In the past year or so the word ‘Incel’ has become a ubiquitous online insult. Short for Involuntary Celibate, it was popularised by men who appropriated the label for themselves. The Incel community is overwhelmingly male (and growing) and to be an Incel (technically at least) is to have not had sex for six months or more.
As so the word has gradually crept into the vocabulary of every internet troll — partly I suspect because we still judge people by how much sex they have, or not in this case. We still view men who don’t have sex as failures in some way.
Incels are therefore an easy target. For men, calling someone an Incel implies something positive — a certain sexual abundance — about one’s own existence. For women it has begun to function as a putdown that ruthlessly dismisses unworthy suitors while simultaneously expelling them from the community of the good as misogynistic and creepy.
In the past decade there has been a three-fold increase in the number of men who have not had sex in the past year. In 2018 the Southern Poverty Law Centre added Incels to their ‘Hate Map’, describing them as “part of the online male supremacist eco-system”. Countless articles have appeared in the media equating inceldom with “toxic masculinity”, misogyny and violence. Most begin from the assumption that Incel ideology, so far as it exists, is a product of men’s domination over women. It is a backlash against feminism; the whingeing of men who have been taught by the tyrannical patriarchy to believe they are entitled to ownership of women’s bodies.
There is invariably some truth to this. The rise of the online ‘Manosphere’ is a reassertion by men of traditional gender roles from which they benefitted immensely. The most notorious Incels, who have gone on murderous rampages, have indeed been narcissistic and entitled men. Elliot Rodger was a 22-year-old Incel who murdered seven people in Isla Vista, California, in 2014. Rodger epitomised entitled masculinity. Shortly before Rodger carried about the massacre, Dale Launer, a friend of Rodger’s father, gave the boy some not terrible advice for building relationships with women on his college campus. Rodger’s response is revealing. As Launer recounted to the BBC:
“As I told him, ‘When you see a woman next time you’re on campus and you like her hair or sunglasses, just pay her a compliment.’ I told him, ‘It’s a freebie, something in passing, you’re not trying to make conversation. Keep walking, don’t make any long eye contact, just give the free compliment.’ The idea being you might make a friend if you make someone feel good.
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