Men who hate women: how ‘incel’ culture became mainstream
It should have been a joyful day spent shopping for clothes and enjoying time with loved ones. Instead, on April 13, at the Westfield Bondi Junction shopping centre in Sydney, 40-year-old Joel Cauchi created terror, stabbing six people to death – five of whom were women. One, Ashlee Good, 38, threw her stabbed baby into the arms of a stranger before later dying in hospital of her wounds. Her nine-month-old child is still recovering.
The only man who died was security guard, Faraz Tahir, 30, who tried in vain to intervene.
Following the attack, the New South Wales police commissioner, Karen Webb, told Australia’s ABC News that it was clear Mr Cauchi targeted women. “It’s obvious to me, it’s obvious to detectives... that the offender focused on women and avoided the men,” she said. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the gender element of the attack as “concerning”. Cauchi’s father meanwhile told reporters: “To you, he is a monster. To me, he was a very sick boy… he wanted a girlfriend and he’s got no social skills and he was frustrated out of his brain.”
Police are still investigating what drove Cauchi, who had previously worked as male escort, to carry out the attack. But it has not escaped attention that the killing has all the hallmarks of an incel assault.
The term – which is short for involuntary celibates – refers to an online subculture of mostly straight, white men who consider themselves unable to attract women and so make them, and wider society, objects of hate. Classed as an extremist ideology by The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), it follows the belief that women are genetically inferior to men, and are driven to reproduce with superior males, therefore excluding less attractive males such as themselves.
Steeped in misogyny and resentment, examples of the belief system are most commonly found on internet forums and chatrooms like Reddit. Its terminology, to the uninitiated, may at first appear as nonsense. For instance, incels refer to “Chads” (athletic, handsome men) and “Stacys” (extremely attractive but vapid women); both do not struggle to gain the attention of the opposite sex. “Beckys” are average-looking women. Women in general are sometimes referred to as “femoids” or “FHOs” (female humanoid organisms).
The incel culture says its followers have taken the “black pill” – a reference from the film The Matrix, which means incels have fatalistically accepted “the truth” that they will never be attractive to women.
Dr Kaitlyn Regehr, associate professor in digital humanities at University College London, has studied how algorithms have led to a rise in online hate and misogyny, including incel attacks. Algorithms are designed to keep a user’s feed interesting and engaging, by serving up similar content to posts they’ve previously read and interacted with. So by reading one incel post, you’re likely to get served up five more.
“We do not know if this Australian stabber had viewed incel content online, but the case has some of the hallmarks,” she explains. “These communities are men who feel left out of romantic relationships and also society more generally.
“They take to online spaces often to get help with their feelings of loneliness, but then find harmful content, which can be even more detrimental to their mental health and wellbeing.
“This content and ideology – focused on women or the upward mobility of women – helps them articulate a feeling of loss of control. First, they feel left out and lonely, then these ideologies morph into frustration and then anger.”
She adds that while such content used to be on extreme sites, such as 4chan and 8chan chat rooms, more recently it has become mainstream, and has moved onto TikTok and other accessible youth platforms. “It is of real concern that young men are being served this sort of content. They are micro-dosing on this stuff and we all need to be concerned.”
All the big tech platforms have taken steps to limit harmful content on their sites, but it’s debatable how effective these steps have been. Recent research has shown that as soon as sites such as Reddit shut down forums hosting extreme content, new ones pop up elsewhere on other sites.
The term incel was initially coined in the late 1990s by a gay Canadian woman known as Alana, who was struggling to find romance. But by 2012, the community had morphed into a place for men who believed they had been wrongfully denied sex with women and that their masculinity was under threat.
In 2014, it then turned violent when Elliot Rodger – considered the ideological founder of the movement – stabbed six people in California before killing himself. Rodger left a YouTube video and a 137-page manifesto, which blamed women for rejecting him.
The attack inspired copycat killings across the world, before spreading to the UK in August 2021, when Jake Davison, 22, killed five people in Plymouth after looking at incel threads online.
The Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a British non-profit organisation, warned that his videos were being used as a “rallying point” for incel extremists. Worryingly, in the months after his death, visits to the largest UK incel forums increased more than fivefold.
For Duncan Gardham, an expert in extremism and terrorism, the rising numbers of those drawn to the Incel ideology is just one example of misogynistic groups that exist within the so-called “manosphere” – a web of online blogs and forums promoting masculinity and opposition to feminism.
“There are no official statistics on incel users, and it is hard to monitor,” he says. “But there has been an increase in these violent online discussions in the last five years and there may well be thousands of adherents in the UK.
“The UK rise has followed what we have seen in the US, with most cases being a mix of far-Right extremism and misogyny. Although some may see this as a loose collection of online individuals who share characteristics, there is pressure that it should be recognised as an ideology and treated as such.
“What distinguishes it from the unpleasant posturing of other misogynists online is the way it advocates random violence against the population in general – and that can be women and men.”
According to studies from the University of Exeter, almost 1,000 references to dehumanising misogyny or violent action are recorded each day in the “incelosphere” – a sharp rise from 2016.
But it is not clear why the increase is occurring, with Harvard psychology postdoc Miriam Lindner suggesting the accelerating social and economic shifts in gender roles, and the way the internet works, is creating an “ecology where incel beliefs can thrive and make violence attractive”.
She explains that, in evolutionary terms, men might desire greater control over the selection process of mates. But in recent decades, the balance of power, in terms of birth control and liberal freedom, has shifted more decidedly to women.
“Women, now that we are in a position where we don’t need to rely on a man to be financially stable, have that freedom to express the attributes that we are looking for in a long-term partner.”
She also highlighted a study from the Pew Research Center, which found that while 60 per cent of single men were looking for relationships or dates, compared to 38 per cent of women. Studies into online dating show that women get more likes than men on these apps, with women finding 80 per cent of men unattractive on dating sites.
“I posit that hateful online communities allow low-status men to engage… with a sympathetic audience of like-minded others, providing private but futile satisfaction,” Lindner writes.
“They are trying to prove their potency, their mattering, their ability to wield power by inflicting harm. This impression of potency could (in an ultimate sense) make them more respected and hence sexually successful.”
J.M Berger, an associate fellow at the International Centre for counter-terrorism, says: “Most experts agree the movement is growing, and there have been a significant number of violent incidents over the last couple of years.
“I think the biggest factor driving the growth of the movement is that it has crystallised a lot of misogynistic attitudes that were already widely present in society, clearly articulating them and seeking to formally justify them.
“Additionally, the rise in self-described incels is probably related to a general rise in right-wing extremism. Not all, but many incels are overtly racist or anti-Semitic in addition to their misogynistic views.”
Whether this is true or not, the infiltration of incel is being felt in wider society. According to a recent YouGov survey, there is a growing incel and manosphere subculture in schools, with one in six boys having a positive view of Andrew Tate, the social media influencer and self-styled king of toxic masculinity. Tate, who has been charged with rape and human trafficking, has been banned from most social media platforms but is hugely familiar to pupils. He has denied all charges against him.
Last May, the Department for Education said there had been a “significant increase” in teachers reporting pupils to the government counter-terrorism scheme Prevent over “mixed or unclear ideologies”, including “inceldom”.
According to digital newspaper Schools Week, government figures showed such referrals “leapt” from 193 in 2016-17, to 1,071 in 2019-20. This rise led a 2020 government counter-extremism commission to call incel subculture a “new threat”.
“The incel movement is not some disparate set of lone wolves who have mysteriously come to the identical conclusions about why and how much they hate women,” explains Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the CCDH. “It is in fact a highly organised online community with shared values and ideas, with lies about women and hate as their defining principles.
“Our research has shown that incel ideology – which openly celebrates the killing and raping of women – is becoming even more extreme, and incels congregate in online forums where they also openly praise violent incels who have committed atrocities.”
“It is essential that the tech companies take action against incel hate forums to help protect women and girls.”
Still, the incel community is not classed as a terrorist group but one of extremism.
Jonathan Hall, KC, the UK’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, says: “Terrorism means you are committing violence while trying to advance a cause or ideology.
“But you can also have people who commit a violent act due to being mentally unwell and having a sense of personal injustice.
“They might believe in a certain view – that all women are to be hated – but they commit their act on their own; they are self-initiated and these are not terrorists.
“Either way, however, these attacks are deeply disturbing.”
