Incel Oriented Motivated Violence and Its Connection to Single Male Sexlessness
The term “incels” is a derivative of the two terms involuntary and celibate. Members of this group operate in online communities discussing difficulties in attaining sexual relationships. Statistical evidence has discovered the presence of misogynistic and favorable violence towards others, most notably women. As a result, several violent incidents have been correlated with these types of communities and, as such, resemble other ideologically motivated forms of extreme terrorist groups (O’Malley, Holt & Holt, 2020).
An exploration of the involuntary celibate (incel) subculture online has discovered and identified 5 incel interrelated normative orders; the sexual market, women as naturally evil, legitimizing dominant masculinity, male oppression over women, and male patterned violence towards women.
Central to the building of their incel ideology is a master-narrative involving violent misogynistic beliefs and attitudes of entitlement, based on male gender and social positioning, with regard to obtaining desired and often illusory sexual experiences. While violence and hate speech within the incel community are both common, there exists a notable subset of incels who have been willing to act on their violent beliefs through the commission of multiple acts of murder. That is to say, successfully completed homicides. The findings suggest that although self-perceptions tend to reflect either grandiosity or self-deprecation, homicidal incels share similar demographic characteristics and dense common clusters of neutralization techniques, cognitive distortions, and criminal thinking errors.
Incel Ideology
At the top of the incel hierarchy are the most attractive men, “Chads.” Incels believe that roughly 20% of the population is made up of Chads but about 80% of women are only interested in men of this class. “Stacy,” the incel term for the most attractive women, will only consent to sex with Chad; “Tyrone” (the incel word for a black Chad), “Chang” (East Asian Chad), “Chadpreet” (South Asian Chad), or “Chaddam” (Arab Chad). Incels, in case you can’t tell, have serious racial hang-ups.
The awareness of this new type of criminals become of paramount importance when investigating cases of Group (Gang) Stalking incidents and its associated reports of electronic torture and psychotronic torture since the demographic of these incels include men with autism spectrum disorder. We will look at autism and the case of Alek Minassian a bit later. Important keywords stand out, as a woman who has been gang stalked suffering electronic torture and psychotronic torture. When reading over the abstracts of research data involving incel oriented motivated violence I find keywords like; violent misogynistic beliefs, attitudes of entitlement, hate speech, the sexual market, women as natural evil, legitimizing their masculinity, male oppression over women, favorable disposition towards violence against others, and a hierarchy of power placed on male social position. This last associated detail is also associated with jihadist extreme terrorism which has its roots in Islamic culture.
While it is important to understand and be aware of new criminal communities operating online and elsewhere, these characteristics fall into antisocial, violent and criminal patterns of behavior. What I find interesting is a common correlation with narcissistic personality disorder, the paranoid schizoid, and white male supremacy. Although I believe forms of male supremacy exist in all ethnic backgrounds, the demographic of incels seems to be mostly white males (55%) according to one researcher, with significant percentages of posters who self-identify as East Asian, South Asian, black, and Latino. This makes up the demographic of incels.
Incels seem drawn to two online platforms; Braincels and incels.co. These incel ideologies are based on a sense that their looks or other personal traits — many users say they have autism — have ruined their romantic chances. They commonly share stories of personal trauma. One incel writes, “I was bullied heavily, which led me to develop severe anxiety and self-hatred. Because of my anxiety, I lack confidence, something women pick up on and [that] labels me a loser. Most of the incels I know are around 16 to 30 years old. They have either been bullied, have autism, or just conventionally unattractive faces.”
Yet incels are not merely an isolated subculture, disconnected from the outside world. They are a dark reflection of a set of social values sustained about women over the centuries that have been common, if not dominant, in broader Western society. The intersection between this age-old misogyny and new information technologies is reshaping our politics and culture in a way we may only dimly understand — and may not be prepared to confront.
The beginning of the incel movement began in the 1990s. Not surprisingly this is the time period when home computers became affordable and available to mostly anyone, but there are some reports of incels as early as the late 1980s who frequented online messaging boards. The irony of the founding of the incel community is that it was started by a homosexual woman. Unsure about her own sexuality and confused by dating rules, she started an online community called Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project. She eventually entered into a real relationship at age 24 with a woman and began to identify less and less with the community she created. As a result, she ceased involvement with the community around 2000. Since then, the involuntary celibate communities have morphed into an ideologically motivated subculture for violence against women. Where the early communities moderated against violence and hate speech, the new established forums encourage and even idolize actors who commit mass random acts of murder. In the beginning, it was neither exclusively male nor dedicated to a fatalistic anti-woman ideology.
One incel member writes,
“Our whole lives we’ve had to endure the pain of being so physically repulsive to females that they’d never even consider giving us a chance. We are actually so genetically inferior that they hate us. They need to suffer,” writes another incels.co poster. “Their hypocrisy is a crime [punishable by] torture for the rest of their slutty lives.”
Here is a blaring connection to electronic physical bodily attacks and psychotronic torture experienced by people who claim Group (Gang) Stalking. I have personally endured these attacks and, in my particular case, it is my mother and I who live together alone without a male representative. In my opinion, as woman, it is likely we are being abused by a misogynistic male attacker who seeks dominion over female flesh and one who a collegiate degree and is well informed regarding advanced technologies.
In one particular case, the very username “St. Marcc Lepine,” was mentioned by a member of an incel forum being noted as being “a risk.” This should have been a red flag because in 1989, the real-life Marc Lépine went into a classroom in Montreal’s École Polytechnique university and ordered the men to leave, then shot all nine women who remained. He continued his attack outside the classroom before shooting himself in the head. In a letter, he claimed the attack was “fighting feminism”; he killed a total of 14 women during the assault, which remains the deadliest mass shooting in modern Canadian history.
What’s interesting is these incels don’t just attack women, but they attack other male competitors which was the case of Elliot Rogers who stabbed two of his male roommates and one visiting male friend before opening fire outside a sorority house. After killing these 3 men, he got into his car and drove to the Alpha Phi sorority at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) campus, opening fire outside and in other nearby locations. He killed three more people — Katherine Cooper, Christopher Michaels-Martinez, and Veronika Weiss — and wounded 14 more before turning his gun on himself. All of the dead were UCSB students.
This movement has broader implications for other acts of random violence known as the phenomenon of Group (Gang) Stalking with electronic targeted bodily assaults and psychotronic torture, a crime I associate with Ransomware attacks as a technologically based form of crime known as cyber attacks. Although Ransomware attacks are considered white collar, Group (Gang) Stalking with electronic targeted physical attacks and psychotronic torture is considered violent crime. Interestingly enough, one of the characteristics associated with male sexlessness is higher education. Individuals in graduate degree programs report having less sex than those without college degrees. The correlations with these forms of crime are; technologically based, a relative high level of intelligence, years spent in college training, and a lack of sexual fulfillment. All these aspects provide an interesting window of insight.
In the article “Male Sexlessness is Rising But Not for the Reasons Incels Claim” report people aged 22 to 35 have broadly similar amounts of sex; 60 to 100 encounters per year. Yet, incels claim the rising level of female promiscuity is at fault for their sexual disenfranchisement, going as far as to call Asian females “noodle whores.” A claim that just doesn’t make sense. The report also states that incels believe 20% of men (who make-up the most attractive and most desirable of all men) are having 80% of the sex, thus dominating and contributing to incels sexual disenfranchisement. Is this true? Researchers say no. For males to have that much sex, they conclude, a man would have to have sex twice a day every day! A statistic that just isn’t true. In fact, a small amount of the top 20% of men having the most sex, according to this article, admitted to having paid for sex or being paid for performing sex. Again, it would seem the incel ideology just doesn’t add up. There ideology seems to possess densely common cognitive distortions, and criminal thinking errors. I would suggest the same for perpetrators carrying out acts of Group (Gang) Stalking with electronic bodily attacks and psychotronic torture.
Still, a common characteristic of bullies and those who favor violence is an aptitude to brag about their misdeeds.
Take Sheldon Bentley, a Canadian security guard in his late 30s. In 2016, Bentley found a homeless man named Donald Doucette in an alley in Edmonton and stomped him to death. In a pre-sentencing filing last summer, Bentley described himself as an “involuntary celibate”; both a forensic psychologist and Bentley’s probation officer testified during the trial that anger at this status led to his violent outburst. Bentley is one of the clearest examples of an incel taking out his rage on another individual. But if you listen to incels themselves, there are many more examples that happen with no documentation or criminal trial. Every now and again, forum users brag openly about how they hurt people — most frequently the women in their lives. I’ve seen posters boast about yelling at women, catfishing them, and even redirecting research funds away from work on cervical and ovarian cancer.
When forum users brag openly about how they hurt people, it is associated with self-vindication and asserting their masculine prowess, displaying a form of power and dominance which they feel they have been stripped of through female rejection. (See the following sources: Nancy Chodorow (2012) Individualizing Gender and Sexuality: Theory and Practice, Chapter 9, “Hate, Humiliation, and Masculinity”; Evan Stark (2007) Coercive Control, Chapter 8, “Technology of Coercive Control”; Weiland (1996) “Matricide and Destructiveness: Infantile Anxieties and Technological Culture”; Van Brunt, Murphy, Pescara-Kovach, Crance (2019) “Early Identification of Grooming and Targeting in Predatory Sexual Behavior on College Campuses,” and Amber Jacobs (2007) “On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis, and the Law of the Mother” which provides an explanation of the personality position of the Paranoid Schizoid, AND Cohn (1987) Sex and Death in the Relational World of Defense Intellectuals which provide an interesting insight to deprecating female jargon.) Not surprising the most chilling incel stories are about outright sexual assault provided by incels. Rapists are at the core of psychoanalytic theory with regard to the Paranoid Schizoid personality position.
It has been known for many decades that it matters who you affiliate with, and those associations shape your behavior in all kinds of ways. There are multiple kinds of harms — and sometimes psychological aggression can have really severe, long-lasting impact on victims.
More Incel Ideology
Some incels encourage other incels to take “the rape pill” — defined as “the understanding that for civilization to survive, femoids (their word for female humans) need to be treated as subhuman objects whose purpose is to obey, and bear the children of, supreme gentlemen such as ourselves.” (The term “supreme gentleman” is one Elliot Rodger used to describe himself.) One incel site called Raping Girls Is Fun, currently had nearly 500 forum members in April 2019. One researcher’s report states, “I’ve seen its users swap stories about the women they say they’ve assaulted and tips on how to commit rape most effectively.”
One Braincels user writes. “I wish only for a painful death for as many of them as possible and I will go out of my way from now on to make women feel uncomfortable and make their lives harder in general.”
The Autism Connection
Alek Minassian, a Toronto man who was found guilty for 10 counts of first-degree murder, was a self-proclaimed incel. He rented a van the day of his attacks in April 2018. He jumped a curb and at a high rate of speed plowed into several pedestrians walking on the sidewalk sending bodies as high as 26 feet in the air. Eight of those 10 murdered victims were women. Minutes before the attack Minassian posted a tribute to Elliot Rogers who killed six people in May 2014. Minassian was said to had a form of autism spectrum disorder and it was argued that Alek was “not criminally responsible” as he suffered a lack of empathy for his victims. The judge rejected the it. One advocate for people with autism said people with autism don’t lack empathy, it’s just their method is different for expressing it and so, sometimes empathy gets expressed in different ways. Minassian was accomplished. A couple days before picking up the rental van to complete his grisly plan, he handed in the final assignment for his college degree in computer programming, and was set to start a software development job with a reputable company. It was the first time Canadian police recognized misogynistic crimes as terrorism.
Sources:
Beauchamp, Zack. Our Incel Problem: How a support group for the dateless became one of the internet’s most dangerous subcultures. Vox.com Published April 16, 2019. Updated April 23, 2019. Retrieved online December 8, 2021. https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/4/16/18287446/incel-definition-reddit
Chodorow, Nancy J. (2012). Individualizing Gender and Sexuality: Theory and Practice. Relational Books Perspective, Volume 53. New York. Routledge; Taylor & Francis Group.
Cohn, Carol. Sex and Death in the Relational World of Defense Intellectuals. Signs: Women, Gender, and Theory. Vol. 12, №4. Summer, 1987. pp. 687–718.
Jacobs, Amber. (2007). On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis, and the Law of the Mother. New York. Columbia University Press.
Porter, Catherine. Toronto Van Attacker Found Guilty in City’s Worst Mass Killing. Nytimes.com Published online March 3, 2021. Retrieved online December 8, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/03/world/canada/toronto-van-alek-minassian.html
Sheridan, Lorraine; James, David V.; and Roth, Jayden. (March 12, 2020) The Phenomenology of Group Stalking (‘Gang Stalking’): A Content Analysis of Subjective Experiences. International Journal of Environmental Research Public Health. 17(7), 2506. https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/7/2506/htm#B5-ijerph-17-02506
Stark, Evan. (2007). Coercive Control: The entrapment of women in everyday life. New York. Oxford University Press.
Stone, Lyman. Male Sexlessness is Rising But Not for the Reasons Incels Claim. ifstudies.org. Published May 14, 2018. Retrieved online December 8, 2021. https://ifstudies.org/blog/male-sexlessness-is-rising-but-not-for-the-reasons-incels-claim
Van Brunt, Brian; Murphy, Amy; Pescara-Kovach, Lisa; Crance, Gina-Lyn. “Early Identification of Grooming and Targeting in Predatory Sexual Behavior on College Campuses.” Violence and Gender. Vol. 6, №1. March 11, 2019.
Wieland, C. (1996). Matricide and Destructiveness: Infantile Anxieties and Technological Culture. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 12(3),
OTHER IMPORTANT SOURCES TO EXPLORE:
O’Malley, R., Holt, K., & Holt, T. (2020). An Exploration of the Involuntary Celibate (Incel) Subculture Online. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, OnlineFirst, 1
Williams, D., Arntfield, M., Schaal, K., & Vincent, J. (2021). Wanting sex and willing to kill: Examining demographic and cognitive characteristics of violent “involuntary celibates”. Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 39(4), 386–401.
