Incel ideology: what it is and why we need to tackle
A dangerous and highly misogynistic ideology is quietly growing, largely under the radar of the mainstream media and politicians. The “incel” (short for “involuntary celibate“) movement has been around for thirty years in the USA and is now rapidly gaining adherents here in the UK. In August 2021 Jake Davison killed five people in Plymouth in what has been called a terrorist attack. A member of Liberal Voice for Women argues that Parliament should be legislating to deal with the problem.
Although I had heard the term “incel” in passing, it wasn’t until I read the book by Laura Bates Men Who Hate Women that I began to appreciate how sinister and pervasive this movement was. Laura Bates, who founded the Everyday Sexism project has been the subject of numerous death and rape threats for her work. In this book she went undercover into the online ‘manosphere’ where she observed the interactions of men who express extreme misogynistic views. Her book begins in the ‘incel’ world, where she explains how young men may stumble across such messaging sites, perhaps while looking for dating advice, but they become rapidly radicalised by the deeply misogynistic and toxic content they find there.
Bates discusses two main beliefs underscoring incel ideology. The first is that “women are dehumanised objects: subhumans who are either too evil or too stupid to deserve to make decisions about their own lives and bodies.” The second belief she describes as “this idea of women as empty sexual vessels without the right to sexual autonomy leads naturally to a feverish obsession with sexual violence, which ranges from assault fantasies and open advocacy of rape to lengthy, chillingly casual arguments about whether or not rape should be legalised.” It is quite the dark read.
As may be expected, incel ideology is deeply anti-feminist. The ideology tells men it is they who are suffering and it is feminist women who are to blame for denying them access to what they perceive as “rightfully theirs.”
In the UK alone there are an estimated 10,000 members of the incel community; the largest community is in the US (estimated at around 100,000). One of the most popular incel sites has over 3 million posts. The Times recently reported that the number of visitors to such sites has increased five-fold in the last nine months here in the UK. This is not a tiny movement, and it is growing.
The men involved are not all hermits and many have jobs and are able to exercise influence in wider society. A US congressional candidate, Nathan Larson authored one article on a popular incel website entitled “A Man Should Be Allowed to Choke His Wife to Death as Punishment for Cutting her Hair Short Without Permission.” When he was outed in a Huffington Post article, far from distancing himself, Larson said: “A lot of people are tired by political correctness and being constrained by it.”
Bates goes on to discuss how incel ideology has made its way into mainstream narratives and into social media platforms that may be readily accessible to young boys who may then become inadvertently “misinformed” at best and “radicalised” at worst. She discusses the fact that the backlash to the #MeToo movement has its origins in incel ideology. Men were told #MeToo was a witch-hunt and that no man was safe from these ‘lying’ women. In reality a New York Times analysis showed that there were over 12 million misogynist tweets in the first 4 months of #MeToo movement, but only 200 men were investigated (with 920 separate accusations against those 200 men) and fewer than ten ever faced criminal charges. An article in Harvard Business Review highlights some of the backlash by men to #MeToo including the fact that nowadays “27% said they avoided one-on-one meetings with female colleagues.”
Men and boys can become radicalised through innocent pursuits such as joining gaming and body building communities. At first the misogynistic memes can seem innocent enough, even humorous, but their repetition can result in a lasting bias against women. Bates discusses that now in schools boys challenge her on the data she presents, especially around rape; some push the narrative that “women are probably lying.” She talks about mothers who hear phrases such as “feminism is cancer” over their sons’ gaming headsets. Bates tells readers that boys have told her, “rape is a compliment really.” At one school, where they had a rape case involving a 14-year-old boy, a teacher asked “Why didn’t you stop when she was crying?” Apparently, the boy looked at the teacher bewildered and said “Because it’s normal for girls to cry during sex,” exemplifying the way hardcore porn contributes to the normalisation of violence towards women, especially the sexual violence espoused in incel forums to which sadly too many teenagers have been exposured.
In addition to all of this chilling radicalisation of boys and men against women, there is the deadly impact of this movement. In the US and Canada over 50 people have been killed in attacks thought to be driven by incel ideology. Last year of course we had our own deadly attack in Plymouth. This was the worst mass shooting in the UK since 2010 and the shooter has been lionised by the incel community as helping drive recruitment , with reports that incel websites had received five-times more visits in the nine months following the attack, with the Times reporting that three of the biggest incel sites has grown from 114,420 visits per month to 638,505.
As Bates says, environmental or animal rights extremism has a much lower death toll but these are still recognised as potentially threatening by organisations looking to tackle extremism, whereas incel ideology and extremist misogyny are not. Feminist and human rights campaigner Joan Smith argues in her book Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists that hatred of and violence against women is also a gateway to other harmful and radical ideologies including white supremacy, homophobia and religious terrorism.
Raising awareness is only the start. It is time to act and a new Bill presents us with a real opportunity. Drafters of the new Online Safety Bill, which could look to address this form of extremism have instead decided that incel websites are “too small” for inclusion in the law, creating a loophole for these sites to continue to promote hatred and violence against women. We need to make the case for including this ideology in the Bill.
The fact this ideology is deadly, radicalises people with a view to changing society expressly by dehumanising women, and is a gateway into other extreme ideologies, means that it meets the criteria of terrorism. Why wouldn’t we want to tackle this? Why wouldn’t we also want to prevent it?
If you feel spurred to take action, write to your own MP, write to Michelle Donelan whose department is sponsoring the Bill and Lib Dem MP Jamie Stone who is our Spokesperson for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport. Also write to OFCOM and let them know your thoughts about incel ideology and why this should also be included in the Online Safety Bill for the benefit of women, girls and the boys and men who are at risk of falling down this destructive rabbit hole.