NYTimes | Alek Minassian, who plowed a rental van through a busy Toronto sidewalk on Monday, left little doubt as to why he killed 10 people, most of them women. Minutes before his attack, he posted a message on Facebook lauding the mass murderer Elliot O. Rodger
and warned of an “incel rebellion” — a reference to an online community
of “involuntarily celibate” men who believe women unjustly deny them
sex.
Mr. Rodger, who killed six people
in Isla Vista, Calif., in 2014, recorded YouTube videos raging against
“spoiled, stuck-up” women he called “sluts” who sexually rejected him.
And before Mr. Rodger, there was George Sodini, who killed three women
in a Pennsylvania gym in 2009. He left behind an online diary complaining that women ignored him and that he hadn’t had sex in years.
Despite
a great deal of evidence that connects the dots between these mass
killers and radical misogynist groups, we still largely refer to the
attackers as “lone wolves” — a mistake that ignores the preventable way
these men’s fear and anger are deliberately cultivated and fed online.
Here’s
the term we should all use instead: misogynist terrorism. Until we
grapple with the disdain for women that drives these mass murderers, and
the way that the killers are increasingly radicalized on the internet,
there will be no stopping future tragedies.
Over
the past decade, anti-women communities on the internet — ranging from
“men’s rights” forums and incels to “pickup artists” — have grown
exponentially. While these movements differ in small ways, what they
have in common is an organized hatred of women; the animus is so
pronounced that the hate-watch group Southern Poverty Law Center tracks their actions.
The
other dangerous idea that connects these men is their shared belief
that women — good-looking women, in particular — owe them sexual
attention. The incel community that Mr. Minassian paid homage to, for
example, was banned from Reddit last year because, among other issues, some adherents advocated rape as a means to end their celibacy.
