NewYorker | Several distinct
cultural changes have created a situation in which many men who hate
women do not have the access to women’s bodies that they would have had
in an earlier era. The sexual revolution urged women to seek liberation.
The self-esteem movement taught women that they were valuable beyond
what convention might dictate. The rise of mainstream feminism gave
women certainty and company in these convictions. And the
Internet-enabled efficiency of today’s sexual marketplace allowed people
to find potential sexual partners with a minimum of barriers and
restraints. Most American women now grow up understanding that they can
and should choose who they want to have sex with.
In the past few
years, a subset of straight men calling themselves “incels” have
constructed a violent political ideology around the injustice of young,
beautiful women refusing to have sex with them. These men often subscribe to notions of white supremacy.
They are, by their own judgment, mostly unattractive and socially
inept. (They frequently call themselves “subhuman.”) They’re also
diabolically misogynistic. “Society has become a place for worship of
females and it’s so fucking wrong, they’re not Gods they are just a
fucking cum-dumpster,” a typical rant on an incel message board reads.
The idea that this misogyny is the real root of their failures with
women does not appear to have occurred to them.
The incel ideology
has already inspired the murders of at least sixteen people. Elliot
Rodger, in 2014, in Isla Vista, California, killed six and injured
fourteen in an attempt to instigate a “War on Women” for “depriving me
of sex.” (He then killed himself.) Alek Minassian killed ten people and
injured sixteen, in Toronto, last month; prior to doing so, he wrote, on
Facebook, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” You might also
include Christopher Harper-Mercer, who killed nine people, in 2015, and
left behind a manifesto that praised Rodger and lamented his own
virginity.
The label that Minassian and others have adopted has entered the mainstream, and it is now being widely misinterpreted. Incel stands for “involuntarily celibate,” but there are many people who would like to have sex and do not. (The term was coined
by a queer Canadian woman, in the nineties.) Incels aren’t really
looking for sex; they’re looking for absolute male supremacy. Sex,
defined to them as dominion over female bodies, is just their preferred
sort of proof.
If what incels wanted was sex, they might, for
instance, value sex workers and wish to legalize sex work. But incels,
being violent misogynists, often express extreme disgust at the idea of
“whores.” Incels tend to direct hatred at things they think they desire;
they are obsessed with female beauty but despise makeup as a form of
fraud. Incel culture advises men to “looksmaxx” or “statusmaxx”—to
improve their appearance, to make more money—in a way that presumes that
women are not potential partners or worthy objects of possible
affection but inconveniently sentient bodies that must be claimed
through cold strategy. (They assume that men who treat women more
respectfully are “white-knighting,” putting on a mockable façade of
chivalry.) When these tactics fail, as they are bound to do, the rage
intensifies. Incels dream of beheading the sluts who wear short shorts
but don’t want to be groped by strangers; they draw up elaborate
scenarios in which women are auctioned off at age eighteen to the
highest bidder; they call Elliot Rodger their Lord and Savior and
feminists the female K.K.K. “Women are the ultimate cause of our
suffering,” one poster on incels.me wrote recently. “They are the ones
who have UNJUSTLY made our lives a living hell… We need to focus more on
our hatred of women. Hatred is power.”
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