Just before he drove a van through a crowd of people in Toronto, killing 10 people and injuring at least 15, Alek Minassian posted on Facebook:
“Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”
Facebook has confirmed that this post is genuine and came from Minassian’s real account – meaning he’s the second high-profile mass killer this decade, after Rodger, whose motivations were expressed in the language of subreddits (now mostly banned from Reddit) and message boards like Incel.me, which are dedicated above all else to a warped, misogynist worldview where women are seen as less than human.
Minassian is a male supremacist terrorist, and there are very likely many more potential terrorists in those online communities.
As it is, they’re celebrating his actions this week:
“I have one celebratory beer for every victim that turns out to be a young woman between 18-35.”
“The murder of our enemies will of course be praised. It’s rational.”
“[T]his is what happens when you leave us without any love or companionship.”
“Incel” is short for “involuntary celibate”. Men who identify as incel believe that women they want to have sex with (the “Stacys”) refuse to have sex with them because of their looks or personalities, and also because more genetically blessed and therefore desirable alpha males (these are “Chads”).
How they think women see any dude over six feet tall, regardless of personality.
They refer to women as “femoids” or “foids” – female humanoids, rather than humans. They believe sex is a human right they have been deliberately denied access to, and harbour astonishing levels of hatred for all women and the “normie” men we choose over them as a result.
Their ideology – because that’s what it is – grew out of the pick-up artist movement. You know, the guys who introduced us to the idea of negging.
This is what we mean when we talk about how kinds of misogyny that seem relatively minor can actually be harmful in the long run.
If you include yesterday in Toronto, the three worst mass murders committed in Canada in the last 30 years were committed by men whose motivation was revenge against a specific woman or women in general. 1/
— Amy Stuart (@AmyfStuart) April 24, 2018
Male supremacy – which is now listed as a hateful and extremist ideology by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and is considered to be a “gateway” ideology to introduce people to the alt-right and neo-fascism – is not new. It’s a digital-era rebranding of the worst aspects of the misogyny that drove the oppression of women throughout history.
But the current language and ideology of male supremacy can be fairly clearly traced back through its online communities to a worldview that rated women out of ten according to their looks, treats human interaction as a literal Game with access to women’s bodies as the prize, and openly advocates manipulating women psychologically.
Every time I read about violent, self righteous incels I get furious, because *plenty of women spend their lives feeling unfuckable*, but instead of being taught that the world owes them sex they're taught to think they're just worthless people.
— Lux ? Alptraum (@LuxAlptraum) April 25, 2018
It might seem almost funny to think about these boards being populated by socially awkward dudes whose lives are filtered through high school movie cliches, sitting around whining to other angry dudes about how women won’t f**k them for some reason that’s totally out of their control and going on hunger strikes until the government gives them a girlfriend.
It’s actually horrifying.
Think of how many men there are in the world who are deeply unhappy, socially awkward and/or not conventionally attractive, and enormously bitter and angry either by nature or after a lifetime of disappointment, rejection and perceived injustices.
Think of how many men quietly or loudly resent feminism for taking away something that benefited them: an entire society of women with little to no social or political power and a very narrow set of standards for grooming and behaviour. Think of how easily a young man who thinks feminism has “gone too far” could become a man who thinks feminism has upset the natural order of things; how easily a man who is sexually frustrated, who has been rejected outright or indirectly by multiple individual women, could go from wondering what he’s doing wrong to deciding it’s the women who are wrong.
Now imagine he finds an online community that seems to understand what he’s going through, a worldview that explains how it’s all a huge social conspiracy and not his fault at all, and an ongoing conversation about how maybe there’s something they can do about it after all. How maybe if they were feared instead of mocked – if they could rob the Chads and the Stacys of their attractive faces with acid attacks, if they could commit mass shootings and rapes to demonstrate their numbers and their power – they would be respected.
That’s how someone gets radicalised.
The path to radicalization for incels often starts with the Red Pill/Pick-Up Artist communities. They try to utilize the pseudo-scientific/dehumanizing seduction techniques, still can't get laid & become infuriated. That's the path Elliot Rodger went down.
— Arshy Mann (@ArshyMann) April 24, 2018
Elliot Rodger openly said that he wanted to “punish” women collectively for the fact that he was still a virgin at 22 (which is incredibly common and not anything to be ashamed of, for the record):
“I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it . . . I’m the perfect guy and yet you throw yourselves at these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman.”
Incel boards refer to “going ER” – Rodger’s initials. They call him a martyr and a saint, and some might be doing it as a joke. But Minassian cited him specifically as an inspiration before getting behind the wheel of that van.
Now they have another hero.