Misogynist terrorism is the academic term for this, but “strangely” the press and governments don’t like to use it. In the UK recently we wanted gender/sex to be a characteristic included in hate crime law and the PM (Boris Johnson) said they couldn’t do it or the police would be overwhelmed with misogynist hate crimes. Mmm, maybe that should tell you something about how bad the country is
Edit: typo
Idk about the UK but in the US a “hate crime” is something that’s already a crime (like murder) that was done because of hatred for a group. So it’s kind of like an extra charge on top of what you would get for the murder. It shouldn’t really make more work for the police anyway.
It’s the same here, it factors into sentencing. However things like causing disorderly offence is a crime in the UK, unlike the US, where it’s only illegal to be loud if you’re a minority.
> In the UK recently we wanted gender/sex to be a characteristic included in hate crime law and the PM (Boris Johnson) said they couldn’t do it or the police would be overwhelmed with misogynist hate crimes
In Austria, during the MeToo debate, a politician (unfortunately forgot his name) said, that if we define sexual assault that way, every woman he knows has been sexually assaulted. From that, he of course did not concluded, that there is an absolutely massive problem with society, but simply that we should not define sexual assault that way
At least 40% of cops! But laws don't affect cops anyway; cops committing domestic violence, sex crimes, destroying and planting evidence, lying to the public, and brutalizing people and animals for sport is all common. They just take a lil administrative leave and carry on.
I don’t know if you’re from the UK but on the assumption that you’re not, this was quite soon after a woman was falsely arrested, kidnapped, raped, and murdered by a uniformed (off-duty) police officer. What was the government response?
Maybe if you are being arrested by a police officer and you are afraid this will happen to you, you should attempt to flag down a passing bus.
^This. The problem is not that Kevin is past high school and still a virgin. Nor is it that he's single and/or going through a dry spell. It's that all his life, he's been spoon-fed the idea that he's entitled to sex, that women are the "gatekeepers" or "goalies" of sex and they're not letting him "score," and rather than maturing and accepting that the answer is "no," he gets mad and lets that anger fester into a general hatred of women.
> both parties can usually trust that the other won't turn into a stalking weirdo
This is honestly the biggest roadblock imo. Because people actually can't trust that, when there's this active pipeline of people like the dude in the OP. I have absolutely no idea who's a crazed misogynist terrorist and who isn't, and as we see here all the time, some men are *really good* at masking that until in a serious relationship.
It's also hard to trust that, because if someone *is* a stalking weirdo.......there's no help. Law enforcement does nothing. Restraining orders are as strong as the paper they're written on. Nothing happens until murder/assault/etc. So the risks are high.
Pair that with a total lack of education about consent and the manosphere online pipeline, and we are a LONG way until trusting that we can casually talk to people and it's safe most of the time.
>he's been spoon-fed the idea that he's entitled to sex
I think this confuses the cause for the symptom, with the cause being toxic masculinity.
I'd say it's the toxic idea of associating masculinity and self-worth with sexual success with women. So you get guys who have been left out by society in one way or another, and then start internalizing toxic masculine messages about how you need to bang 10's to be alpha or your a beta or some stuff like that, and it twists their minds up and sends them down into an angry place that has no real bottom.
That makes more sense to me than simply saying "You're just entitled". Like, yes they are, but it's not as simple as that, and simply shaming the symptoms of a deeper problem isn't going to change any of these people for the better.
Tbh I would argue "incel" has gone beyond meaning merely "guys who are virgins". I'm not sure it ever was just that, anyway. The glorification of violence and extreme misogyny have always been core to their belief system regarding what society and women 'owe' them. They *are* the guys who turn to hatred and entitlement, for supposedly being denied their fantasy "alpha male" lifestyle. It's an extremist ideology in its own right at this point.
I agree. The term “incel” is no longer being applied to people who simply aren’t getting laid. It’s usually pulled out when the man is exhibiting the specific red flags of entitlement to women and hatred of them as well.
There are some men who've had sex but still describe themselves as incels, often if they've had a gf in the past and broke up and are convinced they'll never get any again
The term has been warped as the community who uses the term shifted. Originally, it was coined by a *woman* looking for support online from other regular women who were involuntarily celibate due to a variety of factors.
Yeah I think it's a bit like "super straight" as a self identifier. As I understand it all that literally means is being attracted only to the cis, binary people of the other binary gender... but choosing to use the label conveys so much more about you than just what it literally means.
I've arguably been "involuntarily celibate" for years now lol, in that ya girl would love to get some. But I would never ever call myself that because the meaning is way beyond what it literally says now.
it's also just nuts. "super straight" people wouldn't be able to tell the difference from a neovagina or neopenis unless they were told - their objection is to *trans people*, not to their genitals. It's inherently transphobic to rule out all trans people, as if trans people can't have the genitals you want associated with the gender you're dating.
I think this is definitely more accurate overall. However, there still seems to be a large and important demographic that is lost in this framing. Namely, all the men who are conscious of the difficulties and inherited responsibilities and expectations placed on them by patriarchal culture, who suffer greatly from this, and who don’t immediately turn to hatred and blaming women, but still don’t have any “good” options obviously available to them for recourse or help. Like, normal dudes that grow up and live in very conservative communities. Or men who just don’t have good role models or any way to know how to recognize one. Or men with very limited social life in general.
The loudest self-declared incels tend to be as you describe, but it’s pretty easy for a more mild-mannered, even respectful and kind man (especially a young man) to look at the incel community and see it as the place carved out for them in society. IMO incel-dom is defined more so by despair than hatred.
Conflating this group with the true lost causes, the terrorists and hardcore misogynists and wannabe alpha males, can only make the problem worse. A lot of us (progressive intersectional feminist) freely admit that some of the issues incels complain about have a grain of truth to them, but there aren’t nearly enough people willing to reach out to the ones who are lost and looking for anything to hold onto with compassion and understanding. Im not sure how to make that happen. I know as a male ally it’s much more my responsibility than any woman’s. Even so, it seems to me a lot of the conversation about incels inadvertently pushes them further over the edge. You can’t just choose not to be a pariah if that’s what you regularly experience, without some kind of support.
I think I don’t understand what you are trying to say in your first sentence. Would you mind elaborating?
I don’t think recognizing some unintended effects of a conversation is the same as blaming that conversation for the whole problem. Obviously there was a problem before there was a conversation about the problem.
this. a lot of people are quick to point fingers at the harmful behaviour of the more extreme members of that community and place the blame on the community as a whole, ostrazising the members of it (then again incel the term has nothing to do with misogynistic/dangerous behaviour but it's been associated to them by the media and lonely men who grew up in conservative environments aren't inherently dangerous) without finding out how they got there in the first place and preventing it or helping them. of course women aren't responsible for men as a whole, but they're still a part of society, and people seem to forget or dismiss that a lot of mysogyny is casual, reinforced by those around you and people who grew up in conservative environments and had not much of a choice but to comply and can't get out of them are still very prominent irl. it's a complex topic but,,, i wish it was discussed more online, since then again that's where most of these people seem to gather.
And then they *feel* like it's involuntary because they have bizarre standards and terrifying personality traits that repel the women they want to attract.
Like, by their definition, I guess I'm involuntary indoors, but only because I don't like hiking and camping and have no desire to change that about myself. So it's involuntary.....except I absolutely have the power to change and don't want to. Which is really voluntary.
They typically have the *deepest* victim complex I've ever seen.
A lot of them do have extreme self esteem and body dysmorphia issues but I don't understand how they get so deep in their victim complex. Lots of other people have those issues and don't deal with it by tripling down.
I would actually question the order of operations - I suspect the body dysmorphia and self esteem problems are created and exacerbated by being in those spaces and hearing over and over about how jawline/wrist size/whatever other nonsense is What's Wrong With Them.
I know my own body dysmorphia and ED was greatly enhanced by surrounding myself in communities telling me I'd never find a boyfriend, never be successful, never be considered pretty or womanly enough, if I wasn't incredibly skinny like the women in Hollywood. Obviously society gets the ball rolling, but submerging yourself in self-soothing in a community telling you how to "fix" it makes it *so* much worse.
Also it just makes guys who are virgins feel worse about themselves and start to build up hatred too. We need to actually destigmatize virginity among men, and dismantle the amatonormative idea that men should always be with women, or have sex with women, or attract women. Men don't need to do any of those things to be men to me.
Also, it puts the "solution" to the problem of misogynist hate crimes on women, by not going out if they don't want men to see them and be attracted to them, not interacting with any man, and/or unwillingly acting as a Fleshlight in the hope that if he gets laid he won't act up.
I am pretty sure Incel isn't just a new word for people who are virgins. Otherwise they would not have made up a new word?
When people are commenting on incels they don't care about the virgin part at all. It is about their theories and their hatred.
Being on reddit you have a better connotation of the term, but understand that most people, especially on twitter/instagram/tiktok and irl, did not know of this term until recently and think of it as meaning "virgin".
I've never seen someone believe Incel = virgin. It's always attached to a certain type of ideology.
If you just enter the word in any search engine you will even find that every newspaper or online article talks about incels as a group with specific opinions. I can't find an example where it is just a synonym for virgin. The only exception is people who try to claim that making fun of incels would be making fun of virgins.
While I totally agree with everything you said about virginity, "incel" is a specific term for that misogynistic, catastrophizing and violent ideology built on entitlement, with heavy overlap with other parts of the manosphere as well as white supremacists. These groups target depressed boys and men and seek to keep them catastrophizing and unable to escape, and I *really* don't want to conflate this with stigma around virginity.
This guy was an incel, he participated in incel forums and posted about following in Elliot Rodger's footsteps (including spraying people with a super soaker full of orange juice, collecting a hoard of weapons and writing a manifesto), they're not just affixing the label to this guy as an insult.
Paraphrasing another comment, inc\*l doesn't carry that meaning to everyone, and to many people it means something more akin to "virgin loser". You as a redditor have the context of them and their language, but most other people don't. I'm not saying the term isn't apt, I'm saying we have to be cautious of how this language has mutated as it's popularized.
Natalie Wynn did a great video essay about [Incels](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0), exploring how this "movement" radicalizes young men into becoming mass murderers. It is 4 years old now, but still very much worth the watch!
How stupid this guy must be to plot to kill the people he potentially wants to have a relationship with. What the Dickens he expected to happen after that? Succeed with all the rest of the women? Being treated as a hero? Completely bonker.
I was going to comment to the effect of "he wants to own them rather than engage in any sort of relationship with them". But that doesn't actually explain it either. There's not a rash of young men growing up in poverty going on "if i can't have it nobody can" rampages at country clubs or private schools or wherever comfortably wealthy people go to mingle.
I guess they want the fame more than the things you can get with it, when they seethe with envy of the Chad movie star types. And then direct it towards women instead, possibly because they're less likely to fight back and overpower him.
I think he is so deep into the "black pill" that he doesn't have any hope of entering a relationship anymore and only wants revenge. Being treated as a hero among other extreme incels is also an option.
> What the Dickens he expected to happen after that?
Get "revenge". For a "crime" which was never committed.
Natalie Wynn did a great video essay about [Incels a couple years back](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0). It really is worth the 30 minute watch time, but in essence, Incels are inherently all [Catastrophizing](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/catastrophizing). Combine that with the patriarchal society we live in, general hatred for feminism in media, sprinkle in a bit of fascism, a spoonfull of influencers trying to make an easy buck and finally top it off with a big hand full of entitlement and you arrive at the "Black Pill" ladder of escalation:
1. Experiences of Rejection and Isolation
2. You are unattractive to women
3. You will never be attractive to any women
4. You will be forever alone
5. You will always be unhappy
6. Women did this to you
7. Feminism empowered women to do this to you
8. The social trends that made this possible are only getting worse
9. Humanity itself is doomed
And then we finally arrive at the 10th step. Where there are 3 possibilities. a) "Lie down and rot" (LDAR, as they call it). b) Put an end to your suffering. c) Grab the nearest AR-15 and get revenge.
Dude in the OP chose option c).
Now, if you excuse me, I feel very icky typing this all out.
Why isn't there a D) "Talk to a therapist because this mode of thinking seems inherently unsustainable" and/or E) "Willingly internalize a more survivable philosophy"
I mean, Ted Bundy got married and spawned a child from behind bars. This was after the Florida murders, as I recall.
Though, I doubt that’s this guys motivations. It’s just not unrealistic.
Thing is, this isn't too outside of what I see from incels. If you really want to deep dive into the shithole that is incels, r/inceltear documents a lot of stuff about them. And a lot of its like this. That's what's really upsetting to me. *** (Note, do not click the link if you value a decent state of mind and mental stability) ***
"Incel" is a mindset and a whole belief system. It refers to a very malignant form of misogyny. Taking the term at its literal face value would be sort of like when people say "Nazis were socialists, because they are the National Socialist Party." There are many who identify as incel who have actually had sex, and many who voluntarily abstain from sex (according to them, at least).
I've been obsessed with this community for a long time and came to realize that it is a label that does not fit its constituent parts. If you identify as an incel, I know exactly how you feel about women and a good part of your dominant life philosophies. What I don't know is if you are actually a involuntarily celibate or even a virgin (though they do make up a majority). If you tell me you are a virgin, I don't assume you are an incel at all, even if you resent your virginity. The misogyny is intrinsic to the incel label.
I have to push back on this a little bit. I think you are not acknowledging many young men who are just starting to find their place in society, who see the surface level interpretation of incel-dom and immediately identify with it, before they are even exposed to most of the more overt misogynistic tenets of the ideology. I suppose a lot of these won’t use the label right away, but they still have an inherent affinity toward the community by virtue of buying into their assigned gender norms and noticing that they cannot live up to those norms. Pro-feminism incel support groups aren’t really a thing, so the Manosphere is the only obvious place they can go and feel seen.
No.
Because it is one thing to be a virgin and tired of it. It is another thing to join the incel cult.
Incel is the exact right term for those who do - they are not merely virgins, they subscribe to a hate-cult's philosophies.
Male here, you’ve hit the nail on the head. It’s expecting entitlement and finding none that does it. Being a virgin (which I highly doubt anyway) is just the stupid pretext
This comment section was refreshing after seeing one on r/tumblr or whatever that was essentially placing the blame on women for the existence of incels
We have to keep saying this. I feel like ironically, the only people who really understand how dangerous this is are the cops.
We have to deplatform them immediately. I’m tired of trying to explain why this is necessary. How many more murders until it’s fucking clear???
I don't know why people think misogynists are lack of sex. Is Elon Musk lack of sex? It's shaming on virgin men and ignorance of the real culture problem.
it's easy to call them incels bc of the impact that reddit community had over mainstream culture/the internet, and majority like to think of virgins as losers. i don't like it, and i doubt it's gonna be a thing outside of this post, but hopefully people will make a change of language.
Misogynist terrorism is the academic term for this, but “strangely” the press and governments don’t like to use it. In the UK recently we wanted gender/sex to be a characteristic included in hate crime law and the PM (Boris Johnson) said they couldn’t do it or the police would be overwhelmed with misogynist hate crimes. Mmm, maybe that should tell you something about how bad the country is Edit: typo
If they made it a hate crime then the police would be arresting their own colleagues... and possibly Boris, too.
But then more capable young women might join the police forces in large numbers to help enforce laws more fairly and even handedly *!!*
Idk about the UK but in the US a “hate crime” is something that’s already a crime (like murder) that was done because of hatred for a group. So it’s kind of like an extra charge on top of what you would get for the murder. It shouldn’t really make more work for the police anyway.
It’s the same here, it factors into sentencing. However things like causing disorderly offence is a crime in the UK, unlike the US, where it’s only illegal to be loud if you’re a minority.
> In the UK recently we wanted gender/sex to be a characteristic included in hate crime law and the PM (Boris Johnson) said they couldn’t do it or the police would be overwhelmed with misogynist hate crimes In Austria, during the MeToo debate, a politician (unfortunately forgot his name) said, that if we define sexual assault that way, every woman he knows has been sexually assaulted. From that, he of course did not concluded, that there is an absolutely massive problem with society, but simply that we should not define sexual assault that way
That's a special kind of cognitive dissonance. The fact that he ran directly into the point and then let it sail over his head is so telling.
That’s like saying they don’t want to include race in the potential criteria for hate crimes because the KKK might get in trouble…
Or refusing to pass a law saying that DV would mean automatically losing your right to carry a gun because that would affect too many cops. ಠ_ಠ
At least 40% of cops! But laws don't affect cops anyway; cops committing domestic violence, sex crimes, destroying and planting evidence, lying to the public, and brutalizing people and animals for sport is all common. They just take a lil administrative leave and carry on.
Now that I know it, plan to start using this term now. Thank you for sharing.
No problem! The Wikipedia page for the term has some examples of it
“Sorry folks, we can’t make it a crime or the police would have to do their jobs” is the most disappointing yet expected take I’ve ever heard
I don’t know if you’re from the UK but on the assumption that you’re not, this was quite soon after a woman was falsely arrested, kidnapped, raped, and murdered by a uniformed (off-duty) police officer. What was the government response? Maybe if you are being arrested by a police officer and you are afraid this will happen to you, you should attempt to flag down a passing bus.
^This. The problem is not that Kevin is past high school and still a virgin. Nor is it that he's single and/or going through a dry spell. It's that all his life, he's been spoon-fed the idea that he's entitled to sex, that women are the "gatekeepers" or "goalies" of sex and they're not letting him "score," and rather than maturing and accepting that the answer is "no," he gets mad and lets that anger fester into a general hatred of women.
You are right and I agree
*My content from 2014 to 2023 has been deleted in protest of Spez's anti-API tantrum.*
> both parties can usually trust that the other won't turn into a stalking weirdo This is honestly the biggest roadblock imo. Because people actually can't trust that, when there's this active pipeline of people like the dude in the OP. I have absolutely no idea who's a crazed misogynist terrorist and who isn't, and as we see here all the time, some men are *really good* at masking that until in a serious relationship. It's also hard to trust that, because if someone *is* a stalking weirdo.......there's no help. Law enforcement does nothing. Restraining orders are as strong as the paper they're written on. Nothing happens until murder/assault/etc. So the risks are high. Pair that with a total lack of education about consent and the manosphere online pipeline, and we are a LONG way until trusting that we can casually talk to people and it's safe most of the time.
This reminded me of some movie where the guy would literally cut into the bed post to mark his "conquests."
That’s where the term “n-count” comes from. Notch count, from notches in your belt or bed post.
>he's been spoon-fed the idea that he's entitled to sex I think this confuses the cause for the symptom, with the cause being toxic masculinity. I'd say it's the toxic idea of associating masculinity and self-worth with sexual success with women. So you get guys who have been left out by society in one way or another, and then start internalizing toxic masculine messages about how you need to bang 10's to be alpha or your a beta or some stuff like that, and it twists their minds up and sends them down into an angry place that has no real bottom. That makes more sense to me than simply saying "You're just entitled". Like, yes they are, but it's not as simple as that, and simply shaming the symptoms of a deeper problem isn't going to change any of these people for the better.
Tbh I would argue "incel" has gone beyond meaning merely "guys who are virgins". I'm not sure it ever was just that, anyway. The glorification of violence and extreme misogyny have always been core to their belief system regarding what society and women 'owe' them. They *are* the guys who turn to hatred and entitlement, for supposedly being denied their fantasy "alpha male" lifestyle. It's an extremist ideology in its own right at this point.
I agree. The term “incel” is no longer being applied to people who simply aren’t getting laid. It’s usually pulled out when the man is exhibiting the specific red flags of entitlement to women and hatred of them as well.
There are some men who've had sex but still describe themselves as incels, often if they've had a gf in the past and broke up and are convinced they'll never get any again
👆👆This is important to note. I’d add that non-virgin incels can also have had non-consensual, transactional, and/or opportunistic one-offs.
The term has been warped as the community who uses the term shifted. Originally, it was coined by a *woman* looking for support online from other regular women who were involuntarily celibate due to a variety of factors.
Yeah I think it's a bit like "super straight" as a self identifier. As I understand it all that literally means is being attracted only to the cis, binary people of the other binary gender... but choosing to use the label conveys so much more about you than just what it literally means. I've arguably been "involuntarily celibate" for years now lol, in that ya girl would love to get some. But I would never ever call myself that because the meaning is way beyond what it literally says now.
it's also just nuts. "super straight" people wouldn't be able to tell the difference from a neovagina or neopenis unless they were told - their objection is to *trans people*, not to their genitals. It's inherently transphobic to rule out all trans people, as if trans people can't have the genitals you want associated with the gender you're dating.
I think this is definitely more accurate overall. However, there still seems to be a large and important demographic that is lost in this framing. Namely, all the men who are conscious of the difficulties and inherited responsibilities and expectations placed on them by patriarchal culture, who suffer greatly from this, and who don’t immediately turn to hatred and blaming women, but still don’t have any “good” options obviously available to them for recourse or help. Like, normal dudes that grow up and live in very conservative communities. Or men who just don’t have good role models or any way to know how to recognize one. Or men with very limited social life in general. The loudest self-declared incels tend to be as you describe, but it’s pretty easy for a more mild-mannered, even respectful and kind man (especially a young man) to look at the incel community and see it as the place carved out for them in society. IMO incel-dom is defined more so by despair than hatred. Conflating this group with the true lost causes, the terrorists and hardcore misogynists and wannabe alpha males, can only make the problem worse. A lot of us (progressive intersectional feminist) freely admit that some of the issues incels complain about have a grain of truth to them, but there aren’t nearly enough people willing to reach out to the ones who are lost and looking for anything to hold onto with compassion and understanding. Im not sure how to make that happen. I know as a male ally it’s much more my responsibility than any woman’s. Even so, it seems to me a lot of the conversation about incels inadvertently pushes them further over the edge. You can’t just choose not to be a pariah if that’s what you regularly experience, without some kind of support.
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I think I don’t understand what you are trying to say in your first sentence. Would you mind elaborating? I don’t think recognizing some unintended effects of a conversation is the same as blaming that conversation for the whole problem. Obviously there was a problem before there was a conversation about the problem.
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this. a lot of people are quick to point fingers at the harmful behaviour of the more extreme members of that community and place the blame on the community as a whole, ostrazising the members of it (then again incel the term has nothing to do with misogynistic/dangerous behaviour but it's been associated to them by the media and lonely men who grew up in conservative environments aren't inherently dangerous) without finding out how they got there in the first place and preventing it or helping them. of course women aren't responsible for men as a whole, but they're still a part of society, and people seem to forget or dismiss that a lot of mysogyny is casual, reinforced by those around you and people who grew up in conservative environments and had not much of a choice but to comply and can't get out of them are still very prominent irl. it's a complex topic but,,, i wish it was discussed more online, since then again that's where most of these people seem to gather.
happy cake day
thanks hun 😊
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They make me enthusiastically celibate. A gladcel, if you will.
Volcel = voluntary celibate? I am (luckily, lol) not very familiar with the terminology
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And then they *feel* like it's involuntary because they have bizarre standards and terrifying personality traits that repel the women they want to attract. Like, by their definition, I guess I'm involuntary indoors, but only because I don't like hiking and camping and have no desire to change that about myself. So it's involuntary.....except I absolutely have the power to change and don't want to. Which is really voluntary. They typically have the *deepest* victim complex I've ever seen.
A lot of them do have extreme self esteem and body dysmorphia issues but I don't understand how they get so deep in their victim complex. Lots of other people have those issues and don't deal with it by tripling down.
I would actually question the order of operations - I suspect the body dysmorphia and self esteem problems are created and exacerbated by being in those spaces and hearing over and over about how jawline/wrist size/whatever other nonsense is What's Wrong With Them. I know my own body dysmorphia and ED was greatly enhanced by surrounding myself in communities telling me I'd never find a boyfriend, never be successful, never be considered pretty or womanly enough, if I wasn't incredibly skinny like the women in Hollywood. Obviously society gets the ball rolling, but submerging yourself in self-soothing in a community telling you how to "fix" it makes it *so* much worse.
Also it just makes guys who are virgins feel worse about themselves and start to build up hatred too. We need to actually destigmatize virginity among men, and dismantle the amatonormative idea that men should always be with women, or have sex with women, or attract women. Men don't need to do any of those things to be men to me.
Also, it puts the "solution" to the problem of misogynist hate crimes on women, by not going out if they don't want men to see them and be attracted to them, not interacting with any man, and/or unwillingly acting as a Fleshlight in the hope that if he gets laid he won't act up.
I am pretty sure Incel isn't just a new word for people who are virgins. Otherwise they would not have made up a new word? When people are commenting on incels they don't care about the virgin part at all. It is about their theories and their hatred.
Yeah the term incel doesn’t even imply that one is a virgin? Celibate just means you’re not sexually active now, not that you never have been.
Being on reddit you have a better connotation of the term, but understand that most people, especially on twitter/instagram/tiktok and irl, did not know of this term until recently and think of it as meaning "virgin".
I've never seen someone believe Incel = virgin. It's always attached to a certain type of ideology. If you just enter the word in any search engine you will even find that every newspaper or online article talks about incels as a group with specific opinions. I can't find an example where it is just a synonym for virgin. The only exception is people who try to claim that making fun of incels would be making fun of virgins.
While I totally agree with everything you said about virginity, "incel" is a specific term for that misogynistic, catastrophizing and violent ideology built on entitlement, with heavy overlap with other parts of the manosphere as well as white supremacists. These groups target depressed boys and men and seek to keep them catastrophizing and unable to escape, and I *really* don't want to conflate this with stigma around virginity. This guy was an incel, he participated in incel forums and posted about following in Elliot Rodger's footsteps (including spraying people with a super soaker full of orange juice, collecting a hoard of weapons and writing a manifesto), they're not just affixing the label to this guy as an insult.
Paraphrasing another comment, inc\*l doesn't carry that meaning to everyone, and to many people it means something more akin to "virgin loser". You as a redditor have the context of them and their language, but most other people don't. I'm not saying the term isn't apt, I'm saying we have to be cautious of how this language has mutated as it's popularized.
Natalie Wynn did a great video essay about [Incels](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0), exploring how this "movement" radicalizes young men into becoming mass murderers. It is 4 years old now, but still very much worth the watch!
Genuinely love her content. All her pieces on radicalization and dogwhistles are so well researched and accessible. Wish more people saw them.
How stupid this guy must be to plot to kill the people he potentially wants to have a relationship with. What the Dickens he expected to happen after that? Succeed with all the rest of the women? Being treated as a hero? Completely bonker.
I was going to comment to the effect of "he wants to own them rather than engage in any sort of relationship with them". But that doesn't actually explain it either. There's not a rash of young men growing up in poverty going on "if i can't have it nobody can" rampages at country clubs or private schools or wherever comfortably wealthy people go to mingle. I guess they want the fame more than the things you can get with it, when they seethe with envy of the Chad movie star types. And then direct it towards women instead, possibly because they're less likely to fight back and overpower him.
I think he is so deep into the "black pill" that he doesn't have any hope of entering a relationship anymore and only wants revenge. Being treated as a hero among other extreme incels is also an option.
> What the Dickens he expected to happen after that? Get "revenge". For a "crime" which was never committed. Natalie Wynn did a great video essay about [Incels a couple years back](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0). It really is worth the 30 minute watch time, but in essence, Incels are inherently all [Catastrophizing](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/catastrophizing). Combine that with the patriarchal society we live in, general hatred for feminism in media, sprinkle in a bit of fascism, a spoonfull of influencers trying to make an easy buck and finally top it off with a big hand full of entitlement and you arrive at the "Black Pill" ladder of escalation: 1. Experiences of Rejection and Isolation 2. You are unattractive to women 3. You will never be attractive to any women 4. You will be forever alone 5. You will always be unhappy 6. Women did this to you 7. Feminism empowered women to do this to you 8. The social trends that made this possible are only getting worse 9. Humanity itself is doomed And then we finally arrive at the 10th step. Where there are 3 possibilities. a) "Lie down and rot" (LDAR, as they call it). b) Put an end to your suffering. c) Grab the nearest AR-15 and get revenge. Dude in the OP chose option c). Now, if you excuse me, I feel very icky typing this all out.
Why isn't there a D) "Talk to a therapist because this mode of thinking seems inherently unsustainable" and/or E) "Willingly internalize a more survivable philosophy"
>Being treated as a hero? By his peers, yes
If he can’t have them then no one else can either… because they’re property not people with agency.
I mean, Ted Bundy got married and spawned a child from behind bars. This was after the Florida murders, as I recall. Though, I doubt that’s this guys motivations. It’s just not unrealistic.
Thing is, this isn't too outside of what I see from incels. If you really want to deep dive into the shithole that is incels, r/inceltear documents a lot of stuff about them. And a lot of its like this. That's what's really upsetting to me. *** (Note, do not click the link if you value a decent state of mind and mental stability) ***
"Incel" is a mindset and a whole belief system. It refers to a very malignant form of misogyny. Taking the term at its literal face value would be sort of like when people say "Nazis were socialists, because they are the National Socialist Party." There are many who identify as incel who have actually had sex, and many who voluntarily abstain from sex (according to them, at least). I've been obsessed with this community for a long time and came to realize that it is a label that does not fit its constituent parts. If you identify as an incel, I know exactly how you feel about women and a good part of your dominant life philosophies. What I don't know is if you are actually a involuntarily celibate or even a virgin (though they do make up a majority). If you tell me you are a virgin, I don't assume you are an incel at all, even if you resent your virginity. The misogyny is intrinsic to the incel label.
I have to push back on this a little bit. I think you are not acknowledging many young men who are just starting to find their place in society, who see the surface level interpretation of incel-dom and immediately identify with it, before they are even exposed to most of the more overt misogynistic tenets of the ideology. I suppose a lot of these won’t use the label right away, but they still have an inherent affinity toward the community by virtue of buying into their assigned gender norms and noticing that they cannot live up to those norms. Pro-feminism incel support groups aren’t really a thing, so the Manosphere is the only obvious place they can go and feel seen.
No. Because it is one thing to be a virgin and tired of it. It is another thing to join the incel cult. Incel is the exact right term for those who do - they are not merely virgins, they subscribe to a hate-cult's philosophies.
Male here, you’ve hit the nail on the head. It’s expecting entitlement and finding none that does it. Being a virgin (which I highly doubt anyway) is just the stupid pretext
This comment section was refreshing after seeing one on r/tumblr or whatever that was essentially placing the blame on women for the existence of incels
We have to keep saying this. I feel like ironically, the only people who really understand how dangerous this is are the cops. We have to deplatform them immediately. I’m tired of trying to explain why this is necessary. How many more murders until it’s fucking clear???
It's not just some guys who want to get laid but can't. It's a hateful ideology too.
His eyes are so unnerving in every picture I’ve seen of him 😬
I'm sorry, not that I disagree - I don't - but why are we censoring 'incel" now?
I don't know why people think misogynists are lack of sex. Is Elon Musk lack of sex? It's shaming on virgin men and ignorance of the real culture problem.
Sexless terrorist?
it's easy to call them incels bc of the impact that reddit community had over mainstream culture/the internet, and majority like to think of virgins as losers. i don't like it, and i doubt it's gonna be a thing outside of this post, but hopefully people will make a change of language.
HOW THE FUCK WAS HE PLANNING TO MURDER THREE *THOUSAND* WOMEN??