Violent misogyny is unfortunately not confined to the internet’s ‘incels’
There were, and remain, many compelling reasons not to read My Twisted World, as Elliot Rodger called the apologia he distributed before killing six people, then himself, in 2014. The main one being: let’s not do what he wanted. Women readers, in particular, were scheduled to study his plans to murder as many of them as possible and realise, too late, that it was their fault for not sleeping with him.
But maybe we’ve missed something? In a close reading on a music website, a male reviewer commended it online (before his removal) as “beautifully written”.
Without the internet, in fact, the lengthy document might, like most of its genre, never have gone much beyond clinical circles and the dedicated, spree-killer subset of true crime connoisseurs. As it was, the peer-to-peer connectivity that inspired dreams, among early cyberutopians, of a better world, ensured that the Rodger document would be circulated, rapidly, within the sort of existing misogynistic circles he’d frequented. Here, an international membership feels no need to represent its interest in women killing and torturing as a scholarly pursuit.
On, for instance, Reddit, a website long portrayed by enthusiasts who included Rodger as a marvel of in-house moderation, a sub-group of men identifying as “involuntary celibates” and who idolised Rodger was only closed down last year. Fortunately, given the Toronto mass murderer appears likewise to have worshipped Rodger, Reddit had finally adjusted its policies so as to prohibit content that “encourages, glorifies, incites or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or group of people”.
Prior to that, content glorifying Rodger, alongside more stereotypical exhortations to violence, was presumably regarded as just the routine, woman-hating banter some men go in for, in private, and quite unlike the terrorist hate speech designed, in less respectable online communities, to conclude in murder.
At any rate, the relevant participants shortly reconvened in less censorious forums. “I want to murder a femoid,” a contributor shares on a notionally moderated site, whose signatories enjoy debating how they’d murder a woman, after drugging and raping her. One fancies this: “Take a surgical knife, cut open her abdominal area and remove the organs while she’s alive.”
In the days since the Canadian man murdered 10 people, a good deal of attention, including glossaries of special terms, has focused on the peculiarities of “incel” online behaviour. Here, the standard misogynistic repertoire – “you deserve to be raped”, etc – is ornamented, a bit, with coinages such as femoids. But actually, so what? To many social media users, neither the language nor the sentiments expressed in posts such as the one above, however far along the woman-hating continuum, are likely to look radically out of the ordinary.
Apart from anything, Jack the Ripper, who would now be the toast of angry celibates, had the disembowelling idea 130 years ago. And further demonstrating that misogynistic tropes are by no means the monopoly of resentful male virgins, curators at San Francisco library are currently staging an exhibition featuring a display of dissident-silencing weaponry (axes and bats) and other hate-advertising artefacts.
Photographs of one vitrine, featuring a red bespattered T-shirt reading: “I punch terfs!” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists/women who disagree with me), may have struck a chord with anyone following the current UK debate about the government’s self-ID proposals. To date, threats, from one side, which echo, inescapably, some of those in the pro-Rodger playbook (“die in a fire terf scum”) have yet to generate comparably widespread concern, even after a woman was punched. Her assailant had earlier expressed the wish to “fuck up some terfs”.
For many prominent women, the violence threatened by Rodger fans must sound especially familiar. Caroline Criado-Perez, to whom we owe the new statue of Millicent Fawcett, is just one brilliant woman to have been rewarded, on Twitter, with sexualised menaces (”choke you with my dick” etc), which attracted nowhere near the appalled interest that now surrounds “incels”, as we should surely agree not to call these men, and not only because it implies that involuntary celibacy represents a special condition. It’s often called, for instance, “being single” and is what dating websites were invented for.
To agree to use the lads’ pet terminology, is, moreover, to suggest that something distinguishes them from legions of other threatening men expressing a similar wish to control, punish or just silence women and, critically, in similar language. Such as, to non-compliant sexual targets, “choke on my dick”. A glance at Twitter confirms how generously such abuse has been accommodated, even as the repetitive insults and threats indicate gendered hostility to women in general.
If sexism does not explain how rapidly the language employed against dissenting women (including some trans women) in the UK self-ID debate, degenerated, in some quarters, into generic-sounding obscenities (eg, to unco-operative lesbians, “choke on my ladydick”), perhaps it’s because social media has for so long facilitated the delusion that hate speech, as applied to women, is simply part of the landscape.
The very odiousness of the misogynist language that has become, according (pre-Rodger) to one academic, Emma Alice Jane, “a lingua franca in many sectors of the cybersphere”, may help explain, she argues, why the “ethical and material implications” of this form of hate speech have been so under-studied. Hate speech that persists unchallenged, by both – for their different reasons – reactionaries and progressives, is unlikely, anyway, to be corrected.
Maybe women should skim the Elliot Rodger plan for subjugating their sex, if only to appreciate that, once non-subservient women are expected to live with obscene online threats – and axe exhibitions and punching – at least some elements of his vision have surely been realised.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist