Incel

Involuntary celibacy, or incel for short, is an online sub-culture and movement surrounding highly alienated, usually male individuals who believe structures of oppression to be the cause of their inability to form meaningful sexual relationships. The status of being an incel is typically referred to as inceldom. This is based on the culture of a subreddit that arrived over a decade after the first few, self-described incel forums.

The incel movement is usually supportive of reactionary and bigoted sentiments, especially misogyny. Incel forums serve as a prominent recruiting ground for the alt-right and other far-right groups, in part because of their mutual tendency towards racism and anti-Semitism. Self-described incels have perpetrated multiple terrorist attacks and mass-killings, as part of a rising tendency of right-wing extremism in the West.

History

The first website to use the term "incel" was "Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project", founded in 1997 by a Canadian university student known only by her first name, Alana, to discuss her sexual inactivity with others; however, some media has incorrectly dated it to 1993, the date of a personal interaction that later inspired her to design the page. The site was used by people of all genders and sexual orientations to share their thoughts and experiences. During 1997, she started a mailing list on the topic that used the abbreviation INVCEL, later shortened to "incel", for "anybody of any gender who was lonely, had never had sex or who hadn't had a relationship in a long time". She would later cease participation in her online community around 2000.

The message board love-shy.com was founded in 2003 as a place for people who felt perpetually rejected or were extremely shy with potential partners to discuss their situations. It was less strictly moderated than its counterpart, IncelSupport, which was also founded in the 2000s. While IncelSupport welcomed men and women and banned misogynistic posts, love-shy.com's userbase was overwhelmingly male. Over the next decade, the membership of love-shy.com and online fringe right-wing communities like 4chan increasingly overlapped. In the 2000s, incel communities became more extremist as they adopted behaviors common on forums like 4chan and Reddit, where extremist posts were encouraged as a way to achieve visibility. According to Bruce Hoffman and colleagues writing in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, as "edgy" and extremist statements became more prevalent in incel communities, so too did extremist trolling and "shitposting".

The subculture came to wider public notice throughout the 2010s with the banning of r/incels and when a series of mass murders were committed by men who either identified as members of the subculture or shared similar ideologies. Increased interest in incel communities has been attributed to feelings of "aggrieved entitlement" among some men who feel they are being denied rights they deserve and blame women for their lack of sex.

Organizations

There are a number of forums for self-identified incels. A popular example is incels.co.

Demographics

While solid information about the incel movement is hard to collect because of its hostility to outsiders, certain demographic patterns can be enumerated. An informal poll of a popular incel forum revealed that over 90% of its participants were under the age of 30. Practically all of them are males (they ban women on sight), and 80% of them were from Europe or North America. Over half of them identify as white, with other ethnic groups mixed in as well. A poll taken on incels.co revealed similar results.

Criticism

The incel movement has been criticized and condemned on multiple grounds, including their hateful attitude towards women, male supremacy, relationship to right-wing extremists, and belief that they are entitled to sexual intercourse from females. In modern incel forums, there are also a large amount of pedophiles, zoophiles, and fetishists.

Hot takes on incels

Hot takes on incels

Further "Left-wing inceldom"

It is possible to offer a left-wing alternative to right-wing inceldom. Instead of identifying female hypergamy as the oppressive structure that prevents men from finding worthwhile partners, left-wing inceldom finds social atomisation and prevailing patriarchal norms to be the problem.

See also

• Manosphere

External links

YouTube videos on incels:

• "INCELS Part 1 - Introductions, Truths & Admissions" and "INCELS Part 2 - Analysis, Advice & 'Chadsplaining'" by Vaush
• "Hegelian Recognition and Incels" by Cuck Philosophy
• "Incels and the Last Man" by Zero Books

Subreddits on incels:

• r/IncelTears, dedicated to cataloging instances of incel sexism and bigotry
• r/IncelExit, for people seeking advice on exiting the incel movement