More recently, social media algorithms have led young men to encounter increasingly extreme content. The early Usenet forums were dominated by white men, who grew uncomfortable with the third wave feminist movement. The transformation of Alana’s benign self-help community to today’s extremist ideology is in part a result of the environment in which those forums were created. Seeing themselves as perpetual victims oppressed by a “feminist gynocracy”, they believe that sex is their inherent birthright as men, and that rape and murder are appropriate punishments for a society they perceive as withholding sex from them. Incels subscribe to a transnational ideology characterised by white male supremacy, oppression of women and the glorification and encouragement of male violence. And these figures don’t take into account the number of people visiting and being influenced by these sites without necessarily signing up. Several of the forums have memberships in the tens of thousands, with around a 25% increase in membership in the two years I have been researching them. Today’s incels are not a clearly defined, organised group, but rather a sprawling, disparate community of men across a network of blogs, forums, websites, private members groups, chatrooms and social media channels. “It feels like being the scientist who figured out nuclear fission and then discovers it’s being used as a weapon for war,” she later told the Guardian. The small, supportive, mixed-sex community she created online is a world apart from the extremist, hate-fuelled ideology it has transformed into in the many years since she left those online spaces behind. T he term “involuntary celibate”, or incel for short, used to describe somebody who isn’t having sex but would like to be, was first coined by a young woman named Alana in the mid-1990s.
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