![\"\"](\"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/1525048488591-rally1-3-300x246.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Toronto van attack, April 29, 2018, Vice News<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n From the lead article of the current online version of The Walrus Magazine from The Walrus Foundation in Toronto comes today (May 1–May 2nd as we finish posting tonight),\u00a0“How Everyday Misogyny Feeds the Incel Movement”, by Lauren McKeon.<\/p>\n The subtitle is:<\/p>\n “The Toronto van attack shook the world, but the hatred that inspired it isn\u2019t just an online phenomenon.”<\/p>\n You already probably don’t remember the Toronto attack last week (how many dead and injured?–look it up) because there’s been countless attacks on the innocents in public spaces, schools, places of worship–everywhere–since, and before, all over the world. They collapse on each other and on our battered consciousness in the midst of everything else we are assaulted by in every sense everywhere.<\/p>\n These are the innumerable little wars making up the larger global war increasingly raging if not globally named.<\/p>\n Each important multidimensional stories. All tied to together in a larger narrative.<\/p>\n But for now, let’s remember Toronto through the eyes of Lauren McKeon, and the specific dimension of the sickness of sexism and and its ongoing corrosive impact. No further comment at this point. We give the author and the story it’s say, undiluted\u00a0:<\/p>\n “How Everyday Misogyny Feeds the Incel Movement”, by Lauren McKeon.<\/p>\n The Toronto van attack shook the world, but the hatred that inspired it isn\u2019t just an online phenomenon<\/em><\/p>\n I<\/span>f alek minassian<\/span> had a social-media presence before his arrest on April 23, 2018, it does not appear to have been an active one. A LinkedIn profile (now deleted) shows the single online photo of the twenty-five-year-old who, last week, allegedly rammed his white rental van into Toronto pedestrians on a northern stretch of Yonge Street, killing ten and injuring sixteen. In the photo, the Seneca College student from Richmond Hill, Ontario, is dressed in a suit jacket and dress shirt. There is the suggestion of a broad jaw and thinning hair. He looks benign\u2014even friendly. It is the same photo Minassian reportedly uploaded to his now deleted Facebook page on March 10. That page contained only one post, widely circulated in the aftermath of Minassian\u2019s attack. \u201cThe Incel Rebellion has already begun!\u201d it reads, in part. \u201cWe will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger.\u201d<\/p>\n When it first began circulating after the attack, many people wondered if the strange post was a hoax. Best early guesses on Minassian\u2019s motives included terrorism and mental illness. No one considered the murky corners of the internet where \u201cincel\u201d is a slang identifier for those who see themselves as \u201cinvoluntarily celibate.\u201d But, the day after the attack, the cbc<\/span>tweeted that a representative from Facebook had told a reporter the account belonged to Minassian. Later, a Toronto homicide detective confirmed, once more, that the \u201ccryptic Facebook post\u201d was Minassian\u2019s. On Wednesday, the Toronto Star<\/em> established that the Canadian Armed Forces service number referenced in another part of the post belonged to Minassian, a former recruit. The seeming veracity of the post only raised more questions about the nature of the incel movement\u2014and what it had to do with Minassian\u2019s behaviour.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t the first time incel rhetoric had been linked to mass violence. In 2014, Elliot Rodger shot and killed six University of California, Santa Barbara students and injured fourteen others before taking his own life. He left behind a 137-page \u201cmanifesto\u201d in which he obsessed over his involuntarily celibate status. He claimed that \u201cfemales truly have something mentally wrong with them\u201d and that he wanted to kill both the men for \u201ctaking the females\u201d away from him (the Chads), as well as the women for rejecting him (the Stacys). In the manifesto, Rodger called one woman a \u201cfoul bitch\u201d for not having the \u201cgrace\u201d to say \u201chi\u201d to him and blamed her for making him feel \u201cworthless.\u201d<\/p>\n By his own account, Rodger took his first step into violence by throwing his drinks at couples who kissed in front of him. He later tried out a gun for target practice and joined several online forums for men who were \u201cstarved of sex\u201d and shared his \u201chatred of women.\u201d He likewise hated (and named) men whom he viewed as more socially successful than him, planning a \u201cDay of Retribution\u201d to punish, torture, and kill women. After the mass shooting, the \u201cSupreme Gentleman\u201d achieved a cultlike status within the incel movement, with certain members later calling him, and others they believe to be like him, a hERo\u2014with intentional emphasis on his initials. Other \u201cER\u201d homages include \u201cwinnER,\u201d \u201caltERnative,\u201d and \u201cbettER.\u201d Recently, the movement adopted Nikolas Cruz as a hERo after discovering an apparent YouTube comment the Florida school shooter had made, promising \u201cElliot rodger [sic<\/em>] will not be forgotten.\u201d That Cruz chose Valentine\u2019s Day for the massacre has only added to his mystique.<\/p>\n Even without the link to mass violence, it would be a mistake to underestimate the movement. When Reddit banned its incel subreddit in November 2017, the online community had 40,000 members. Though it claimed to be a \u201csupport group\u201d for those navigating a \u201cnormie\u201d world, Reddit said the incel community violated its then new policy prohibiting any group that \u201cencourages, glorifies, incites or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or group of people\u201d\u2014in this case, women. Though many incel members have said they were merely commiserating, not preaching violence, on the Reddit channel, the misogyny threaded through the group\u2019s rhetoric is undeniable. Incels often refer to women as both \u201cfemoids\u201d (a portmanteau of female<\/em> and humanoid<\/em>) and \u201croasties\u201d (a term that\u2019s meant to liken a woman\u2019s genitals to a roast beef sandwich). Women are \u201csluts\u201d by nature, \u201cnothing but trash that use men,\u201d and \u201cgenetically hardwired to exchange sex for money, status, power, shelter and material\u2014things that they cannot earn or make for themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n Unsurprisingly, scrubbing the incel subreddit did not succeed in silencing them\u2014on Reddit or elsewhere. A new subreddit, called Braincels, boasts more than 17,000 members. Incels also have a presence on 4Chan, another message-board website. Beyond that, the dedicated website incels.me<\/em> has over 5,000 members. Conversation threads there happen under subject lines such as: \u201c[Serious]Can you talk to a girl knowing that her mouth has been filled with semen?\u201d (answer, from one user, whose profile photo is of Bill Cosby: \u201cThey weren\u2019t made to talk. I have no reason to listen to them talk.\u201d), \u201cThe END GAME is women losing their rights\u201d (initiated by a user who was later banned), and, in reference to recent events, \u201cHonestly, reading all the comments that people on news articles and Facebook [write] about us only JUSTIFIES what the van killer did.\u201d Doses of presumed \u201ctruth\u201d like this are part of an assumed Matrix<\/em>-style awakening, called taking\u2014or, conversely, dishing out\u2014the \u201cblackpill.\u201d Unlike in the movie, where the main character, Neo, must choose between a red and blue pill, incels contend the blackpill, a third option, shows the real truth: the game is rigged from the start. The game, in this instance, being seduction, by which they mean sex with a woman.<\/p>\n Only time will reveal whether Rodger truly inspired Minassian\u2014though there is no doubt the latter has already become a galvanizing figure in the movement, a hERo. But understanding, and countering, the incel movement and its belief system requires more than an explainer. It requires taking these boiling-pot expressions of male rage, entitlement, and hatred seriously. And that<\/em> means asking a more urgent question than simply what\u2014why. As in: Why is such a viciously misogynist movement flourishing?<\/p>\n H<\/span>istory has often<\/span> dismissed misogyny as a motivation for killing sprees. Take, for example, one of Canada\u2019s most infamous mass shootings, the \u00c9cole Polytechnique massacre in Montreal. On December 6, 1989, Marc L\u00e9pine walked into the engineering school, entered a classroom of about sixty students, and separated those inside into two groups: men and women. Then L\u00e9pine told the men they could leave. He declared, \u201cI hate feminists!\u201d and opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle, killing fourteen women. M\u00e9lissa Blais argues in her 2014 book, \u201cI Hate Feminists!\u201d: December 6, 1989 and its Aftermath<\/em>, that, despite Lepine\u2019s stated intentions, the immediate discourse in the media, and wider public, largely rejected his act as an example of anti-women violence. According to Blais, those reeling from the tragedy wanted to find sense in another answer: mental illness, easy access to firearms, growing violence in Western society. Accepting an impetus of targeted hate against women meant also acknowledging a collective responsibility for the massacre\u2014and also to do something about it.<\/p>\n If we seem readier today to describe L\u00e9pine\u2019s rampage as an example of violence against women, let\u2019s not forget that it took us nearly thirty years to get here\u2014and even now, in recent years, media and popular culture cannot quite decide how to frame the massacre. (The 2009 film Polytechnique<\/em>, for example, invites viewers to consider the male victims of the shooting\u2014the survivors.) And yet it shouldn\u2019t surprise us that some in the incel movement consider L\u00e9pine a kind of forerunner\u2014an early hERo. Like today\u2019s frustrated young men, L\u00e9pine was navigating an era of amplified professional and social advancement for girls and women\u2014including increased academic success and participation, as well as improved access to abortion services, which are all things that were hotly debated in the public sphere at the time. His deadly actions fit within era\u2019s rising backlash against that gender shift, just as the modern incel culture is blooming under a populist rallying cry for a return to simpler, more wholesome times. If it feels like d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu, it should.<\/p>\n This renewed sense of anti-feminism, in other words, is happening precisely because<\/em> women are surging forward. Men in this corner of the alt-right don\u2019t only crave economic resuscitation but a return to a traditional world\u2014one in which so-called \u201cnice guys\u201d win, and, in that winning, reap the rewards: the girl, the job, order, and happiness. Women who balk at such midcentury fantasies are told they have it wrong: once the natural order of things is reinstated, they\u2019ll be happier too. They\u2019ll no longer be Stacys\u2014greedy women obsessed with jerking men around so they can achieve power, wealth, and status\u2014but redeemed, peaceful wives and mothers. They will have a purpose, and it will not be one defined by the so-called evil feminists and social-justice warriors. Welcome to the angst-ridden identity politics of angry men.<\/p>\n To continue ignoring these movements, or to attribute their actions to something else, only invites their unchecked growth. That shared sense of aimlessness and loneliness is real, and the resulting hunt for community, meaning, and change has not only fuelled the incel movement but the rise of other parallel, and sometimes converging, social phenomena: men\u2019s rights activists, the alt-right, Donald Trump, and, yes, the mass popularity of Canada\u2019s own Jordan Peterson. After all, Peterson\u2019s international bestseller, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos<\/em>, is marketed not as some alt-right screed, as certain lefty media often portray it, but as a self-help book.<\/p>\n And part of Peterson\u2019s counselling is directed toward men, admonishing them to \u201ctoughen up, you weasel.\u201d His \u201creal man\u201d proselytizing pinpoints the feminization of men and the \u201csexual liberation\u201d of women as key factors behind many presumed societal woes, including declining marriage rates. \u201cBoys are suffering, in the modern world,\u201d he write. He emphasizes that this suffering happens under the pressure to play a \u201cgirls\u2019 game.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat this means for the future,\u201d he adds, \u201cis that if men are pushed too hard to feminize, they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology.\u201d For men to be healthy, happy, and successful, he preaches, they need to be free of feminization, of weakness.<\/p>\n That this advice is coming for a man who once mused to a Vice<\/em> reporter that he didn\u2019t know whether men and women could ever coexist in the workplace without sexual harassment\u2014but that one way to help would be to ban makeup in the workplace because it\u2019s \u201csexually provocative\u201d\u2014is exactly the point. To be clear: Peterson does not advocate for violence against women or for the incel movement (and, as a married man, he\u2019s by definition not one of them)\u2014but that hasn\u2019t stopped those with violent views from mimicking and even co-opting his rhetoric, or from seeing him as a champion. For those who want to use his views to justify their own, Peterson, and men presumed to be like him, personify reason, while feminists and their allies are illogical, hysterical fascists.<\/p>\n Yet, for all the talk of individual improvement, to disciples of the new manosphere the answer for fulfillment isn\u2019t found inward but outward: to Peterson\u2019s so-called chaos, to the corruption of traditional roles, and, for some, to women themselves. Incels believe they cannot get ahead because they are \u201cugly,\u201d yes, but also because women are vapid, hypocritical \u201cwhores\u201d who use makeup and internet dating to have sex with men above their \u201cnumber match\u201d\u2014i.e., a five who dates a ten. These are presented as \u201cblackpill\u201d truths. Or, as one Twitter user suggested after the Toronto van attack: \u201cIf the Canadian government implemented a state distributed girlfriend program I GUARANTEE these attacks would stop.\u201d<\/p>\n Among incels, such solutions are not uncommon\u2014even if they\u2019re sometimes played off as being tongue-in-cheek or blunt sarcasm. One incel told Global News that the community\u2019s message boards are often mere venting or \u201cdark humour.\u201d Such a defence is not the unique domain of incels. This idea that we should find it funny when men degrade women, or reduce them to gross characterizations of our body parts, is ubiquitous.<\/p>\n For example, in mid-April, the Ontario ndp<\/span> disqualified Matt Soprovich from running to be a candidate after finding social-media posts in which he compared \u201cgirls\u201d to deer: \u201cif you make any sudden movements they spook easy, and then you might end up hitting them with your car.\u201d Soprovich complained to the cbc<\/span> that \u201cthis was a stupid and juvenile post by a twenty-three-year-old close to a decade ago\u201d\u2014in fact, the comment was posted in 2013\u2014and that he rejected \u201cthe accusation that this was a glorification of predatory behaviour on my part, whether real or perceived.\u201d Such men are not incels (as the incels themselves will tell you), and it would be ridiculous to suggest that they are the equivalent of L\u00e9pine, Rodger, Cruz, or even Minassian. But they exhibit a misogyny that is no less disturbing for being so casually practiced. A couple of days after Bill Cosby\u2019s recent conviction on three counts of sexual assault, I saw a Facebook photo circulating of a man wearing a shirt that said, in all caps, \u201cFree Bill Cosby Fuck Them Hoes\u201d\u2014the caption, written by a man, included the emoji that\u2019s laughing so hard it\u2019s crying.<\/p>\n S<\/span>o long as<\/span> women keep pressing for change\u2014and are vocal about it through movements like #MeToo, Time\u2019s Up, and last year\u2019s Women\u2019s March on Washington\u2014the backlash will grow. But this is not a new revelation. I\u2019ve spent the past four years talking to both feminists and anti-feminists for my book F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism<\/em>. In it, I make the case that the backlash will only grow. Feminists, early on, tipped off the public about the broader societal connections to L\u00e9pine\u2019s actions and warned of the potential for mass violence. We first raised the alarm over incel culture after Rodger achieved martyr status four years ago. And we are raising the alarm now as some start to mythologize Minassian\u2019s attack. In recent years, we have also started calling for action on murdered and missing Indigenous women, persistently high rates of domestic violence, violence against sex workers, and violence against transgender women. We have have told the world that violence, sexism, and hate have, for too many of us, become far too normal.<\/p>\n In a time like this, one of national tragedy, our shock can act as a buffer against seeing parallels between everyday life and Minassian\u2019s alleged attack. We are searching for meaning in an act that is, to many of us, incomprehensible\u2014an act that, even as we learn more about it, may not become any easier to understand. But, while we do not yet know what Minassian saw in the incel movement, we do know what it sees in him. Already, at least one threat of mass violence has appeared on incels.me<\/em>, reportedly in response to the media\u2019s public scrutiny of the movement. According to Canadaland<\/em>, a user displaying Minassian\u2019s photo as his profile picture urged a shooting at the cbc<\/span> headquarters in Toronto, asking that his fellow members \u201cbecome the hero that incels deserve\u201d and kill as \u201cmany of those evil whores and normies reporters as possible.\u201d Legitimate threat or not, it certainly won\u2019t the last expression of anger toward reporters, particularly female ones, that will appear on incel message boards.<\/p>\n Even as we mourn the Toronto attack, it is taking on a meaning intended to mock our grief. No matter what allegedly motivated Minassian, or the complex reasons that drove him, his actions are seen as a call to arms for a growing number of men who believe that they should be able to do what they want to women. Go on, tell me I\u2019m being hysterical.<\/p>\n