“Incel”

[Scribblegirl]

Just come across this horrific phrase in the context of the Canadian attacks. I’ve always thought I was relatively aware but this completely passed me by.

Does anyone have any background resources they can share on the phrase/“movement”? Not sure I can face some of the murkier sites my first searches found.

Troll, that link! That is the funniest thing I've read in years. What sites has that man been reading? Do they mail you free crack when you sign up?

This is the second large scale terrorist attack by an intel. The first being Elliot Rodger. No doubt it will be explained away again as mental health issues.

But something else is clearly going on. The hate from some men is palpable.

It was an MN thread which alerted me to the comment by Laurie Penny: "Germaine Greer once wrote that women have no idea how much men hate them. Thanks to the internet, now we do". So bloody true.

Porn is overly accessible and causing unrealistic expectations (hot horny young women gagging for aggressive sex from any man).

And it's further normalised in popular culture. Can you imagine reversing the sex roles in films such as Knocked Up (fat goofy guy charms beautiful woman), or Man Up (old fella charms beautiful younger woman - despite being initially annoyed that she's not actually 24)?

What can happen to make things better? Or will it inevitably get worse?

It feels that rights for women are taking a complete nose dive.

Angry it is HILARIOUS and TERRIFYING at the same time.

We have a real problem with young men.

I actually think it's really easy for us to assume that this is a tiny minority, but the number of posters on these sites would suggest otherwise. Some may not be as bad as others- but this kind of logic is being spread around and I've felt that it's worth monitoring.

A lot of campaigns for body image in recent years have focused on women and unrealistic photoshop etc. I don't know if we've targeted boys in the same way or had the same success in reaching them.

These aren't guys who are conforming to the trope of 'The Geek gets the girl in the end.' These are guys who think they're above every girl and so should be able to do what they want to her as per their right as a male.

Agreed. On the rare occasions that men deign to acknowledge that this is happening they try to handwave it away as poor sad geeks vetting. That's not what's going on here. These are radicalized young men who've already proven that they're dangerous. Their beliefs can make for comical reading but they're just so absurd, but the next step after laughter should be "what are we going to do about this?"

Venting, not vetting. Please don't let these guys near any pets.

It is all too easy to laugh it off.

But as parents (as many are on this site) there is the very real possibility that our disenfranchised teen is one of these.

How many posts have we seen on here in the past referring to tween/teen porn misuse, young girls conforming to ridiculous ideals of sexuality coming from porn, the language some young boys use towards their mothers, sisters and other women.

Now, i LOVE gaming. But gaming seems to be one of those hobbies that young boys can be herded into. It's hard to say no if all their friends are doing it and we can kid on that it's a social thing because they can talk to their peers online - but in reality we are isolating them further.

For every kid that is able to have a laugh with their kids on fifa and then go out and hang out with mates there is another that is playing farcry and staying in all night- it is a lonely existence. They might not feel lonely because there's other people on the screen- but by being able to realise their social characters outwith a real life setting it means that they are not bound by normal social norms.

For example, if a group of teen boys are sitting in your local burger joint shouting at the top of their lungs about bitches and ho's or sluts they are likely to be asked to leave. Or they could be spotted by their neighbour who dobs them into their mum etc etc.

Online that is not happening. Their behaviour goes unchecked and is acceptable within this new audience. There is no fear of somebody telling their mum (a very potent motivator when you're a 13 year old boy-whether they like it or not!).

Schools are not set up to cope with this. Curriculum changes do not happen overnight. Teachers cannot be expected to take this on board.

As parents it is our responsibility to know what our children are doing. And if you don't know how the internet works (as many people have proven on Mn over the years by being oblivious to personal data, general terminology or the horror that is some ends of 4chan...) then you shouldn't be letting your kids anywhere near it.

It is fucking scary. I'm not laughing.

I hate the idea that anyone is entitled to sex or romance from anyone else. It's really creepy. It needs calling out any time anyone hears it. If people are not interested in me because I'm fat or middle aged, fine. No one is entitled to sex or romance.

I still thing a massive percentage of the growth of this kind of attitude in young men is due to porn. There's a whole generation who were sneakily watching hardcore porn on their phones from long before they were old enough to actually have sex, and it's created all sorts of ugly, hostile attitudes towards women on a scale that hasn't been seen before.

I'm scared for the young women who're encountering those young men when they try to go out and form relationships, and glad to be old enough that even if DH and I ever split up I wouldn't have to deal with that generation of men.

And you know what they say about 'fat, middle aged women'?

You should be having sex with them. Because of your 'reduced' curb appeal, rather than keeping your body for yourself- you should have sex with an incel. As it's their human right. And if you don't do so it's because you're a snooty uptight bitch who thinks she can get a 'Chad' (classically good looking man.)

There is no thought there as to whether you are a lovely person, fun to be around, whether you want to be celibate, what your choices in a partner would be and if you're gay it is because you are being a bitch and denying men of their birthright.

It is the most disrespectful, dehumanising thing. And they've been talking about women on the internet like this for YEARS. It is literally a culture within itself with it's own jargon, in-jokes and codes of practise.

I agree that porn is a major factor. I also think that when we are educating our children about sexuality, sex and choices that the fact that it is an elective CHOICE is often overlooked.

Sex has become so normalised an activity- that it seems like everyone is doing it. Everywhere. On tv, in adverts, in porn, at school- wherever.
So to be told during sex education that this is universal information that will affect us all is untrue. We don't have discussions about long term celibacy. It's a totally legitimate choice and for some it is an involuntary choice.

If we're going to teach our kids the facts of life- lets teach them the actual facts of life.

I agree with you troll.
And yet....almost ALL my 12 yr old's friends have a smart phone, and I am an oppressive parent because I haven't got him one yet. And I won't get x box live. Not yet anyway. But can I hold out til he's 16? I doubt it!
It actually breaks my heart for him that he will inevitably be exposed to shit I couldn't handle as a grown up woman who has been around some stuff.
So what are parents going to do about it? Nothing as far as I can tell from my own little area. Head, meet sand.
I sometimes wish the Internet didn't exist.
(I would certainly get more done anyway!)

When I say I agree I mean in particular your 1st post.

It's really tough IfNot. Because although we want to buck a trend- we don't want to make our own children's lives harder by doing it. Even if we think we're doing the right thing in the long run.

I asked in our local school fb group if we could have a general agreement in the class (which is p6 by the way) not to have smartphones and if children need phones let it be the old- type ones.
I fully understand why parents whose children walk to school etc want their kids to have phones- but give them the basic models.

The complaints from parents ranged from 'I dont want to have to pay for another phone.' to 'X won't be able to do everything he wants on that phone.'

Then the school announced a 'Bring your own device' policy- to save money on ipads for the school the p7s would be allowed to bring their own smartphones into class for research purposes.

So many parents think this is a GREAT idea. Because the internet is the future. Kids have to be technologically advanced etc etc.

Personally I think it's ham fisted. We have the option to sign policies at school not allowing our kids photos to be taken yet they're sending schoolkids into school with cameras.

I am of a generation that had MSN messenger after school and Myspace. The bullying/nonsense/shitposting that went on then was insane and that was before cameras and video were being welcomed into schools.

If I don't give my daughter a phone- she'll be the weird one. I want to scream because its actually the case that the whole system is weird and needs to be stopped!!

Also when I complained at a school meeting about the bring your own device policy they said that my worries about inappropriate material being shared in school were unfounded and that I should attend a group to chat about kids and internet usage and how to restrict settings.

I KNOW how to do this. But I am aware that others don't or won't or just don't care. I am actually not worried about how my daughter uses the internet because she has had it drummed into her be me and doesn't get to use it unsupervised - what I am worried about it other kid's attitudes to the internet and the effects that it can have on my daughter.

I cannot control what other people's children do- or how they parent. Already you have kids under the age of 10 playing war games like Call of Duty that are gory and bloody and stressful. They might be desensitised to it- but they shouldn't be and my child isn't.

Isn't that bring your own devices policy absolutely horrible in terms of singling out children whose parents aren't as well off and who therefore won't have devices/the same kinds of devices as the kids from wealthier families?

It is. But the school will have devices on supply apparently for those who don't have.

If it was all being done on school devices which were locked down and unable to transfer messages/pictures then I'd be more ok with it.

But to allow free reign on personal devices with who knows what on them is just plain stupidity. (One of the best regarded primary schools in Scotland as well.)

Haven't rtft but I came across this article about 4chan today in amidst all the coverage of the incel movement and found it very interesting:

medium.com/@DaleBeran/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7cb798cb

Esker, it's an interesting article, but ultimately I think they credit 4chan with far too much.

Much like here, 4chan is a place where all manner of things are shared and discussed. From funny memes, to politics, to pictures of pets, gardening tips, sex chat etc etc.

Sometimes they do hilarious things; like rigging online competitions for where Justin Bieber should do his next concert (North Korea) or it spawns the best selling card game of the decade (Cards Against Humanity)

There's also a side of it which is Grim- it's gory, porny and talks about all those things that naice ladies on MN don't talk or know about like DOXXING, making omelettes with semen (I'm not even kidding), mock bomb threats and sometimes real bomb threats. Or admittance to murders (All true.)

Some incels might be on 4chan. But it is not incel specific. It is a total shitshow of a website and not for the faint hearted. There's some great stuff there but also some really terrible things that you can never scrub from your brain. Definitely not suitable for young people. (Yet some idiot parents let their 13 year olds on it because they dont know what it is.)

Moral of my ranting is: We are the parents. It is up to us to know what our kids are doing. Just because the online world is not physical- it doesn't mean it cannot harm your children. If anything it is MORE harmful as it is able to reach out to them in the safety of their own homes.

We need to be so much smarter about how we educate our children.

I really think male violence is getting to be a crisis.
Calling attacks "terroris" means the focus is on the politics behind it rather than the common factor of angry young men.
I'm also not very happy the victims are being called people not women. It obfuscates the dynamic.

Still, R4 did a whole segment on incels last night so perhaps understanding male violence is going to become more mainstream.

The question is, what can we even do about incels? We can't ban the online spaces where they congregate (and even if we could they'd just make new ones), and their beliefs overlap with those of several other groups of misogynists. They clearly attract large numbers of disaffected young men, and the more time those young men spend talking to other "incels" the more extreme their beliefs become. Which isn't a thing you can really stop.

What about when they're actively planning crimes, though? Eliot Roger talked about what he planned to do in incel forums before he actually did it.

@AngryAttackKittens I 100% agree porn is to blame. I'm glad too I am middle aged and won't need to deal with this but I have a daughter and I can't imagine how she would cope.

@TrollTheRespawnJeremy where is it said fat kiddie aged so.en should 've sleeping with incels? Luckily, I'd probably crush them to death so won't be needed. I wonder why they don't just learn to form proper relationships!

"It is the most disrespectful, dehumanising thing. And they've been talking about women on the internet like this for YEARS. It is literally a culture within itself with it's own jargon, in-jokes and codes of practise."

I heard about it through Mumsnet about 6 months ago. Before that I never heard of it. Why?

What can we do about it?

Well to me these things only flourish when society turns a blind eye. Think about drink driving/seatbelts - yes they were legislated against/for but what really drove uptake and behaviour change was a swing in how society perceived drinking and driving, or not strapping your kids in the back. I remember my stepdad being mocked for fitting seatbelts in he back of our car and him being determined to do it because it was a safety thing.

The rise of the incel movement to me to such a degree shows that there is insufficient opposition in wider society. You’ll always get fringe groups. And then the web makes it easier for those people to connect. But you dont get big groups unless the attitudes in them are widespread or tolerated in society.

So the alt right - I’m afraid trumps victory shows you that a significant number of people believe in, or don’t actively dislike, the ideas contained within. There’s no point callingvthem fringe loons when there are so many of them, you’ve got to start asking how and why so many believe that.

And the same goes for incels - most decent men may not be on the same scale of delusion and hatred for women but you only have to read the DM comments under any article about feminism to get a sense of just how widespread a degree of hatred for women is. So again, society at large isn’t ‘against the idea enough’ to make it socially unacceptable.

When idea are truly beyond the pale groups retreat to niche spaces on the web in small numbers. But when it’s the end of the bell curve of something a lot of people believe anyway it’s a different matter.

I’m afraid I agree with the Greer quote above.

So what can we do about it? I don’t know. Raise our boys to be decent? Shine a light on the ideology in the media? Until it’s seen as societally unacceptable it won’t go away.

Incel/PUA/porn/TRA are all just different forms of misogyny. The common thread is that they think women owe them, and any women who disagree deserve to be harmed.

The more I think about it the more I really agree that the problem with these men (not just the terrorists but also the daily mail comments type of misogynist) is the perceived reduction in status of the white male. White men are still on top, but a lot of the less economically or socially successful ones seem to feel that everything has been taken from them. It's so odd because it's not based in fact or reason at all. Just pure entitlement.
There's a reason no school shooter/unabomber type has ever been a black woman.

What can we do? As the mother of a young man I talk to him about stuff like sex, consent, porn and the fact that it may not be consensual, violence against women and how much stronger men are physically.
So far he seems to get it. He has female friends, he watches women's football and admires the players skill, he knows women are people I think.
I also try to talk to him about masculinity-I have talked about his uncles who are football loving techy/mechanic types and pointed out how daft and soppy they are. I have told him that I have seen DP cry and that men are allowed to be soft. I constantly remind him that he doesn't have servants..
And yes I restrict the unsupervised Internet, and feel exactly like you troll that parents DO NOT GET IT, and neither do schools. Our school has a load of "policies" on online bullying but allow devices in school. And yes angry it does provide an excuse for phone shaming kids who either don't have the best phones because their parents can't afford it, or who actively want them to have an dumb phone. So you are left in this no win situation of make your kids feel like the only freak or give them the damn smart phone. Unwinnable.

Incel/PUA/porn/TRA are all just different forms of misogyny. The common thread is that they think women owe them, and any women who disagree deserve to be harmed.

Indeed.