From Cops to Incels: Understanding Entitlement and Control of Women’s Bodies
Content note: This piece covers themes of institutional misogyny, rape and sexual violence, sexual harassment, police, and fatphobia.
In April 2018, Alek Minassian used a van to murder 10 and injure 15 people. Before his attack, he went to Facebook posting, “The incel rebellion has already begun! [...] All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” Elliot Rodger, the man responsible for the 2014 Isla Vista massacre, is often referred to as the king of the incels, short for “involuntary celibate.”
The incel community, primarily made up of white, heterosexual men, are joined by their frustration in experiencing repetitive sexual rejection. Their online community has centred itself around hatred of women and disturbing visions of vengeance against society. Forms of extreme violence and misogyny are often uplifted and encouraged within online incel forums, as members of the community boast about their perpetration of harassment and sexual violence. Forums are filled with frightening stories of violence against women, such as serial assaults on public transit, groping, and fantasizing about rape. Although the posts range from rants to explicit descriptions of assault, the overwhelming number of stories illustrate one apparent belief -- they think they are obligated and entitled to women’s bodies.
Within the cases of both Alek Minassian and Elliot Rodger, the criminal legal system and the media attempts to label them as lone wolves, bad apples, and in the case of the courts, not criminally responsible. Out of fear, many of us depict incels as freak accidents of the internet or their mental health in an attempt to distance ourselves from them as much as possible. However, incels aren’t just a mistake or a minority in society, but rather a direct byproduct of State-sanctioned colonial violence. Within a State moulded by the patriarchy and white supremacy, groups of white men that are consumed by their privilege - cops and incels alike - manipulate rhetoric of victimization and oppression to construct sympathy from a world that is built around their narratives.
Through the violence and control of marginalized bodies, incels and the State prove themselves to be the benefactors of systemic racism, misogyny, fatphobia, homophobia, and coloniality.
For example, in 2017, Québécois Judge Jean-Paul Braun alleges that a 17-year-old girl may have been ‘flattered’ by the advances by her 49-year-old abuser. Judge Braun states, “She’s a young girl, 17. Maybe she’s a little overweight, but she has a pretty face, no?” he continues, “She was a bit flattered. Maybe it was the first time he showed interest in her”. Incels often mirror this use of desirability politic and fatphobia to justify sexual violence as they chronically dehumanize fat bodies.
This facade of love and compassion, used to romanticize the violent control and abuse of marginalized peoples, is inherently tied to colonization. In a video titled “I'm An Incel. Ask Me Anything,” a self-proclaimed incel shares his understanding of society: “I probably wouldn’t view the [same] things that you view as oppression, as oppression. I would view it more as how we [white men] treat children that we love; we control them, but we control them lovingly”. His statements parrot notions of assimilation as well as Western imperialism and supremacy that vindicate colonial nation-states.
Similarly, white-washed accounts of coloniality as an act of generosity or kindness continue to sculpt court rulings. In a 1991 British sexual assault case, Judge Arthur Myerson justified reducing the rapist’s sentence to 3 years by stating, “you [the rapist] showed concern and consideration [for his victim] by wearing a contraceptive”. This delusion that oppressed peoples should be grateful for their abuse is pushed by colonizers and then reflected in white men’s understanding of their own positionality.
Binary understandings of gender that are rooted in the patriarchy often infantilize and domesticate misogyny-affected people. The incel’s knowledge of humanity imitates neoliberal capitalist versions of land and people, where the language of conquering and transaction are used concerning women’s bodies.
Richie Reseda, a formerly incarcerated abolitionist, argues “people say you go to prison ‘cause you don’t follow the rules. It’s not true. You go to prison ‘cause you do follow the rules, the real rules that tell men how they’re supposed to be”. Men don’t become violent or abusive because of their so-called nature, but rather because colonial institutions have shaped them to be. To disregard the incel subculture as an individual catastrophe of the internet is to further erase the persistence of white supremacy and misogyny as ingrained into every facet of colonial nation-states. We must develop more fulsome understandings of incel culture as not only a disaster in itself but as a failure of the patriarchy.