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An incel (/ˈɪnsɛl/ ⓘ IN-sel; a portmanteau of "involuntary celibate") is a member of an online subculture of mostly male and heterosexual people who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one. They often blame, objectify, and denigrate women and girls as a result. The term inspired a subculture that rose to prominence during the 2010s, later influenced by and associated with misogynist terrorists such as Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian.
The incel subculture's online discourse has been characterized by resentment, hostile sexism, anti-feminism, sexual objectification and dehumanization of women, misogyny, misanthropy, self-pity and self-loathing, racism, a sense of entitlement to sex, nihilism, rape culture, and the endorsement of sexual and non-sexual violence against women and the sexually active. Incels tend to blame women and feminism for their inability to find a partner; their romantic failures are often attributed to biological determinism, where women's preference for mating with high-status males (nicknamed "Chads") is seen as innate and unchangeable. Incel communities have been criticized by scholars, government officials, and others for their misogyny, endorsement and encouragement of violence, and extremism. Over time the subculture has become associated with extremism and terrorism, and since 2014 there have been multiple mass killings, mostly in North America, perpetrated by self-identified incels, as well as other instances of violence or attempted violence.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describes incels as "part of the online male supremacist ecosystem" that is included in their list of hate groups. The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) states that "the incel community shares a misogynistic ideology of women as being genetically inferior to men, driven by their sexual desire to reproduce with genetically superior males, thereby excluding unattractive men such as themselves" which "exhibits all of the hallmarks of an extremist ideology"; GIFCT states that incel beliefs combine a wish for a mythical past where all men were entitled to sex from subordinated women, a sense of predestined personal failure, and nihilism, making it a dangerous ideology. Estimates of the overall size of the subculture vary greatly, ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands of individuals.
The first website to use the term "incel" was Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project, a blog and mailing list founded in 1997 by a female university student living in Toronto known as Alana, in order to write about and discuss her own experiences of celibacy with like-minded people. The blog was intended as a supportive and inclusive site for people who had difficulty forming romantic relationships, and was used by people of all genders and sexual orientations to share their thoughts and experiences in order to overcome social barriers such as shyness. Alana originally used the abbreviation "invcel" for "involuntarily celibate", later shortening it to "incel". Her website was intended for "anybody of any gender who was lonely, had never had sex or who hadn't had a relationship in a long time". She later said, "I was trying to create a movement that was open to anybody and everybody."
During her college years and afterward, Alana realized she was bisexual and became more comfortable with her identity. As her own dating life improved, Alana stopped maintaining the website, passing the site's contents on to someone else she did not know around the year 2000. In 2018, Alana said of her project: "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. Things have changed in the last 20 years".
After learning that the perpetrator of the 2014 Isla Vista killings was being glorified by parts of the incel subculture, Alana wrote: "Like a scientist who invented something that ended up being a weapon of war, I can't uninvent this word, nor restrict it to the nicer people who need it". She expressed regret at the change from her original intent of creating an "inclusive community" for people of all genders who were sexually deprived due to social awkwardness, marginalization, or mental illness.
In 2003, the message board love-shy.com was founded as a place for people who felt perpetually rejected or were extremely shy with potential partners to discuss their situations. It was less strictly moderated than its counterpart, IncelSupport, which was also founded in the 2000s. While IncelSupport welcomed men and women and banned misogynistic posts, love-shy.com's userbase was overwhelmingly male. Over the next decade, the membership of love-shy.com and online fringe right-wing communities like 4chan increasingly overlapped.
In the 2000s, incel communities became more extremist as they adopted behaviors common on forums such as 4chan and Reddit, where extremist posts were encouraged as a way to achieve visibility. According to Bruce Hoffman and colleagues writing in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, as "edgy" and extremist statements became more prevalent in incel communities, so too did extremist trolling and "shitposting".
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An incel (/ˈɪnsɛl/ ⓘ IN-sel; a portmanteau of "involuntary celibate") is a member of an online subculture of mostly male and heterosexual people who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one. They often blame, objectify, and denigrate women and girls as a result. The term inspired a subculture that rose to prominence during the 2010s, later influenced by and associated with misogynist terrorists such as Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian.
The incel subculture's online discourse has been characterized by resentment, hostile sexism, anti-feminism, sexual objectification and dehumanization of women, misogyny, misanthropy, self-pity and self-loathing, racism, a sense of entitlement to sex, nihilism, rape culture, and the endorsement of sexual and non-sexual violence against women and the sexually active. Incels tend to blame women and feminism for their inability to find a partner; their romantic failures are often attributed to biological determinism, where women's preference for mating with high-status males (nicknamed "Chads") is seen as innate and unchangeable. Incel communities have been criticized by scholars, government officials, and others for their misogyny, endorsement and encouragement of violence, and extremism. Over time the subculture has become associated with extremism and terrorism, and since 2014 there have been multiple mass killings, mostly in North America, perpetrated by self-identified incels, as well as other instances of violence or attempted violence.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describes incels as "part of the online male supremacist ecosystem" that is included in their list of hate groups. The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) states that "the incel community shares a misogynistic ideology of women as being genetically inferior to men, driven by their sexual desire to reproduce with genetically superior males, thereby excluding unattractive men such as themselves" which "exhibits all of the hallmarks of an extremist ideology"; GIFCT states that incel beliefs combine a wish for a mythical past where all men were entitled to sex from subordinated women, a sense of predestined personal failure, and nihilism, making it a dangerous ideology. Estimates of the overall size of the subculture vary greatly, ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands of individuals.
The first website to use the term "incel" was Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project, a blog and mailing list founded in 1997 by a female university student living in Toronto known as Alana, in order to write about and discuss her own experiences of celibacy with like-minded people. The blog was intended as a supportive and inclusive site for people who had difficulty forming romantic relationships, and was used by people of all genders and sexual orientations to share their thoughts and experiences in order to overcome social barriers such as shyness. Alana originally used the abbreviation "invcel" for "involuntarily celibate", later shortening it to "incel". Her website was intended for "anybody of any gender who was lonely, had never had sex or who hadn't had a relationship in a long time". She later said, "I was trying to create a movement that was open to anybody and everybody."
During her college years and afterward, Alana realized she was bisexual and became more comfortable with her identity. As her own dating life improved, Alana stopped maintaining the website, passing the site's contents on to someone else she did not know around the year 2000. In 2018, Alana said of her project: "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. Things have changed in the last 20 years".
After learning that the perpetrator of the 2014 Isla Vista killings was being glorified by parts of the incel subculture, Alana wrote: "Like a scientist who invented something that ended up being a weapon of war, I can't uninvent this word, nor restrict it to the nicer people who need it". She expressed regret at the change from her original intent of creating an "inclusive community" for people of all genders who were sexually deprived due to social awkwardness, marginalization, or mental illness.
In 2003, the message board love-shy.com was founded as a place for people who felt perpetually rejected or were extremely shy with potential partners to discuss their situations. It was less strictly moderated than its counterpart, IncelSupport, which was also founded in the 2000s. While IncelSupport welcomed men and women and banned misogynistic posts, love-shy.com's userbase was overwhelmingly male. Over the next decade, the membership of love-shy.com and online fringe right-wing communities like 4chan increasingly overlapped.
In the 2000s, incel communities became more extremist as they adopted behaviors common on forums such as 4chan and Reddit, where extremist posts were encouraged as a way to achieve visibility. According to Bruce Hoffman and colleagues writing in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, as "edgy" and extremist statements became more prevalent in incel communities, so too did extremist trolling and "shitposting".