The foundational misogyny of incels overlaps with racism | Paradkar

2018/05/03 Leave a comment

Hard to understand and comprehend the extent and nature of such hatred:

The more things change, the more they stay the same, sometimes dangerously so.

In all the discussions around Incels or involuntary celibates — a term violently wrested out of an obscure internet subculture and thrown into mainstream lexicon after last week’s van rampage in Toronto — a less talked about aspect is the overlap of its foundational misogyny with racism.

There’s a reason for that. It’s complicated.

“When you have these communities that don’t have coherent ideologies on a lot of things, they’re united in their misogyny, not necessarily united on the racial stuff,” says Arshy Mann, a reporter for Xtra, a Toronto-based LGBTQ magazine, who has been surfing the larger “manosphere” subculture for a decade and researching Incels for the past six months.

Taking a virtual gander through some of these Incels threads is like entering the byzantine paths of a twisted mind. Whatever adjectives cross your mind, “healthy” is unlikely to be one of them.

Mann has come across East Asian men upset that white men have an easier time sleeping with East Asian women. He has come across brown men who fetishize whiteness.

Often, the racism is specifically anti-Black, he says.

“All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger,” says the now-deleted Facebook post on the wall of Alek Minassian, the man charged with murders after the Toronto van rampage.

Rodger, the half-Asian 22-year-old Santa Barbara, Calif., killer of six people (and then himself) in 2014, hailed as some sort of patron saint for the Incels, was so fixated on whiteness he bleached his hair and fantasized about tall, blonde girls. He saw their rejection as a rejection of his non-white parts. So he reserved in his so-called manifesto particular venom for boys of colour who got attention from white girls.

“How could an inferior, ugly Black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves. I deserve it more …”

Rodger’s rage wasn’t reserved just for Black people, though.

“How could an inferior Mexican guy be able to date a white blonde girl, while I was still suffering as a lonely virgin?”

“How could an ugly Asian attract the attention of a white girl, while a beautiful Eurasian like myself never had any attention from them?”

While experts caution against assuming that it was Minassian who authored his Facebook post, its content offers a window into this miserable world.

“The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys!” it says.

Chads are the attractive white men who get all the attention from Stacys, usually white women. But if Chad is the hated white guy in this warped world then “Tyrone” is the Black Chad, even more to be reviled.

Yet, there is a large non-white, or “ethnicels” participation on these forums.

“A significant number of these people who self describe as Incels identify as non-white,” says Mann. “I see a lot of South Asian and east Asian men and boys — or people of south Asian and east Asian origins.”

The currycels and ricecels.

And, of course, there are nazicels.

“There’s a real overlap with other parts of the alt-right,” says Mann. “The “manosphere” more broadly is an entry point into more racist, anti-Semitic and white nationalist ways of thinking.

“Because these are parallel subcultures there is a lot of movement from one to the other.”

On one incels.me thread, there is a discussion on “should Incels and alt-right form an unholy alliance?”

Not everyone is on board automatically. “They get some pushback,” says Mann. At the same time, he says, it’s a topic placed “within the window of legitimate discussion.”

On that same thread, a poster asks: should anti-miscegenation laws be enforced globally or should prostitution be made legal around the world?

It’s difficult to take seriously what appears to be juvenile jockeying around, a venting if you like, a play for who is worse off, who is uglier, who has it tougher — until there’s an actual body count.

“Of course, not all of them are violent,” says Mann. But the groups create a permission structure to engage in violence, he says. “They’re explicitly saying this is a good thing to do … It’s a way to prove their masculinity to engage in public violence.”

In one discussion on Minassian, a poster calling himself “blackcel” says, “While I do not condone killing or rape, I would be a lot more proud of a methodical Incel serial killer who carefully picked his victims and possibly raped them before death.”

via The foundational misogyny of incels overlaps with racism | The Star

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ICYMI: Fringe internet culture can’t stay in the fringes

2018/05/01 Leave a comment

Useful and insightful commentary as usual Amarnath Amarasingam on “incel” radicalization:

Combine powerful online echo chambers, the perceived decline of the white male, a surge in online troll culture and groups of angry and alienated men, and you have a powerful cocktail for dangerous radicalization.

As of yet, we don’t have proof that these conditions led to the horrific van attack in Toronto that left 10 dead and 14 injured. But we do have a clue: a Facebook post on the page of Alek Minassian, charged in Monday’s attacks, talking about the “Incel Rebellion.”

Incels or “involuntary celibates” are those who are essentially forced into celibacy because they cannot find a sexual partner. Many of the young men who join this movement feel ignored, and the groups of which they are a part have likewise been ignored by mainstream society. That’s why many of us hadn’t heard the term “incel” until this week.

As we learn more about Minassian’s history, it might very well turn out that the incel movement was not the primary factor in his decision to get behind the wheel. But it’s worth discussing regardless, because as many of us are beginning to realize, fringe internet culture can cause real social harm.

Incels operate across the same platforms as a range of extreme right activists — platforms such as Reddit, 4chan and 8chan, and use communications channels such as Discord, the gaming chat application noted for its use by activists seeking to influence European elections in favour of far right groups.

In fact, the movement plays off of similar tropes and language as the extreme right, using terms like “cuck” and “feminazi.”

The ideological nexus that ties these groups together is the perception of (white) masculinity being under threat from external forces such as women, people of colour, refugees and the political left, combined with a hatred of social progressive values that empower previously marginalized communities.

Normies, Chads and Stacys

These incel individuals, who often suffer from a range of vulnerabilities including anxiety and autistic spectrum disorders, flourish in digital fora that provide them with the opportunity to embrace their identity as outsiders, relishing in their role as “beta male.”

In the confines of these incel echo chambers, they blame their social misfortune on their peers who have fewer issues engaging in social activities — people they label as “normies,” “Chads” and “Stacys.”

Normies, a term originating on 4Chan and referring to anything and anyone who is mainstream, includes Chads, a nickname used to describe good looking men who have no difficulty finding women who will sleep with them, and Staceys who are women who always reject incels in favour of Chads. The behaviours that the “betas” feel incapable of achieving offline — such as social confidence and intimate relationships — are projected onto these imagined boogeymen.

Many of these youth needed support, though some of them may have turned to established social institutions already for help in the past. Today, they’re increasingly finding it in these closed-off online collectives, talking with like-minded and equally alienated individuals, which ends up amplifying and reinforcing — rather than addressing and counteracting — their angst and anger.

As with all cases of radicalization, under the right set of psychological and personal conditions, individuals can be pushed to violence. Thousands of youth may feel these grievances, but only a few may ever decide that violence is a necessary way to express themselves. Even after decades of research in terrorist radicalization, the question of who might ultimately turn to violence is still beyond our grasp.

Elliot Rodger is the primary example of an incel radicalized to the point of violence. In 2014, the 22-year-old killed six people in Isla Vista, California, after posting a manifesto about his hatred of women and desire to punish them for rejecting him. His violence was later lauded on the fringes of the internet, fostering a range of distasteful memes and helping to reinforce the mythos of the group.

Academic discourse around “fragile masculinity” has long pointed out that we need to start taking these grievances more seriously, particularly among youth. Many of these online discussions are overflowing with worrisome levels of toxic masculinity and anger. In the mindset of those who occupy these spaces, they are trapped between the strong men they cannot become, and the weak men who reinforce the feminism that they see as ostracising and oppressing them.

Ultimately, these communities are providing a home to those who feel unable to find a place in mainstream society. The attitudes espoused therein must be challenged, but more importantly, these individuals must be offered an opportunity to engage with those outside of their echo chambers, through meaningful interventions and support.

 

Source: Fringe internet culture can’t stay in the fringes

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