by Suruthi Bala
Entitled
Incels are also all about entitlement. In her book, Entitled, author Kate Manne explains this really well: yes, incels complain about the fact that women will not have sex with them, but their real issue is often that they are not receiving the right kind of attention from the right kind of women. As you can see from their weird sex-ladder descriptions of men, incels see the world as a black-and-white hierarchy broken down into categories of people defined by their appearance and sexual status. In the world of men, these are the alphas, betas, and omegas. When it comes to women, they are either Stacys or Beckys.
A Stacy is the female counterpart of a Chad—a high-value woman who is attractive and desirable. Beckys are the opposite of Stacys—unattractive, usually flat-chested women. Incels want Stacys and feel angry that Stacys want Chads. Incels feel entitled to love, pleasure, and power and they don’t want it from Beckys. But if a woman dares to desire pleasure and power, and that pleasure comes from a man she finds desirable, then she is of course a slut. To incels, her making that choice for herself is in itself not fair, because when she makes that choice it means that she is directly denying incels the pleasure they feel they are owed.
OK, OK, we get it—this is a weird one to wrap your head around, so let’s consider the teen romances we all used to watch… The hot girl was an idiot because she didn’t notice the geeky guy who really loved her; instead she wanted the hot jock. She was always horrible and mean to the geeky guy, but he still loved her. Why? Well, if she wasn’t very nice to him, then he only liked her because she was hot. However, in the movie his love would be portrayed to the viewer as pure and wholesome. The hot girl not fancying him and liking the hot guy instead was presented as shallow and slutty, naturally.
Why is the geeky guy a sympathetic character despite his shallowness, but the hot girl is a bitch? This puerile worldview of men being “friend-zoned” or ignored by a woman they want, and then feeling victimized and resenting her for it, is the founding principle of the incel movement. The idea is completely interlinked with the notion that women cannot be trusted to decide who they want sexually; they are far too inferior to make decisions that in any way affect men. Left to their own devices, women will choose the dominant dickhead and ignore the gentleman in front of them: the incel (who, as if it weren’t already clear, is anything but a gentleman).
The Road to Radicalization
By simply blaming their issues on something they feel is totally out of their control (their appearance), incels relieve themselves of any personal responsibility. It’s all someone else’s fault. This way of thinking is not unique to incels by any means, and in fact this deep-seated grievance is a fundamental commonality we see in those who are prone to any kind of radicalization across the board. Consider racists: if they aren’t as successful in life as they’d like to be, immigrants and minorities must be to blame. When we consider these similarities (blaming or scapegoating others chief among them), it’s easy to see why there’s a definite dovetailing of extreme right-wing communities and incel communities online.
Pathetic as their ramblings are, don’t be fooled. It’s this hopelessness and grievance that make incels so dangerous and the most violent group within the manosphere. (PUAs believe that they can manipulate women into giving them what they want, and other groups like MGTOW—Men Going Their Own Way—have decided they don’t want women at all because we are all a bunch of bloodsucking parasites.)
Incels desire love and sex, but they feel hopeless in getting them. And this hopelessness fills some men with what they call “omega rage,” a point at which their total lack of sexual hope leads them to commit violence, suicide, or murder. So much of incel ideology interlinks not just with the thinking of other extremist groups, but also fundamentally with terrorism. Many incels, just like Minassian, call for a “beta uprising” or the “incel rebellion,” which refers to a mass uprising of all betas and omegas joined together to get revenge on all women and quash the rise of an oppressive dystopian feminist society. Retribution will be sought via violence against all women to force and scare them into “giving nice guys a chance.”
This of course reinforces the idea at the heart of the incel philosophy—that women are expected to provide sex not because they want to, or because they feel attracted to the person, but because they must in order to please men. The group firmly believes there should be consequences to saying “no.” If that’s not terrorism, then what is?
Elliot Rodger, “The Supreme Gentleman”
In our opinion, no one paints a clearer picture of this ideology than the incel hero—Mr. Elliot Rodger, who was in fact the first individual to be labeled a terrorist of the alt-right by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Rodger had been a ticking time bomb for a very long time. He posted YouTube videos and online rants about how he was filled with rage at the sight of “brutish men” with beautiful women who ignored him. “The supreme gentleman” Rodger also left behind a very, very detailed 141-page biographical manifesto called “My Twisted World.” And yes, while it is a toe-curling, stomach-churning, wanting-to-scrub-the-eyes-with-bleach kind of read, his videos and manifesto do give us a pretty unique view into how Elliot Rodger went from weird teenager to mass murderer.
So, let’s start at the beginning. Elliot Rodger was born in London in 1991, and at the age of six he moved with his family to LA. (The Rodgers were a pretty wealthy family—in all his videos, Elliot is wearing designer clothes and driving around in a BMW, even as a student. Never trust a fucker who learned to drive in a fancy car.)
Soon after the LA move, Rodger’s parents split up. In his manifesto Rodger talks about how this destroyed his life. Clearly it had an extremely devastating impact on him, but although divorce can be difficult for kids to deal with, given that 50 percent of marriages in the US end this way, it’s a pretty normal thing to happen. Rodger, however, writes about his parents’ divorce as having doomed him.
His issues seem to have run deep right from the start. As a child and then as a teenager, Rodger struggled to engage with other people and the world around him. He wouldn’t make eye contact, he barely spoke, and he was painfully socially awkward. He also seems to have been disconnected from the reality of his own behavior. In his manifesto he writes about continuously making an effort to meet and engage with women, but how he was constantly rejected.
This is a fundamental part of the incel belief system: that they fail with women despite trying. But for Elliot Rodger, and most incels, this is just part of their fantasy blame game. Because in reality Rodger had most likely never even had a conversation with a woman outside of his family—and not because stupid women are all attracted to abusive “brutes” rather than him, “the supreme gentleman,” but because he wasn’t good at speaking to women (or other people in general).
At this point, perhaps you feel some sympathy for him. Loneliness isn’t a good feeling, and Rodger was clearly dealing with some serious unmanaged anxiety issues. But Rodger, like other incels, externalized all the rage he most likely felt toward himself and blamed his self-loathing on women instead. This blame then spiraled into radicalization and eventually violence. Reading his manifesto, we can see his preoccupation with the injustices he believes have been thrust upon him; like many mass murderers or spree killers, Elliot Rodger is what is known as an “injustice collector.” He rants and raves about women, claiming, “It’s an injustice, a crime, you ignore me and go after these obnoxious men when I am the supreme gentleman.”
Elliot Rodger, although not the first incel to go on a killing spree, really has become not only a weird cult figure of reverence in this world, but also a blueprint for the archetypal incel killer. Like many in this space he totally immersed himself in an online echo chamber of hate, grievance, and misogyny. But we can also see, through his manifesto, the anticipation he felt toward starting college, calling it “a time when everyone has sex.” It seems that he thought college was his chance to start fresh, but without having addres
sed his social anxiety challenges and with his ongoing obsession with online forums, things weren’t any different after he joined the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2011.
There, Elliot Rodger began bubbling away with a white-hot rage. In 2012 he even bought a gun—a Glock 34 semiautomatic pistol—and he started writing in his diary about feeling a “new sense of power.” He also found himself crossing more and more lines with people in real life. He raised several eyebrows on campus when he started throwing coffee at couples he saw, or at girls who rejected him, and he also started filming himself hiding and spying on couples. This kind of confrontational behavior and voyeurism (similar to a man who says his favorite director is Quentin Tarantino) is rarely indicative of anything good.
By the spring of 2013 Rodger was in therapy, at the request of his parents, but it wasn’t doing much to quell his growing rage. In fact, at this point he was adding to his arsenal; he bought another handgun, the much more powerful SIG Sauer P226. After this purchase he wrote in his diary, “Who’s the alpha male now, bitches?”
He also started to become more and more immersed in online forums like PUAhate and ForeverAlone. These forums were addictive to Rodger because they amplified and cemented his worldview, allowing him to find people just like him, who were angry about the same things he was, and who hated life as much as he did. These forums were the perfect echo chamber where violent thoughts and words became louder and more extreme. He was engaging in this hate on a daily basis, posting disturbing, aggressive, misogynistic, and racist messages. But even on these forums, where he was met with acceptance and even applauded, Rodger still couldn’t connect with people. He claimed that although his new incel pals shared his hatred for women, unlike him they were too cowardly to act on it.
“The Day of Retribution”
Rodger was getting closer and closer to D-Day, but being the magnanimous young man he was, he wrote in his journal: “I will give the female gender one last chance to give me the pleasures I deserve from them.” Again, this highlights the idea that women owe him sex and that women exist purely for their reproductive and sexual capabilities. If this was a one-off man thinking this, it might be easier to write off as merely a load of nonsense, but this philosophy was fundamental to the extremist communities on websites Rodger used daily, and as we’ll see later in this chapter, hardly an isolated ideology.
So for this “one last chance,” Rodger decided to try his luck with the ladies at a college party. But instead of wooing beautiful girls with his charm and supremely gentlemanly skills, he got blind drunk and ended up in a fight. On his way home a concerned neighbor spotted him and tried to help. According to this person, who stayed with him for hours, Rodger was incredibly emotional and barely spoke until he finally pulled himself together and said, “I’m going to kill all those motherfuckers, then kill myself.”
On April 30, 2014, the police received a call from a mental health worker who had been contacted by Elliot Rodger’s mom and dad, after they had watched a video he had posted to YouTube. The police went to Rodger’s apartment but, unbelievably, he was able to talk his way out of it by claiming it was just a misunderstanding, and the police left. This would prove to be a huge mistake. Just three weeks later Elliot Rodger would go on his killing spree. If they had searched his place they would have found his angry manifesto and the guns.
On May 22, 2014, Elliot Rodger, then just 22 years old, uploaded another strange video to YouTube. It was called “Day of Retribution” and it featured the young man sitting in his car talking straight to the camera. This video is bizarre to say the least; in it, Rodger speaks in his characteristically calm, villain-esque tone explaining that tomorrow will be the day he gets his “revenge against humanity,” and how he’s going to punish everyone for “the blond stuck-up sluts who rejected him.” This almost 15-minute-long video ends with Rodger telling the world, “I hate you. I hate all of you. I can’t wait to give you exactly what you deserve—annihilation.”
At around 9 p.m. the following day, Rodger emailed his manifesto to his parents and his psychologist. He then murdered his housemates, James Hong (age 20) and David Wang (age 20), and their friend George Chen (age 19), who was just staying over for the night. Rodger stabbed them all to death as they slept and wrote in his manifesto that he wanted to kill them so that he could turn their apartment into “his own personal killing and torture chamber.”
After these senseless murders, Rodger started what he called his “war on women” and headed straight to the Alpha Phi sorority house. He arrived there at 9:25 p.m., carrying three semiautomatic weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. He banged on the door of the house but no one answered. It was then that he saw three women outside—Veronika Weiss (age 19), Katherine Cooper (age 22), and Bianca de Kock (age 20)—and immediately opened fire. Heartbreakingly, Veronika and Katherine died on the spot, but Bianca, who was hit five times, somehow survived.
Rodger then headed to a place called the Ivy Deli; it was 9:30 p.m. and the place was packed. When he got there he started shooting into the shop. Inside, one of his bullets hit and killed 20-year-old student Christopher Michaels-Martinez. It’s hard to know exactly what was going on in Rodger’s mind at this point, but psychologists say that spree killers motivated by revenge always think that the rampage will make them feel better; it rarely does. So we can assume that at this stage in the game, Elliot could have been feeling frustrated that the release he was looking for just wasn’t coming.
If you’re wondering what the differences are between a spree killer, a serial killer, and a mass murderer, see the sidebar.
SPOT THE KILLER DIFFERENCE
Elliot Rodger is what we can call a spree killer. You may already know what we mean by that, but let’s do a quick definition check-in.
A serial killer is relatively easy to define—it’s someone who kills at least three people in separate and distinct incidents, with cooling off periods in between. A mass murderer is someone who is generally defined by a single event in which they kill four or more people. A spree killer is someone who kills two or more victims in a short time, in multiple locations, with almost no break between murders. Elliot Rodger could technically be called a spree killer or a mass murderer (there’s a whole argument about this even in academic and law enforcement circles), but for our purposes we’re going to say that he’s a spree killer, because he covered quite a lot of ground to carry out his attacks in various different locations.
Despite his anger after the deli shooting, Rodger calmly got back into his car and started driving down the streets of Isla Vista, firing his guns at random. He opened fire on a group of students outside a 7-Eleven store, but by this point the police were there and firing back. One of the officers even managed to hit Rodger in the hip, but even this didn’t stop him. Rodger likely knew he was in the endgame, and he had already planned for this. He wrote in his manifesto weeks before the attack, “When the police come I will speed away ramming and shooting as many people as I can until I find a suitable place to finally end my life.”
Spree killers like Rodger want to cause absolute mayhem, and then they want to die quickly. This is so they can be martyred for their “cause”—and so they don’t have to face the consequences of their actions. Like we said before, Alek Minassian, the Toronto van killer, tried to get the cops to shoot him, but luckily the arresting officer was able to bring him in alive.
Elliot Rodger wasn’t going to take that risk, and just 12 minutes after he fired his first shot, he crashed into some parked cars and shot himself in the head. By the time he was finished he’d murdered six people and injured 13. The following morning, the police went to his apartment, where they found his manifesto and the bodies of his housemates. During Rodger’s attack, his parents, who had received and read his manifesto just minutes before he started his spree, had been racing from LA to Isla Vista to stop him, but they did not get there in time.
As you can imagine, this horrendous shooting absolutely dominate
d the headlines at the time, but something notably missing from the news stories was the word terrorist. The media seemed much more keen to focus on Rodger’s mental health issues rather than the ideology that had driven him to kill. The story was much the same when, four years later, Alek Minassian committed mass murder. Again, we did not see the media use the big T word, even though he and Rodger had both explicitly told us their motivations.
Most countries define terrorism, in a legal sense, in more or less the same way. The US Code of Federal Regulations defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” The UK’s Crown Prosecution Service agrees; they state that terrorism is “the use or threat of action, designed to influence any government organization or to intimidate the public. It must also be for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial, or ideological cause.”
As we’ve seen through our discussion of the incelosphere’s sordid sexual hierarchies and their accompanying rage, incels don’t just hate individual women. They have a clearly formed ideological and social cause for which they are fighting, and they are furious with society itself, raging at the whole damn system—a system that in their minds is keeping them and their dicks down.
Incels are filled with anger that society has moved, and is continuing to move, in a direction that increasingly allows women to make their own decisions about everything from work to sex and love. These men feel that this freedom afforded to women is directly oppressing them. Therefore, they believe, they have become a marginalized group within society and a violent revolution is needed in the shape of their “incel rebellion.”