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.
History and organization
Background The first website to use the term "incel" was Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project, a blog and mailing list founded in 1997 by a female university student living in Toronto known as Alana, in order to write about and discuss her own experiences of celibacy with like-minded people. The blog was intended as a supportive and inclusive site for people who had difficulty forming romantic relationships, and was used by people of all genders and sexual orientations to share their thoughts and experiences in order to overcome social barriers such as shyness. Alana originally used the abbreviation "invcel" for "involuntarily celibate", later shortening it to "incel". Her website was intended for "anybody of any gender who was lonely, had never had sex or who hadn't had a relationship in a long time". She later said, "I was trying to create a movement that was open to anybody and everybody." During her college years and afterward, Alana realized she was bisexual and became more comfortable with her identity. As her own dating life improved, Alana stopped maintaining the website, passing the site's contents on to someone else she did not know around the year 2000. In 2018, Alana said of her project: "It definitely wasn't a bunch of guys blaming women for their problems. That's a pretty sad version of this phenomenon that's happening today. Things have changed in the last 20 years". After learning that the perpetrator of the 2014 Isla Vista killings was being glorified by parts of the incel subculture, Alana wrote: "Like a scientist who invented something that ended up being a weapon of war, I can't uninvent this word, nor restrict it to the nicer people who need it". She expressed regret at the change from her original intent of creating an "inclusive community" for people of all genders who were sexually deprived due to social awkwardness, marginalization, or mental illness.
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