INSIDE THE DARK, DANGEROUS AND DEADLY WORLD OF INCELS

In the murkiest corner of the internet, a community of hateful men have united as incels (involuntarily celibates) to soak in their resentment of women, indulge their sick fantasies and share their twisted beliefs. Writer Laura Bates spent a year infiltrating their ranks. What she saw and read will stay with her forever

- Laura Bates

Most people have never heard of incels. When I was working on my book, they would raise an eyebrow and ask, “In- what?” One person thought it was a battery. Someone else expressed their surprise I was interested in microbiology. The people incels walk past on the street don’t generally know they even exist. That’s why, when incels do crop up in news reports or conversations, they are so easily dismissed as a tiny fringe group of online weirdos. What you hear about them sounds so strange, so extreme, so hard to believe, so laughable even, that it is easy to shrug off. That’s a mistake.

The incel community is the most violent corner of the so-called manosphere. It is a community devoted to an extreme hatred of women. A community that actively recruits members who might have very real problems and vulnerabilities, and tells them that women are the cause of all their woes. A community in whose name more than 100 people, mostly women, have been murdered or injured in the past 10 years.

A year before I started writing my book Men Who Hate Women, it wasn’t a community that Alex, a disillusioned young white man in his early twenties, had ever heard of either. He wasn’t a hardened misogynist, just a bored guy surfing the internet with a vague awareness of people talking about sexual harassment and the gender pay gap. Alex had never had a girlfriend, he didn’t have a lot of money, and he felt frustrated and lonely. It didn’t seem fair the focus was on women’s needs while his lot in life, as a supposedly privileged white guy, didn’t seem so splendid. Alex didn’t feel privileged at all.