Lewys Brace, a senior lecturer in computational social science at the University of Exeter, said of the incel community: “It’s grown, and it’s continuing to grow and diversify, not just growing in terms of users, but also in terms of platforms on which the content appears on.”
He said the incel community in Britain had grown since the pandemic and the COVID-19 lockdowns, partly because people were at home more, but he added: “I also think it’s also partly due to the fact that it’s a much more insidious ideology than some others in the way they really prey on some of the insecurities of these very, very young people. And I mean, they are quite young. I’ve seen posts from people who are 12 or 13.”
Brace told The Epoch Times: “So the incels basically believe that all the traits that women find attractive in men are biologically predetermined. Things like hairline, jaw line, eye colour, stuff like that. They then believe that these traits are sub-standard in themselves, that they are naturally quite ugly.”
“At the same time, they believe that since the rise of second wave feminism in the ‘60s and more recently with various social and technological innovations and developments, that women have gained more autonomy and no longer depend on men for social and economic security,” he added.
Incel Ideology ‘Strips Women of All Agency’
He said: “So it’s quite misogynistic in multiple ways, but one of the ways in which it is most misogynistic is the way it strips women of all agency.”Incel terminology ranks the most handsome, tall, and physically perfect men as Chads, and describes beautiful, unattainable women as Stacys.
Below them come beta males, sometimes called normies, and plain women, known as Beckys.
Then, right at the bottom, come incels.
In the incel ideology, Alpha males such as Tate, a former kickboxer, will always have more success with women and they believe—like the plot of the movie “The Matrix”—men can either take the “blue pill” and continue to live in ignorance, or take the “red pill” and accept the reality of their situation.
Brace said the “wider manosphere” includes incels and “men going their own way,” while Tate would be in a category called “pick-up artists.”
Davison—who gunned down five people in the space of eight minutes, including a 3-year-old girl—is not the first killer known to be influenced by incel culture.
Just before embarking on his attack Minassian went on the message board 4Chan and posted a “manifesto” that began: “Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”
That was a reference to Elliot Rodger, who shot and stabbed six people in California in 2014 before turning his gun on himself.
In February 2020 a 17-year-old incel stabbed a sex worker to death at a massage parlour near Toronto.
The teenager later praised Minassian and, when asked by a police officer why he identified as an incel, told them: “You don’t choose to become an incel. You are born one.”
Brace said Davison and Minassian were both 25 when they carried out their attacks and both had intended to die, but Minassian, who was hoping for “suicide by cop,” survived.
He said this appeared to be a common thread among older incels.
Dangers of Going Down Incel ‘Rabbit Hole’
“They go down this rabbit hole and they eventually hit a point where they feel like this logic is true, and there’s no escaping it. And I think once they go down that rabbit hole, that’s when they start to become obviously more of an attack threat,” he added.In incel ideology, taking the “black pill” means either accepting your fate or doing something about it, meaning some kind of mass violence.
In May 2014 Elliot Rodger, 22, posted a “retribution” video on YouTube and emailed a lengthy autobiographical document to more than 30 acquaintances after carrying out a massacre near a university campus in California.
Rodger never actually used the term incel, but his misogynistic manifesto laid the groundwork for much of the online ideology.
Superintendent Rachel Bentley told the Plymouth inquest Davison had watched a YouTube video about Rodger and had also made references to the “black pill.”
Davison also uploaded videos in which he described himself as a “virgin, [expletive] fat and ugly.”
Brace said the term incel has actually been around since the late 1990s and was ironically first coined by a Canadian woman who set up a website called Alana’s Involuntary Celibate Group and called members invcels, a word which morphed into incels.
Interviewed by the BBC in 2018, Alana said her website had been a “friendly place” and added: “It definitely wasn’t a bunch of guys blaming women for their problems. That’s a pretty sad version of this phenomenon that’s happening today.”
Charlotte Proudman, a London-based barrister and feminist activist, wrote last week on Twitter: “We need to stop thinking of incels as awkward hideaways in a basement on the internet. They are literally YouTubers, policemen, politicians, fathers and brothers. Being an incel has nothing to do with the way you look or present, it’s the way you value and treat women.”
In October 2022 the government issued advice on “understanding and identifying radicalisation risk” in schools, colleges, and universities.
Overlap Between Incel Community and Far-Right
Brace said there is overlap between the incel community and the far-right.“The blue pill/red pill, that’s very common in the far-right, as is this whole idea of this mythical golden age long ago. There’s some anecdotal evidence that perhaps members of the far-right are trying to prey on the weaknesses of incels. But I can’t speak to that because there’s no empirical data for that,” he said.
Brace said there is growing awareness of the danger posed by the incel ideology online.
He said: “Schools are very much aware of it. The problem is, they are doing everything they can but the government needs to enact a more holistic base approach, dealing with this stuff ... We need to introduce lessons into the national curriculum to deal with disinformation, extremist content online, and basically train young people to know when they see this stuff, to know it’s not true, and so deal with it in a healthy sort of way. It’s much like an inoculation, to use a terribly contemporary metaphor.”
