Lexicology

 

Lexicology

The term "involuntary celibate" (shortened to "incel") refers to self-identifying members of an online subculture based around the inability to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one, a state they describe as "inceldom" or "incelibacy". It is sometimes used interchangeably or alongside other terms, such as "love-shy" (describing those with social anxiety or excessive shyness preventing romantic success), "FA" (short for "forever alone"), "unfuckability", "omegas", "betas", "the undersexed", or "the sexless". Alana, the coiner of the term incel, initially considered using other terms such as "perpetually single" or "dating shy".

Members of incel communities regularly use jargon and a distinct dialect. Incels often use dehumanizing and vulgar terms for women, such as "femoids" (which they sometimes shorten to "foids") and "roasties" (a reference to the labia minora, which incels believe changes shape after a woman becomes sexually active and begins to resemble sliced roast beef). Incels refer to attractive sexually active women as "stacys", less attractive sexually active women as "beckys", and attractive sexually active men as "chads". People who are average looking and not incels are "normies". "Mogging" refers to the act of eclipsing another person in terms of physical appearance and thereby undermining them. "Looksmaxing" is an attempt at enhancing one's appearance by methods including getting a haircut and dressing nicely, taking steroids and working out, or undergoing plastic surgery. The abbreviation "NEET" refers to people who do not have jobs and are not attending school: "not in education, employment, or training".

Members of incel communities use many variations of the term "incel" to refer to subgroups within the community, such as "volcels" (voluntary celibate; someone who chooses to forego sexual intercourse), "fakecels" (those who claim to be incel, but in reality have recently had sex or been in a relationship), and "truecels" (true incels; men who have never had any sexual or romantic encounters). There are also a number of race-based variations of the term "incel" which refer to people who believe their race is the reason behind their inability to find a partner, including "currycels" (people of South Asian ancestry) and "ricecels" (those of Chinese or Southeast Asian backgrounds), or collectively, "ethnicels".

The term "incel" is sometimes used as an insult to label men who are seen as undesirable, but who are not part of the online community.

Demographics

Self-identified incels are mostly male and heterosexual, and are often described as young and friendless introverts. Estimates of the size of incel communities vary, and range from the thousands, to tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands.

Many sources describe incels as predominantly white. Sociologist Ross Haenfler was quoted in The Washington Post describing them as primarily white. Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center echoed this to NBC News, saying they are "young, frustrated white males in their late teens into their early twenties who are having a hard time adjusting to adulthood". Jaki and colleagues, publishing linguistic analysis of a large incel forum in The Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict in June , contended that "contrary to what is often reported" there was no definitive evidence that the group is predominantly white, and that "it is impossible to say whether the majority of ... users are white men, but our data implies that this may be less true than expected. They suggested that the various mentions of race on the forum "may reflect, to some extent, the ethnic variety of the forum". However, Hoffman and colleagues, publishing in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, reported that a March  survey of the same forum determined that most respondents self-identified as Caucasian.

Some media outlets depict incels as unemployed ("NEET") and living with parents. Incels are mainly located in North America and Europe, although there are also incel communities for people outside the Anglosphere, such as the Italian website Il Forum dei Brutti. The English language forums also receive much traffic from non-anglophone countries. Research published in  by the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) on the three largest incel forums found they had a total of about , users, with only about , who post actively. The FOI found that between .–.% of the visitors to the forums originated from Sweden, though they caution this may not be accurate given the use of personal VPNs.

The incel subculture includes people who are in sexless marriages (or other sexless relationships) but who wish to be sexually active. Asexual people and those who are voluntarily sexually abstinent are not considered incels.

Female incels

The first incel website, Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project, was gender-inclusive. There are present day women-specific incel forums, such as /r/Femcels, /r/TruFemcels, and /r/ForeverAloneWomen. Nonetheless, there is disagreement in online incel communities on whether women can be incels, with some claiming that male incels grossly outnumber female incels, others claiming that it is impossible for women to be an incel at all, others claiming that only women with a physical deformity can be incels, and others arguing that only unattractive women belonging to the "bottom percentile in terms of appearance" can be incels. According to the Anti-Defamation League, the majority of incels do not believe women can be incels.

Tens of thousands of self-identifying female incels, also called "femcels", are reported to populate the internet. Their most popular site is r/TruFemcels on Reddit, with over , members. Journalists have written that outside of the female incels' own communities, few believe women can genuinely experience involuntary celibacy. Some female incels believe they could have casual sex, but fear it would only be from men who would abuse or disrespect them.

Women who identify as incels share some similarities with their male counterparts, such as belief that physical appearance is the most important factor in finding a partner. In other ways they tend to be different; for example, according to journalist Isabelle Kohn, rather than being angry at the men who reject them, they empathize with the men for not wanting to date them. Kohn notes the tendency for female incels to turn their rage inwards, rather than outwards like males. Journalist Arwa Mahdawi hypothesizes that the fact female incels do not go on violent rampages like some male incels is the most obvious reason why female incels have not received much attention in mainstream media. As of February , Kohn wrote that she could find "mountains" of academic papers on male incels, but none on female incels. She says the assumption that female incels do not exist adds to their pain.

 

Criticism

Of incels

Incel communities have been widely criticized in the media and by researchers as violent, misogynist, and extremist. Keegan Hankes, a senior research analyst working for the Southern Poverty Law Center, has cautioned that exposure to violent content on incel forums "play[s] a very large role" in the radicalization of incels, and describes incel forums as having "more violent rhetoric than I'm used to seeing on even white supremacist sites". Journalist David Futrelle has described incel communities as "violently misogynistic", and is among critics who attribute worsening violent rhetoric on incel forums to the growth of the alt-right and white supremacy, and the overlap between incel communities and online hate groups. Psychologist and sex researcher James Cantor has described incels as "a group of people who usually lack sufficient social skills and ... find themselves very frustrated." He has said that in incel forums "when they're surrounded by other people with similar frustrations, they kind of lose track of what typical discourse is, and they drive themselves into more and more extreme beliefs." Senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), Amarnath Amarasingam, has criticized some incel communities where calls for violence are commonplace, saying "under the right set of psychological and personal circumstances, these kinds of forums can be dangerous and push people into violence". Another researcher at the ISD, Jacob Davey, compared the radicalization of incels in incel forums to teenagers being urged to go to extreme measures on online forums that promote anorexia and other eating disorders, and to online campaigns convincing people to join ISIL. Speaking about incels' feelings of entitlement to sex, Davey said the attitude "can go as far as the justification of rape".

While generally agreeing with critics' concerns about misogyny and other negative characteristics in the incel subculture, some commentators have been more sympathetic towards incels. In April , economist Robin Hanson wrote a blog post likening access to sex with access to income, writing that he found it puzzling that similar concern had not been shown to incels as to low income individuals. Hanson was criticized by some for discussing sex as if it was a commodity; others wrote more positively about his opinions. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote a similarly controversial op-ed in May  titled "The Redistribution of Sex" in which he suggested sex robots and sex workers would inevitably be called upon to satisfy incels' sexual desires. Some commentators wrote articles agreeing with this view, including Toby Young, who agreed that sex robots could be a "workable solution"; others criticized the column for objectifying women and for legitimizing the incel ideology.

Journalist Zack Beauchamp has expressed concern about other types of harm inflicted by incels that may be lost in the attention paid specifically to mass violence; he points to forum posts in which users brag about yelling at, catfishing, and sexually assaulting women. University of Portsmouth lecturer Lisa Sugiura has described incel forums as a "networked misogyny", and urged the posts in such forums be taken seriously not only in the context of hate speech but also as a form of grooming that could radicalize "impressionable and vulnerable disillusioned young men". Some sociological research on incel communities has analyzed them as a hybrid masculinity, in which privileged men distance themselves from hegemonic masculinity while simultaneously reproducing it.

Of platforms providing services to incel communities

Criticism has also been directed against platforms that host or have hosted incel content, including Reddit (which banned the /r/incels community in , and banned most of the remaining incel communities in September , but is still home to some incels) and Twitter. Cloudflare, which provides services including DDoS protection and caching so that webpages are still accessible when a site is offline, has also been criticized for protecting incel websites against downtime even when webhosts have terminated service.

Of media reporting on incels

Reporting on incels by media outlets following the incel-related attacks during the s has been criticized for its "breathless" coverage, for normalizing incel communities by describing them as "sexually frustrated", and for directing readers to incel communities. Some reporting has also been criticized for giving attackers notoriety by reporting on them at length, or for victim blaming by implying that women who had rejected the attackers' romantic or sexual advances held some responsibility for provoking the attacks. Those who have written sympathetically about incels have faced criticism for legitimizing the incel ideology, such as from Samantha Cole in Vice who condemned media outlets who "cove[r] and amplif[y] toxic internet culture as if it's valid ideology".