Inside the warped world of the incel movement

How do men become misogynists? I recall the boys at my sink school in the northeast of England — many of them were vile bullies that relentlessly targeted girls with sexual harassment and bullying. They learned it from older boys, fathers and pornography. How much worse it is today, despite decades of feminist campaigning. Today, nothing paints as clear a picture of how much some men hate women as the incel movement.

The incel (involuntary celibates) community was popularized when Elliot Rodger killed six people in California in what became known as the Isla Vista massacre.

Rodger shot himself in the head and died. A video titled ‘Elliot Rodger’s Retribution’ was later discovered in which he outlined his motives for the well-planned attack. He had wanted to punish women for rejecting him, and sexually active men because he envied them. Rodger hated women, and he hated the men that could easily access them.

Then there was Alek Minassian who killed 10 people in Toronto in 2018 by driving down a crowded sidewalk of a crowded street. Minassian was motivated by misogyny and had been radicalized by the incel movement. Like Rodger, he had painstakingly planned the massacre.

No longer hidden away in the underbelly of the dark web, the incels have infiltrated social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and have their own special fora on which they spew hatred of women and minorities.

These men believe that they are entitled to the sexual and romantic interest of women, and express bitter hatred towards women who reject them. Men can be dangerous when they are rejected by women. Their control slips, their inherent sense of entitlement is fractured, and the incel community bonds over a desperate desire to justify their hatred.

I hung out on the incels.co site for a morning and, despite having campaigned against male violence and misogyny for 40 years, felt sick and distressed at what I saw.

First up was a thread with the subject, ‘Vaginas look disgusting’. The comments and photographs displayed pure hatred towards women’s bodies, with men reassuring each other that although they would have sex with ‘one’ they consider ‘them’ to be totally gross.

Then there is ‘Female Privilege is Very Real, and Very Big. Statistics Prove It’ except the stats are as twisted as the minds of the men posting them. There are endless posts on this thread from men insisting that women are better off than men. ‘Nature’ doesn’t care about us, writes one incel, ‘and yet we are expected to wageslave like good little boys.’

Another thread, ‘I insult women as chad and they continue talking to me and give me their number’ is all about how women love bad boys, who incels call chads — men who have worked out they don’t have to be ‘witty or clever’ to get women to have sex with them, because women prefer insults to charm.

By doing this, claims ‘chad’, he ‘not only gets a reply but her number and then bangs her.’

‘You must be pretty sheltered to think those are “insults” and “treating women like shit”. This is how normies talk in 2018.’

In the ‘Roundup of Thailand Trip: Stayed in Thailand for 22 days. Fucked 10 girls including two 17-year-olds, none of them hookers’ thread, with an emphasis on advice to other men on how to do exactly the same, the poster writes:

‘So how do you get the girl back to your room? The usual method is you do whatever you’ve arranged to do (park, ice cream etc), then you suggest going to watch a movie in your room. Do NOT tell her you’re going back there to have sex. If a Thai girl comes back to your room, 90 percent of the time she’s willing to fuck you.’

Incels did not invent these horrendous attitudes, but they give carte blanche to other men to adopt them.

What did I learn from my time on the site? That these are the exact same men, two generations on, I was at school with. What has changed? We now have the internet. Men that hate women will gravitate to sites such as incels.co where they will validate and egg each other on. Such sites should be shut down like sites that radicalize young men into becoming jihadists. If we allow them to flourish, more young men will consider hating women to be a team sport.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.