The incel movement was discovered by the general population in 2014 after a mass murderer posted on Facebook, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun…” Starting as an inspirational social movement, incels has been tied to at least four mass murders and, most recently, as a mass shooting threat for the October 2019 movie premier of The Joker. Like with other hate groups, radicalized young men use incel ideas to boost their tattered egos and justify sexist and even violent behavior. How can we prevent our kids from being victimized or radicalized by this crazy movement?
What is an incel?
The term incelwas first coined in 1993 and is short for “involuntarily celibate,” a non-derogatory term for people who’ve had a hard time finding an intimate relationship.
The incel movement began when a young woman named Alana was working in a university math department. While she was at her desk, a man walked up and said, “I am 27 years old and have never been on a date.”[1] Alana noticed the man needed someone to talk to, so she listened. She discovered that she too could identify as an involuntary celibate. After she found love, she created an online support group for “INVCELS” who were distressed due to intimacy problems.
Early in the group’s development, a primary rule was adopted that members could not blame others for their problems. Instead, each member was required to commit to self-improvement. At that time, haters and blamers were kicked out of the group.[2] Over time, Alana left, the movement grew, and different sub-groups of incels formed.
Social Movement to Hate Group
Researchers believe that the boasts and posts of social media feed into a hopeless cycle of compare and despair for some users.[3] For the more radical of social media users, there are online forums where one can find validation for their despair. Radicalized incels adopt hateful belief systems typical of a broader online manosphere on forums like 4chan, Reddit, and Voat. Incels overlap with extremist men’s rights vlogs that offer pickup artistry tips and espouse the hateful rhetoric of alt-right and white supremacy groups, inciting suicide among fellow incels, the assault of sexually successful women, and violence toward sexually successful men.
Further spurred by the #MeToo Movement, radicalized incel groups spew hate and use their comradery to threaten and intimidate others. Some stereotype people who have successful relationships as “Chads” and “Stacys.” With young people unsupervised online hours every day, hate group forums can influence vulnerable teens. In my book, Screen Time in the Mean Time, I describe how “the Internet platform is the perfect tool for grooming, behavioral manipulation, and coercive thought control.”
The Black Pill
The black pill is an analogy from the movie, the Matrix. In the Matrix, Neo has two options of pills to take, the blue pillto stay in the Matrix, and remain in the comfort of blissful ignorance or the red pillto face life’s harsh realities.[4] Incels use the term black pill to describe the fatalistic perspective that women control the world, and incels are hopeless to get sex because of biological determinism, meaning they were fatalistically born with intimacy-crippling features like low attractiveness, small penis size, or shyness.[5] They believe they lost their chances of intimacy at birth because they lost the genetic lottery.[6]
Group Think & Radicalization
Online forums offer violent incels a community of like-minded individuals to escalate hateful philosophies. In psychology, we call thisgroupthink, reflecting the dynamic of one’s ethical, moral, and rational values eventually dissolving into the group’s character. Individuals joining a group in search of support are vulnerable to a group’s coercive and sometimes irrational group opinions. Groupthink differs from individual opinions in that members ultimately fail to think for themselves, instead of becoming dependent on group principles.
Mass Murder
In May 2014, a member of the incel group shot and killed six people in Isla Vista, California.[7] His name was Elliot Rodger, and he was 22 years old. Fueled by the philosophies of other members of the group, he felt revenge was his only solution. Rodger felt rejected by women. He blamed handsome people who were happy for his lack of intimacy with women. The Incel community saw him as a hero.
In April 2018, Alek Minassian killed ten people driving through a crowded street. He posted on Facebook, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun… All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”[8] Alek carried out the attack for the same reasons Rodger did, hatred for those who did not have intimacy problems.
In October 2015, Christopher Harper-Mercer killed nine people at his community college campus in Roseburg Oregon before killing himself.[9] He too identified as an incel.
In February 2018, another man who was part of the incel community, Nikolas Cruz, was charged with killing 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.[10]
Clowncel
In September 2019, the FBI reported to partners in the private sector about a threat from online incel communities regarding unspecific mass shootings threatened to occur at the premiere showings of ‘the Joker’, slated for October 4, 2019. A September 2019 report by the Department of Defense reported on the same threat.
Those making these threats were reported to be a side group of incels who identify as clowncels. They chose this movie because they resonated with the beliefs of the main character, Arthur Fleck. Arthur is a poor, mentally ill stand-up comedian who is a victim of violent thugs and a society that views him as a freak. In the movie, he retaliates against society by becoming a criminal mastermind known as The Joker.
Support positive online and offline peer relationships rather than restrict unhealthy friendships.
Teach your teen how to avoid cyberbullying by teaching empathy, social and netiquette skills, and complex problem-solving.
Just as parents keep an eye on their teens’ school and after-school activities, they must also monitor their virtual activities.
Model healthy balance and self-care.
Implement healthy eating, sleeping, and exercise habits and explain why that is so important for strength and health.
Love and compliment your kids loudly and unapologetically for all they are.
Reinforce that the self is made up of far more facets than a beautiful face.
Remind your teen that what they see on social media and in advertisements isn’t always the real deal.
Thank you to CSUCI intern, Andrew Weissmann, for teaching us about the incel movement, and how it has splintered off to be a hate group with coercive access to kids. For more information about how to protect your kids from the grooming techniques of cults and hate groups, check out the GKIS article “White Supremacists or ISIS? Are Hate Groups and Cults Seducing Your Teen Online?
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetKidsInternetSafe.
Onward to More Awesome Parenting,
Tracy S. Bennett, Ph.D.
Mom, Clinical Psychologist, CSUCI Adjunct Faculty
Works Cited
[1] ReplyAll Gimlet
[2] ReplyAll Gimelt
[3] bbc.com Facebook lurking makes you miserable by Sean Coughlan
[4] medium.com by Ethan Jiang
[5] medium.com by Ethan Jiang
[6] bbc.com/news/blogs-trending Toronto van attack: Inside the dark world of ‘incels’ by Jonathan Griffin
[7] The New York Times What is an Incel? A term used by the Toronto Van Attack Suspect, Explained by Niraj Chokshi
[8] The New York Times What is an Incel? By Niraj Chokshi
[9] The New Yorker The Rage of the Incels by Jia Tolentino
[10] Babe.net by Harry Shukman
“Monsters aren’t born. They are created”… Are you buying that?
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I’m so furious right now! I just got off the phone with my UCSB-student daughter, who informed me about a slasher film titled, Del Playa, being promoted for release. A petition with 20,000 signatures so far is being circulated by Santa Barbara college students calling for its halt, rightfully upset at the audacity of this writer/director capitalizing on the death of innocent victims from last summer’s Isla Vista shooting. The movie was filmed in Isla Vista, written and directed by a UCSB alumni, and has a protagonist stalker/murderer portrayed in a sympathetic light (“Monsters aren’t born. They are created”). The writer/director was quoted to say,
I’m more than skeptical. After all, the superficial, narcissistic online celebrity culture has taught us that profit and shameless self-promotion at the expense of others is acceptable. Everybody’s doing it!
Somebody’s feeling helpless and losing their composure? Film it and FaceBook it! Celebrate their downfall. Hilarious!
Sex on a yacht? Film it and arrange for it to be “stolen.” Publicly denounce the thief while signing your reality series contract.
Kids get gunned down in cold blood by a deranged murderer? Go to the same neighborhood and film a slasher film. Make the protagonist a bullied loner turned down by a beautiful cheerleader like the real-life murderer. Publicly apologize to the still-traumatized community while actively promoting the release of the film.
What the hell is happening to us? Have social media likes and potential for profit rented out the moral judgment center of our brains? Are we so jaded by disappointment that we no longer bother to speak out for the right? Are trolls now setting the tone of discussion just because they have no limits and limitless time? Please tell me my judgment is skewed from the perspective of a protective mother lion. Because I don’t like to think that we have, in fact, slid to such lows as a society.
I’m aware that I risk promoting this heartless film capitalizing on still-fresh pain and trauma. I’m honestly conflicted about it. But I also hope it sparks outrage that shames the film creators into pulling it from the shelves. Or maybe my article will remind us that six innocent kids were stabbed and gunned down in cold blood May 23, 2014, by a remorseless homicidal maniac; a young adult who wrote a detailed manifesto evidencing his evil plot to punish those who wronged him; a young adult who left a chilling YouTube video stating his indignation upon being rejected by beautiful women. It’s important that we don’t forget the victims and work harder for gun violence prevention.
I’m still sad for the murder victims’ families, as well as the Santa Barbara students stripped of their safety and sense of innocent celebration. I was a student at UCSB in the 1980s. My memories of Isla Vista are of partying hoards of sunburned college kids, laughing and playing Smash Ball at sunset at Dog Shit Park. In those days we feared midterms, finals, and that we might oversleep and miss one of the three parties we hoped to attend that night. These were the memories of innocence, our first try at independence and openly joyous friendship; the memories of university life outside of the library or classroom.
I have a daughter there now who heard the bullets and saw kids running in terror last summer, moments before she was planning to walk the same streets as the murderer’s bloodied victims. She came home and fell into my arms, afraid, confused, and sad.
We desperately tried to understand what had happened. We read the killer’s ranting manifesto on the living room couch, lit by the glow of news updates. We cried and ached for the parents who lost their young sons and daughters, the apples of their eyes, their lives taken when their futures were blossoming with possibility. We still work to patch together her recovery while trying to reclaim a fun-filled university experience.
Who in their right mind would think of filming a slasher film in the same community only one year later?
Somebody who spent hours with its creation somehow blind to the parallels and the pain it would cause? Somebody who thinks they can say there’s no connection when parallels are splashed all over the trailer like blood on asphalt? Somebody without basic empathy and compassion?
For those who know my work, you know I speak out against public shaming. You also know I’m a fierce advocate for the underdog, for families and kids. Today I’m calling for writer, director Shaun Hart and producer Josh Berger to pull their film in dedication of the grieving and the traumatized and reflect on their conscience. Or better yet, devote their creative enthusiasm in service of murder victims instead of providing violent fodder for the lost and the lonely.
Is this a first amendment rights issue or a human one? Weigh in, shout out, take a side! I’m proud of the Santa Barbara students speaking out. They give us hope that the world has not gone to hell in a hand basket. I’m with student writer Hector Sanchez Castaneda, who says
