Underground Anti-woman and Incel Movements and Their Connections to Sexual Assault

Abstract

Anti-woman movements online are growing in influence and entering the mainstream over time. A loosely related coalition of far-right, anti-feminist online communities called the “manosphere” might be a gateway to increasingly extremist misogynistic and violent worldviews. The manosphere is associated with several recent terrorist acts, including Rodgers’ killing spree in Isla Vista in 2014 and Minassian’s massacre of numerous pedestrians in Canada in 2018. “Involuntary celibates,” aka incels, are a community of mostly young men characterized by their virulent resentment towards women and their inability to find consenting romantic and sexual partners. There is evidence that users in the manosphere migrate from less extreme anti-feminist subcultures to incel forums (Ribeiro et al., arXiv. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.07600.pdf, 2020), where they become increasingly radicalized in their beliefs and are encouraged to act violently towards women to intimidate women into behaving the way men want them to (e.g., Lilly, ‘The World is not a safe place for Men’: The representational politics of the manosphere. Theses, 2011. University of Ottawa. https://doi.org/10.20381/RUOR-5184, 2016). This chapter will provide a high-level analysis of the roots of the modern incel movement and examine putative effects, implications, and solutions regarding the incels.

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