BEFORE Elliot Rodger killed seven people and injured 14 more, he posted a manifesto online. It comprised 137 pages analysing his life, overflowing with hatred for women and violent fantasies of how he would enact retribution upon them. On May 23, 2014, he posted a video announcing what was to come. He would punish women for rejecting him as well as men who were sexually active, intending to slaughter a house of sorority sisters in Santa Barbara. He then stabbed his three flatmates before driving to the house. When he didn’t get past the front door, he shot three women nearby. He shot another man before driving through Isla Vista shooting and mowing down pedestrians, and then turned the gun on himself.
Four years later, April 2018, a man went on a rampage in Toronto. He hired a van and drove into a crowd of people. He intended to kill as many people as possible. Ten died, 16 were injured. He begged for the arresting officer to shoot him in the head. Before the attack, suspect Alek Minassian posted on Facebook that a rebellion had begun. He was “going ER”, as it’s become known in the years since Isla Vista. Going Elliot Rodger.
First Rodger, now Minassian. Both men who felt genuinely entitled to sex because they were men. They blamed women for denying them, and social progress for enabling women to choose their partners more freely. Rodger and Minassian were members of an online subculture where violence against women is glorified, beliefs in their inferiority are compounded and where suicide, death and violence against women are central to discussion. Where men can go from internet loners to committing acts of staggering brutality. These men are not the “lone wolves” they seem. They are the product of a leaderless group where misogyny is doctrine. They are considered heroes by men who call themselves “incels”.
Incel means “involuntary celibate”. These are self-identified men who share an ideology; believing their sexless lives are the fault of women who choose other sexual partners. In inceldom, women are shallow and vindictive, interested only in hyper-masculine “high-status” men. Some go so far as to suggest that women can’t be raped by conventionally attractive men, because they really desire it. For the crime of sexual rejection, women deserve punishment. They must be made subservient to men, can be raped without consequence, and exterminated.
There’s an ideological war brewing in online spaces, where lonely men reach out to one another. They’ve created an echo chamber where death and sexual violence is the norm, pushing moderately disaffected and vulnerable men to seek validation for their feelings in radical misogyny. Together they’ve constructed an alternate worldview. Elliot Rodger considered himself a soldier, committing acts of terrorism in the name of his belief.
Religious extremism is our default schema for what terrorism is. In the same way the internet has contributed to a rise in radicalisation, it’s not hard to see how the same mechanisms could radicalise others in service to a different political ideology. The work done to conceptualise and explain religious radicalisation throws light on the Isla Vista killings and the Toronto van attack, giving us a means of making sense of the seemingly senseless. This is misogynistic terrorism carried out by men who’ve become radicalised. It must be understood in these terms to make sense of what’s happening and to join the dots between one seemingly random act of violence and another.
Dr Robyn Torok of Edith Cowan University in Australia has produced an explanatory model of online radicalisation and behaviour. Radicalisation isn’t about the seductiveness of violence. It doesn’t happen because someone wakes up one day with a clearly defined enemy and a desire to wipe them out. Torok’s model explains how disaffected, isolated individuals seek each other out online and in these spaces find an outlet for and vindication of their feelings.
Like internet forums that breed religious extremism, incel spaces trade stories of blame, oppression, exoneration narratives, an acceptance of death and a shared desire for a return to an imagined past. Here they find brotherhood, and a sense of purpose in serving a “cause”. Extremists like Elliot Rodger are martyred, offering men who’ve given up a path to posthumous glory. Understood in these terms, some men who hate themselves and blame women for their isolation will turn to violence.
This is far bigger than a warped sense of sexual entitlement. It’s but one thread in this tapestry of hate fuelled by individual circumstance, cultural messages and social forces. Insecure men measure themselves by their sexual prowess. The culture tells them that women are objects that exist to please them, while lionising hypermasculinity. By their sexist logic, they’re failing on two counts – to bed women and to be the right type of man. In their minds society has placed them in the margins, with women denying them and alpha males laughing at them.
Replace extreme religious ideology with extreme sexist ideology, and you can begin to form a picture of how an incel becomes a terrorist.
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