New columnist: Verity Johnson
If you had asked me a few weeks ago what I thought about a bunch of men online who were angry at women because they couldn’t get laid, I’d have snorted. Yeah, yeah. I know. The internet is full of angry men bitching and whining about women. I found that out when I became a columnist at 16. I’ve had a pretty much permanent stream of angry emails from dudes who want to shout at me, sleep with me and attack me. Normally all at the same time.
We know, vaguely, there are a lot of angry men on the internet. Even if your only exposure to them has been reading the comments section on a news article. And yeah, we snort, they’re sad and angry and awful – but they’re just losers. They’re not a threat in real life, right? They’re just bitching and moaning. They’re just basement-dwelling, fedorawearing, keyboard-bashing armchair warriors.
I don’t think this now. After Toronto, I realised just how wrong these assumptions are. Before driving his van on to the sidewalk and killing mostly women, Alek Minassian wrote on Facebook: ‘‘The incel rebellion has begun!’’, promising to overthrow ‘‘Chads’’ and ‘‘Stacys’’ and praising the ‘‘supreme gentleman’’ Elliot Rodger.
He’s referring to the group of online misogynists called ‘‘incels’’ (involuntarily celibates). They are a splinter group of a wider internet men’s rights movement.
You might have heard of Men’s Rights Activists? Those, loosely, are a bunch of men who bitch about how women/feminism ruined their lives, took away their rights, and need to be overthrown so men can be in their rightful place again. (Grrrr, manly noises, grrr.) This is where the overwhelming image of internet misogynists as sad-sack, immature idiots comes from.
But incels aren’t your standard MRA. Incels are largely self-pitying, angry men who can’t get laid. They blame women for denying them sex. They argue that sex is a man’s fundamental right, and that women enjoy deliberately withholding sex from them in order to torment them. Attractive women (Stacys) are also apparently only sleeping with good-looking alpha men (Chads), and deliberately rejecting these men. And we’re also asking to be sexually assaulted by wearing provocative clothes like, ahem, yoga pants.
And in comparison to incels, MRAs are practically the Power Puff Girls. See incels, unlike MRAs, advocate violence as the only solution to free themselves from female oppression. And so they preach for the bloody overthrow of women, having endlessly detailed discussions on how to gruesomely gang-rape and murder women.
It’s not bitching and moaning. It’s a horrifically misogynistic ideology that indoctrinates socially isolated men and incites them to attack, rape and kill women. And that’s what they do.
Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista gunman who in 2014 opened fire on a sorority house and murdered six people, was an incel. His aim was to get revenge on the women who rejected him by slaughtering them. And to assert his alpha supremacy over the Chads by killing them too.
Suddenly this isn’t a few neckbeards bashing keyboards. This sounds a lot more like a terrorist movement. Although it’s likely the attackers have mental health conditions, they aren’t lone wackos having psychotic breakdowns; they believe they’re carrying out an ideological mission.
But the scary part is that incels’ violent behaviour isn’t unique; it’s just on the hyper extreme end of a scale of male violence present in society. As I’ve got older, I’ve seen time and again the link between male entitlement, insecurity and violence. Women who get jealous of their partners tend to get bitchy and emotionally manipulative to them. Men who feel entitled to their partners and get jealous often just hit them.
I felt a version of this myself when I was in a bar in Wellington last month. A red-faced guy staggered over to me and closed in shouting, ‘‘Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey beautiful.’’ I looked the other way and started to move away. So he punched me in the stomach. The bar staff looked on in boredom.
The other scarier part is that their extreme, emasculating shame in their virginity isn’t that foreign. I distinctly remember the time I met a guy from an all-boys school, who had been getting so much stick for being a virgin at 16 that he paid to lose his virginity in a brothel. He just wanted to feel like a ‘‘real man’’. He’s not the first guy I’ve heard of who has done that.
No woman would pay to do that. We might feel shame for not being able to attract partners, but we wouldn’t attempt to validate our femininity by paying to get laid.
It’s the parallels between the real world and incels’ world that make this truly terrifying. It reminds me that extremists aren’t some alien entity that just appear.
They start out as that red-faced guy in the bar. New columnist Verity Johnson is a 23-year-old Auckland writer, TV presenter and social media guru.
Suddenly this isn’t a few neckbeards bashing keyboards. This sounds a lot more like a terrorist movement.