“Incel” is a portmanteau of “involuntary celibate.”

“Incel” is a portmanteau of “involuntary celibate.”

This fuckless—I mean feckless—group is comprised almost exclusively of young men, usually white, who lament their inability to get laid. It’s a toxic online subculture that despises women while also wanting to use them for sex. But it’s not really about the sex. Rather, incels are a hate group that cannot abide having their sense of entitlement thwarted. They want to conquer the bodies of beautiful women to gain status in the male hierarchy, or some dumbfuck bullshit idea like that.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: May 23, 2014—

The Isla Vista, California, massacre on May 23, 2014, brought the word “incel” into the common vernacular. The term was actually coined by a woman in the ’90s as a way to help people. But like many things it was co-opted and warped by men like Elliot Rodger.

Rodger, a 22-year-old virgin, couldn’t find a girlfriend, and to him that was enough to justify mass murder. But not before writing a 107,000-word hate-filled manifesto about how much he despised women for “starving him of sex.” Using a combination of stabbing, shooting, and his car as a weapon, he murdered six people and wounded fourteen others during his rampage before putting his gun to his own head.

I wish people bent on murder-suicide would do it in the reverse order.

To give you an idea of how fucked-up the incel community is, they anointed Rodger “Saint Elliot” because he “martyred” himself to the cause. Incels number in the tens of thousands online, and several mass murders have been committed by them in North America, resulting in dozens of deaths. A shift in how these killings are treated came as a result of a February 24, 2020, stabbing attack in Toronto that killed one woman and injured another. A minor-aged male incel was charged. Police later labeled it an act of terrorism.

And that is an accurate determination. Incels are as radicalized as any terror group. They have their own lexicon to slot people into various groups. They are nihilists who feel their lives are doomed due to not being considered conventionally attractive, so burn the world down. But they are not all beyond hope. There are many former incels. Learn the terminology and seek to intervene if you know someone who is at risk of being sucked into this terrorist organization.