RedHanded

by Suruthi Bala

  The prosecution showed the jury an experiment on how long it would take a car like Smith’s to fully submerge—she had had six minutes to save her kids and didn’t. Smith was able to show investigators exactly where the car was, meaning she must have stood and watched it sink. So it’s hard to argue that it was an accident or that she didn’t know what she was doing, especially as she waited until the car was fully submerged before she went running to a nearby house, crying hysterical tears, to recount her carjacking story.

  So, the trial came down to the following:

  1 Did Susan Smith have a mental disorder? I think we can safely say yes.

  2 Was she suffering from a mental disorder at the time of the crime? Possibly. Even likely, given her history.

  3 Did her mental illness interfere with her ability to know that what she was doing was wrong? We don’t think so. Susan Smith lied to the police for nine days; she made up a completely false story about being abducted; and she led the police on a wild goose chase after a phantom Black man.

  The jury felt much the same. On July 27, 1995, Susan Smith was sentenced to life in prison for the murders of her sons, Michael and Alexander, with the possibility of parole after 30 years. Smith claims to have remorse and says she didn’t lie to protect herself; she lied to protect her ex-husband’s parents. And she still says that she did not kill the kids because of Tom Findlay. She is adamant she was intending to kill herself, but she never explains why her sons ended up dead and not her. Smith tried to appeal her sentence in 2010 but failed.

  If there’s anything we have learned during our years doing our podcast, it’s that the crossroads representing the intersection of law and mental health is a dangerous place to be standing. It’s a bloody mess, and if you hang around there too long, something big, heavy, and existential-crisis-shaped is going to smash into you. Our aim with this chapter is to make clear there are many nuances to mental illness, and that there is a huge difference between diagnoses made to treat sick people and diagnoses made for a court of law.

  And finally, we wanted to address a criticism often levied at the NGRI defense—that it’s used as a tactic or a get out of jail free card. As you’ve seen, not only is it a very difficult defense to pull off, it also doesn’t really benefit anyone except the truly “insane.” Susan Smith has the chance for parole in 2024, but it’s unlikely she’ll get it as she hasn’t exactly been the model prisoner. Andrea Yates has been committed to a mental hospital for an indeterminate amount of time, and while it’s the best place for her as she is actually receiving the treatment she needs, she’ll be there long-term. Susan Smith might get out, but Andrea Yates probably never will.

  Remember, not guilty by reason of insanity doesn’t mean freedom. And as the saying in legal circles goes: “You’d have to be insane to plead insanity.”

  4

  MISOGYNY

  Black Pills, Blue Balls, and Basement Virgins

  EVERY FIBER OF OUR BEING WANTS TO SIMPLY LAUGH AT “incels’’ (involuntary celibates) and their deranged hatred of women. We want to roll our eyes and scoff at these basement-dwelling weirdos who sit around on their online forums, complaining that they are losing out in the “sexual marketplace” because of their weak chins and short legs, and who call women “femoids” (female humanoids). But increasingly, just mocking these men feels like a mistake.

  Over the past few years, members of this strange and sad subculture have started to organize, and more concerningly, radicalize. Individuals who identify with the incel movement have committed horrific acts of real-life violence that can only be described as terrorism.

  The latest figures from the FBI show that from 2015 to 2020, at least 50 murders in North America have been directly linked to incel-inspired violence. Incels are, without a doubt, one of the West’s newest domestic terror threats, and as pathetic as these men are, as the body count linked to their ideology piles up, it’s time we took them dead seriously.

  In this chapter we are going to take a big old deep dive into the grimy waters of the “incelosphere,” bask in the putrid glow of online misogynistic radicalization, and ask what drives the violence we’ve seen in recent years. While some people in the media want to just dismiss these men as jokes and losers (and don’t get us wrong, they are most certainly super losers), there’s so much more to this story. Journalist David Futrelle is an expert in all things manosphere (the toxic corner of the internet filled with anti-feminist propaganda that, according to a 2019 article in the Atlantic, has become “a recruiting ground for potential mass shooters”). We think Futrelle absolutely put it best when he said, “misogyny kills, quite literally.”

  Toronto Van Attack

  While there are sadly many, many incidents of mass murder by incels that we could reference to kick off this chapter, let’s start with April 23, 2018, in Toronto. This was the day a 25-year-old man named Alek Minassian drove a van into a crowd of people waiting outside a local tennis game. He killed 10 and injured 16 that day, and the fact that his victims were mostly women was no accident.

  After the van attack Minassian was captured alive (despite his best attempts to end it all through suicide by cop), and he was arrested and taken in for questioning. It turned out that he was a former computer science student who had gone on to join—and then swiftly leave—the Canadian Armed Forces. If at first the police were confused by what had been behind this man’s desire to carry out such a seemingly random attack, Minassian quickly made his motivations clear. He told investigators about his time on the incel forums of Reddit and 4chan, and explained through gritted teeth how angry he was at women—a rage he claimed had grown and festered after he had been rejected by a girl in 2012.

  The year 2012 was six years before the attack! So Minassian was still furious about a rejection that had happened more than half a decade before, and he was using it to explain why he had just murdered 10 women. And it only got a whole lot more bizarre when Alek Minassian stated that he was a “supreme gentleman.” He said he was angry that women would give their love and affection to all these “obnoxious brutes” instead of him. He then started telling the police that he knew a lot of other guys on the internet who felt the same way, but that they were just “too cowardly to act on their anger.” He also said that he hoped his attack would motivate others to join him in what he called the “incel rebellion.”

  At the time of this attack, the world of incels was not very well known or understood. It was a strange and clandestine group, and a lot of the references and language that Minassian was using made little sense to outsiders. But soon, more clues began to emerge as to his motive. It turned out that just minutes before he had plowed his van into innocent people, Alek Minassian had uploaded the following post to Facebook:

  Private Recruit Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the supreme gentleman Elliot Rodger!

  Who the hell is Elliot Rodger? Well, he’s the founding father of modern online inceldom, the poster boy for the movement—the grand high wizard of being a dick who hates women. He earned himself these illustrious titles when he killed six people and injured 14 others in Isla Vista, California in 2014. And like all horrendously self-important wankers, Rodger left behind a screed—a 141-page manifesto called “My Twisted World,” in which he raged about women and explained in great detail his desire to get revenge on the entire female population. This piece of literary genius really stuck, and today it has become something of a bible for the incel community.

  But before we get to King Dweeb Elliot Rodger, the man himself, a forewarning: This chapter is going to need a lot of glossary-ing. You may have noticed that the message Minassian posted on Facebook doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Well, incels are a pretty insular bunch with a very specific set of ideologies and a very—shall we say—esoteric, meme-heavy way of communicating. So in order for us to really understand the crimes committed by members of th
is group, we have to come to grips with a lot of strange terminology. Prepare yourself to be smacked in the face with a ton of new and very weird lingo.

  Dickhead Dictionary

  Incels (“involuntary celibates”) are (mostly) men who are unable to find a romantic and sexual partner—even though they want one and believe that they have tried to get one. Crucially, they feel that women are to blame for their lack of spousal success. And so, one key unifying trait of incels, at the very heart of incel philosophy, is a deep-seated grievance toward all women.

  These men are angry and bitter and live in a black-and-white world of their own creation in which one’s appearance trumps everything else. Incels see sex as a commodity to be traded among the attractive. Incels believe that they lose out on sex because women are shallow and simple. In this worldview, sex is a zero-sum game: all men are fighting it out for sex and relationships with women, and one man’s success is another man’s loneliness.

  So perhaps you’re wondering, where might one find an incel in the wild? Well, they are a part of the dark and infinitely creepy corner of the internet known as the manosphere: a cesspit of misogyny, mildly amusing memes, horribly punctuated websites, and increasingly terrifying calls for brutal acts of violence against women—including mass rape. It’s worth pointing out, in an ironic twist, that the word incel was actually coined in the 1990s by a female student called “Alana.” She innocently started Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project as an online group for lonely people to connect and support each other. However, the community seemed to fracture in the mid-2000s and a new misogynistic offshoot called Love Shy was born.

  Since then, the term has been hijacked by these angry and aggrieved men who rage at women for not giving them the sex that they feel entitled to, and now “Alana” no longer has anything to do with the incel community. Today, most incels are men, and while female incels, referred to on online forums as “femcels,” do exist, they are usually dismissed by their lonely male peers who do not believe that women can really be incels.

  Now that we know the modern incel origin story, let’s have a gander at the evolution of this group. By 2015, they were hanging out pretty openly on mainstream forums like Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan, and quickly their numbers boomed. They sat around on these sites talking about how outrageous it was that women denied them sex. Some (who clearly revered Elliot Rodger) also started to share their fantasies about violence, calling on their fellow incels to take part in random shootings and advocating for mass rape.

  Pretty soon the violent fantasies started to spill over into real life, and incels were pushed out of places like Reddit. They were driven to start their own “safe space” forums like incels.me. While these incels were driven underground, with just a few clicks any of us normies can get onto an incel forum, and having spent a few days secretly hanging out in one we can confirm that it is a scary echo chamber of hate, rage, and the notion of genetic predeterminism. After reading the posts and discussions on a forum like incels.me, it’s incredibly easy to see that these men hate women, they hate the world, and they hate themselves. They look at everything in life through the lens of intense hatred.

  Basically, incels are unable to find a relationship or get laid and they violently loathe anyone who can. As far as they are concerned, the reason for their solo sex lives is partially due to attractive men who have sex with too many women and therefore monopolize the sex game—but of course, it’s also all women’s fault. Why? Let us explain.

  The Socio-Sexual Hierarchy and Other Fun Stories

  The socio-sexual hierarchy is a fun tier system of sexual desirability that incels have created. At the top of it sit the alphas, or Chads. In incel lingo, a Chad (or to give him his full name, Chad Thundercock—and no, we’re not making this up) is the archetypal high-status male. As his full name suggests, Chad gets all the sex in the world. Physically, Chads are tall, attractive, muscled, and have strong chins (not unlike our dear Hannah); there is a lot of weak-chin obsession on these incel forums.

  According to incels, Chads invariably treat women incredibly poorly, but us women are so simple and dumb that we fall for these men anyway. Incels see themselves as the nice guys or “supreme gentlemen,” who are always overlooked by women because at heart all women just want hot, bad guys who treat them terribly. And apparently, when a femoid is in the presence of a Chad she experiences “gina tingles”—gina being a cute little incel term for a vagina. These tingles take over our female brains and stop us from thinking rationally.

  For men with self-professed little to no experience with women, these incels sure seem to think they know an awful lot about vaginas… and their tingles. (For starters, they don’t even seem to know that the correct terminology here is not “gina tingles” but “fanny flutters.”)

  On the next tier down from the Chads are the betas. These men are what incels would describe as sellouts. They aren’t attractive enough or bad-boyish enough to get all the sex, but by giving in to the man-hating agenda of feminism, they do get some. Betas are often referred to as “cucks.” What’s a cuck? Well, it’s a man who is desperate for acceptance, approval, and affection from women, but his desperation has led to the compromise of his true values and the desecration of his dignity and self-worth. Essentially, incels believe that (1) cucks are just pandering to women in order to get sex, and (2) that women should know their place, be dominated, and forced to have sex.

  Interestingly, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and John Legend are named regularly on incels.me as cucks. It appears that this is because these celebs seem to respect and care about their wives. (We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: someone get us a couple of cucks!)

  Speaking of finding ourselves a cuck, as we both creak into our thirties, incels would say we’re already well over the hill, if not totally buried under it. Because in the mind of the incel, the sexual life cycle of the average woman goes a little something like this: Until the age of 25, women ride the “sex carousel,” getting it on with as many alphas as we can. Then we eventually settle down with a well-trained beta we can keep in line. This is because, according to incels, femoids “hit the wall” at 25, after which point we become less and less sexually desirable.

  Incels have also started borrowing a rather festive term coined by Japanese businessmen to describe women over a certain age—Christmas cake. According to Urban Dictionary, Christmas cake is meant to be eaten on December 25th; after that it’s gone bad and it might as well go in the bin. (Do you get this incredibly funny “high IQ” joke?) So all you ladies out there, tick tock. Or, you know, find yourself a cuck who likes coagulated Christmas cake in April.

  But anyway, back to the sex tiers. After the alphas and the betas come our boys the incels—or the omegas. According to incels, an omega is a low-status male who has no chance whatsoever of getting laid, at all, ever. Pickup artists, or PUAs, on the other hand (another creepy inhabitant of the manosphere swamp) also call themselves omegas, but they believe that they can use “the game”—a set of techniques designed to seduce and manipulate women—to overcome their lack of physical attractiveness. These surefire techniques that are guaranteed to win you sex and love with any woman include negging, harem management, premature intimacy, and kino escalation. If you’re thinking WTF check out our sidebar for the gag-inducing details.

  HATE THE “PLAYER” AND HATE THE GAME

  PUAs are the absolute worst, and so we take great pleasure in writing this embarrassing list of their sad manipulation techniques. Once you know what these tricks look like, you’ll spot the bullshit a mile off. Now don’t get us wrong, these techniques are hardly a secret—they were clearly outlined by author Neil Strauss in his 2005 book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, but let’s have a gander at some of the highlights.

  Kino Escalation: This is the gradual invasion of a woman’s physical space; PUAs will gradually escalate their physical touch to test the boundaries and see how far they can go.

  Neg
ging: A “neg” is a backhanded compliment designed and delivered to lower a woman’s self-esteem and make her more eager to seek the PUA’s validation.

  Harem Management: PUAs will always bring up their exes or other women to manufacture love triangles, or false competition to make themselves look highly desirable.

  Premature Intimacy: This tactic is to force a woman to be vulnerable quickly, and it usually involves the PUA proclaiming on the first date how emotionally invested and smitten he is.

  So, as you can see, PUAs are just as misogynistic as incels; they are perhaps just a little bit more optimistic. Incels, however, have taken what they call “the black pill,” and if you’re thinking that sounds familiar and completely unoriginal, you’d be right—it comes from The Matrix. In the world of incels, though, “taking the black pill” means waking up to the idea that the most important factors in attracting women are looks and physical traits (because us women are shallow and stupid—and of course, no examples whatsoever exist in the real world of women being attracted to any men ever who aren’t perfect Adonis-bodied thundercocks).

  Incels say that without certain physical traits, a man can never succeed with women and should therefore just give up. It is an idea based in biological determinism, total hopelessness, and sexual nihilism. Incels wear this grievance ideology like a protective exoskeleton. It gives them the freedom to say that they are just victims of circumstance; there is no point in their trying to work on themselves or to address why they might be struggling to make meaningful connections with other people. And it’s common to actually see people on the internet sympathizing with these men because, yes, they are lonely and social isolation is a terrible thing. But hold up. As Jennifer Wright put it in a 2018 Harper’s Bazaar article, “Their existence is not about being lonely. It is about blaming women for their loneliness.”