The Making of an Incel

How online misogyny turns into offline violence

- KATHERINE LAIDLAW

Mass violence motivated by misogyny is repeatedly attributed to mental illness, framed as the act of a lone man driven to snap by his disordered neurology. That’s what happened in Montreal when a gunman killed fourteen women in 1989. It happened again when another man murdered six people in Isla Vista, California, in 2014. And again when a fifty-one-year-old denturist killed twenty-two people in and around Portapique, Nova Scotia, in April, in the deadliest mass shooting in Canadian history.

The connections between mental illness and attacks like these will be explored in-depth in a trial set to start this November. Alek Minassian is accused of killing ten people and attempting to kill sixteen others by driving a van through crowds of pedestrians on a Toronto sidewalk two years ago. The judge in the case has said the outcome will turn not on whether Minassian committed the crime but on his state of mind when he did.

Hours after the attack, Minassian told police that he wanted revenge. He’d been rejected by a woman and was part of a group known as “incels,” a community of self- described “involuntarily celibate” men who gather online to share frustrations about a lack of access to sex. Thousands of users fill forums on websites like 4chan and other, darker parts of the internet. They discuss violent fantasies — such as ruining the good looks of attractive men and women with acid attacks — encourage rape, and advocate for mass killings. In the last few years, some of these calls have resulted in attacks offline, new developments in the tradition of misogyny-based violence that has existed for the duration of human history.