Incels

An incel ( IN-sel; an abbreviation of "involuntarily celibate"), is a member of an online subculture of mostly male and heterosexual people who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one. The incel subculture came to wider public attention in the 2010s with the banning of controversial subreddit r/incels and a series of mass murders committed by men who either identified as incels or held similar ideologies, including Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian. The incel subculture's online discourse is characterized by social rejection, social isolation, resentment, hostile sexism, anti-feminism, sexual objectification and dehumanization of women, misogyny, misanthropy, self-pity and self-loathing, racism, a sense of entitlement to sex, nihilism, rape culture, and the endorsement of sexual and non-sexual violence against women and the sexually active. Incels tend to blame both women and the feminist movement for their inability to find a partner. They often attribute their romantic failures to biological determinism and hypergamy, where women are said to have an innate and unchangeable preference for mating with high-status males (nicknamed "Chads"). Classified as part of the manosphere, an online association of anti-feminist and male supremacist groups that includes incels along with men's rights activists (MRAs), men going their own way (MGTOW) and pick-up artists (PUAs), most incels identify with the "black pill", a more nihilistic version of the manosphere's belief in the "red pill" that argues men are an oppressed group in a society dominated by feminism. The "black pill" refers to the fatalistic belief that the heterosexual dating market, and society in general, exist primarily to benefit women and physically attractive "alpha males". Incels believe it is impossible for unattractive men to escape this social hierarchy. Incel communities have been criticized by scholars, government officials, and others for their misogyny, endorsement and encouragement of violence and extremism. Over time the subculture has become associated with extremism and misogynist terrorism, and since 2014 there have been multiple mass killings, mostly in North America, perpetrated by self-identified incels, as well as other instances of violence or attempted violence. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describes incels as "part of the online male supremacist ecosystem" that is included in their list of hate groups. The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) states that "the incel community shares a misogynistic ideology of women as being genetically inferior to men, driven by their sexual desire to reproduce with genetically superior males, thereby excluding unattractive men such as themselves" which "exhibits all of the hallmarks of an extremist ideology". GIFCT states that incel beliefs combine a wish for a mythical past where all men were entitled to sex from subordinated women, a sense of predestined personal failure, and nihilism, making it a dangerous ideology. Estimates of the overall size of the subculture vary greatly, ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands of individuals.