Increasing Rhetoric of Dehumanization

The themes found in the Santa Barbara manifesto have been picked up, elaborated on, and evolved in new directions in misogynist incel discourse. A Sluthate.com comment six months after the 2014 attack, on a thread about “incel shooting sprees,” explicitly stated the instrumentality toward and commoditization of women’s bodies, asserting that every person deserves to have basic needs met like food, shelter, and, “if you are a male, sexual access to attractive females as that is considered a basic need for men as well.”¹

New objectifying terms in the guise of memes developed, growing through the online forum 4chan. The “beautiful blondes” of the Santa Barbara manifesto are exemplified by the meme of “Stacys” (also “Stacies”), sexually desirable (high SMV) white women stereotyped as blonde and curvy. Meanwhile, “attractive, popular men who are sexually successful with women” are memed as “Chads.”² The 2018 Toronto van attack perpetrator called for the overthrow of Chads and Stacys.³ Memes are often taken as not serious, ironic or humorous, but they also can be assessed as forms of objectification: All sexually desirable women are so interchangeable they are given the same name, a term that reduces them to a set of sexualized physical characteristics. (Another, meme “Becky,” refers to women viewed as less desirable—but more attainable—however, this term appears infrequently in misogynist incel forums.) Even Chads are interchangeable and defined by appearance, significant given that such men have been secondary targets for violence. Misogynist incels have racialized—and racist—terms for non-white Chads; the most-used such term, “Tyrone,” refers to Black men, who are viewed as having a sexual advantage with women.

Two other disparaging terms popularized through 4chan are used frequently by misogynist incels as well as the alt-right: “normies” and “cucks.” The word cuck, shortened from cuckold (a man whose wife or partner is sexually unfaithful), disparages certain men as servile, submissive, and weak. Cucks, Chads, Stacys, and Beckys are all “normies,” men and women viewed as conforming to society, i.e., “normal,” non-incels. This categorization sets up an in-group/out-group dynamic also characteristic of dangerous speech. Misogynist incel men have voiced support for violence committed even by non-incels because the victims were normies. For instance, r/Incels posters lauded the 2017 Las Vegas shooter, who killed 58 people attending a concert, for killing normies, sympathizing and identifying with the perpetrator, even though he had a live-in girlfriend and was not an incel.⁴

While most studies and media on incels have focused on the terms Chads and Stacys as distinguishing the community, this does not accurately reflect the severity and popularity of dehumanization toward women in contemporary misogynist incel forums. Mechanistic dehumanization, not significant in the Santa Barbara manifesto, has become central to misogynist incel rhetoric, reducing women to machines with no capacity for emotion. This “sanitizes violence against the target,” so that killing is reduced to “pulling the plug of an inanimate object. In fact, sometimes denying the other group the ability to feel any emotion may motivate excusing one’s own collective abuses against them.”⁵ It is similar to objectification in perceiving its targets as interchangeable and instrumental. The terms “femoid” or “foid,” abbreviations for “female humanoid” or “Female Humanoid Organism,” have far outpaced the use of the term Stacy. On incels.co, foid is used four times as often as Stacy/Stacie. Yet Chad remains the primary term for “sexually successful” men. While other men can be targets, women are the focus of misogynist incel dehumanization and violence.

Beyond the memes and ubiquitous mechanistic dehumanization, misogynist incel men have developed an array of other dehumanizing and derogatory terms for women. In particular, objectifying language refers to women by demeaning terms for their genitalia, most popularly “roasties” (a vulgar way of describing labia), or just reduces women to “holes.” On incels.co, roastie appears almost as much as Stacy/Stacie. Terms for women considered undesirable for lacking idealized physical features include animalistic epithets, for example, “landwhales,” and racist epithets, such as “noodlewhores,” a term for Asian women. To give a sense of how common basic dehumanization is when making reference to women, femoid(s)/foid(s) alone are used a third as frequently as the neutral terms women/woman/girl(s) on incels.co.

Beyond the memes and ubiquitous mechanistic dehumanization, misogynist incel men have developed an array of other dehumanizing and derogatory terms for women.