UPDATE: The CBC has confirmed with Facebook that Minassian’s post declaring himself an incel and hailing Elliot Rodger is real.
By David Futrelle
As I write this, it’s still not completely clear if Alek Minassian, the alleged driver of the van that killed ten pedestrians in Toronto yesterday in what appeared to be a very deliberate attack, is in fact a self-identified “involuntary celibate” trying to take revenge against the “Chads” and “Stacies” and other “normies” he blames for ruining his life — or if these reports are simply some sort of 4chan-style hoax.
But on the Incels.me forum, one of the more egregious hangouts for incels online, many are already hailing the alleged mass murderer as one of their own.
In an assortment of threads that popped up after the news media began to report on a supposed Facebook post from Minassian announcing that “the Incel Rebellion has … begun,” some of the Incels.me regulars are celebrating the killings and the alleged killer as “life fuel” for them and their nihilistic, misogynistic, misanthropic “movement.” (Click on the pics below to see the comments in context on Incels.me.)
Naturally, it didn’t take long for one of the regular commenters to adopt a picture of Minassian as his avatar.
But no one was quite so enthusiastic about the killings as the commenter calling himself BlkPillPres, who wondered if the killer had taken the advice he had given in a previous thread to use something other than guns in his “ER” — that is, Elliot Rodger-style — attack.
Many in the media and in politics are unwilling to label attacks driven by misogynistic ideology as terrorism — often declaring them to be simply the result of “mental illness,” as many did in the case of Elliot Rodger’s murders (ignoring his hundred page manifesto), and as the authorities are already doing in the Toronto attacks.
But misogyny is not mental illness; it’s hate. And what BlkPillPres is talking about here is essentially the dictionary definition of terrorism — “[t]he unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” The tactics he suggests are an explicit attempt to subject “normies” to “constant fear” — that is, terror — in all areas of their lives, in order to advance BlkPillPres’ goal of “black pilling” the world and intimidating those who criticize incels into silence.
Following his link back to the older thread, one quickly discovers that it is even more disturbing. In it, BlkPillPres sets out what he sees as the virtues of various terroristic strategies, from acid attacks to mass rape to vehicle attacks like the one we saw yesterday. (If you are feeling at all fragile you may wish to stop reading this post right here.)
Others in the thread suggests that this all sounds great to them, with one aiming some of his ire at the IncelTears subreddit, which is devoted to criticizing Incels on Reddit and elsewhere.
Other commenters offer their own even more horrifying ideas.
Like Ub2w, BlkPillPres is especially taken with the acid-in-the-face tactic.
“Kek.”
Sadly, as someone who has been writing about incels for several years now, none of this is surprising. Disturbing, yes, but not surprising. Incel is a hate movement, and it is long past time for it to be treated as such.
NOTE: The reaction amongst Reddit incels has been more measured; I may delve into that in a future post.
Seconding Kilgore’s post about online radicalization. I’ve been thinking about this a fair bit, since I can see that path as being a bullet I dodged.
I’d first heard the term Incel back around 1994-1997, and I remember thinking “Hah, yeah, sounds like me” before realizing it wasn’t a good place to consider myself. As a victim of violent bullying in Jr. High, I had very low self-esteem, not helped by wrestling with my bisexuality. Back then, the popular cultural message to nerds was “You will die alone”.
That said, I was also pretty privileged. White cis middle class male, after all. So I had my head up my ass, and pop culture made it really easy to keep it there. That’s the default setting for every fantasy hero who gets the girl through heroism and adventure, rather than any sort of active romantic effort. The competing message of hollywood films was “You deserve a beautiful girl” and “You will never have one”. It also didn’t help that my exposure to feminist thought was largely of the gender essentialist 2nd wave stuff, which tended to feed into the streotypes of “What women want” as a monolithic group. It didn’t help that all of my closest friends were guys as well.
There were three things that ultimately helped me get off my bullshit. The first was the furry fandom. That was one of the few ways I was able to first socialize with women of a similarly geeky persuasion, and realize the pop culture narratives I’d been fed were false.
The second was reading feminist blogs. After 9/11, I was introduced to liberal blogs, one of which was Pandagon. Matt Yglasias and Ezra Klein brought in Amanda Marcotte who linked more heavily into the feminist blogging sphere. That’s where I heard the formulation of the “Nice Guy”, and began to realize “Oh shit, that was me.”
The final piece of the puzzle was ultimately sites like Captain Awkward, which really drove home the nature of abusive relationships, and how people react to them. It also helped me come to terms with the real things holding me back: Social anxiety and long-simmering dysthemia.
That was ultimately what kept me from dating: fear of actually asking anyone out. Fear of rejection. Fear of mockery magnified by bullying. It was also unconsiously regurgitating the sense of sexism and entitlement I’d grown up with.
Unfortunately, having said all that, I don’t have any real insight into paths out of radicalization for others, or a way to reach these guys. All the things that helped keep my head in my ass are pretty much gone: culture is much more inclusive, geek culture is dominant, there are far more inclusive and wide-ranging fandoms, and easier places to interact online. And yet, we get gamergate, where dudes harass women in favor of virtual titties, then whine that no women wants them. It’s a self-reinforcing downward spiral egged on by fucking monsters.
Sigh… So hey. For what it’s worth to all the women online, there’s a few terrible people you saved from themselves. Thank you.
Took you some work though, didn’t it. (Don’t dismiss that effort – self change is HARD! 🙂 )
If someone isn’t wanting to put in the work – they think they don’t need to, for example – it’s still just as easy to hook up into a toxic loop.
Probably easier – wide ranging fandoms have a downside. When there’s only one place to gather, you’re forced to be less choosy. Big fandom means you can self segregate, and people take advantage of that.
This is all so disgusting. They keep getting worse. Honestly I think some of that’s probably to do with toxic masculinity – when your entire view of social interaction is competitive jockeying for status, it’s easy to get vicious cycles of one-upmanship when you tie that status to something that isn’t strongly bounded. It’s like they’re competing in a misogyny contest.
There’s something that jumps out at me from the rape-and-acid guy, the “nobody else gets to enjoy her beauty” thing. Eeeeesh. There’s so much to unpack there – beauty as a thing for male consumption, sex specifically as status for men, and all kinds of purity/virginity garbage. I want to focus a bit on that purity aspect, because I think there might be an insight here: I’ve been thinking this about incels for a while, that a lot of their myths (see, for instance, the “loose vagina” thing, or all the supposed ways to detect non-virgins from that recent post) persist because they want to think of sex as permanently damaging women. In a twisted sense, I think they might be seeking “mattering”, they want to feel like their actions make a difference. In the absolute worst way possible.
I almost want to call it “sexual sadism”, except that that runs the risk of being confused with consensual BDSM and that’s not at all what I’m talking about. I’m not sure what else to call it, though, it’s literally an adversarial mentality that wants to harm people through sex. There’s this whole idea that sex is degrading to women veined throughout our culture, and so I don’t necessarily think it’s a big step for a man to go from “I want to get sex” to “I want to degrade women”, and then decide to cut out the intermediary.
I started thinking about this back in January, after reading this piece by Lili Loofbourow https://theweek.com/articles/749978/female-price-male-pleasure
and thinking that for a certain kind of man this is probably a feature rather than a bug. I’ve meant to write about it and just couldn’t finish the piece, I’ve tried a few times now.
Rape culture constructs male sexuality as inherently predatory. And if you think about that for just a second… what happens to prey?
(In some sense the prey’s suffering might matter, too – cats tend to ignore dead mice, for instance. And it’s not always about food, cats often kill without eating. I realise I’m probably stepping on a minefield by insulting cats in this space, and I don’t mean to – I quite like cats, honestly! But they were the first example that came to mind.)
Seeing men come out of the woodwork in every discussion of sexual misconduct and go out of their way to empathise with the predators rather than the victims is also rather telling, I think. Even in cases as obviously vile as Harvey Weinstein or Larry Nassar, I’ve spoken to men about the situations and had them ignore the victims to whatabout the abusers. I’m not saying all men – not in the least – but it’s happened often enough that I think it’s significant.
I don’t think I’ve got anything concrete here, but I think it bears thinking about.
That might not be the sole source of problems. What about those who don’t know how? I don’t think this is something that has a user manual that everyone gets a copy of … and not everyone has access to therapy, counseling, or similar such services either, for financial or other reasons.
Concerning the similarities to DAESH and other terroristic groups, most actual study of the recruits points to the same kind of disillusionment with society as a prime motivator in joining the cause, so to speak, and then it is eventually dressed up in some form of supposed goal in the case of Daesh, though less so with the Incels and other misanthropically nihillistic terrorists. That is not to say that it is the sole motivational factor nescessarily, just that this usually tends to be a common denominator. I’d provide links, but is very early and I don’t have them to hand, sorry.
@Surplus
Fair point.
I were thinking about one particular group of people, but your group is equally a problem. There’s also the ones who don’t see a problem in the first place. Those are the really troubling ones to my mind.
I wonder if another component of incel is how it’s not socially acceptable for men to compliment and reassure each other. At least not in most circles. It’s very, very common for women and girls to be insecure about our appearance. We tend to talk to our friends about these insecurities. And although like incels, we will commiserate and share our own appearance based insecurities, we will also tell our friends about their attractive qualities. For example, if a friend was anxious about having a big butt, I might say “at least you can hide that with an A-line skirt. Especially since you have great legs and skinny arms. But I have fat arms and that is so much harder to hide. At least you don’t have fat arms and giant boobs!” This kind of talk empathizes with the bodily insecurity but also reassures the other person that they have good points to compensate for the bad.
Of course, this all assumes there are universally good and bad traits. This is problematic and I try to avoid these types of discussions nowadays not the least because as someone who used to have an eating disorder, it’s a triggering topic. But for all the flaws in this sort of typical conversation between female friends, it’s vastly better than the way incels do it. Which is just to basically say “yeah, you’re ugly. So am I.”
I think a lot of the reason this type of toxic male bonding occurs is because men typically are not allowed to compliment other men on their appearance in a non-sexual way and because men are not typically allowed to ask for reassurance from other men. Women can lean on each other in ways men cannot. Just another way toxic masculinity hurts both women and men.
I hope this isn’t too garbled. I’ve had some wine and it’s late. So. Yeah.
Completely off topic, but since I don’t like laughing alone …
https://twitter.com/darth/status/988884855642443777
@wwth I think you might be onto something there too, though I’ve had quite a bit of wine myself so who knows.
More wine.
Why the hell are these people not being tracked down and rounded up for confinement already?
@WWTH:
Yeah. The sad thing is that strong emotional connections between men used to be the basis of society. Or, well, at least much more acceptable. Of course, that tended to express itself in misogynistic ways, but still: https://thewalrus.ca/the-epidemic-of-isolation-among-young-men/
@GenJones: Rounding up people is usually the preferred methods of our enemies, last time I checked. Although it’s not as easily imagined or satisfiable, I am always in favour of reeducation and rehabillitation, and that actually goes for Incels and Nazis both. Although, as stated, it’s what I would prefer. When it isn’t possible, I am all for exploring every option available, but it really does depend on the circumstances and what can be achieved.
@WWTH:
I think you’ve got something there.
In my experience, part of the problem is that boys are taught to value themselves in a very competitive light. You can’t be strong; you can only be stronger than someone else. This means that if you hang out in a group where everyone’s strong, then you’re nothing special and so have less value.
Because it’s a relative rather than an absolute, it means that the only way to build someone up is to put someone else down at the same time. This harms the sort of affirming, we’re-both-valid sort of conversations that you mention, because both men are taught to see the other man as a threat and to read every complement as zero-sum.
One of the things that I love about progressive spaces is that I can talk to other people who were socialised male, and not have this sort of bullshit.
Edit to add: I wonder if this is why there’s such a strong correlation between unexamined masculinity and belief in laissez-faire capitalism?
Two poisonous tastes that taste poisonous together … :-s
The Grauniad has got this at the top of the page today:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/24/toronto-van-attack-facebook-post-may-link-suspect-with-incel-group
@WWTH:
Well, I’m as sober as a priest on Sunday and it makes sense to me. Though I think there’s a second aspect that amplifies the effect even more.
Specifically, people need reassurance, and the nature of our society pretty much makes it impossible for some of men’s emotional needs to met other than by women. This would then be another reason for men to feel desperate to have, and to maintain, a relationship with a woman, and to act out in sometimes destructive ways if for whatever reason that isn’t happening for them.
Indeed a prediction can be made from this, which is that there’ll be a correlation between incel/MRA/MGTOW/etc. type extremism, or susceptibility to radicalization in general even, and lacking or problematic maternal involvement in their lives. Because in the absence of a lover, most men have no other likely female confidantes but their mothers. If they’re also unavailable for any reason (including physically present, but emotionally unavailable) they’ll have nowhere they feel they can turn for reassurance.
@EJ:
Undoubtedly. And hostility to the welfare state, and and and. When you’re graded on a curve and someone’s getting government assistance, you’re going to yell “that’s cheating!” in indignant fury.
Getting rid of this “graded on a curve” BS and grounding people’s worth in sufficiency, rather than superiority, is needed … and for both/all sexes. For men, sufficiency in the various things you mentioned. For women, sufficiency in attractiveness, so it’s not “I’ll never look like the women on the magazine covers!” but “I can’t look too bad, men occasionally ask me out” or whatever.
@GenJones:
Because of this pesky little important thing called the First Amendment, most likely.
@Autonomous:
That’s running into Stalin, wishing to avoid Hitler. I really don’t know what to do, beyond surveill their forums and deal with the ones that do break the law (including by overstepping Amendment I with actionable death threats and suchlike) and doing a better job of raising the next generation of boys by passing as little of toxic masculinity to them as we can manage. (Which still requires getting all, or most, of the parents to agree to something…at least the worst affected, by their own admission, seem to be having some problems breeding, so the worst of the parents will be somewhat less bad than the worst period.)
@Surplus: I am well aware of the connotations there 😉
But if we leave the propagandizing and indoctrination to the reactionaries, I can’t see any substantial and meaningful gains in terms of creating the foundations for continued social progress. It’s why I wish all the Nazi/MRA/whatever-flavoured-idiots were correct in their insistence that Cultural Marxism was actively being imposed on the youth 😀
Dan Someone:
That’s a good question. I think they mostly operate on the common intuitive idea that punishing wrongdoers is a goal in itself, or a means to uphold the abstract principle of justice, rather than a means to achieve something practical, like prevent future wrongdoings.
They dress it in terms of a social revolution, because it sounds cool and grand, and they don’t think it beyond “violence is a natural recourse of the oppressed”. It’s so simple because their perceived oppression is generally just a way to rationalize violent fantasies, dreams of grandeur and feeling of righteousness.
Their ideology already maintains that the enemy is mainstream culture, so they can just attack random crowds without discrimination. That said, most of them would probably prefer to focus on hurting “Stacies”, and in some cases especially particular people who’ve rejected them.
To me, incels are all about entitlement, denial and projection. There is obviously variation within the incel world, but I think there’s one very common type, who I’ll call Ian Sell.
Growing up, Ian internalised that he is entitled to all sorts of things and as a straight cis man he’s been ‘playing life on the easy setting’. He does OK at his studies and/or at work and he believes that when he succeeds it’s due to being smart and when he fails it’s because he’s bored and unmotivated. He is fairly average in appearance, certainly not ugly but also not cute and he doesn’t try particularly hard with grooming or looking after himself because making an effort is for losers. He has a few friends, even some girls, as he grows up because he’s not yet a terrible person and because young people aren’t always great at spotting or acting on red flags.
Based on popular culture and porn, Ian believes that having sex and a compliant, conventionally attractive woman are utterly central to being a real man. He also believes he is entitled to sex and women because he is a man and because (he believes) he is smarter than most people, especially women, who he regards as unintelligent, emotional and irrational. And like everything else in his life, he shouldn’t have to work or change (especially non-physical aspects of himself) to attract a partner – that would imply there is something wrong with his intellect or character and he can’t accept that.
As his peer group starts to pair off, he tries to ‘approach’ women, perhaps using some PUA techniques that he picked up online. He gives off loads of red flags and mostly approaches women who are conventionally very attractive. After a few rejections, he grumpily approaches a less attractive woman, but his attitude is even worse and she rejects him too. He becomes sullen and bitter, which of course makes him even more likely to be rejected.
At this point, Ian could try self-reflection or ask women he knows where he’s going wrong. But he would have to accept many unacceptable things to do this successfully. He can’t accept that he is creepy, that women are human, that he needs to listen to other people to be liked, that women are as smart as men, that women are often better at social interactions than men, that he isn’t actually a nice person, that his dissatisfaction with life isn’t mostly because of a lack of sex etc. etc.
So he needs an explanation and he blames his looks. He sees couples and attractive women, he reads about women who enjoy sex and it burns him up inside. If only he was more attractive he would get sex, he would have a hot girlfriend. He becomes ever more bitter and angry, which of course makes it ever less likely that women – or any normal people – will want to talk to him.
He finds the online incel community at some stage in this process and they provide an outlet for his rage and frustration. They confirm that it’s all about looks and he must be repulsive – looks and lack of wealth are the main reason men are rejected by women, who are shallow. Attractive women are sluts; rich, attractive men are taking all the woman and both groups are doing it for the joy of being high status and rubbing the noses of men like him in the dirt. This is where the projection comes in – he believes everyone else is as full of hate as him.
There then follows a cycle of him becoming ever more full of hate and violence (encouraged by the online community) and his life becoming worse as a result, which makes him angrier and so on. It’s now incredibly hard for him to break out of this cycle, because of what he’d have to admit about himself. If a non-incel suggests that his problem is his attitude, he is adamant that no one can tell what he’s thinking. He is probably drawn into all sorts of adjacent groups such as the alt-right, making him more angry, paranoid and less able to connect with ordinary people.
His family and friends start becoming more distant, which he also blames on his ugliness. This is why he thinks that if other people were disfigured, they’d lose their family and friends. Projection again.
Sorry, this has become far longer than I planned and I’m not the most elegant writer. Also, I hope I don’t sound like I’m making excuses for Ian. He’s a hateful bag of runny shit, but I think understanding the journey he took to get there might be part of the solution.
I’m amazed. The MSM actually seems to be paying attention to the incel angle. First, the Guardian, and now even the CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/what-is-an-incel-toronto-van-attack-explainer-alek-minassian-1.4633893
Grauniad summary on incel. Explicitly references the alt-right connection.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/25/what-is-incel-movement-toronto-van-attack-suspect
it’s a joke to think Stalin even “re-educated” one person. he put his enemies in mental hospitals, sent to execution or to die in a penal colony. no one was “re-educated”. people pretended maybe – because they are afraid. but Stalin even sent Soviet soldiers who captured by the Nazis to penal colony after they returned from war. he personally signed 44,000 execution papers, and famously didn’t read them.
for me, life is short. we must concentrate on viticms of nazis and incels. punishment is all we can do – there is no more time to waste on nazis and incels. and use our time instead to improve society, fight patriarchy and misogyny and racism so that no more nazis will grow, so young men don’t need to be incel – so they know to share their feelings. but for people who are already nazis and incels, and who already harmed people, I want to care for victims first before reeducaion or rehabilitation.
Whenever there’s talk of re-educating or rehabilitating the MRAlt-right, I’m always reminded of the film Day of the Dead. That’s the one where the scientist spends all his efforts on trying to ‘cure’ the zombies.
In the end he manages to get one zombie to say “Hello Aunt Alicia”.
The whole point of course being that he’s wasting his time; and it would have been much better for all if he’d just concentrated on how to get rid of the mass of zombies outside.
Can’t help but think the same principle applies in the real world.
Incels have been arguing on whether or not they wanted to become a known terrorist movement. Now, the decision has apparently been made for them.
???
@GenJones
Great idea! Do we let ICE do it, or bring Arapaio out of retirement?
(That were sarcasm.)