by Greta Jasser
Incel forums are online spaces with little to no moderation against violent and harmful speech. Yet, despite the almost non-existent community guidelines, users aim to debate, break or circumvent them, as transgression and violent talk are central to the community that formed in these spaces.
| The term incel is a shorthand for ‘involuntarily celibate’. It is a self-identification of individuals who believe they are unable to attain sexual and/or romantic relationships. While the term was first coined by a bisexual woman, who struggled to find a partner and opened up a space for self-help for her and others, it evolved into a descriptor of the mainly (often exclusively) male online spaces, displaying a high level of toxicity. While anyone might fit the description of not finding romantic and/or sexual partners at some point in their life, the misogynist incel men’s movement, is shaped around the “dehumanization of women and glorification of violence”. Incels are part of the “manosphere” an equally self-allocated description of a conglomerate of blog, forums and websites united by misogyny. The term has also long become part of the pop cultural repertoire, further stretching its meaning. It is a group which mainly interacts online. With their male supremacist worldview, incels – and the manosphere – tie into a broader right-wing online ecosystem. The desire to re-instate an imagined past, in which the social roles of men and women were clearly defined, and (white) men formed the top of the social hierarchy, makes them part of an array of (online) right-wing movements. |
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When moderators of the largest incel forum online added a rule forbidding the sexualization of minors on the board, users pushed back until the rule was changed. It was amended to say “pre-pubescent minors”. The forum moderators included “pre-pubescent” after users deemed it unreasonable to not be able to discuss the body of, for example, a 17-year-old, when the guidelines only listed the sexualization of “minors” as prohibited. The already lax posting-guidelines – at least when it came to violent and harmful content – were further relaxed to accommodate a community that formed around a nihilistic worldview and deliberate social transgressions, and that puts their identity as misfits and outcasts center stage. While a rule that is aimed at curbing potentially pedophile content would be uncontroversial in most spaces (including online), incel forums run on the transgression of social norms as well as deep-seated misogyny and anti-LGBT attitudes. This combination makes even the sexualization of minors a point of contention, while the rule “No gay or LGBT content, unless you’re criticising it” seems to go unchallenged. Further, a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found, that keywords related to pedophilia were used by 28% of users within their dataset (e.g. denoting girls, that have not reached the age of consent as “jailbait”). The same study found that “discussions of pedophilia show 53% of posters are supportive” of the issue. Endorsing or tolerating pedophilia, even anonymously and online, is one of the ultimate taboos to break. Often, this transgression goes hand in hand with violent fantasies and a desire to punish women and girls. Squirrell documented, for example, the takedown of an incel website, the tagline of which explicitly endorsed sexual violence against underage girls.
The incel forum debate on the exact phrasing of the community guidelines on the sexualization of minors, and its outcome illustrate two things: the importance of potentially dangerous or illegal behavior to the incelosphere, as well as the impact of community guidelines (or lack thereof) on the communities that form within online spaces. The rules on the largest incel forum tolerate an array of transgressional and violent talk. One BBC report claims that there are “Rape posts every half-hour” on the biggest incel forum. The moderators explicitly allow “celebrating” mass murders of “our perceived or actual group enemies”, only disallowing direct incitement or announcements of murder and suicide. Misogynist incel forums are notorious for celebrating perpetrators of mass murder as saints, and debating or encouraging self-harm, suicide and (mass) murder-suicide. The “actual or perceived group enemies” are women, as well as men who are seen as more attractive, and/or more romantically successful than incels.
Violent talk
The culture of violent talk is intrinsic to incel spaces. Violent talk encompasses “utterances by extremists who express an ideology and invoke the use of violence as part of those expressions”. It provides a “sense of doing and an opportunity to express their frustrations and anger”. And works as a form of identity talk, that constructs, interprets and communicates an individual’s identity as congruent with the collective identity of a group. In this specific case, the group identity is delineated through determining the significance and legitimacy, or at least tolerance of violence and violent utterances.
The expression of violent fantasies is part of the toxic incel techno subculture. It might, in fact, be one of the most attractive features to some users, as it is an easy, yet effective way to express a collective, oppositional outcast identity. This identity is further solidified through cultural and linguistic codes. One of these codes is the debating, breaking or circumvention of the already minimal regulations on violent talk. This is done through the meme-format ‘in Minecraft’, for example.
“In Minecraft”
The phrases “in a videogame of course”, or “in Minecraft” are common vernacular across online spaces. Minecraft is one of the best-selling videogames of the past years, where users can build structures, as well as compete or cooperate with other players. The meme likely originated on 4chan around 2018, and is used to ironically suggest that whatever the poster wrote beforehand is not applicable to the “real world”, but is meant to happen “only in a videogame”. The phrase does not immunize the poster against content moderation or other consequences, although there was a short debate on its actual usefulness on the forum, in which one user urged to not “say edgy s**t on here because I don’t want the FBI to come to my house and my family knowing I post here”. Rather, use of the meme in incel spaces implies a deliberate transgression of even the loosest community guidelines, as well as a sense that the forum is being monitored. The meme became part of the group’s vernacular.
As Gibbs pointed out “each social media platform comes to have its own unique combination of styles, grammars, and logics, which can be considered as constituting a ‘platform vernacular’, or a popular (as in ‘of the people’) genre of communication”. Active, visible transgression through the announcement or celebration of violence is part of the incel online vernacular.
“Perceived or actual group enemies”
Both violent talk and transgressions contribute to community-building in incel spaces. They clearly delineate who is part of the community. They show who follows along with the transgressions, and is not shocked and driven away by descriptions of (sexual) violence, the sexualization of minors, or the breaking of other taboos. Sharing transgressions and cultural codes produces a “shared sense of ‘we’, and by extension, a collective identity”. They also create an outgroup, that is, the “perceived or actual group enemies” referenced in the community guidelines, and normalize violence against these “enemies” as part of the group’s action repertoire.
Neither violent talk nor deliberate transgressions are unique to community building in the incelosphere. The concept of violent talk was developed analyzing white supremacist activists, and right-wing mobilization often includes transgressions as a tactic of political agenda-setting. Transgressions are also part of most subcultures. Yet, outside of right-wing movements, few present violent talk and transgressions so openly. Users might visit incel forums first out of curiosity, or asking what is wrong with them. Some then immerse themselves and participate in the violent talk. As Vorre Mogensen illustrates, the user who began asking what is wrong with him, two years later posted “How many foids could you kill in a fight?” (“Foids” being a derogatory and dehumanizing term for women). The immanence of violent talk, as well as the transgression of rules attracts users to incel forums, which is why for some websites and forums, it is not a side effect, but a central selling point and source of identity formation, that keeps users in the spaces.
While users sometimes simply grow out of the subculture, and while violent talk can be a stand-in for physical violence, the support for violence against perceived enemies is alarming. This is why I want to echo O’Donnell and Shor in their warning, that there is a need to “examine misogynist incels as a potential terrorist group and male supremacism as a basis for terrorism”.
Greta Jasser is a research associate at the University of Hildesheim and a PhD student at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Jasser is a founding member of the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism (IRMS). She holds an Msc. in Political Theory from the London School of Economics and Political Science, as well as an MA in Social Science Data Analysis from the University of Essex. In her PhD research she analyses far-right and misogynist movements online with a focus on technology, platforms, affordances and ideologies
This blog post is a re-post from C-REX’s RightNow! blog, the original content and the organisation can be found here.
Image Credit: Original image by Kevin Walsh via Wikimedia Commons, adapted by Lucian Stephenson.
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