti-feminist movements, thus excluding most individuals who do not identify as “incels” with forethought.
The Development of the Manosphere: A Response to Women’s Empowerment
The manosphere is a reactionary movement, or a backlash, to feminism and specific feminist aims, such as anti-rape movements (e.g., Gotell and Dutton 2016). Backlash is an attempt by a hegemonic group to recoup lost power or influence – or even the threat of lost power or influence. Backlash can entail using violence or intimidation towards the movement that caused the group in question to lose dominance (e.g., Faludi 1991; Mansbridge and Shames 2008). It can follow gains in social movements – for example, gains enjoyed by women during the second wave of feminism in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s may have been the antecedent to a societal backlash wherein women were undermined continuously in the media and the workplace. Backlash during this era entailed techniques such as hypersexualizing women and girls in entertainment and propagating bad science that declared women could become infertile in their youth, which implied that if women ever wanted to have children, then it was in their interest to become pregnant in their early adulthood and forgo careers (Faludi 1991).
Anti-feminist movements as backlash are founded on two main premises: (a) that women are either equal or more privileged than men today and (b) that feminism has profound, unforeseen consequences that damage the female experience, resulting in fewer women marrying and having children. (Faludi 1991). Faludi theorized that anti-feminist backlash is a defensive response to the ostensible crumbling of traditional ideals of gender norms. This backlash is evident in numerous ways, such as typical anti-feminist characterizations of the modern American man who is emasculated for not engaging in archetypal male behaviors such as sexual dominance and breadwinning. In the manosphere, self-identified male feminists and men who care about women’s empowerment are labeled beta males or cucks, a pejorative term for a male partner of an adulterous wife or girlfriend or to identify a man who is not sufficiently “masculine” because they care about women’s rights (e.g., Ging 2019; Marwick and Caplan 2018).
This recoil against feminist supporters demonstrates an attempt to return to prefeminism dynamics of gender by mocking people who support progressive models of gender relations. It also alludes to the possibility that liberal educations are not in and of themselves enough to address manospheric believers, as they often believe feminist educations exist to emasculate and weaken men (e.g., Ging 2019; Marwick and Caplan 2018). Not only do underground online anti-feminists in the manosphere show resistance and general disregard for women, but they actively seek to promote male hegemony (e.g., Ging 2019; Lilly 2016).
Therefore, not only is there a form of backlash to women’s empowerment, but an operative movement to suppress the role of women and often in ways that are often violent. This violence manifests in several different ways: physical violence, such as in domestic abuse and mass shootings; sexual violence; stripping protections from women under the law; economic violence; and even forms of psychological violence like bullying and manipulation from partners, male peers, and the media. What these different methodologies have in common is that they are designed to make and keep women docile, frightened, and disenfranchised (Lilly 2016).
As women have become empowered with access to higher wages, better jobs, and, ultimately, the right to choose what she wants to do with her body and time, women are staying single longer and often not marrying at all (Wang and Parker 2014). Research spanning decades has revealed that a large proportion of single women, even in older demographics, are happy with being single (e.g., Mintel Press 2017). Other research has found that men benefit more from heterosexual marriage than women (Stronge et al. 2019). For postmenopausal women, transitioning into a heterosexual relationship is associated with adverse health habits like increasing problematic drinking habits and unwanted weight gain, while divorce is associated with improved health indicators and behaviors such as improving body mass indexes and exercising more frequently (Kutob et al. 2017).
Other studies have found that marriage is less beneficial for both men and women today than it was several decades ago (Stevenson and Wolfers 2009). These studies suggest that women are better off when they are empowered to choose whether or not they marry. This theory is buttressed by evidence that women residing in countries with strong stigma against being single do not benefit from being unmarried and often suffer as a result (e.g., Himawan et al. 2018).
Despite the robust data, there is pushback against women who choose to marry later or remain single. While social scientists suggest that the older marrying age is evidence that single women are flourishing, some traditionalists and manospheric users contend that marriage decline is a sign of a decaying society and that women are worse off as a result (e.g., Ging 2019; Lerxst 2017). Though many institutions have adapted to the later marrying age and fewer people marrying, some subcultures have displayed incredible resistance to these demographic changes decrying declining marriage rates and numbers of traditional families.
Those who express enmity to women marrying later in life frame the delay as “bad for women.” For example, Faludi (1991) recorded the remarkable reaction following poorly conducted studies in the late twentieth century that claimed women became infertile as young as 30. News outlets and anti-feminists cited these studies as evidence that feminism was to blame if women delayed childbearing after establishing a career and encountered fertility problems, leading to depression. Feminism remains the perceived fount of any consequence that delays heterosexual marriage or encourages women to work outside of the home (Charen 2018).
As fewer heterosexual women are marrying, fewer heterosexual men marry. Men have propelled entire social movements, subcultures, and communities revolving around their discontentment with women who choose to remain single longer, indefinitely, and otherwise on their terms (Lilly 2016). The immediate consequence for men that many manospheric subcultures identify is fewer opportunities for sex for most men, though this claim is dubious.
Indeed, sexlessness among young American men aged 22–35 appears to be at a high point relative to recent history. Over 20% of never-married men reported not having sex in the past year in 2016, nearly doubling from 2010. In contrast, sexlessness among never-married young American women has remained mostly stable since around 1990, with around 16% of never-married women reporting celibacy in the past year (e.g., Stone 2018; Wilcox and Stone 2019). The amount of sex young American women collectively have has remained comparatively stable since 2000, but never-married men have reported having fewer sexual encounters in the past year than never-married women (Stone 2018).
Some researchers attribute this phenomenon to poor economic prospects for millennial and Gen-Z men, as more are living with their parents and fewer have steady jobs than in generations past (Binder and Bound 2019). Some social scientists describe substandard unemployment among men to be part of a greater “shortage of marriageable men,” which we might also extend to “dateable” (Sawhill and Venator 2015). There are fewer unmarried, 25–44-year-old employed men compared to women, which researchers suggest contributes to risky behaviors like drug abuse and higher mortality among young men (Autor et al. 2019).
This apparent disenfranchisement among a growing subset of men may be especially alienating when paired with the rise of the “lonely American man,” as Shankar Vedantam of National Public Radio dubbed the problem of men lacking nurturing communities when compared to women (Cohen et al. 2018). Indeed, there is evidence that men rely more on their female partners and friends for emotional and social support, while women tend to rely on their friends (e.g., Hamlett 2019; Wade 2013). Manospheric subcultures may represent some men’s attempts at mitigating this loneliness, whether by finding communities in their fellow lonely men or by blaming feminism for their pain.
Last edited:
