By David Futrelle
Hearing the news that Air Force personnel at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland were recently given a briefing on the threat posed by the incel movement — complete with slides featuring incel obsessions Becky and Stacy — some reacted with predictable jokes.
“You never know when the Air Force will need to bomb the Incel State,” author and ex-Daily Caller journalist Scott Greer joked on Twitter.
“These guys fly planes?” asked another Twitterer. “I’m concerned. You should only let smart people do that.”
So far, details on the briefing are a little scanty. According to Task & Purpose, a site reporting on military and veterans’ issues,
At least one Air Force base is on the lookout for a sinister new threat: angry men who can’t get laid.
Personnel at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland were recently treated to a threat brief regarding an “increase in nationwide activity” by self-described “incels,” members of an online subculture of “involuntary celibacy” who adopt an ideology of misogyny, mistrust of women, and violence in response to their failed attempts at romantic relationships.
The brief was first made public via a screenshot posted to the popular Air Force amn/nco/snco Facebook page on Tuesday. An Air Force spokesman confirmed the authenticity of the screenshot to Task & Purpose.
The screenshot in question showed a slide from the presentation featuring an interent-famous incel meme starring supposed female archetypes Becky and Stacey.
Obviously, the Air Force isn’t contemplating any air strikes on incel hideouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, or anywhere else.
The briefing seems to have been intended to warn about the possible dangers of incel rampages by Air Force personnel themselves, many of whom obviously have access to considerable firepower and the training necessary to know how to use these weapons in the deadliest manner.
“The intent of the brief was to educate the Joint Base Andrews commanders on the behaviors and activities attributed to the group to safeguard our Airmen/installation,” an Air Force spokesperson told Task & Purpose.
It’s a good thing that the Air Force is taking incels seriously. We can’t dismiss the real threat of incels because of the absurdity of their beliefs. Terrorists and mass killers are often motivated by beliefs that the rest of us would consider ridiculous.
Son of Sam believed his neighbor’s dog was telling him to kill. Charles Manson ordered the killings at the Tate and LaBianca homes in hope of setting off a race war that would ultimately put him in charge of the world — basing his peculiar eschatology in part on secret messages he thought were hidden in Beatles lyrics. Compared to these two — and to many other mass killers — incels seem almost rational.
As for the memes? They’re a central part both of incel and alt-right culture; they radicalize angry young men in the same way that YouTube videos and books like the neo-Nazi bible The Turner Diaries do. These days, mass killers don’t just pen manifestos; they also leave a trail of memes. The Christchurch killer included references to memes in his manifesto; the Toronto van killer, an incel, left behind a short statement on social media referencing several popular incel memes.
“Indeed,” Task & Purpose notes,
the screenshot [of the Air Force briefing] appeared the day after Brian Isaac Clyde, a former Army infantryman who frequently posted memes that referenced the incel movement alongside anti-government conspiracies to his Facebook page, was shot by federal officers after he opened fire outside a Dallas, Texas federal building.
It’s not clear if Clyde considered himself an incel; his social media was overstuffed with all sorts of memes popular amongst alt-rightists and manospherans and right-wing conspiracy theorists generally.
We learned a long time ago that 4chan’s racist and anti-Semitic memes weren’t just “ironic.” Nor are threats of violence any less serious if they take the form of a meme. Incels make a lot of memes. They’ve also killed a lot of people. Everyone needs to take them seriously.
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Sorry for the poor quoting – sheesh!
@kupo: wow, your hair is gorgeous!
I used to dye my hair (I haven’t done it for awhile because my hair got a bad chemical burn and was really brittle for awhile. But my hair has long since healed, and I’m thinking of going bright blue. Either that or bright green. And no, not because of any man!
@Bina: I’ve had conversations with men who were absolutely flabbergasted when I tried to explain to them that women don’t do everything for men. I didn’t hang out with any of these men for long.
Dispatches From the Culture Wars has a new pest who might come from MRA/MGTOWland. They’re calling themselves MannSplainer.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2019/06/20/how-donald-trump-exploits-fragile-masculinity/
Ive had lots of convos w trans & queer folks about how reclaiming our hair is liberating. That first hair cut or growing it out or w/e helps w dysphoria, sends signals to the community, and defies the dang hair police.
I feel like @Turan just told me the answer to a riddle I struggled with for years, tho.
I would add that I think less RWers dye their hair, it’s the whole old fashioned mentality.
Which is why I lol about it bc makes them sound more square than my Old School Republican Dad
@Kupo
You have hair like a magical mermaid would have. It’s beautiful.
“Lushes natural blonde hair”
*eye twitch*
@kupo – What beautiful colors! Your hair is a work of art.
@kupo
Holy hell and all its furies, that is glorious, I have to go, I have to go now, must get to a hair salon with a bagful of manic panic like yesterday.
A few years ago I dyed my hair bright blue. It looked amazing.
And last year I dyed my hair neon pink for my cousin’s wedding. His wife loves pink and guests were asked to incorporate some pink in their outfit. I and the guy all in black with neon pink high lights like shoe laces and piping stole the show of all the guests.
I don’t dye my hair more often for two reasons:
1. If my hair gets longer than 3 cm it drives me up the wall, so I buzz it off regularly.
2. Bleaching and dyeing my hair makes it feel like plastic. I often run my hand through my hair when thinking hard. Which I do a lot for my job.
It’s also bloody expensive and there is no way in hell I’ll try bleaching my hair at home. Saw too many hair horror videos for that!
@kupo
That is by far the most beautiful, skillfully-done dye job I have ever seen. ?
I have a navel piercing, and I once met a guy who said “I don’t know why women do that, I’ve never looked at a navel piercing and thought, wow that’s sexy…”
It was a really weird moment, realising that he applied my choice to pierce my navel, done when I was 18 because I wanted to be Nancy from The Craft and I thought it was the kind of thing she’d do, to himself. Without even questioning it.
He also turned out to be the kind of person who rudely grilled my best friend on the ins and outs of being transgender, and how, exactly, two people with dicks have sex with each other “I’ve heard you do [insert weird straight male rumour] is that true?”
So fuck that guy. (I didn’t, but sadly a lot of people did so I imagine he has not yet learned his lesson)
I suspect one reason why incels and similar hate make up etc is that they hate women (well duh!) but specifically real, fleshy, individual, imperfect women, not realising there is no other kind (any more than there is any other kind of anyone).
As others have pointed out, “Stacy” is an artifice; she is not real: she is basically “Becky” dressed up, and Incels, unlike normal adults, are perpetually angry and disappointed (rather than delighted) when it invariably proves to be the case that “Stacy” is an actual real person not their fantasy doll.
In short, they are basically a really, really noxious versions of a small child being angry that department store Santas are not the real thing.
@kupo, I love it, especially how there are different dyes in layers so it looks almost iridescent.
Which kind of got me thinking about cassowaries because, really, who wouldn’t want to be a metal af flightless bird with iridescent plumage who can disembowel people with a kick?
CASSOWARY SEES YOU THERE IS NOWHERE TO RUN
PS While searching for cassowary images, I also found pictures of cassowary chicks and OMG SQUEE ?
http://savethecassowary.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Cassowary_withChick.jpg
@Violet the Vile:
Ugh, I hate people like that. I mean, we’re human, we’re intelligent (mostly), we’ll work it out: it’s kind of what our species does. It’s like announcing to the world, “I am the least imaginative person you will ever be unfortunate enough to spend time in the sack with”. Yeah, way to sell yourself there, bro.
Almost as bad as the, “homosexuals squick me out so much that I’m going to spend the next 10 minutes/ 5,000 words going into eye-watering detail of what they get up to– or I think they get up to– in private, you cannot imagine how repulsed I am” guys. They’re my favourite. /s
The Becky is rated “average 6/10” on what I assume is Objective Female Hotness Scale going from 1 to 10, or something like that. Oddly enough, for men who make a big deal on being below-average looking, incels don’t seem much interested in postulating the properties of below-average looking women. According to the Normie Distribution Principle, these women must exist somewhere, although no stock photographer has yet managed to capture evidence of them.
The Stacy is rated “10/10 qt 3.14”, which I’m somewhat curious about. I assume it’s some advanced sexual market economics.
@Lumipuna:
Presumably that’s “cutie pie”?
@Cat Mara
So I googled cassowaries, because I privately doubted the disembowling with a kick ability (“it’s a bird! No way!”)… turns out you are right. I got to “the commonest injuries are […] bone fractures” and “bits of children have been discovered beneath the nests” before I closed that tab with the resolution to never get near a cassowary.
Oh, thanks. I was never into iconographic puns, in any language.
I really recommend reading the book this is taken from “Whoever Fights Monsters” Robert Ressler goes through loads of cases like this and even writes how people who do these kinds of things are just expanding on normalised but toxic male behaviour related to women. Its a really good but very intense read.
@Big Titty Demon:
Ah, but you’re forgetting the secret ingredient: Australia. Can you imagine the conversations when the continents got their flora and fauna?
Europe: How about birds?
Australia: Cool but what if also… murder birds?
Africa: Dude, you say that for everything! Murder snakes, murder spiders, murder jellyfish… seriously, are there any species living in you right now that won’t murder you?
Australia: Well, there’s koalas. They’re a bit bitey, sure, but not actively murder-y, not as such…
Europe: Well, that’s nic–
Australia: I’m pretty sure it’s the toxins in the eucalyptus leaves, though. If they weren’t all stoned off their gourds on them, they might be more homicidal…
Africa: OMG WTF is wrong with you
A cassowary foot. We might not remember when dinosaurs walked the Earth but the cassowaries do… and how they belong to the same clade:
Koalas may not be “actively murdery,” but a very large percentage of them do have chlamydia, and humans may be able to catch it from them (not from having sex with them, but from exposure to their urine).
@Kupo:. Your hair is stunning. It reminds me a little of the Aurora Borealis, that light phenomenon that happens near the north or south poles. I’ve never seen it in person, only in pictures.
RE:. David Berkowitz. Amazingly enough, I’ve read that he has a prison job providing mental health/emotional counseling to his fellow inmates. He’s the serial killer I have the clearest childhood memories of, because I had relatives who lived in the NYC area. He was also, at the time, called the 44 Caliber Killer.
This whole business of women supposedly changing their appearance only to be more attractive to men…I remember overhearing a discussion of anorexia, and one man wondered why girls and women would voluntarily starve themselves, since it wasn’t attractive to men! Someone patiently explained that it had very, very little to do with men.
I’ve noticed that men’s blazers & suit jackets have quite a bit of padding in the shoulders. Are men guilty of “false advertising”? Should women be pissed off at them, when their physiques aren’t quite as they appear? Look at the Rotten Tangerine. He’s got enough padding in his suit’s shoulders for at least three typical suit jackets.
I dyed my hair candy apple red right before a school trip to Prague last year. It was a really pretty color and I wish I could keep it up, but it only looks good on me in conjunction with a clean-shaven face and trying to maintain that is impossible.
@ cat mara
There was an interesting experiment where the researchers replicated a velociraptor’s limb and claw as a robotic arm; and then using the best estimates of muscle strength etc. set it loose on (already dead) pig abdomens.
Whilst the claw could occasionally pierce the abdomen, it couldn’t slice it. It was too rounded. So no disemboweling it seems; rather the limb would have just been used to hold the prey in place whilst they ate.
Having sat through 26 years of AF security/terroism briefings at this point, I’ve been wondering when they would get updated for some of the current domestic terror/security risks. I haven’t seen this yet- sure hope I do- because I’ve been asked several times why I follow incel/MRA/PUA crap here.
The dude in charge of our briefings locally is a hard core Trumpie and completely tone deaf to the room. When 45 was elected he was gleeful and positively giddy while briefing a large room full of science/research folk. Many, many of whom are POC, women, and naturalized citizens- all tasked with doing research for the AF and keeping our research ours- not a very happy room at all and he was completely clueless.
@ Castrating Harpy;
You’re talking about someone who preplanned their behavior to trip the hot buttons of apparent mental instability, intending to later portray themselves as insane while committing premeditated acts.
This sounds perfectly sane to me.