On an online incel, or “involuntary celibate,” community, there are several topics you’d likely stumble upon. Anonymous members may be asking how to become attractive and date women, while others may discuss how much they hate and resent women. Others believe there is no hope for leaving inceldom.
“We were doomed from the moment of conception,” said one user on incels.is, a popular online message board for incels. “Bad luck and ridicule will follow us until death, where we will rot away and quickly be forgotten.”
While some members of incel communities only participate online, others’ actions dangerously escalate — like on Oct. 11, when self-proclaimed incel Tres Genco pled guilty to plotting to commit a hate crime and shoot thousands of women at an unnamed Ohio university.
Genco’s plot isn’t an isolated incident. Since 1989, over 20 violent attacks or attempts related to incel or misogynistic beliefs have occurred in North America and the United Kingdom alone, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.
The most infamous U.S. attack happened in May 2014 in Isla Vista, California. Elliot Rodger, who outlined his motives in a video and manifesto, killed six women and wounded 14 before killing himself. He blamed women for his unhappiness, loathed himself for being mixed race and held a deep resentment for attractive men and interracial couples, according to his manifesto.
Rodger has become an idol in incel spaces — sometimes referred to as the “Supreme Gentleman” by admirers, a title he’d given to himself in his manifesto — and has inspired other incel attacks and plots.
The defining factor of incel ideology is misogyny and extreme versions of the normalized sexism intertwined with American society, said Jessica Reaves, the editorial director for the ADL's Center on Extremism. The language misogynistic communities use parallels that of other violent extremists, like white supremacists.
“There’s just an underlying hatred of women that may come across as, ‘Oh, we’re just trying to protect men,’” she said. “Incels are self-loathing, but ... their disgust for women is what motivates them. They both want desperately to attract women and have successful romantic and sexual encounters with them, but they also despise women.”
Some of the incel community’s core values include the belief that incels can’t form relationships due to their genetics and a deep-held resentment against women, men they believe are superior to themselves and society for being predisposed against incels.
Reaves believes there has been an increase in incel-related violence and plots in the last few years, but it’s hard to confirm that because of the difficulty of discerning actual numbers. Media reports of these events are few, and law enforcement needs to know more about incels in order to properly document them, she said.
Reaves also believes the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on mental health, time in isolation and time online may have also caused an uptick in incel community membership.
The origin and evolution of the incel
While incels are associated with misogyny now, it didn’t start out that way. The term incel was coined by a Canadian college student in the 1990s. She created the website “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project” as a community for others struggling to form romantic relationships.
But starting in the 2000s, the community turned from being an open space for individuals, both men and women, to discuss their loneliness. Incel forums became more misogynistic and male-dominated as members blamed women for single men’s relationship struggles.
Incels fall under “The Manosphere,” a term encompassing a variety of misogynistic online communities. The subculture has specific vocabulary to categorize men and women and incel beliefs.
Some online communities, such as the subreddit r/RedPillWomen, exist as spaces for women incels, or femcels, to interact. Femcels also discuss loneliness, resentment for attractive women and being victims of society. Controversy surrounds the term “femcel,” as several online users claim they don’t exist.
Incel ideology also plays into white supremacy, according to Brian Van Brunt, a behavioral intervention expert and co-author of the book “Understanding and Treating Incels.” The ideal man that incels may aspire to become — or fully resent — is white, straight, cisgender and able-bodied.
Van Brunt said individuals are led to incel communities and ideologies out of feelings of marginalization and disconnection from the rest of the world. He used a “Pinocchio” analogy to describe incels — they want to be “real boys,” but they feel disenfranchised by being rejected in their romantic and sexual endeavors.
He also said media portrayals of men and women can also push individuals further into the incel ideology: Women are portrayed as sexual objects held to unrealistic beauty standards, and successful men are portrayed to use women for sexual gratification.
“They [incels] do this thing of catastrophizing, of taking something bad and making it worse and horrible,” Van Brunt said. “The incel problem is really tied to maybe some other problems in our society around the transition from childhood to teens to adulthood, what it means to be a man in today’s society, what it means to be a gentleman in today’s society.”
A 2019 survey conducted by the moderators of incels.is revealed information on members’ demographics, sexual and romantic experiences, mental health and the factors they thought held them back from being in relationships.
Out of roughly 550 respondents, most were between the ages of 18 to 25 and were from either North America or Europe. About half of respondents said they were white, and all said they were male.
Van Brunt emphasized that there’s a spectrum to how much of an incel someone can be. He co-created an Incel Indoctrination Rubric for the National Association for Behavioral Intervention and Threat Assessment, which lists the stages of indoctrination an individual goes through as they become more entrenched in the subculture.
A fixable problem
Van Brunt doesn’t believe the incel conversation should only focus on individuals who end up committing gruesome acts. They reflect the extreme side of the incel spectrum, and he said most people stand at the lower end where they’re frustrated by their lack of success with women.
To deal with extreme incels, Jessica Reaves said the ADL aims to provide as much information as possible to the public, like a glossary of commonly used terms. The organization also trains local, state and federal law enforcement on what the incel threat looks like, what to look out for and why the threat should be taken seriously.
“People are starting to really pay closer attention,” she said.
This problem is a fixable one, Van Brunt said. Having a strong support network and a space where people can commiserate is part of helping individuals deal with their struggles — and the original iteration of the incel community with “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project” provided that space in a healthy way.
“I think that’s important where people can feel heard and that helps. I think that’s part of the healing process,” he said. “It actually started where it should finish.”
Meredith Lutter contributed to this story.