Help ... I've fallen down a rabbit hole ... an unfortunate rabbit hole at that. In my defence it's like a car wreck, it's impossible to look away... anyway ...
It's too late now, here I am and here you are..
Please join me in this personal hell! Enjoy :)
So, as much as I deeply regret having to force anyone to learn about incels in the first place, this particular group of people are a prime example of how language, gender, and sexuality all intersect with each other... in ... a not so positive way. (Please understand also that incels as a topic is way to complex to break down in a few blog posts, this is simply the ling anth side of it)
I guess first I should give some context on who these people are, as not everyone knows this (thank god). Buckle up lads this is going to be a wild ride.
"Incels" a shortened form of their proper title "Involuntary Celibate". I think from that alone you could already begin to see what we're dealing with here. The term itself has mixed opinions on origin, some claiming it came from a woman in Toronto, who after struggling with relationships herself (later we will see how her coinage of the word would eventually become one she could no longer use) created an "all-text website - Alana's Involuntary Celibate Project" (Baker, 2016), which though now it no longer is up and running. "Involuntary Celibate" would eventually be shortened to "Incel" by users of her site. The creation of this site occurred in 1993. Now, years later, it has been taken and repurposed for the use of a generation of men (specifically men - no (or very rarely) women) who frequent reddit and other internet forums.
Since it's inception, the identity constructed around Incels has morphed from someone who is simply 'love shy' or involuntarily celibate due to anxiety and the like, to basically a man with entitlement issues, is incredibly sexist and misogynistic, and overall not nice people. There is a specific reason I put a subreddit for the title. Though this subreddit does not exist (taken down for violent language and threats of actual violence - discussed more later), it is this specific Brandâ„¢ of incel I'm making this series of posts on.
You may be wondering to yourself, 'hey Vega, what's the point? Why should we even worry about these people?' and those are excellent questions. Why focus on incels instead of some other internet community? I'd argue this is because incels have been having an effect on the real world, in a horribly negative way. The violent language towards incel's object of hatred - namely women, and some men - has spurred on real life tragedies, tragedies that feel doomed to repeat themselves.
In part 2, we will discuss the vocabulary of incels, which is rather extensive but important for context.
Sources:
Baker, Peter. 2016. "The Woman Who Accidentally Started The Incel Movement". ELLE. https://www.elle.com/culture/news/a34512/woman-who-started-incel-movement/.
Also! feel free to comment, or .. don't and just pretend you never had to read any of this