Warning: this article contains content which some readers may find distressing.
On 12 August this year, Jake Davison, 22, killed five people in Plymouth – including his mother and a three-year-old girl – before turning the gun on himself. He is not the first to carry out a mass shooting – but there’s something about this particular rampage that causes something to snap inside John*.
Taking to the Reddit forum r/incelexit, John writes: “For five years I’ve watched this community pump out shooter after shooter and I ignored it. Today is my final day as an incel. I can no longer be associated with these guys.”
Before the tragedy that took place in Plymouth, ‘incel’ wasn’t a term commonly bandied about in the British media. Incels, or ‘involuntary celibates’ – a disturbingly large online subculture characterised by extreme misogynistic beliefs and views that women are sub-human sex objects – were largely ignored.
The horrifying actions of Davison – who expressed an affinity with the incel community and shared similarly nihilistic views – have shone a stark light on a depraved and deeply disgusting collective that society tends to worryingly avoid tackling until it’s too late.
Davison’s attack may have been the first to take place in the UK, but several other misogyny-motivated mass sprees have taken place in the past 10 years. Among the more infamous include Elliot Rodger’s rampage in Santa Barbara in 2014, which saw six people killed. More recently, Alek Minassian killed 10 people and injured 16 in Toronto in 2018.
While mass shootings perpetrated by gun-toting women-haters is something we’d typically attribute to areas across the Atlantic, the roots of the relatively young incel movement started around 15 years ago in the UK. Its origins lie in ‘pick-up artistry’ and ‘professional seduction’ – namely, men who rank their sense of worth on sexual success with women.
“It was based around the book, The Game, written by Neil Strauss,” internet commentator Ryan Broderick explains. “Men would meet up, have classes, learn techniques such as negging and peacocking before trying techniques out on women in the street – usually around London’s Covent Garden.”
However, a number of men who had engaged with these pick-up artist techniques with no success started a reactionary forum titled PUA Hate, which laid the groundwork for incel subculture today.
“These were men who were both deeply aggressive towards women [referred to in incel lingo as ‘Stacys’], and now hugely distrusting towards other men, whom they call ‘Chads’,” Broderick says. “They started creating really rigid socio-sexual hierarchies to explain why they weren’t attractive to women and started using terminology such as ‘red pill’ – the ‘realisation’ that men don’t hold any systemic power, and are entirely at mercy to women’s impulses.
“There was an osmosis between PUA Hate and other internet forums such as Reddit and 4Chan, which resulted in a more crystallised form of the subculture.”
The past five years have seen the incel subculture take a far more nihilistic approach, with a definite shift towards the ‘black pill’ theory – the belief that looks are genetically determined, and that women choose sexual partners based solely on physical features (dubbed ‘lookism’).
“Black pill is when you discover that you can never change your status within this rigid sexual hierarchy,” Broderick says. “And the only escape is either to kill yourself or to kill as many people as possible.
“These forums are grotesque, and it’s such a race to the bottom in terms of content and discourse. They quickly become super violent and incredibly graphic.
“We’re talking about these quite young, vulnerable men being more and more isolated as they’re being pulled into these increasingly dark, violent and strange places online.”
Boys can be disturbingly young when they are initially introduced to extremely misogynistic views. The aforementioned John was just 13 when he started engaging with incel content, having stumbled across it on 4Chan’s infamous r/9k forum, a breeding ground for controversial and inflammatory views. After Googling a number of terms, he found another forum, purely dedicated to the black pill ideology and its nihilistic values.
“The forum sees both men’s and women’s faces rated rather grievously,” he recalls. “The ‘black pill’ and its components were discussed in detail. Suicide was mentioned often. They used a lot of hateful language regarding women, such as “h*le,” “sl*t” and b*tch, as well as ‘foid’, short for female humanoid, because they see women as beneath human.”
Everyday Sexism founder Laura Bates saw first-hand the horrors of the discrete incel forums, when she posed as a disenchanted young man to infiltrate the chatrooms for her book Men Who Hate Women.
“I watched men earnestly debate whether women should be murdered or kept as ‘sex slaves’ and argue over whether rape should be legalised. (It shouldn’t, one said, because that would take all the fun out of it,)” she wrote in The Telegraph.
“One day, they were discussing a massacre at a US school. There were rumours the shooter had been rejected by a female classmate. The forum members hoped that he had been able to rape her before she died. I switched off my computer and cried.”
But Laura’s experience isn’t an outlier, with John explaining he was exposed to highly disturbing content every single day.
“There was quite a bit of racism. Indian incels are called ‘currycels’, Asian incels are called ‘ricecels’, the N-word was used liberally,” John says. “I saw a post from someone who said they were in support of child rape.
“The advice given to men was to ‘bonesmash’ – hitting your face repeatedly until ‘micro cracks’ appear, which allegedly shapes one’s face and you become more attractive.”
Broderick compares the rabbit-hole-esque thought process that sees young men turn more inwardly towards incel culture as being similar to the grooming and radicalisation process that can evolve into religious extremism.
“In my head, religious fundamentalism and the incel community are the same,” he says. “They ‘recruit’ in the same way, they both want to destroy society and create mass violence. The exact same process is being used to get a young kid to join Isis as it is to convince another to drive a truck into women in Toronto. It’s the same process of isolation, then using memes and relatable content to create an emotional response.
“Then they’re brought further and further down the rabbit hole until they’re made to feel they no longer fit into this world and can turn violent. As they implode, their thinking becomes more and more disordered. The incel belief system really is like a thought disease.”
But despite their similarities, the mass shooting in Plymouth was not considered a terrorist attack, instead being described by the Devon and Cornwall Police as a “domestic incident”. This description is troubling for Broderick.
“It’s strange as the UK is so hyper-vigilant when it comes to Islamic extremism,” Broderick says. “And yet there’s Charlie and Tommy sat inside posting on Reddit about how they want to cut girls’ heads off. And no one has any problem with that.”
It’s also worrying for Dr Eleanor Seymour, a research fellow in Gender and Human Rights at the University of Nottingham.
“Incels such as the Plymouth shooter Jake Davison could be considered terrorists,” she says.
“While many in the incel subculture do not personally act out their violent fantasies, they may encourage others and incite hatred against women and other men.”
But it’s not just the extremity of incel culture that is cause for concern in society, Dr Seymour says.
“I don’t think the threat of misogyny is ever taken seriously enough,” she says. “Misogyny runs through the fabric of most societies and is based on gender inequality and patriarchal societies. There have been many threats against women and women’s rights over the centuries, and incels are the latest iteration of this.
“We accept misogyny and sexism as a fact of life. We spend so long trying to teach our daughters how to survive. How to not be raped, how to protect themselves from male violence and negative attention. How to present themselves so they are taken seriously. Why is the focus on women attempting to protect themselves and minimise the damage?”
The isolating effect of the coronavirus pandemic, and the economic instability and lack of chances to socialise, sees Dr Seymour concerned about young boys who could be easily primed for misogyny.
We’re already seeing studies that may suggest the deeply rooted misogyny of the internet is starting to affect young men – a study conducted by HOPE Not Hate found that 50% of young men found feminism had “gone too far” and that it makes it “harder for men to succeed.”
“Youth today face a difficult future,” Dr Seymour says. “They have grown up in a difficult context with social media and other technology as a constant in their childhood. I think pornography has a lot to answer for here. Children are exposed to pornography (including violent content) at a much younger age and this is influencing their view of relationships and women.
“Women in pornographic films are generally compliant and exist for the pleasure of the man. When women do not react this way to men in real life, men can feel rejected, ashamed and angry. I think for some young boys, it is easier to have an ideology that tells you nothing is wrong with you and everything is everyone else’s fault rather than have to acknowledge and address your part and the responsibility you play in your life.”
As someone who was previously drawn to and deeply immersed in incel culture, John, now 18, points more towards his own perceived lack of support, which he believes pushed him into this dark and dangerous ideology.
“I think many young men unsuccessful in dating are looking for answers and find themselves on such forums which reassure them it is society’s fault. This is a comforting feeling, so many stay in these communities,” he explains. “I was going through a rebellious faze, and didn’t feel I had the same support as my peers.
“I believe that there are a lot of misguided young men who are resentful towards women and society, and they’re just wallowing in their own misery.”
So, what preventative measures are being taken? How do we stop the men who find themselves drawn towards the dark and disturbing world of inceldom? Reddit, which has hosted a number of forums that have attracted incels previously, also has a number of forums dedicated to providing support, with r/virgin and r/incelexit aiming to stamp out dangerous or incel-associated language.
“We welcome both men and women and everyone in between,” a moderator from r/virgin explains. “With that being said, we take incel posts very seriously, and have made it clear that they are not welcome in our sub.
“We do our best to remove such posts and comments, as well as the people making them. However, some posts and comments are never reported, and although we do our best to randomly check threads for unacceptable comments, we are human and some get missed. On Reddit, moderating was voluntary.
“We in no way promote violence or hatred. We are simply an all-inclusive support group for those who are struggling.”
But how can we stop young men going down that path in the first place? Dr Seymour believes that we can stamp out any misogynistic inclinations from childhood and the enforcement of tropes and stereotypes.
“We need to have a reckoning,” she says. “It starts with how boys and girls are socialised. The terms ‘crying like a little girl’, ‘throwing like a girl’ etc. are all insults used to diminish girls and ultimately indicate that there is something fundamentally wrong with being female. These messages are internalised for both boys and girls.
“Girls think that there is something wrong with having feelings but so do boys, which causes boys to reject their emotions. The avoidance of strong emotions leads to poorer academic performance for boys.”
But for Broderick, the path that leads young boys to become incels, and then potentially mass shooters, is just not that simple.
“Somewhere along that journey, something just goes horribly wrong,” he says. “And that is sad, because perhaps with better education, or better socialising, or just anyone in their lives who cared about them, maybe they’d be able to avoid these dark places.
“But I’ve also met well-educated, thoughtful and well-adjusted guys that go down that route and just spin out of control. And I don’t have much sympathy with those sorts of incels, because they were given every single chance to escape this, and they continue down that path.
“It’s just so much darker and complicated that we can imagine. They’re almost like a result of a social glitch.”