SEE ALSO: 10 Stories That Show How Horribly We Treat Male Rape Victims He wasn’t talking about a terrorist group. He was talking about a group of sexually frustrated men who get together and chat on the Internet. They call themselves incels, short for “involuntarily celibate,” but they aren’t as harmless as they sound. The things they talk about in their online communities are incredibly disturbing. These places are breeding grounds for mass murderers—and there’s every reason to believe that they are going to hurt people again.
10 ‘All Women Are Sluts’
“All women are sluts,” an incel posted on one of their message boards. “It is in their very nature.” This wasn’t a lone psychopath in a group of otherwise stable people—it was one of the more popular posts. And it was an idea almost every incel seems to share. Women, these men believe, are to blame for the incels’ lonely lives. They see the opposite sex, as one incel put it, as “pure and utter evil.” They rarely use the word “woman,” though. Instead, women are called “cum dumpsters” or “female human organisms,” a term used to suggest that they don’t deserve any more autonomy than an inflatable sex doll. These men hate them. They’ll claim it’s “scientifically proven” that women “use men” or make long posts declaring, “Women crying makes me happy.” So why do they hate women so much? It’s simple: Women won’t have sex with them. That’s not us being cynical—incel communities will openly admit that that’s the reason. One long post listing all the reasons women are “the embodiment of evil” spelled it out directly. Women, the poster complained, “say they care about Incels but won’t provide them with sex.”[1] Nobody in the community called out how ridiculous that was. Every one of them just cheered him on. “I agree,” one user said. Another chimed in, “One of the best posts in a while.”
9 ‘You Need To View Rape From The Rapist’s Perspective’
Rape isn’t a bad thing, as far as these men are concerned. The real evil in society, they believe, is that women are unwilling to have sex with any man who asks. So, by their twisted morality, sexual assault is almost a noble act. And they’re willing to tell people—including rape victims. “You need to view rape from the rapist’s perspective,” one incel told a woman after she’d shared her experience being sexually assaulted.[2] If anything, he felt, she should be flattered. “It requires a lot of passion of a man to risk all of himself [ . . . ] just for an act of sex with a female.” It’s a common view for these men: that rapists are the real victims. In a separate incident, another incel told another rape victim: “Sweetie, if you think your life is bad, just imagine how the rapist must feel. He raped you because no female would give him the chance. It was his only chance to get laid.”
8 Campaigning For Legalized Rape
“Society treats single men like trash,” one incel ranted online. “It has to stop.” Specifically, he meant women. Women who refuse to sleep with unattractive men, he argued, are the root of all of society’s problems. The incel community, though, has a plan to fix it. They want to legalize rape. “We need a constitutional amendment forcing attractive virgin females to have sex with incels,” one poster said.[3] As far as he was concerned, this was the only way to stop mass shootings. The problem, he argued, wasn’t guns or mental health; it was that women wouldn’t let men have sex with them. “Time and again,” he ranted, “mass shooters suffer from this problem.” Widespread violent rape, to the incels, is like a noble custom from a bygone era. “For 99% of human history,” another incel ranted, “females did not choose their sexual partners. [ . . . ] They would be seized as spoils of war and end up as sex slaves.” Having a roving army slaughter your family and sexually abuse you, to these men, isn’t a scary thought. It’s something worth being nostalgic about. Again, none of the other incels criticized his idea. Instead, one simply replied, “I would actually prefer this.”
7 Sharing Rape Fantasies
“I was pondering what it would be like to have a Jewish rape-slave,” one incel told the other members of his forum.[4] “The Nazis must’ve had a really good time with them.” The man went into detail about how great it must have been to be a member of the Gestapo in a concentration camp, wistfully imagining telling one of his victims, “You’re not getting food till you put out.” It’s definitely one of the creepiest fantasies any of these men have shared, but it’s hardly the only one. These message boards are filled with men describing creepy rape fantasies, with one admitting: “If it wasn’t for rape I would never get hard.” Another mused about having a “device that will make any woman in the vicinity want to have sex with you.” It wouldn’t be unethical, he insisted, because “women are basically mind controlled anyway.” They don’t stop at just imagining it, either. These men have been caught sharing videos of real women being violently raped. One member even complained a video wasn’t violent enough. His comment read: “There wasn’t enough fighting back for me to enjoy it.”
6 ‘General Question About How Rapists Get Caught’
These incel communities aren’t just places to share creepy fantasies or blow off some steam. They’re enablers. They encourage each other—and some of them try to go through with it. “I’m female,” a male member of an incel community on Reddit posted on a community for women, “and I’m curious about how it’s possible to catch a rapist if you don’t know who he is.” He had a specific plan he was going to put into motion, and he wanted to know if he could get caught. “Let’s say I get drugged down by a random guy I’ve never met, raped while I’m unconscious and left alone in the woods or something,” he asked. “How would I even start searching for someone like this?” It was weirdly specific, and that set off enough alarm bells for people to realize that this wasn’t a woman worried for her own safety. Some people checked his post history and found page after page of comments on incel message boards, vividly describing his horrible rape fantasies and his struggles not to go through with it in real life. “Checked your post history,” another user wrote back. “You’re not a woman. You’re as far away from a woman as anyone in the history of humans has ever been.”[5]
5 ‘I Finally Raped A Girl’
The incel from the previous entry probably got discouraged enough not to go through with his plan—or, at least, that’s certainly what we hope happened. But he’s not the only person in this community to go past fantasizing and actually hurt people. On a message board called incel.me, one user posted a thread boasting: “I finally raped a girl.”[6] His story was story was quickly deleted by a few nervous moderators, but it’s hardly the only time a member of an incel community has bragged about rape. “I’m not giving up,” another incel posted, talking about his plan to find a “passed out female” at a party and sexually assault her while she’s unconscious. “She won’t know and she won’t loose [sic] anything since she’s not virgin.” Another gave his fellow incels tips on how to molest women. “Every man should learn CPR,” he told his community, because it “allows you to legally put your hands on or near an unconscious woman’s chest. And if she dies, you can feel her up while she’s still warm.” Nobody discouraged him. Nobody told him he was a creep. Instead, the top-rated comment he got in reply was: “I would rape that b—ch so hard.”
4 ‘It’s Ridiculously Easy To Rape And Kill Someone’
“I might do this,” an incel told his community. “It’s ridiculously easy to rape and kill someone in their house.” He wasn’t worried about what would happen. “Both of my parents are dead,” he explained. “It won’t affect them if I die.”[7] It’s the next logical step in their fantasies. Some of these men aren’t satisfied with just becoming rapists—they want to go out in a blaze of fury and murder. “I fantasize about it every day,” a user in another incel community declared. “I am seriously thinking about just getting a gun and shooting everything up.” “Normies and femoids need to understand what can happen after you bully us for so long,” another argued. He was in the middle of a rant defending serial rapist Frank Yeager. As far he was concerned, Yeager’s victims only had themselves to blame for rejecting him. Women, he believed, need to know: “Some of us will snap and rape.”
3 Celebrating Mass Murders
When Alek Minassian massacred ten innocent people, the incel community didn’t feel bad. They cheered. “I hope this guy wrote a manifesto,” one declared. “He could be our next new saint.”[8] He wasn’t alone. Another incel said that he was going to have “one celebratory beer for every victim that turns out to be a young woman between 18–35.” And yet another praised Minassian for killing “more people than the supreme gentleman Elliot [Rodger].” He was referring to the man behind the Isla Vista massacre, another self-proclaimed incel who, in 2014, murdered six people and injured 14 more. Like Minassian, the incel community had immediately praised Rodger for committing mass murder. “What happened is punishment for evil and violence of feminists and liberals,” a man calling himself “That Incel Blogger” declared. Society was to blame for Rodger’s killings, he said, because it “drove this young man to be unable to find a girlfriend.” A killer doesn’t even have to be one of their own, though, for them to cheer him on. When Stephen Paddock opened fire on 22,000 people in Las Vegas, the incels praised him even though he wasn’t part of their movement. They called it “life fuel,” cheering Paddock for killing “normies.” “The victims are all equally worthless,” one incel wrote. “The shooter is always the one who leaves all the notes with his motives and true feelings. I want to be one of them.”
2 ‘Going Elliot Rodger’
Minassian probably won’t be the last incel mass murderer. On the incel communities, people are already talking about their plans to commit a massacre. They call it “Going ER”— or, in other words: “Going Elliot Rodger.” No incel was more enthusiastic about Minassian’s mass killing than an incel.me member called BlkPillPres. “This sh—t right here is lifefuel for me,” he said after the news broke. “Normies,” he said, “need to be in constant fear.” He shared his ideas for the next mass killing. “I want to see some mass food poisoning deaths,” he said, “maybe a pipe bomb or two.” He was more keen, however, on the idea of hooking a sprinkler system up to a vat of acid and letting it rain on a concert hall. “All the normies who used to think ‘looks don’t matter’ will [now] get to test the theory,” he said, before adding a “lol.” The community didn’t try to talk him out of it. They egged him on. “Only fear sends a message,” one incel agreed. Another wrote, “The incel rising is nigh.” Others gave him suggestions, like “Look up flamethrowers on youtube. Easy to make.” By the end, BlkPillPres had taken their advice and decided on what he called his “MO.” If he worked up the nerve to go through with it, he declared, he would rape women first. “Then acid face attack.”[9]
1 ‘We Touched Hands. I Literally Feel High’
The incel movement is a horrible, toxic community. It’s a group of rape and murder enablers, people who encourage each other to hate and to hurt and who make the world a worse place. But more than anything else, these people are horribly sad. More than terror, reading their posts just leaves you feeling pity (though that in no way excuses any crimes they commit). “Did an escape room with all of femail [sic] coworkers,” one bragged to an incel community.[10] “I was stuck in a small room with three femails for 58 minutes. They smelled so good and we touched hands so much. I literally feel high.” It’s what most of these men’s lives are like. These people hate themselves. They call themselves “omegas,” people at the absolute bottom of society. They openly admit that they “spend most of their time inside,” ridicule their own appearances, and openly talk about killing themselves. These communities might be a breeding ground for domestic terrorism, but the people themselves aren’t just scary. They’re sad, lonely people, acting out because of a desperate need for love. Beneath the show of rage, they are so eager for the slightest compassionate touch that it makes them, as that poster put it, “literally feel high.” Read More: Wordpress
