The term “incel” began in a vastly different place from the word we know today. Coined by a woman known as Alana, it was first used within a Reddit group for lonely singles in the 1990s. These incels were nothing like the group we know today: made up of adults of all genders, the forum looked to support first-time daters in their search for a relationship (Williams). It was not until long after Alana’s departure that the group took a deeply misogynistic and violent turn.

Today, incels are most known for their online presence and their public acts of gender-based violence (GBV). Attacks such as Santa Barbara’s in 2014 or Toronto’s in 2018 have been responsible for the deaths of dozens. Incel culture—the attacks, but also the grotesque online ideology behind them—has become highly publicized and captured the fascination of scholars and the media alike (Kelly et al 6).

The foundational belief in incel groups is that women and sex is something that is owed to them, but for some reasons (the stupidity of women, the rise of feminism, etcetera), that right is being unfairly denied. In this way, two key terms of Phoebe Donnelly’s “Demystifying Gender Analysis for Research on Violent Extremism” become important when discussing incels: biological determinism and protest masculinity. That is, incels create their own system of oppression by their gender essentialism, and, protesting that created hierarchy of masculinity, perform these violent acts as a form of protest masculinity. This makes incels a self-sustaining system (Donnelly 5).

Gender analysis is unique in incel violence because men are the creators and arbitrators of that violence, and yet women are scapegoated as the cause. While incel rhetoric repeatedly identifies themselves as “victims” of deprivation and “injustice” by women (to the Santa Barbara attacker, incel GBV is just “retribution” for women’s own wrongs against them), the elaborate culture within incel forums is what actually oppresses them and drives them to violence (Kelly et al 12). So, while women are important to the study of incels as the main target of their violence, men and their construction of masculinities are undoubtedly more important. Incel men are their own worst enemy.

Further, an intersectional lens is important to the study of incels because much of the constructions of masculinities and femininities within these forums rely heavily on established racist tropes. “Chad,” the ideal masculine figure (that is, the man that has sex with women) is always white; again, the Santa Barbara attacker identifies those who are not a “descendant of the British aristocracy” as “inferior” men that do not deserve the limited resource that is women (Williams, Kelly et al 12). The popular acronym “JBW” (Just Be White) indicates a strain of incels of a racial minority, where their lack of whiteness is the barrier between the pleasure they are entitled to. Further, self-identifying acronyms like “NEET” (not in employment, education, or training) have brought attention to a class dimension in incel culture (Kelly et al 21).

Studying the masculinity created within incel communities is key to stopping their violence in the future. It is only through a widespread, multidimensional approach that incel ideology can be stopped—an approach that engages with security policy as much as it does social deprogramming.