CONTENT WARNING: This one is just brutal. If you’re feeling even the slightest bit queasy about the headline, please don’t read any further.
By David Futrelle
Sunday morning, a young man named Brandon Clark allegedly murdered 17-year-old Instagram “e-girl” Bianca Devins, apparently a friend of his, brutally slashing her throat and then slashing his own in an attempt to kill himself. Sometime between the murder and the attempted suicide, he took a photo of her bloody body and uploaded it to 4chan.
The photo quickly spread across social media, including the Incels.co forum, where it was evidently found by a commenter calling himself canino1997, who reacted to the horrific tragedy by masturbating to the picture of Devins’ lifeless body and sending a picture of the resulting “cum tribute” to the girl’s mother (or perhaps her stepmother) as a sort of ‘”lesson” for her.
He attached a screenshot of what he said were the messages he’d sent to the mother along with his “tribute.”
Naturally, other incels applauded canino1997’s initiative. “[Y]our doing god’s work,” wrote one commenter. “Based as fuck,” added a second. “Based kikebook Stalkercel,” agreed a third, which is the Incel way of saying he thought that canino1997 is was an excellent Facebook stalker.
On Facebook, Bianca’s stepmother didn’t say anything about
canino1997’s particular act of malicious harassment, but she did post at length about the anguish of seeing the photos of her stepdaughter’s corpse — an anguish amplified by the knowledge that countless strangers were passing the pictures around in an attempt to shock others and, in some cases, to garner new Instagram followers.
It is absolutely disgusting that people are sharing, screenshoting the pictures of Bianca’s (tragic) death!! Wtf is wrong with you people!!?? … I will FORVER have those images in my mind when I think of her. When I close my eyes, those images haunt me. …
Imagine sitting there, in disbelief and praying to God that this is all some mistake and that your baby will walk through the door any minute. Now imagine seeing those pictures and having everything in you break. Imagine not even being able to yell out and scream or cry because your soul has now just been broken.
After writing this blog for eight years, and watching the political developments in the US over the last three, I can’t say I still have a lot of faith left in humanity. But discovering the incel and his “cum tribute” hit me like a punch in the gut; in some ways it feels as gratuitously cruel as the murder itself.
There’s a lot more to say — none of it good — about this case and the assorted reactions to it online. But I will save that for later posts.
NOTE: Canino1997’s original post was taken down by the Incels.co mods, though evidence of it remains in the responses to it from other commenters. I borrowed the screenshots from a post in IncelTears, a subreddit devoted to monitoring and mocking incels.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a donation our way! Thanks!
TERF’s aren’t feminists. They like to play act that they are, but they are transphobic assholes who are also aphobic as well, for some reason. (I know the reason.)
I will loudly fight TERFs. In fact, you’ll find many feminists fighting TERFs. It’s like they are their own subcategory of people, with a label, that we can all denounce. (Because they suck, and are not welcome here. It’s even in the comments policy!)
But incels don’t have that, do they? They are just all one thing. You could claim that you are a moderate incel… But what does that even mean? How does an ideology that is, at its essence, saying that women are shallow creatures who are only interested in looks and can’t comprehend anything else, have a moderate view?
You are reducing a significant portion of the population to non-human status, is what I’m saying.
Also, and this might surprise you, but you aren’t the only person in their 30s who isn’t in a relationship and hasn’t had people knocking down their door to be in one.
Many of us don’t turn to a hate ideology for answers.
I would not be in a relationship with someone who I was ashamed of going outside with. Touché.
However, I wouldn’t feel shame because my partner had a recessed chin (something I actually have!) or acne scars (I have those too! As well as not infrequent pimples!) or their nose didn’t match their face, as decided by the very scientific and 110% objective face-to-nose matching program run by Incel Laboratories.
I would feel ashamed to go outside with someone who was rude or abusive passers-by, maybe, or perhaps wore a shirt that said “Incel” on it.
Absolutely not*, but my definition of “ashamed of going outside with” would be someone who treats people terribly, not someone with vitiligo (interesting choice, there, as a lot of people find vitiligo to be beautiful).
*Ok, so yes, in the past, I was in a relationship with an abusive person I was actually ashamed to go places with because he would be an ass at people, especially people in service roles, but I’ve learned the red flags now.
No, I’m pointing out one of the warrants that is logically required in order for you to hold your stated belief.
I never claimed you said any of those things directly; I very clearly stated that your belief inherently implies that you also believe one of these two propositions:
1) You believe that literally everyone is so shallow that no one is capable of valuing any other human trait, either singly or in combination, more than looks.
or
2) You believe that other traits are also valued — although not as much as looks — and that in theory such other traits can, either singly or in combination, overcome a person’s “unanimously hideous” looks and enable them to to find a partner.
I also stated that based on your word choice and tone, I assume you believe proposition 1. I threw in the bit about “even blind people” to highlight how fundamentally stupid it is to assume that everyone values the same set of traits equally.
The nature of a warrant in logical argument is that it’s an unstated assumption upon which an argument rests, and that invalidating the warrant often invalidates the entire argument. I’ve found it’s also usually very instructive what people assume to be true — especially if they don’t know that they’re assuming it.
So, is my assessment of that warrant of your belief wrong? And if so, how?
And you would be wrong. Yes, many people — probably even most — find those traits unappealing, but not everyone. There are guys who enjoy having their scrotums nailed to a two by four; it’s not even close to a stretch to think some folks find each of the traits you list appealing.
…and even if someone isn’t attracted to those traits, that doesn’t imply that that person actually cares about physical looks enough for it to matter in terms of finding a partner. Do you think Stephen Hawking’s wife was particularly concerned with his looks? And that’s just one high-profile example; there are countless others that we never hear about because the people involved aren’t famous.
Okay, so how many traits does it take for it to be “truly over”? Are some traits weighted more heavily than others, in the “over” calculations? Are particular combinations of traits more hideous than each individual trait involved, in a sort of gestalt of horror?
I mean, if it’s that universal, surely someone has quantified all this….
No, but that would have exactly fuck-all to do with their looks.
…also, although not directed at me, I absolutely have to respond to this bullshit:
It’s guilt by an association that you fucking claimed for yourself, dumbass.
So no, you bloody well can’t call them TERFs unless they change their usernames to include the term TERF.
You’re a real fucking moron, asshole.
I dunno, if any of us suddenly started talking about “adult human females” or how “biological women” need their own spaces or put XX in their usernames, that would probably count.
@kupo
Fair point.
Great, now I’m thinking the Finnish idiom “fits like a nose on head”.
Also, Lainy wrote:
I was also thinking cases like these – namely, that as long as your face HAS a nose, you aren’t among the most abnormal folks in that regard.
@Lumipuna
This is mostly OT but I also don’t care for the topic at hand since it’s somewhat dominated by an incel I wish would go away: Do you have either of the idioms “Got his beard stuck in the mailbox” or “owls in the moss”?
No, because I don’t have the word TERF in my username, and I haven’t expressed any transphobic opinions either here or anywhere else, so you have no sensible grounds for calling me one.
On the other hand, you explicitly identify yourself as an incel in your username, so it seems to me that it’s entirely reasonable to assume that you’re broadly sympathetic towards the disgusting ideology that’s associated with the incel movement. Because if you weren’t, there are a gazillion other usernames that you could have picked – it’s really not hard to avoid making that association.
Put it like this: if a member of the KKK had recently lynched someone and another KKK member had defiled the corpse and sent photographic evidence to grieving relatives, would you be popping up here with the name “kkk157” or “grandwizard157” and realistically expect a warm welcome? And if not, what’s the difference?
So stop calling yourself an incel, a term that’s becoming increasingly synonymous with both verbal and actual terrorism, not to mention the most consistently skin-crawlingly repulsive misogyny that I think David’s managed to dig up in this blog’s entire history. If you aren’t a vile misogynist, incel groups are absolutely the last places you should be visiting, and you certainly shouldn’t be embracing the term – it’s become too tainted for it to be reclaimed.
It figures, it just figures, that in a thread about the murder of a young woman and the scumbags who delight in the pain of her family, a fucking incel would show up to throw himself a pity party.
Consume feces and experience a permanent cessation of vital functions – is that polite enough for you?
Shitbag.
The back half of your penultimate paragraph skates rather close to violating the comments policy.
Sorry @Hippodameia, I have to agree with @Ariblester here. I understand the feeling, but careful of the comments policy.
Thank you 100% for the first paragraph though!!!! Sometimes I get so wrapped up in trying to explain to someone things that I forget the greater context, which is
@incel157 – I do wonder about your choice of articles to defend the Moderate Incel on. Can you even imagine what her mother would have gone through, if she got these messages? Can your body contain the horror and grief and rage and sorrow and disbelief? Mine can’t. I think I’d rip apart.
(I wouldn’t, really, I’d have to hold together for the TV interviews that are inevitably going to happen. And the funeral, and the wake. And the court dates. And more press. I would be unraveling the entire time, but I would know that I need to hold it together for my daughter. Because if I behaved in any way other than the Perfect Parent, my daughter might not get justice at all.)
I can’t fathom why anyone would do what the OP claims he did, besides “””””””for the lulz””””””. I can’t fathom anyone coming in here, and defending the group of people the person responsible for this belongs to.
And yet you did…
That’s enough internet for me for the night. Going to read a book and then try to get some sleep. :/
I apologize to the community and withdraw the comment.
Nope.
@Lumipuna
They are Norwegian idioms, I just wondered if they crossed over to Finland.
No, it’s not the “only place”, heck, it’s the worst place to be. Even if I played the “looks matter most” game (which I don’t, I have mild BDD about my overall appearance, even if my partners so far have always called me handsome. I consider myself entirely unbearable to look at, but hey, apparently I’m not the best judge of beauty), I wouldn’t think about hanging with people this deranged. Go and find friends. And I don’t mean the cesspool of reprehensible nightmares that is a the incel pit and also not some bunch of misanthropes who just want to abuse each other because they have no dependent spouse to beat. I mean: Find real people you share actual interests with and hang with them.
And don’t give me the “too old” shit. I work in elderly care and palleative care. I have met people with late stage skin cancer, who were reeking of pus and vinegar and still had beautiful relationships with others.
What you’re doing is emotional self-harm. That’s not noble or accepting, you just don’t need a razor cut yourself.
I have worked in an appalic care unit. I have seen people with locked-in syndrome, who can only communicate with their eyes. And even some of them have relationships. And of one, I know that he met his girlfriend after the incident. Think that’s better than a weird headshape and a fleeting forehead? A boyfriend who can only nod and smile at best?
Here is the sad fact: It’s you. It’s the fact that you rather leather yourself in disgust and repulsion and surprise: Others notice that and it doesn’t feel nice.
Looking back, I am incrdibly lucky that I didn’t have an incel forum because I could have ended up just like those hobgoblins if I let this “community” poison my mind
Please don’t. I feel like you’ve been around long enough to see us push back against this same kind of talk before and I don’t have the energy right now to explain why this makes people on here uncomfortable, but it does.
Quite aside from anything else, “in your 30s” isn’t remotely old. I met my wife when I was already comfortably into my mid-thirties, and this isn’t at all unusual in my social circle. And because we met online and spent a fortnight emailing and a week phoning before we finally met face to face, physical appearance had literally nothing to do with our initially establishing that we liked each other a lot – on our first proper date, neither of us had more than the vaguest verbal description to go on.
(Granted, this was before webcams and smartphones became ubiquitous, but it still demonstrates that looks most certainly aren’t everything. I once asked her what she thought of my canthal tilt and wrist circumference and she snorted with derision when I told her that some people think that such things are critically important.)
And how did we keep things going after that initial encounter? By the magical formula of treating each other decently (a key but often neglected element of which involves listening to each other and taking an intelligent interest in what the other one’s saying) and treating people around us with similar tact and understanding. I’ll never forget the time she recalled the exacct moment when she thought I might be long-term relationship material – during one of our earliest dates, a waiter made a mistake with our order and I shrugged it off as just one of those things. She said that most of her previous boyfriends would have made an overtly theatrical scene out of humiliating the poor bloke, under the deeply erroneous impression that this would somehow impress her.
It seems to me that incel communities preach the precise opposite of this – treat women with absolute contempt (in extremis, “othering” them with deliberately dehumanising terms like “femoids” or “foids”), generalise horribly about women in general without bothering to listen to what individual women might have to say, preach that women are only good for sex and literally nothing else, and that it’s completely impossible for men and women to interact socially if there’s not likely to be a sexual outcome… well, if you believe this utter steaming pile of rancid jackal manure, you’ll simply remain in the same obsessive self-loathing vicious circle that led you to seek out incel communities in the first place. And, frankly, you’ll deserve to be.
@kupo
I’m sorry.
Big Titty Demon:
Reportedly, there’s been a lot of conceptual and idiomatic crossover between Finnish and Swedish (I speak only a little Swedish so I can’t say directly). IDK know about Swedish and Norwegian, or how all these languages have been affected by Latin and German and more recently English.
http://giphygifs.s3.amazonaws.com/media/13A7YlLvYVDnmU/giphy.gif
Fuck off.
For those who didn’t know, e.g., me, KHHV is incel jargon for “kissless, hugless, handholdless virgin”. Somehow even more self-pitying than the term “incel” itself.
I’m frankly afraid to Google this because of the sites I might get, but what does KHHV mean?
And someone said already. Sorry, I didn’t see that post before posting this
Thank you
Thank you, Mabret, for posting the definition. Sorry I left it out.
I fired up TOR on my phone to look it up, and then never posted the answers so others wouldn’t need to.
I hang my head in shame.