Introduction

In Santa Barbara, Calif. in May 2014, a 22-year-old man perpetrated the first attack connected to the “incel” community, a group of people who identify as “involuntarily celibate” due to a claimed inability to find sexual and romantic partners. He set out to kill women at a sorority, but was unable to gain entrance, attacking passersby instead. At the time, most coverage mistakenly identified the perpetrator as a “failed pickup artist,” due to his activity in an online forum oriented toward men dissatisfied with the industry that promised to teach them how to seduce women. For years after the attack, there was no substantial media attention to the incel community. Yet over that same time period, the manifesto and videos produced by the Santa Barbara attacker influenced the development of a movement of misogynist incel men, shaped around entitlement to sex and dehumanization of women.

In 2018, an attack in Toronto perpetrated by a self-identified incel man, running over and killing 10 people with a van, drew widespread attention from North American media to the incel community for the first time. This attack was followed six months later by a misogynist attack on a yoga class in Tallahassee, Fla., by a man who had previously compared himself to the Santa Barbara perpetrator.

In the years since, incel communities have captured a piece of the public, academic, and the policy world’s imagination. Numerous news pieces, journal articles, policy papers, and other coverage have appeared. However, this attention has carried significant and potentially harmful oversights and misconceptions, beginning with the way the term incel is used. The (heterosexual, cisgender) men-only misogynist movement whose growth is of concern now should be differentiated from the original use of the term, which dates to a 1990s gender-neutral community founded by a bisexual woman. The Institute for Research on Male Supremacism recommends the term misogynist incel (similar to the construction of the term “racist skinhead”) to distinguish the male supremacist ideology and movement from personal identification with the term incel. This term will be used throughout the report.

In this policy brief, we explore the history of incel identity and the development of a new misogynist ideology, explaining core concepts related to dehumanization and entitlement, significant frameworks such as the “red pill” and “black pill,” and violence as central to the movement ideology. In this brief format, we provide only a short overview of additional issues worthy of extensive analysis, such as race in incel communities. Our focus here is on conveying information most relevant to understanding and addressing potential violence by misogynist incel perpetrators.

This policy brief analyzes the language used by misogynist, racist, and far-right groups, the intensity of which may be disturbing for some readers. Examples of speech discussed include topics of sexual violence, pedophilia, racist speech, and suicide.