In May 2014 in the idyllic beachside community of Isla Vista, California, a horrific new strain of terrorism was unleashed. Elliot Rodger, the perpetrator of the attack, fatally stabbed or shot six people and injured 14. His actions weren’t fueled by racism or religious hatred but by misogyny. Rodger was a pathologically self-pitying 22-year-old virgin who viewed his actions as “retribution” against womankind for sexually rejecting him.His actions and worldview resonated with a legion of embittered and entitled young men around the world, who saw themselves as unsalvageable losers in the sexual marketplace. To them, Rodger became a kind of martyr. They called themselves “incels,” for “involuntary celibate.” And they have carried out a string of deadly attacks since Rodger’s: a 2018 van-ramming attack in Toronto; a 2020 machete attack at a Toronto spa; a mall shooting in Glendale, Arizona, the same year; a mass shooting in Plymouth, England in 2021.Incels are just one extreme pocket of a toxic online ecosystem known as the manosphere, an incubator for misogyny and anti-feminism, radical male grievance and entitlement, and occasional acts of deadly violence. It frequently overlaps with the far-right, and shares many of the same underlying beliefs around race and gender, despite incels being a racially diverse community.Central among these is the belief that feminism has ruined modern society by creating a world in which women are supposedly equal agents—thus denying men the dominance they believe is natural, and essential for their happiness. “They are all focused on the idea of males losing traction, or losing position and status in society,” said Sarah Daly, an expert on mass violence, gender, and online communities at Saint Vincent College in Pennsylvania.“There's an ideological link, for sure,” said Jacob Ware, a counterterrorism expert and adjunct professor at Georgetown University. “The view that women are backwards, that feminism is taking away our right to be strong men, to be strong white men.”He said it was also common to see incels use highly racialised language – as seen in a long screed disseminated by Rodger (who was of mixed white and Asian descent) prior to his attack, in which he ranted about Black and Asian men and their ability to date white women. But incels diverge from the far-right’s attitude toward women in one key aspect, said Ware. Far-right groups have traditionally tended to demonstrate what he called a “benevolent sexism” – viewing women as a kind of fetishised “property” of white men to be protected from external “threats.”“Incels redefined that – they're what we call hostile sexists,” said Ware. “So for the first time, we see that rather than committing violence in defence of that image of the perfect white woman, we're now seeing hostile violence targeted at [women]. That's a change. And it makes incels a new challenge and a different kind of threat.”The murky overlap between the manosphere and the far-right can be seen vividly in cases like the deadly targeted shooting spree in tattoo parlours and elsewhere in Denver in December 2021 by Lyndon McLeod, a minor influencer in the manosphere.McLeod had built his reputation in the manosphere with a fiction trilogy called Sanction, which chillingly presaged his own attack. The series’ protagonist, a hate-filled, celibate tattoo-shop owner named “Lyndon MacLeod,” brimming with contempt for the world, goes on a killing spree at a tattoo parlour, killing two people who shared the same name as McLeod’s real-life victims.As well as prophesying McLeod’s actions, the book functioned as a kind of far-right, masculinist manifesto. McLeod championed strands of white nationalist ideology, ecofascism and self-help libertarianism, railed against minorities and left-wing causes, and ultimately attempted to glorify mass violence as a kind of redemptive act. McLeod was shot dead by a police officer and posthumously canonised as a “saint” by online far-right groups, in the footsteps of the Christchurch terrorist and other recent mass shooters.But while the hateful ideologies of the manosphere can clearly bleed over into far-right, acting as a potential gateway to right-wing extremist ideology, Ware said that extremism researchers were wary of viewing the movement through that lens. Doing so, he said, risked underplaying the very real threat that incels already posed in their own right.“We already have a serious threat against female communities from the incel movement,” he said. “Let's not downplay that... It's already bad enough.”
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