Listen, I know you're still wondering 'hey Vega, why is any of this important though?' and I'm going to tell you why. The content for this part once again contains violent language, proceed at your own risk.
The problem with online communities is that often times, what goes on within them is often overlooked, or not taken serious, even when threats are made. This is why the r/incel subreddit lasted so long before it got taken down. These ideologies and worldviews these incel men have ascribed to is creating actual real life risk. Sure people make threats online all the time, and most of the time these are empty and are never followed through but incels are increasingly taking their violent language and acting on it. This is an example of speech having real life effects. A lot of their threats are prelocutionary speech acts, they scare, they convince, they inspire the listener - depending on who they are. They scare the typical listener, usually the woman that an incel is trying to speak to due to the nature of the things incels say (typically super sexually charged)
While these conversations are not necessarily face to face, they are still conversations and they're all typically gendered to high heavens, and extremely sexually charged. They're typically gendered in terms of gendered slurs thrown around, and extremely sexually charged because a lot of them boil down to threats of sexual assault. I didn't want to include the more disgusting images and examples, I hope you'll forgive me, but please trust that the majority of threats made by incels when they feel rejected are those of aggressive sexual assault and often times murder.
I should probably give you that real life example of incels and their violent language (as if the internet isn't real life). I'll keep this short because this singular incident could become (and likely will become) it's own series of posts. I want to talk about Elliot Rodgers. He is hailed as the "Incel God" (because he actually accomplished a lot of what incels want to do), and was the perpetrator of the 2014 Isla Vista Massacre. He injured and killed many people going on a rampage over the fact that he was an incel. He was jealous of the fact that women and men that weren't him were sexually active and decided to take the threats he uttered on the internet and make good on them. Oh might I also add that there is an extremely racist and racialized portion to his posts (and the rest of the incels posts) that directly link blackness back to slavery, as he states in his Manifesto "I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves" (Rodger), as you see there is this superiority and entitlement that is ingrained, not only in this statement, but overall and throughout incel speech. That particular statement, which for context sake was said because he saw this person of colour with a white woman, shows sure signs of indexicality as Elliot indexes his background to claim superiority and indexes the random person's supposed "background" to show inferiority. His manifesto is 141 pages long, and is entirely above the scope of this particular series, but the language that could be broken down surrounding this individual alone is extensive.
The purpose of this example is to show that there are real life consequences to this normalizing of violent and aggressive hatred towards women by this community of people. In my research I've seen boys as young as 14 (or supposedly, people can obviously lie about their age) engage in this incel community. There is this continuation of violence that can only lead to something bad. That's why, as much as I hate to expose anyone to this kind of disgusting behaviour, I feel the need to educate and inform people, because these people could be anywhere, and they could follow along in Elliot Rodger's footsteps.
We can't exactly know of any other real world actions that were motivated by this incel mindset but with the amount of threats of sexual assault and worse, we can never be too careful.
Alright folks, part 5 is up next and we're concluding this rollercoaster of a series.. Thank god right??
Text Sources:
Rodger, Elliot. "My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger" (PDF). Document Cloud.org. Archived (PDF) from the original on May 25, 2014. Retrieved April, 2018.
*Image sources are linked in the pictures