A 25-year-old California incel was recently arrested and charged with hate crimes, after he allegedly sprayed women with pepper spray in a series of attacks that he filmed and put on YouTube. With the hate crime “enhancements” on top of his various felony charges, he could face up to 13 years in prison.
This gentleman, who I will not name, is not your typical incel, in that he actually went out in the world and acted out his hatred of women. While a number of incels have of course attacked and killed innocent victims, most incels simply fantasize about this sort of thing.
Indeed, over on Incels.is, the most popular incel forum, the regulars bemoaned the “Pepper Spraycel’s” arrest. It’s “ovER for saint pepperspray,” lamented one. “So fucking sad,” wrote another, “he was so based for doing what he did. It’s over for us. Time to rope.” Their only criticism? Saint Pepperspray turns out to be good looking, certainly handsome enough to score a “Becky,” so, while still a hero, he’s actually a “fakecel.”
Jesse Singal, the former New York Magazine writer turned Substacker, thinks these guys are getting a bad rap. Singal, perhaps best known for his appalling takes on trans issues, seems to be turning into some sort of incel apologist.
In a recent Substack posting, Singal roundly criticized that Center for Countering Digital Hate report on incels I also wrote about critically on Tuesday. Some of his criticisms of the report’s methodology were spot on. (I’m not going to summarize; you can go read it.) But unfortunately the whole piece was in service of a position on incels that I think is not only naïve but dangerously naïve.
To hear Singal tell it, the sorts of appalling comments I quote above — exceedingly common on Incels.is and wherever incels congregate — aren’t appalling comments for real. They are, rather “desperate, attention-grasping LARPing.” Incels are just playing at being psychopathic, violence-obsessed, woman-hating assholes to score internet points with other LARPers like them.
People say such terrible things about incels, Singal laments, but only a “very small percentage” of them are serial killers or harassers.
[M]ostly they are this sprawling sad-sack community of disaffected young men with a diversity of views on various subjects, including women. There are creepy men’s rights activist incels, but there are also more straightforwardly tragic ones, hobbled by physical or mental disabilities, who blame themselves rather than women for their shortcomings.
What on earth is he even talking about? Go on Incels.is right now. Try to find one of these “sad-sack” incels who doesn’t hate women with the very fiber of their being. Show me this alleged “diversity” of opinions. Even the much vaunted “Incels Without Hate” forum on Reddit was taken down … for containing too much hate.
Also, there are essentially zero “men’s rights activist incels,” creepy or otherwise, because MRAs at least pretend to be activists who think the world can be made better for men (in their view). Incels reject any this sort of activism out of hand as an empty “cope.” Most of them are deeply committed to the idea that nothing can get better. That’s part of what makes them so dangerous. That’s one of the reasons they, or at least that “very small percentage” of them, go out and kill people.
Singal would know this, if he knew shit about incels.
Would Singal say the same sorts of things about the vicious racists on, say, Stormfront? Would he excuse them as mostly “sad sacks” who are just “LARPing?” I rather doubt it. Why is it that only those who hate women are given these sorts of apologias?
Singal also wants us to know that incels haven’t killed all that many people, if you think about it. Sure, he breezily acknowledges, some
incels do, very rarely, commit horrific acts of violence. It’s not a nonexistent threat.
I’m sure the loved ones of those killed by incels will be glad to know that the incel killers weren’t imaginary.
But there’s a lot of danger in the world, and people aren’t always good at appropriately evaluating and triaging risks, so I think there’s always a danger that some shiny new threat will attract more attention than it should … [E]ven a liberal estimate of [the number of people killed by incels] would be dwarfed, by almost an order of magnitude, by the number of murders in Chicago in 2021 alone, and is far lower than the number of Americans who succumb to Covid every day.
Using similar logic, you could point out that even in the worst years in the 19th century, the number of lynching victims was really pretty low compared with the total black population. Why, you could ask, have people made such a big deal of this “shiny” danger?
I think people did because hate crimes are not only uniquely abhorrent but they are also acts of terrorism designed to keep the hated population “in line.” And these crimes don’t happen in a vacuum — in most cases there are countless others that commit no hate crimes but who root for those who do. That’s made explicit in those horrifying photos of public lynchings in which giant crowds of white people surround the body of the victim with huge grins on their faces.
You get a similar response on the Incels.is forum every time an incel kills. And for every incel who posts about murder there are innumerable “lurkers” in the forums who agree but don’t speak up. One of the scariest things about he flawed but still useful Center for Countering Digital Hate report was that it showed just how disturbingly popular Incels.is has become, with some 17,000 members (including 4000 who actually post on the site) and 2.6 million visits a month.
All that is enough to keep me worrying about them. It would be nice if I could, like Singal, blithely dismiss everything posted to that site as inconsequential LARPing. But it’s not LARPing, and it’s not inconsequential.
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People identifying as incels have only killed a small number of people because the term has only come into widespread use in the past few years. I suspect some spree killers of the past would have used the incel branding for themselves if it had existed when they committed their crimes.
Huh. I am not familiar with incels who blame themselves for their own shortcomings.
“Using similar logic, you could point out that even in the worst years in the 19th century, the number of lynching victims was really pretty low compared with the total black population.”
Indeed, that very argument WAS uttered in Congress on several occasions during the early 20th Century in debates over passing a national anti-lynching law. Those debates were eventually shut down by Southern Whites threatening to filibuster every pro-business bill up for discussion so long as an anti-lynching bill was on the agenda. Forced to choose between standing up for civil rights and money, Republican Northerners immediately and unsurprisingly chose money.
But I don’t think Freakonomics was trying to make the argument that the Klan wasn’t as violent as we think or that there weren’t enough lynchings to matter. It was making a good argument, but in a tasteless fashion. And that argument is that specifically in the 1940s, the Klan no longer needed to engage in much active violence. After Southern Whites gained control of all legal functions in the South, and after many Black cities and neighborhoods were essentially wiped off the map in the 1910s and 1920s, and no one did anything about it or cared, they no longer were lynching very many people because no one was standing up to them. If an individual fought for civil rights, they would disappear, and if a movement started somewhere, that place would probably be destroyed in a race riot, and crucially, no one would care. Or, well, no one with the power to do anything would. The media wouldn’t report on it. The government would actively suppress any debate on the topic. People in the North were just looking the other way. It was a depressing time to be alive.
However, all that being said, there is one major problem with Freakonomics’ argument and data, and indeed much of the data on lynchings. And that is that people who died in so called race riots are not counted as dying by lynching when they clearly are. The lynching statistics are a major undercount, because it is only counting isolated incidents. But from 1915 – 1925, there were mass murders happening all over the country.
The 569 people who were lynched between 1910 and 1920 in the cited chart are not including the 100 or more Blacks killed in 1917 in East St. Louis, and probably more people who died in the aftermath from losing their homes and all their possessions. And there was a race riot in Tulsa in 1917, too, and then of course the huge massacre in 1921.
Those mass murders were the real threat of the Klan, and them plus the inability to get White politicians to do anything about them pretty much wiped out the civil rights movement for 40 years. By 1940, there were no neighborhoods left to destroy and no one willing to risk the purposeless deaths of themselves and everyone they cared about.
I ask ever incel apologist I come across why they don’t just have sex with an incel, so they won’t be incels anymore. They aren’t fond of that idea.
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckityfuck!!
I just had to power cycle my fucking PC because Windoze 10 decided to party like it was 1999 and things like process isolation and kernel mode hadn’t been invented yet (outside of the Unix world, where of course they’d had those since the seventies). I went to move 2 files from one folder to another and bam! The operating system hung. Not the file manager, the operating system. Mouse frozen, keyboard leds no-toggly, the works. If it was even still servicing interrupts there was no sign. I let it sit for five to ten minutes to see if it was livelocked rather than deadlocked; no dice. If it was ever going to spontaneously recover, it was clearly going to take longer to do so than it would take to reboot anyway, perhaps much longer, so I reached for the power button.
XP was significantly stabler than W9x/ME; their first consumer OS with Unix-like internal compartmentalization to prevent misbehaving userspace apps from taking the kernel down with them. Vista and 7 were nigh-unkillable, with the only cold boots I ever needed to apply to either of their heads being from graphics driver failures on Vista that left me blind, and one single solitary similar incident on 7, which otherwise was pretty good about being able to restart crashed video drivers without any more severe consequence than a scary 20 seconds or so of a blank screen before the video came back up. 10 seems to have made a distinct step backward if something as innocuous as a file move (of random jpegs, nothing related to the OS itself) can trigger a full system hang.
I wonder how much of a further step backward 11 will be when I’m eventually forced to it by there not being any hardware shipped anymore with 10 or earlier …
We may have reached peak Microsoft.
Closer to the topic: does anyone know how to circumvent the substack paywall? None of the tricks in my current repertoire work there: disabling CSS, searching for the page in google’s cache, searching for it in archive.org, disabling JS, enabling JS, opening the site in an incognito window (which works brilliantly for Medium’s nearly 100% of the time), and even resorting to “view source”, control-Fing for a phrase in the article text, and then settling in for a long session of annoying horizontal scrolling (which works on most remaining cases, such as Bustle) …
Right on the topic:
As I noted on a previous thread, even posts by those who have no intention of ever acting out their violent fantasies IRL still function as stochastic terrorism, as surely as Fucker Carlson’s Fox diatribes do. Fucker’s rants generate a Kyle Rittenhouse every so often, and the incels’ generate an ER or a van killer every so often.
Stochastic terrorism needs to become an exemption to freedom of speech on the basis of (stochastically) inciting (potentially) imminent lawless action.
And given its observed immediate consequences, Trump’s J6 Ellipse speech also falls into that exception. Why isn’t he in jail yet? Fomenting a coup, stealing classified (even SCI!) documents and keeping them where the Russians can easily get at them … it’s sadly unsurprising that he got away with even blatant rapes (E. Jean Carroll), but even wealthy and well-connected white guys are usually not permitted to jeopardize national security and get away with it as it gives all the other wealthy and well-connected white guys the heebie-jeebies. Same as when they threw the book at Derek Chauvin: not because he killed a black man, but because he prompted a backlash sufficiently large and vigorous as to frighten the moneybags set with credible nightmares of a Bolshevik revolution in their own back yards, and/or because the over-the-top and blatant nature of that particular killing was such as to actually set back the cause of white supremacism rather than advance it …
We don’t actually despise incels for real, we’re all just Internet LARPing our disgust, so why is Singal getting so bent out of shape?
Maybe if we started killing incels – only a “very small percentage” of us, of course – he’d write a fawning article about us, too…
A saying I heard somewhere: “The road to fascism is lined with people telling you to stop overreacting.”
When apologists like Signal talk about the small number of people actually KILLED by some group of haters or terrorist-wannabees, they’re trying to get us to ignore the far broader and deeper effect of the movement, and mindset, that encourages the killers. Yes, only a small number of these haters actually kill anyone; but a far greater number of them commit smaller acts every day that tell women, in no uncertain terms, that they should never think they’re safe anywhere, and cannot expect to be able to stand up for themselves without fear of serious punishment. All of which means the actual killings are parts of a larger campaign of terrorism, and therefore have a far greater effect on their target-group than the same number of isolated violent crimes.
I’m going to search YOUTUBE now for videos of men who are celibate and don’t want to be purposely distancing themselves from the term “incel” or at least the connotations associated with it due to violent incel criminals. Has anyone here found any? Are there celibate men speaking out against this incel crime wave?
@Love Is All
Why would celibate men speak against “crime wave” (actually several crimes in the most violent, gangs-infested and dangerous of all Western countries) if they don’t identify with the label “incel”? And if they do, they are unlikely to apologise either, but on Youtube you will rather not find videos supporting violence and terrorism, so searching is futile anyway.
@Raging Bee
Do you think internet incels and men commiting everyday violence against are largely the same group? Incels are members of online subculture for socially excluded people, cultivating mental problems and encouraging withdrawal and suicide, they don’t have much interaction with women.
Hey lard, why don’t you go fuck some incels so they aren’t incels anymore. Since your dumbass loves them so much
@Lard, “And if they do, they are unlikely to apologise either, but on Youtube you will rather not find videos supporting violence and terrorism, so searching is futile anyway.”
There are several manosphere youtube channels and they discuss the “plight” of men all the time so I’m looking for some talking points about this. I guess “Passport Bros” might be one manosphere demographic that thinks they found a “solution” to their poor faring in the USA. I’ll check and see what, if anything, they have to say about this.
This troll Lard grosses me out and really fucking pisses me off.
I hate creepy gross complaining incels and take great pride in judging cis men *by appearance first*. Fuck off incels. If a person is a cis man then it’s either handsome and attractive or something whose existence I don’t care about.
Lots of people have those problems and aren’t entitled jerks
And if they are as unattractive as they say they are then some of us don’t want them to interact with us.
It’s my right as a woman, and especially as a divine living goddess, to choose who interacts with me even if my criteria is mean, cruel, bitchy and arbitrary which it IS and which is the whole fucking point
Incels have lots of interactions with women. The Incels.is forums is full of stories of members doing anything from catcalling to assault and battery towards women or couples and getting cheered on by other members for it. Those are interactions.
Dumbass is dumbass on all issues; no film at 11.
@Elaine: The RW insists that people can be turned gay. So maybe the incels should try, I dunno, Drag Queen Story Hour, watching a lot of RuPaul, whatever the RW is whining about. Turn themselves gay and live entirely in a world full of men who like to have sex. No dealing with women, tons of sex.
Except Teh Gayz have better taste. Still, if enough of the incels could switch, they wouldn’t be incel any more.
Confront an incel with “You wanna have sex but no women will give you the time of day. Have you tried men? No? Then it’s not involuntary, is it? Ask around about your closest glory holes, dude. Meet up with some of your online bros.”
It’s almost as if sexuality doesn’t work the way they think it does.
@Goddess Stacey could scare them into trying it, maybe?
@David: Lard is just full of it. Just a giant block of cut/paste pig fat. Let him go ooze his lazy misogyny elsewhere, we don’t need him here.
@Love Is All We Need
I’m a heterosexual man who never had sex, and generally would like to have sex some day. I don’t feel like I have anything meaningful in common with incels. Is this somehow surprising enough that I ought to spread awarenes of this?
A short look at what incels are actually writing should be enough to make anyone with open eyes see that the problem with incels has little to do with their sex lives or lack thereof.
@ Love Is All We Need
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding something here, but it almost seems like Lard has a point. (Damn…)
Why would random celibate guys who probably do not consider themselves as part of any community of celibate people in general speak out against a particular group of celibate guys? I mean, incels are really only recently becoming mainstream news and many celibate guys have probably never even heard of them, so looking for them to be publicly condemning incels is likely to be a very fruitless endeavour.
In a more personal sense, I am celibate and do not want to be, but a bad upbringing and numerous personal issues have put/kept me in such a state. I do not blame women for it and nor do I seek some sort of revenge for it. The thought of speaking out against incels on YouTube because I share a commonality with them never crossed my mind. Are you saying I should or am I grossly missing your point(s)?
Disclaimer: I am most definitely not trying to be an incel apologist here. I am just surprised at the idea of being somehow grouped in with them over not having sexy times
Edit: Just noticed I missed your second post. I guess I seized on “celibate men” as a rather wide net and didn’t pick up that you were focusing on manosphere type guys who are actually members of a given online community?
@GSS ex-noob
If they were gay but still assholes they might still be all fascinated with me in the creepy way that I hate though.
I know it’s a common reaction to a goddess but I still hate them. But that kind of makes your point because when I’m on one of my guy’s backs, whip in hand, with him in full gear I can scare a hell of a lot of people, including the ones who are also fascinated.
The bullets are slow.
https://atomicrops.fandom.com/wiki/Lard
Of course the ones who want to trigger mobs against women conflate men, and men who aren’t having sex represented in lots of synonymous language including celibate.
Mr. Futrelle, I see that in addition to our lovely, sweet Elaine you have here also “Tyrant Bitch” which is with 99% certainity incel troll. Do somebody even takes care of comment section?
@ .45 “ I guess I seized on “celibate men” as a rather wide net and didn’t pick up that you were focusing on manosphere type guys who are actually members of a given online community?”
Yes. I am specifically focusing on YOUTUBE Manosphere channels.