The Ultimate Incel Shakedown

Let’s talk Blackpill, femoids and all things manosphere

Photo by Diane Picchiottino on Unsplash

When I write about icky things like feminism and dudes being accountable for their actions, I inevitably invite an array of entertaining commentary from angwy men who don’t feel great about being called out for their shit. They get BIG MAD about the wild notion that they should make an effort for the things they want in life just like the rest of us pleebs — namely sex and relationships — and argue that if women just stopped all this liberation and #bossbabe stuff, we wouldn’t have to deal with the constant onslaught of their weaponized self-loathing. If we just wanted to fuck them, they wouldn’t be forced touch themselves on the train in front us or shoot up our yoga studios. Instead, they’ve embraced that #incellife.

MEN STRONG, WEAR HARD HAT

A particularly common retort I hear from incels — self-described involuntarily celibate men who openly hate women for denying them their god given right to pussy — is that men are basically responsible for building the entire world and without them, societal infrastructure would surely crumble. On a planet devoid of men who can lift heavy things and put them down, women would simply wither away under the weight of so many doors they are physically incapable of opening.

This is, of course, hilarious in its absurdity for many reasons, but the foremost is that it’s yet another awe inspiring example of how easily men can run straight into the point and miss it completely. Here, incels essentially acknowledge that women have been purposefully and systematically kept from certain sectors of the workforce — think construction, transportation or public safety. But instead of interrogating the “why” of that further, they flip the script to bolster their own narrative, while the reality is that there has been and continues to be legislation (or lack thereof) that restricts women’s entrance into certain fields.

Examples of this might include the absence of paid maternity leave or a lack sexual harassment laws. Or it may be legislation that doesn’t allow women to drive, operate heavy machinery, work late hours or register their own companies and so on. (These are all real laws in various countries across the world, I might add.) And this is on top of the fact that much of Western society is governed by unwritten gender role expectations that deem men and women better suited for specific jobs and tasks based on social constructions of femininity and masculinity that have no basis in biology .

Did I mention that if men simply vanished tomorrow, homicide rates among women would plummet? Given a second chance at life, surely we could fill the tiny shoes you’d all leave behind.

MEN GODS, BUILT WORLD WITH BARE HANDS

Some incels may also make the argument that women should be showing gratitude toward men because they created the very world we live in. It is worth noting that, in this case, said gratitude generally translates to sitting down, shutting up and putting out. I find this perspective especially eye-roll inducing since this brand of incel also clearly enjoys a white supremacist fantasy. Though not necessarily a prerequisite, racism and incel culture often stroll hand-in-hand, and these white dudes seem to have forgotten that the U.S., in particular, was built on slave labor.

Since emancipation, white men have gone on to downplay or outright steal the contributions of people of color and women for centuries. Ask yourself — why is it that so many of us hadn’t heard of black women’s contributions to the space race until we saw Hidden Figures in 2016? Bet you might still have no idea who The ENIAC Programmers (six women inventors of the first electronic computer) are either. And then there’s women like Dr. Grace Murray Hopper (Computer Programming Language), Rosalind Franklin (DNA Double Helix), Esther Lederberg (Microbial Genetics) and Vera Rubin (Dark Matter) just to name a few more for good measure. But here’s the real icing on the cake: Did you know that the incel community was actually created by a woman!?

It is pure playwright-level irony that in 1997, a progressive queer woman started a group called Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project, which was “meant to be one of the earliest online havens for people who wanted to have romantic relationships but couldn’t.” Alana started the group because she found dating tough as a bisexual woman in the 90s. But modern day incels took this welcoming, affirming place where people felt safe to ask one another for advice and turned it into a community of men who not only bond over their shared hatred of women, but celebrate and encourage acts of violence and rape.

Men really know how to ruin a good thing, I’ll give them that.

MEN WATCH MATRIX ONE TIME, BRAINS GO BOOM

This leads us to the now increasingly prolific incel “Blackpill” ideology, the foundation of which argues that women shouldn’t have any rights — particularly to choose their own sexual partners — because they are fundamentally shallow and evil creatures. If left to their own devices, women will continue to only choose the most attractive men and leave the rest of the uggos to suffer from a perpetual state of blue balls. I guess not one of these dudes has heard about the existence of Pete Davidson.

This incel dogma was adopted from the 1999 movie The Matrix, where Keanu Reeves’ character is given a choice to take a Red Pill that will awaken him to the reality of his existence — the matrix itself. But for incels, the Blackpill mentality is about both acknowledging and subsequently rejecting the supposed Red Pill reality of women’s increasing societal domination. Blackpilled incels often try to prove women’s cruel propensity toward valuing physical attractiveness over all else by misreading or skewing data and conducting their own “experiments” that are more than a little lacking in the rigorous peer review department. They also often refer to women as “femoids” or “foids” as a way to signify that they are sub-human — think a shortened form of “female humanoid organism” or “female android”. Ultimately, these dinguses believe that the “woman problem” is a societal ill that can only be solved by LDAR (stands for laying down and rotting, and sounds great to me) or the less preferable option of mass violence. Hence, we’ve seen tragedies the likes of:

• The 2014 UC Santa Barbara campus shooting that killed 6 and injured fourteen. The murderer left behind a 137-page manifesto detail his incel status and discussing how he wanted revenge for being rejected by women. He has since been celebrated and idolized as a martyr on incel forums.
• The 2015 Umpqua Community College shooting in Oregon that killed 9 and injured 8 others. The shooter left a manifesto mentioning his interest in the 2014 California murders and his anger at not having a girlfriend.
• The 2016 murder of a man in an alleyway in Alberta, Canada. The killer said he was frustrated with being an incel for four years and took it out on his unsuspecting victim.
• The 2017 killing of 2 at Aztec High School in New Mexico. The shooter praised “the supreme gentleman” who committed the UC Santa Barbara murders and was active on several incel and far right forums.
• The 2018 mass murder of 17 (and injury of another 17) ot Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Though allegedly driven by an array of extremist views, the shooter previously posted online that the UC Santa Barbara murderer would not be forgotten.
• The 2018 vehicle-ramming attack in Toronto, Ontario that resulted in 10 deaths and 16 injuries. The perpetrator posted “the Incel Rebellion has already begun” and praised the UC Santa Barbara killer before making his own attack. He later told police that n the video, Minassian is shown telling police that he was a virgin, and that he was motivated by a resentment of “Chads and Stacys”, as well as women who gave “their love and affection to obnoxious brutes” rather than to him.
• The 2018 killing of 2 women and injuring of 4 in a Tallahassee, Florida yoga studio. The murderer had been an ardent follower of incel ideologies had a history of sexual harassment. In numerous YouTube videos, he praised the UC Santa Barbara killer and expressed hatred for women because he could not get a girlfriend.
• In 2019, two separate plans to commit murder motivated by incel ideology were thwarted by authorities.
• The 2019 fatal stabbing of a woman spa worker (and severe injuring of another) at a massage parlor in Toronto, Canada. Evidence pointed to the stabbings being motivated by incel ideology, the perpetrator of which was just 17 years old.
• The 2020 shooting of three (all injured, but thankfully not killed) in Glendale, Arizona. As self-professed incel, the shooter targeted couples and planned to kill at least ten people. It was also alleged that the shooter sent a video of the attack to a woman he wished to impress.
• Between January and the end of July 2020, five self-identified incels were arrested in separate incidents in North America for killing or planning to kill women.
• In April 2021, a 19-year-old self-described incel was arrested in Manhattan after approaching women and telling them he was going to detonate a bomb.
• In July 2021, a 21-year-old self-identified incel from Ohio was charged with attempting a hate crime and illegally possessing a machine gun. The man was a frequent poster on a popular incel website in which he expressed his desire to “slaughter” women and his goals to kill 3,000 people in a mass attack.
• The 2022 killing of five in Plymouth, England. The shooter posted videos online actively used incel forums on Reddit.

(Source: Thanks, Wikipedia.)

Are you as exhausted and disgusted at reading this lengthy list as I was by compiling it? I can’t eloquently describe the feelings this exercise stirred inside me, but my chest still aches.

MEN STILL BIG MAD, DO LOUD YELLS

As for the incel solution to their sex life woes that doesn’t involve mass murder, well it’s also pretty disturbing, though entirely predictable. With every progressive shift, new societal hierarchies cause confusion and anger for previously privileged folks, and their reaction is often a backlash that calls for a return to some bygone era where they were entitled to things they didn’t earn. Blackpill is the embodiment of the incel backlash — they think if we could just go back to the 1950s where women weren’t allowed to open their own bank accounts and were beat over head with messaging about chastity and virtue, all men would get the respect and sex that they were born to receive as proud owners of flesh flutes. In fact, some incels actually believe — as in this is not a joke in an Onion article — that women who deny them sex are committing an imaginary crime they call “reverse rape.” Something tells me these are the same guys who also think they’re victims of reverse racism when they’re told white people can’t dance.

What’s important to note is that this backlash has crept into society in more subtle ways that, while in contrast to acts of mass violence, would be dangerous to eschew. Every day, men feel justified in denigrating women through sexual harrassment, misogynistic comments and threats, discriminatory and predatory behavior in the workplace and generally making certain corners of TikTok absolutely unbearable. (Can’t a gal doom scroll in peace?!) Entitled misogyny is nothing new for cultures around the world, but the addition of virtual spaces has worked to further proliferate and ingrain these insidious ideologies. The internet holds up a mirror to man’s worst impulses and then makes photocopies. The “manosphere” has since emerged.

The danger of the manosphere — the collection of websites and online forums that celebrate all things misogyny, from so-called pick up artists to men’s rights activists and truecels — is that it builds upon the false sense of male entitlement and female obligation to the point of radicalization. Aside from violence, such radicalization can have a very real impact on policy-making and governance. As Kate Manne, author of Down Girl, smartly points out, incels are as much of a political threat as they are a physical one. We’ve already seen the Blackpill ideology take root in popular alt-right platforms, steering lawmakers toward restrictions on women’s sexual and bodily autonomy and obscuring the seriousness of issues like violence against women and the gender pay gap.

MEN MANLY MEN, SOMETIMES

For incels and their compatriots, it’s clear that women having equal rights threatens their stature and security as men in a society that has historically put them first. Without this leg up, they’re left to ponder what value they bring to the world. And for many, the answer is not much. Underprepared to operate with the level of emotional intelligence and empathy that women want and deserve in a partner, they’ve opted for an arguably emasculating alternative. Cling to their failure. Wear it as a badge of honor, and use it to excuse their behavior. Sure, they’ll still take the privileges where they can get them — like more opportunities for professional advancement or reasonably sized pants pockets — but as for the rest, well they’re happy to continue to strategically use their shortcomings in order to rage with near impunity, absolve themselves of guilt and above all, resist change.

For a bunch of dudes who claim to be well-versed in all things The Matrix, I guess they didn’t make it past the first movie to hear The Architect say, “denial is the most predictable of all human responses.”

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