Since Valentine’s Day is around the corner, this week I’m gonna touch on a topic that does not deal with couples exchanging cheesy gifts, but people on the other end of the spectrum. Remember the 2014 Isla Vista Killings? No? Well, buckle up your seatbelts, kids, because I’m gonna teach you a thing or two about the mysterious world of incels.
Although it sounds like the name of a battery company, incel is actually short for involuntary celibate. It’s an online subculture of people who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one, a state they describe as inceldom. Mostly these are white male heterosexuals roaming around less restrictive chat rooms such as 4chan, incel.me and other forums and blog posts that encourage incels. So what does it have to do with the killings? Let me explain.
Since they can’t get a girlfriend, they get together online and discuss the negative unsuppressed feelings that they have when the women they like are snatched away by the world’s Chads. Chad is defined as that one guy with perfect hair, good looks, great muscles and all the charisma in the world who can get any girl they like. These incel communities, more often than not, promote feelings like misogyny, racism, misanthropy, a sense of entitlement to sex and a sense of resentment against all the Chads that exist. They can almost be considered a cyber hate group of jealous white males who can’t get laid. I’m providing some unwanted comic relief here because it gets a bit dark later and midterms are coming.
Anyway, it started off as a small subreddit on…you guessed it, Reddit and like all things on Reddit, became viral. Incels started pouring in from all the corners of the world, sort of like an anti-me-too movement, until Reddit permabanned the entire group in 2017 for spreading hatred and violence against women among the community. Incels then started going into chat rooms that are easier to access, or even YouTube, which is where Elliot Rodgers posted about killing all the blondes that he could find. This brings me to our topic.
On May 23, 2014, Elliot Rodger, a student at University of California, Santa Barbara went on a killing spree against the students near the campus in Isla Vista, California, killing seven and injuring 14 before shooting himself in the head. He was a self-described incel with violent, misanthropic tendencies with some mental health problems. Before his attack, he uploaded a video to YouTube titled “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution” where he talks about the revenge he’s going to exact on the world that rejected him, sexually and socially. This is a snippet of what he says that sums violent inceldom up: “I’ve wanted a girlfriend, I’ve wanted sex, I’ve wanted love, affection, adoration. You think I’m unworthy of it. That’s a crime that can never be forgiven. If I can’t have you, girls, I will destroy you. You denied me a happy life, and in turn, I will deny all of your life. It’s only fair.”
Surprisingly, the term incel was started by Alana, a female Canadian college student who made a website called “Alana’s Involuntary Celibate Project” where she defines invcels or incels as “anybody of any gender who was lonely, had never had sex or who hadn’t had a relationship in a long time” (although considering no one knows her personally, she could very well be a 300-pound dude named Chuck living in his mother’s basement in suburban Detroit). She started it as a good-natured community of people who can get together and talk about not being able to find a partner until it was hijacked by the hate-filled mass murderers like Elliot Rodger, which she regrets to this day.
There’s still lots to say about incels and their behavior and how feminists and numerous communities condemn the environment they’re creating, but enough for now. I just hope that these acts of violence wouldn’t be glorified among the incel community like Rodger was. If you’re feeling alone and depressed, talk to someone about it. Don’t desensitize yourself to anti-social elements and definitely do not become one of the incels as we know them today.
