Incel ideology overlaps misogyny with racism
The more things change, the more they stay the same, sometimes dangerously so.
In all the discussions around incels, or involuntary celibates — a term violently wrested out of an obscure internet subculture and thrown into mainstream lexicon after last week’s van rampage in Toronto — a less talked-about aspect is the overlap of its foundational misogyny with racism.
There’s a reason for that. It’s complicated.
“When you have these communities that don’t have coherent ideologies on a lot of things, they’re united in their misogyny, not necessarily united on the racial stuff,” says Arshy Mann, a reporter for Xtra, a Toronto-based LGBTQ magazine, who has been surfing the larger “manosphere” subculture for a decade and researching incels for the past six months.
Taking a virtual gander through some of these incels threads is like entering the Byzantine paths of a twisted mind.
Whatever adjectives cross your mind, “healthy” is unlikely to be one of them.
Mann has come across East Asian men upset that white men have an easier time sleep- ing with East Asian women. He has come across brown men who fetishize whiteness.
Often, the racism is specifically anti-Black, he says.
“All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger,” says the now-deleted Facebook post on the wall of Alek Minassian, the man charged with murders after the Toronto van rampage.
Rodger, the half-Asian, 22-year-old Santa Barbara, Calif., killer of six people (and then himself ) in 2014, hailed as some sort of patron saint for the incels, was so fixated on whiteness he bleached his hair and fantasized about tall, blond girls.
He saw their rejection as a rejection of his non-white parts. So he reserved in his so-called manifesto particular venom for boys of colour who got attention from white girls.
“How could an inferior, ugly Black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves. I deserve it more …”
Rodger’s rage wasn’t reserved just for Black people, though.
“How could an inferior Mexican guy be able to date a white blonde girl, while I was still suffering as a lonely virgin?”
“How could an ugly Asian attract the attention of a white girl, while a beautiful Eurasian like myself never had any attention from them?”
While experts caution against assuming that it was Minassian who authored his Facebook post, its content offers a window into this miserable world.
“The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys!” it says.
Chads are the attractive white men who get all the attention from Stacys, usually white women. But if Chad is the hated white guy in this warped world, then “Tyrone” is the Black Chad, even more to be reviled.
Yet, there is a large nonwhite, or “ethnicels” participation on these forums.
“A significant number of these people who self-describe as incels identify as nonwhite,” Mann says. “I see a lot of South Asian and East Asian men and boys — or people of South Asian and East Asian origins.” The currycels and ricecels. And, of course, there are nazicels.
“There’s a real overlap with other parts of the alt-right,” Mann says. “The ‘manosphere,’ more broadly, is an entry point into more racist, anti-Semitic and white nationalist ways of thinking.
“Because these are parallel subcultures, there is a lot of movement from one to the other.”
On one Incels.me thread, there is a discussion on “should Incels and alt-right form an unholy alliance?”
Not everyone is on board automatically. “They get some pushback,” Mann says. At the same time, he says, it’s a topic placed “within the window of legitimate discussion.”
On that same thread, a poster asks: Should antimiscegenation laws be enforced globally or should prostitution be made legal around the world?
It’s difficult to take seriously what appears to be juvenile jockeying around, a venting if you like, a play for who is worse off, who is uglier, who has it tougher — until there’s an actual body count.
“Of course, not all of them are violent,” Mann says. But the groups create a permission structure to engage in violence, he says. “They’re explicitly saying this is a good thing to do … It’s a way to prove their masculinity to engage in public violence.”
In one discussion on Minassian, a poster calling himself “blackcel” says, “While I do not condone killing or rape, I would be a lot more proud of a methodical Incel serial killer who carefully picked his victims and possibly raped them before death.”