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It was on a quiet spring afternoon in 2018 that a van barreled down a busy avenue in Toronto, Canada, killing 10 people and injuring 16 others.
The driver, Alek Minassian, 25 years old, had posted a video on his YouTube channel a few hours earlier inciting hatred against women, accusing them of not finding him attractive. After he was arrested, he claimed he was still a virgin and had used the van as a weapon to carry out his “mission,” hoping to inspire further misogynistic attacks. “I know a lot of guys on the internet who feel the same way I do,” he later admitted to investigators, while also specifying that these other men “lacked the courage to take action.”
This tragic event is only one in a long list of massacres carried out abroad, all characterized by their violent anti-feminism and dangerous forms of nationalism and white supremacy. In 2014, Elliot Roger, 22, killed 6 people and injured 14 others before killing himself in California. In 2015, Chris Harper-Mercer, 26, massacred 9 people and injured 8 before ending his own life at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. In 2018, neo-Nazi Nikolas Cruz, 19, caused the deaths of 17 people and injured as many in a Florida high school. A few months later, also in Florida, Scott Beierle, 40, killed 2 women and injured 5 people in a yoga center before taking his life. In 2019, Bryan Isaack Clyde, 22, was fatally injured by police before entering the courthouse in Dallas, Texas, after having posted a detailed attack plan on social media: he had 150 rounds of ammunition on him.
All these attackers—white, young, and heterosexual, belonged to online misogynistic and sexist groups: on their profiles and YouTube channels, they had multiple posts whose content praised the overthrow of a so-called “feminist domination,” which, according to them, relegates men to a humiliating subordinate role in a society they claim is plagued by increasing levels of misandry. In 2020, the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) in The Hague denounced this terrorist threat which is on the rise in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and the Youth Fear and Hope Report recently highlighted that young and very young people are increasingly influenced by the macho rhetoric circulating on the internet. According to the study, boys often talk about it at school, and it even reaches the point of harassing female teachers, while 50% of British boys between 16 and 24 believe that feminism hinders male success.
“Involuntarily single”
Roger and Minassian named themselves Incel, a term born from the words “involuntary” and “celibate” to denote their involuntary celibacy: an extremely widespread subculture on the internet that is based on the impossibility of having sex in a world ruled by women who are only interested in alpha males. The members of this subculture are lonely, frustrated, and depressed heterosexuals who claim to be victims and complain about the enormous difficulty they face due to their physical ugliness, which they consider an insurmountable obstacle standing in the way of the potential of a fulfilling relationship. Their worldview calls upon numerous pseudo-scientific theories that combine biological and genetic evolutionism, demography, and social psychology.
The “blue pill” is a central concept of this movement, in reference to the Matrix film (the Wachowskis, 1999) in which the protagonist is offered a choice: by taking the blue pill, he will continue to live in an illusion, in the virtual reality that he knows, while the red pill would allow him to understand what is happening outside the illusion. Incels consider that the “blue pills” are those who are still unaware of women’s overwhelming domination of men, while only the “red pills” are conscious that they live in an unjust, gynocentric society. Then there are the “black pills,” who doubt that such an imbalance between genders can be rebalanced. Also in their beliefs is that certain physical characteristics, such as a prominent jaw or the size or symmetry of the face, could also exert a fatal attraction on women, and no aesthetic improvement could compensate for the absence of these fundamental traits.
By Incel logic, there are two types of women: the “Beckys,” who are ugly, discreet, generally feminist, and despotic, and the “Stacys,” who are beautiful, charming, sexually desirable, and only interested in alpha males, themselves dubbed “Chads.” These “Chads” are the only ones who possess the three factors that are essential to seduce “Stacys”: Looks, Money, and Status (LMS). Women are also referred to as “femoids” (FHO)—female humanoid organisms—or even “breeding stock,” “incubators,” and “sperm reservoirs.” This emphasizes the deep contempt women are subjected to.
The male population is also divided into specific categories: the “Chads” (10%), the Incels (20%), and the “normies.” The latter represents the ordinary, beta man (70%). Often bullied, victims of harassment, and subjected to the classist dynamics of major American universities, Incels refuse hegemonic masculinity and despise serial seducers. They are neither homophobic nor fascinated by physical prowess or the achievement of economic status to subjugate women: they prefer to denigrate and punish them for their lack of interest in them.
The Italian context
In Italy, many sites can be linked back to the Incel movement. These include the “Forum dei Brutti,” which, with more than 16,000 users, is currently the largest. There is also “Un Brutto Forum,” “Il Redpillatore,” “totalitarismo.blog,” and “Uomini Beta,” which promote hate speech that is much more explicit and violent than in American communities, given that they are closed and less normalized groups. The “Forum of Incels” is a particularly interesting case. Born in 2019 after splitting from the “Forum dei Brutti,” it only took two years for it to rank 152nd in the list of Forumfree’s “best forums” out of 6,000 online groups. Its administrator has given numerous interviews in which he strongly emphasizes the need to recognize men’s rights in opposition to the values of feminism and advocates for the reestablishment of the natural hierarchy of powers between the sexes.
Between Nietzsche, Leopardi, and the Joker
These platforms often take up aphorisms from Friedrich Nietzsche and verses from Giacomo Leopardi, who is considered an Incel ante litteram because of his ugliness and his failure with women, contrary to Gabriele D'Annunzio, whose notoriety in terms of literature and female conquest makes him a perfect example of an “alpha male.” Another important reference is the Joker, the protagonist of the eponymous movie (Phillips, 2019), relevant because of his experience of social exclusion and his deep psychological distress. The scars that disfigure his body, being rejected by his neighbor, his problematic relationship with is mother, and his profound relational incapacity make him an emblematic symbol of the victim rhetoric of Italian Incels. Contrary to Batman, whom they consider to be a “Chad” with a strong LMS, Joker is in fact a loser who rebels against his own fate with incredible violence.
A worrying transnational phenomenon
Incels belong to the larger and more complex world of the “manosphere,” which takes its name from the eponymous blog created in 2009 and made famous by Ian Ironwood’s 2013 self-published book The Manosphere: A New Hope for Masculinity. This broad transnational movement spreads different types of toxic masculinity and forms of activism in favor of men’s rights via online platforms such as Reddit, Instagram, Telegram, and YouTube. Its roots go back to the Men's Liberation Movement, which structured an initial critical reflection on gender stereotypes in the 1970s. As of the 1980s, some of its members started to veer towards militancy to defend men’s rights, feeling increasingly threatened by women who were considered the main cause of their insecurity, frustration, and instability.
Though it is a very vast and heterogeneous phenomenon, there are certain recurring elements that characterize the anti-feminists, and more generally the anti-women, of the manosphere: fierce criticism of feminism, considered the scourge of an increasingly gynocentric world marked by misandry, hate speech, and the demand for masculinity to be reaffirmed by all means. As such, sexually frustrated involuntary celibates (Incels) accuse women of rejecting them and attack them accordingly with insults, assault, and, in some cases, feminicide and massacres.
Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) are fighting against the discrimination they believe men—especially separated fathers—suffer from, in an effort to regain their lost supremacy. Pickup artists (PUAs) disseminate videos, articles, and courses that teach seduction techniques and show women as mere sexual objects; the goal is only to build male confidence and self-esteem. Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), on the other hand, have adopted a separatist approach and are convinced that the only way for them to regain their power is by avoiding any interaction with the female gender. And the Alt-Right movement promotes a strongly nationalist and supremacist discourse.
During the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) organized in May 2021, one of the studies presented showed how the groups in the English-speaking manosphere that are considered to be the most “moderate”—the MRAs and PUAs—are losing ground, giving way to more radicalized and violence fringes such as MGTOWs and Incels.
In the face of this phenomenon, feminist journalist and writer Jennifer Guerra emphasizes, “Brushing off Incels as crazy or mentally ill only aggravates the situation; society must take responsibility. Involving them in the real world is the only solution to help them concretely put an end to misogynistic massacres.
