“The Incel Rebellion”

Under the male supremacist framework Rodger had subscribed to, he believed that he was entitled to sex, and women en masse deserved death for his deprivation. Sociologist Michael Kimmel, who studies masculinities, argues that this concept of “aggrieved entitlement” explains the motivations behind disproportionately male-perpetrated mass killings and everyday violence against women.⁴ 

Aggrieved entitlement, Kimmel writes, is a belief by men “that they are entitled to certain things—power, wealth, sex—and that they are entitled to use violence to restore what they believe is rightfully theirs.” Kimmel sees this perception at play not only in explicitly misogynist attacks, but also in White supremacist groups, which tell White men that they have been unfairly deprived of their rightful place in society. According to Kimmel, entitled killers need “to believe that they were justified, that their murderous rampage was legitimate.”⁵

In a YouTube video Rodger posted describing his plans, he laid out the twisted logic under which he sought “retribution.” “It’s an injustice, a crime because I don’t know what you don’t see in me,” he said. “I’m the perfect guy and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman.”⁶

Rodger was hardly the first man in the United States or Canada to commit mass violence against women because of his sense of aggrieved entitlement. In 1989, 25-year-old Marc Lépine killed 14 female engineering students at École Polytechnique in Montreal (which had rejected his application), leaving a note declaring, “I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker.”⁷ However, Rodger’s attack was distinguished by his known connections to male supremacist online forums. He frequented r/ForeverAlone, a subreddit forum for incels, and r/TheRedPill, a forum founded in 2012 at the intersection of the existing Men’s Rights Activist (MRA) and Pickup Artist (PUA) or “seduction” communities.⁸ MRAs claim that men are oppressed by feminist society, venturing into conspiratorial thinking. Pickup artists teach men “game”: tips and strategies for picking up women that include demeaning and “negging” them, and advocate techniques that frequently amount to rape.⁹ While little studied before the shootings, in 2014, misogynist online Reddit forums ranged from 30,000 subscribers (r/ForeverAlone) to almost 200,000 (r/seduction); today, r/TheRedPill is one of the largest, with over 250,000 subscribers.

Rodger also posted regularly on PUAhate.com—a messaging board for failed pickup artists—which he credited with confirming “many of the theories I had about how wicked and degenerate women really are.”¹⁰ (After his attack, PUAhate was renamed Sluthate, a change viewed as seeking to avoid the spotlight Rodger put on the website; however, it also shifted focus from railing against PUA lessons to simply hating sexually active women.) His posts included a rallying cry to fellow incels: “If we can’t solve our problems we must DESTROY our problems…One day incels will realize their true strength and numbers, and will overthrow this oppressive feminist system.”¹¹

Since 2011, a similar revenge fantasy has been referred to on 4chan—an online forum that has become a major gathering place for the growing Alt Right umbrella of White and male supremacists, and to which Minassian pretended to be reporting in his Facebook post—as the “beta uprising.”¹² Some incels admiringly also use the phrases “going ER”—as in “going Elliot Rodger”—or “going Sodini” (the latter of which was coined after another aggrieved, sexually inactive man, George Sodini, opened fire in 2009 at a fitness class full of women, killing three and leaving a year’s worth of sporadic online journal entries describing his motivations¹³) Christopher Sean Harper-Mercer, a 26-year-old who killed nine people at Umpqua Community College in Oregon in 2015, referenced Rodger in what the Los Angeles Times described as “a script of his life to convince the public and media that the killings were the result of his mistreatment by others, and that he was merely seeking revenge.”¹⁴

Though aiming most of his vitriol at women, Rodger also seethed at “all of you sexually active men”—voicing a resentment characteristic of the incel community. Online incel and Alt Right forums refer, as Minassian demonstrated in his Facebook post, to sexually successful White men as “Chads,” and to their attractive (and for an incel, unattainable) White female counterparts as “Stacys,” or to both as “normies.” Rodger’s resentment wasn’t only directed at White men, however; he was also deeply infuriated by Asian and Black men who attracted White women. Though himself biracial—with a White father and Asian mother—Rodger viewed his Whiteness as superior. Similarly, Harper-Mercer, also biracial, condemned Black men as “vile” (exempting himself because only his mother, not his father, was Black) and wrote that he “fully agree[d]” with Rodger’s position.¹⁵

In October 2017, incel commenters applauded Stephen Paddock, the mass shooter who killed 58 people in Las Vegas, for his successful massacre of such “normies.” Despite the fact that Paddock had a live-in girlfriend, incel supporters saw him as one of their own, identifying with the “despondent rage” and “alienation” of mass shooters, who were portrayed as the “real victims.”¹⁶

Even those members of the MRA landscape who don’t commend the violence of shooters like Rodger or Minassian still support their sense of being aggrieved. Daryush Valizadeh (“Roosh V.”), a PUA leader who founded the site Return of Kings (recently designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center ¹⁷), did not explicitly endorse Rodger’s attack, but blamed progressive organizations like SPLC for the killings and warned that until “beta” men have accessible ways to have sex with women—such as legalizing prostitution or teaching “game”—“these massacres will be more commonplace as America’s cultural decline continues.”¹⁸ After this April’s Toronto attack, Roosh V. spouted the same line of blame, tweeting, “Alek Minnasian wouldn’t have killed people with a van if the media had not inoculated him and other lonely men against effective game teachers like myself. Sleeping with only two or three Toronto Tinder sluts would have been enough to stop his urge to kill.”¹⁹

Though incels have generally been associated with pickup artists—or failed PUAs—developments in recent years suggest that the incel community should be analyzed as a distinct identity within the overlapping spheres of male supremacist mobilizations. From mid-2016 to November 2017, a new misogynist forum, r/Incels, grew rapidly to some 40,000 subscribers before getting banned. While support for violence is an unaddressed problem across male supremacist forums, other misogynist subreddits have been more circumspect than r/Incels with regards to overt glorification of mass killers.²⁰ Reddit, which has long permitted hateful content under the guise of free speech, announced in late October 2017 that going forward the site would “take action against any content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people.”²¹ This resulted in the prompt banning of White supremacist and neonazi forums, including r/NationalSocialism, r/Nazi, r/DylannRoofInnocent, r/EuropeanNationalism, r/KillTheJews, and r/Far_Right. Two weeks later, r/Incels went the way of these racist and antisemitic forums.²²

However, other forums, on Reddit and off, continue to propagate incel ideology. This latest act of mass violence explicitly referencing incels and hailing Rodger speaks to the importance of paying greater attention to the threat posed by this community.