My phone received a notification from the BBC. It was a breaking news. I pressed on the notification and it led me straight to the app. There was a van attack in Toronto, Canada. Later that night, scrolling through my Facebook feed, I learned the word, ‘Incel‘.
INCEL or Involuntary Celibates are members on the internet consisting of heterosexual men (mostly white) who blame women for the lack of sex and romance in their life. They believe that they are entitled to having young, pretty women give them sex; and display hatred toward women and sexually active men. They are usually found on forums like 4chan, Reddit, SLUTHATE, etc. where they are busy making misogynistic, racist and violence-endorsing comments towards women and other non-incel men who they address as ‘normies’.
Despite being a very misogynistic group, the word ‘INCEL’ was in fact coined by a Canadian college student known only as Alana in 1993. She created a website where everyone could share their thoughts about her involuntary sexual activity. Later in her life, she gave away her site to a stranger. Soon after, Reddit became a hotspot for an active online INCEL community where INCELs claimed women could not be INCELs because they have access to sex. When Reddit banned threads that were deemed to promote hate speech to minorities, the community moved to other platforms that were more lenient to their views and thoughts. The community currently has their own lingo, called women dehumanizing words such as ‘femoids’ or ‘stacys’ and calling non-incel men as ‘Chads’. Note: they are mainly referring to white women and white men.
INCELs first came to media spotlight after the 2014 Isla Vista Killing, where 22 year old Elliot Rodger left seven dead and fourteen injured. He had been an active member on the PUAHate forum. Before the incident, Rodger uploaded numerous videos on YouTube where he lamented about being a rich, good-looking guy, yet no girls would date him. In his manifesto, Rodgers wrote, “How dare those girls give their love and sex to those other men and not me, I constantly think when I see young couples. There is nowhere in the world I can go anymore. There is no more life to live. The Day of Retribution is all I have. It is the final solution to all of the injustices of this twisted world. By doing this, I will set right all of the wrongs I’ve had to face in my sorry excuse of a life.”
Although what Rodger did horrified the people, he became a sort of a martyr for the INCEL community. And this is what exactly inspired the Toronto van attack by Alex Minassian on April, 2018. Before his attack, Alex Minassian posted on Facebook praising Elliot Rodger. Minassian killed 10 people and injured 13 others.
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Between these two attacks, there have been other attacks where the perpetrators have had connections to the Incel community.
Despite the huge media coverage of such attacks, the word ‘INCEL’ is almost never mentioned by the mainstream media. The motivation of these attacks have been often associated with mental illnesses. For me, I think there should be more awareness of this word because at the end of the day, despite the existence of toxic-masculinity or Inceldom, women have rights over their bodies.
Sources:
I Read The Elliot Rodger “Manifesto” So You Don’t Have To