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Involuntary celibacy or the incel subculture consists of online communities whose members define themselves by being unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite wanting to, a state they describe as inceldom. Self-identified incels are almost exclusively heterosexual and male, because, according to the incel worldview, females can only be voluntarily celibate.
Discussions in incel forums are often characterized by resentment, misanthropy, misogyny, and the endorsement of violence against sexually active women and more sexually successful men. The Southern Poverty Law Center has described the subculture as "part of the online male supremacist ecosystem", and self-described incels have committed several mass murders in North America.
Terminology
The term incel is a portmanteau of the words involuntary celibate. After a period of academic use, the term came to wider public notice with the banning of the /r/incels subreddit, and a series of mass murders committed by men who self-identified as involuntarily celibate or who shared similar ideologies.
Coinage
The terms incel and involuntary celibate are reported to have been coined by an anonymous college student with the alias Alana from Toronto, Ontario, in 1993, when she created a website in order to discuss her sexual inactivity with others. The website, titled "Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project", was used by people of all genders to share posts about the topic. During her college career and after, she realized she was queer, and became more comfortable with her identity. She later gave the site to a stranger. After reading about the 2014 Isla Vista killings, she 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." Alana has expressed regret at the change in usage, with her original intention being to create an "inclusive community" for men and women who were sexually deprived due to social awkwardness, marginalization or mental illness.
Popular usage
In popular usage, the term primarily refers to the online communities of people who self-identify as involuntarily celibate. These communities are characterized by misogyny, the glorification of violence, and racism. According to The New York Times, involuntary celibacy is an adaptation of the idea of “male supremacy,” an ideology the Southern Poverty Law Center has begun including in their list of hate groups.
In these online communities, the term "involuntary celibate" or "incel" is used alongside other terms, such as "love-shy" (social anxiety or excessive shyness preventing romantic success) and "incelibacy". The German author Maja Roedenbeck Schaefer uses the English-language term "Absolute Beginner" to describe individuals who are celibate, but not through personal choice. Some online communities use more specific terms to quantify specific kinds of incels, such as "truecel", someone who has never had any form of physical intimacy, "mentalcel", someone whose involuntary celibacy is caused by a mental health issue, "fakecel", someone who pretends to be incel, or ethnicel, a person of color (or visible minority) who is incel.
The term encompasses people who are in sexless marriages (or other sexless relationships) but who wish to be sexually active. It is considered to be distinct from asexuality and from voluntary sexual abstinence.
Psychology
Further information: Sexual frustrationInvoluntary celibacy is not a medical or psychological condition, but some of those who identify as incels suffer from physical disabilities or psychological disorders. A 2001 Georgia State University study found that people who self-identified as incels tended to feel frustrated, depressed, and angry regardless of why they felt they were involuntarily celibate. These researchers found that involuntary celibacy was often correlated with depression, neuroticism, anxiety, and autistic disorders.
Online communities
The misogynistic and occasionally violent rhetoric of Incel communities has lead to numerous bans from websites and webhosts. /r/incels was a Reddit community (known as a subreddit) that offered a forum for people who identified as involuntarily celibate. The subreddit was known as a place where men blamed women for their involuntary celibacy, sometimes advocated for rape or other violence, and were generally misogynistic and often racist. Members of the group described women as "femoids" or "stacys" and described men who were able to have sex with these women as "chads". One post titled "general question about how rapists get caught" was asked by a member pretending to be a woman, saying they wanted to know how a woman who was drugged and raped would begin finding her rapist. Others glorified Elliot Rodger, the perpetrator of the 2014 Isla Vista killings.
On October 25, 2017, Reddit announced a new policy that would ban "content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people." On November 7, 2017, the /r/incels subreddit was banned for violating this policy. At the time of the ban, the community had around 40,000 members.
Incel communities continue to exist on platforms more lenient of their content, such as Voat and the message board /r9k/ on 4chan. Such communities frequently overlap with topics such as pickup artistry and men's rights activism. Incel communities are a part of the broader manosphere. Although there are mixed-gender forums that to cater to both male and female incels, such as Reddit's ForeverAlone. Some incels have advocated for the allocation of sex robots to incels.
Mass murders
There have been a number of mass murders in North America by men who have self-identified as involuntarily celibate, or whose statements align with "incel" ideologies.
The 2014 Isla Vista killings drew attention to the concept of involuntary celibacy, and particularly the misogyny and glorification of violence that is a mainstay of many incel communities. The perpetrator, Elliot Rodger, self-identified as an incel and left behind a 137-page manifesto and YouTube videos discussing how he wanted revenge for being rejected by women. He had been an active member of an involuntary celibacy community called PUAHate (short for "pickup artist hate"), and referenced it several times in his manifesto.
The perpetrator of the 2009 Collier Township shooting, George Sodini, has been embraced by some of the involuntary celibacy communities. Although the involuntary celibacy forum where Elliot Rodger had been active, PUAHate, shut down soon after his attack, Rodger became something of a martyr to some communities that remained, and to some of those that began later. After the October 2017 Las Vegas shooting by a man with unclear motive, some of the involuntarily celibate community celebrated the shooter, who they felt was a hero who was targeting "normies". The trend has since continued—Alek Minassian, the suspect in the April 2018 Toronto van attack, posted on Facebook shortly before the attack, "The Incel Rebellion has already begun! ... All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!" After the attack, a poster on a website created to supersede /r/incels wrote about Minassian, "I hope this guy wrote a manifesto because he could be our next new saint." The term "Incel Rebellion" is sometimes used interchangeably with the term "Beta Uprising", which refers to a violent response to incels' perceived sexual deprivation.
List of mass murders by self-identified involuntary celibates
| Date | Location | Country | Description | Main article |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 23, 2014 | Isla Vista, California | United States | 22-year-old Elliot Rodger killed 6 people and injured 14 others near the campus of University of California, Santa Barbara before killing himself. He left a lengthy manifesto and YouTube videos detailing his hatred for women and his involuntary celibacy. | 2014 Isla Vista killings |
| October 1, 2015 | Roseburg, Oregon | United States | 26-year-old Chris Harper-Mercer shot and killed 9 people and injured 8 others at the Umpqua Community College campus before killing himself. He left a manifesto at the scene, outlining his interest in other mass murders including the Isla Vista killings, anger at not having a girlfriend, and animus towards the world. Before the attack, when someone on an online message board had speculated he was "saving himself for someone special," Harper-Mercer had replied, "Involuntarily so." Several hours before the shooting, someone suspected to be Harper-Mercer posted a threat to a Pacific Northwest college to a involuntarily celibate 4chan board. | Umpqua Community College shooting |
| April 23, 2018 | Toronto, Ontario | Canada | A van driver, suspected to be 25-year-old Alek Minassian, killed 10 people and injured 14 others. Minassian was arrested soon after the attack. Shortly before the attack, Minassian had posted on Facebook that "the Incel Rebellion has already begun" and applauded Elliot Rodger, the self-identified incel attacker in the 2014 Isla Vista killings. | Toronto van attack |
Ideology of the "black pill"
Beliefs that are common in incel communities, such as fatalism and defeatism for unattractive people, are collectively referred to as the black pill. Many male incels also believe that modern society is gynocentric, and that women are predisposed to hypergamy.
The concept of the "black pill" distinguishes incels from the men's rights movement and their popular reference to the red pill, an allusion to the dilemma in the movie The Matrix where the protagonist must choose to remain in a world of illusion (taking the blue pill) or to see the world as it really is (taking the red pill). In the context of men's rights activism, "taking the red pill" means seeing a world where women hold power over men. In comparison, "taking the black pill" was described by WBUR-FM as meaning "I will now espouse violence, hatred and misogyny."
The term black pill was coined on the blog Omega Virgin Revolt, where the term commended despondency in order to distinguish incels from the pickup artist communities. According to an incel Reddit subforum called /r/braincels, someone who has metaphorically "swallowed the black pill", been "blackpilled", or LDAR (which stands for "lay down and rot")", has come to "the real or perceived socially unspoken realisations that come from being a longtime incel."
See also
- Androcentrism
- Human mating strategies
- List of subcultures
- Male expendability
- Manosphere
- Mate value in humans
- Sexual frustration
- Sexual tension
- Toxic masculinity
- Men Going Their Own Way
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