On Incels and Feminism

On incels, misogyny, and how women are affected by misogyny

Catharine A. Mackinnon…left in color because look at her dramatic hair color! It’s so cool.

Thank you for reading unknown canon. I write about and advocate for intersectional feminist♀️and lesbian ⚢ literature, history, and analysis; and directly with survivors of assault.

I would appreciate it if you could please support by liking and sharing this or other posts. If you have the means, please consider becoming a paid subscriber — which helps grow my advocacy ♥️

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So many people proudly proclaim themselves to be feminists. Wear t-shirts and caps that declare “we should all be feminists” and “the future is female”. Congratulate themselves for all the freedoms women enjoy, make comparisons of the materials conditions of women in the Western versus the Islamic world. They talk about progress, how more women are graduating from college, law school, and medical school than men. They declare themselves proud to be feminists.

In 1989, Marc Lépine walked into an engineering class at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, Canada, armed with a gun and a knife. He shot at the ceiling to show the students he meant business, and separated the men and women before asking the men to leave. When a student asked him why he was there, he told her he was fighting feminism. Nathalie Provost protested that they were engineering students, not feminist activists. He opened fire, killing six of them. Then he walked out, shooting more women in corridors and through the window of a door that a student locked in an effort to save herself. He killed fourteen young women that day.

Elliott Rodgers, self-pityingly steeped in thoughts of entitlement to women and women’s bodies, wrote a manifesto and videos about how much he wanted hot blonde sorority girls, and that he wanted to punish them for rejecting him. On May 23, 2014, he killed six people and injured fourteen others. Three of his victims were young women in front of a sorority house.

His murders gave brought a previously fringe movement to the surface. Involuntary celibates, shortened to incel. The term was originally coined by a lonely bisexual woman. It’s moved far from its origins, and spun out into a movement of lonely, depressed men. The reason these men are depressed is that they believe that no women desire them, and further, will never desire them. They take their current situation and turn into catastrophe. That no amount of working out, making friends, going to parties or career success will make them desirable, because they believe women only desire a very specific subset of of hyper-masculine men, who are tall, broad-shouldered, square-jawed and prominently brow-ridged… who only comprise a small subset of men.

Unfortunately, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you tell yourself that you’re not attractive and never will be attractive, and then you get extremely gloomy about this…and then you spent hours in forums through which other people reinforce this worldview over and over…well, then, that becomes your reality. That incels have their own vocabulary, with terms like Chad for the hyper-masculine, Stacy for the hot blonde sorority girl, gigachad, Tyrone for a Black hyper-masculine, femoid for women…I mean, cults also have their own vocabulary, it gives people the feeling of being an insider. Not only are people who are gloomy susceptible to cults, but research shows that folks that are depressed and anxious are more likely to be very online and more prolific users of social media¹.

People generally do not want to have sex with other people who feel that they are owed sex. Women do not desire men who feel that they are entitled to a certain type of women, preferably blond, but young, thin, conventionally attractive. In that sense, the incels aren’t totally wrong that these women are less likely to date them. The hot thin sorority blond usually dates and marries the type of man she considers her equal — most of us typically date women we think our equals — whether that be equally conventionally attractive, has an attractive investment portfolio, or something else that makes his status closer to hers. Incels take this a step further, believing women are hypergamous, seeking only to marry those are that more attractive or higher in socio-economic status. Their belief is…ironic.

The incel misses that the many women date ordinary men who aren’t in sororities and aren’t blond. Just as incels tell themselves that they are invisible to women, many woman are also invisible to them. To break them out of their depressive/catastrophic mindset, to break them out of the cult-like forums that reinforce their hopelessness would be the answer, to get them off being hyper-online, to shift our entire culture to one that isn’t misogynistic, to see the obvious…but how to do that? These are men who feel that their lives have been ruined, they think it’s women that ruined their lives, so they have nothing to lose.

Elliott Rodgers inspired others, who professed their admiration for him online: Nicolas Cruz, who shot and killed seventeen students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland in 2018², Alek Minassian killing eleven people in Toronto two months and nine days later. So many there’s a Wikipedia page of them, but even that excludes misogynists like Lépine.

The women that Lépine and Rodgers killed were college students. Is an achievement of the feminist movement? If feminism put women in colleges, then did feminism also lead to the deaths of women at the hands of antifeminist, misogynistic men who did not want them there, and who felt that these women should instead be readily available for sex with whichever man desires her?

I would argue no, that the problem we face today is that we have not achieved the end of gender-based oppression. That while people might say “I’m a proud feminist”, feminist movements still have a long ways to go.

One issue is that every time we take a few steps forward in achieving reducing oppression, we slow down. That’s what we’re seeing now: that the social justice movements of the past decade or so have brought ideas, theories, and new awareness of oppression to masses of people, with the internet and social media serving as effective tools for spreading that message. Then we face the inevitable conservative-populist backlash, with far right-wing movements gaining traction worldwide. Young men have become particularly radicalized, and particularly seek traditionalism and conservatism as refuge, eg., historically, women have been more religious, and we’re currently seeing young men becoming more religious. Men such as Lépine and the incels are part of that backlash. Many very online folks (people who research internet culture) believe that there’s a pipeline from mildly misogynistic men, to incel forums, to the alt-right. I wonder if that pipeline’s that linear, or if sometimes it starts with alt-right thinking (eg., it could be racist) and then goes to hatred of women.

In her speech Mass Murder in Montreal: The Sexual Politics of Killing Women, given at an event marking the one year anniversary, Andrea Dworkin argued that men such as Marc Lépine were essentially putting up new barriers to keep women out, that the actions of such men are by design political, to convince women to retreat back into the homes and to seeking safety through men. The politics of Lépine and the violence of incels is antifeminist: it seeks to undo the achievements of feminism. Lépine targeted an engineering college: he wanted to go after women pursuing a traditionally male discipline.

Incels have a similar tactic: that feminism is the cause of their woes. That feminism convinced women that women have the right to say no. They further argue that feminism by design will further disempower and emasculate them. In some sense, perhaps they’re right: after all, if women have more greater choice, and more options to wait later to get married or pursue more fulfilling careers, then they’re less available to men. With the second-wave feminism, much of society has moved away believing that a woman only had value if she was married, which also means that there’s less social pressure for women to give in to the demands of men for sex and/or marriage. Women no longer go from father’s house to husband’s; women are theoretically no longer chattel exchanged between males in many parts of the world.

In Mass Murder in Montreal, Dworkin told her audience that a gun or a knife was one way a radicalized man could overcome women’s “no’s”. Women are usually killed in more private settings. Nine out of ten women who are murdered in the U.S. are killed by someone they knew. More than half of those are killed by an intimate partner. Their murderers are men who believed they had a right to and rights over the women they killed.

Today, we could argue that we have moved the needle for women. That if women have greater opportunity and equality in education and in the workplace, they also more options in leaving abusive partners. After all, a woman who cannot financially support herself and especially cannot financially support her children is much more likely to stay with a man if he can. That women in the West can open their own bank accounts without male cosigners adds to their financial freedom. It’s still psychologically difficult to leave an abusive relationship, but legal and cultural changes have made it easier.

As well as the backlash, the sort of lightening of oppression without doing away with oppression and inequality altogether create unique danger. Because feminism has moved far enough to put women into professions and working class jobs in great numbers, but hasn’t yet achieved equal status or psychological, physical, and sexual safety in those workplaces, women are in danger in the workplace. In the United States, a 2017 EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) found that up to eighty-five percent of women have been sexually harassed in the workplace.

In her book and study Sexual Harassment of the Working Woman, Catharine A. MacKinnon expanded on this: that under capitalism, women are segregated by gender and occupy a structurally lower position in the workplace. MacKinnon supports this assertion by showing the reader (through data) that men will often refuse to hire a woman even if they can get away with paying her less. Then, sexual harassment and rape keeps women in a state of fear and dependency. Most women know that if they speak up about it, there are consequences: retaliation, unemployment. Worse, a ruined reputation in her industry that disables getting hired at another company. Small studies show that women who are raped in the workplace are often do not return to that workplace.

As with Monique Wittig and other second-wave feminists, Mackinnon posits the male as being defined by domination, and the female as defined by submission. Incels likely believe the same, but their belief is that world-order should stay in tact, whereas feminist thinkers and activists want to deconstruct it.

In her seminal work Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, Mackinnon argued that sexuality is socially construed, and that gender was the embodiment of that social construction³. As long as that dominant/submissive paradigm remained, simply putting women in colleges and workplaces wouldn’t overcome it. Mackinnon diverges from Monique Wittig, in that Wittig believed that lesbians existed outside this binary. Mackinnon instead believed that “so gender marked that it carries dominance and submission with it, no matter the gender of its participants.⁴”

Mackinnon’s background is in law — she’s a legal scholar (who also has a PhD) and law professor — and so her approach is different than the feminist philosophers whose backgrounds are strictly philosophical. I first learned of Mackinnon through her groundbreaking work on sexual harassment in the workplace. She was a co-counsel in the landmark Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, which established that sexual harassment (and Vinson wasn’t merely harassed) violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

And so, Mackinnon approaches her theoretical thinking of feminism with a different framework. Looking at lesbians through the lens of employment law, we still occupy the submissive position in the workplace. A lesbian is no less likely to experience sexual harassment in the workplace. Less than two months ago, lesbian police officer Ashley Cummins was awarded $10MM for harassment. She was repeated passed up for promotions which went to less senior men, and her colleagues said she’d have to have sex with male officers if she wanted to get ahead in the workplace. It’s a great thing that she got that money, too: Cummins hasn’t been able to get another job doing police work since filing the suit, despite years of experiences and prior experience with the FBI and DEA. In the workplace, lesbians are at risk of sexual harassment but also of homophobia and exclusion from all genders, given them (us) an even greater possible disadvantage.

Any women who speaks out about harassment, as Cummins has, risks making herself unemployable in her industry. In my work as an advocate, I’ve met other women who have had the same experience as Cummins. I wish I could survivors that that risk didn’t exist, but it still does.

Sexual harassment comes from a similar place as incel thinking. Both are rooted in oppression of others, with ideas of domination and submission. Sexual harassment is much frequent in industries with strong hierarchies (meaning that some people are perceived as being powerful and others much, much less so), insular industries where people are afraid of speaking out because their reputation will ruined in the industry and not only at that one job, and where boundaries are porous and not respected.

Hierarchies, ruined reputations for speaking up, and lack of boundaries: a worldview that an incel might get behind. There are incels who argue that they should be able to rape without consequence — ‘No starving man should have to go to prison for stealing food, and no sexually starved man should have to go to prison for raping a woman.’⁵ There are incels who argue for “sexual marxism” and “state-sanctioned girlfriends”.

The issue with this is obvious: it turns the girlfriend or the girl who was raped into an object, a thing to be possessed and used at will. It ignores her humanity, her autonomy, her need for safety, and the emotion devastation that sexual harassment, coercion, and assault cause for the victim. Sex isn’t a fundamental human right, it’s a privilege and a gift.

I think, and have written before, that writers and philosophers are never impartial. Amia Srinivasan wrote an viral essay called The Right to Sex, in which she gracefully elaborated of how systemic views of attractiveness equate to an unequal and unfair distribution of access to the bodies of others in the sexual marketplace. She questioned whether or not anyone had a right to sex, drew the reader’s attention to the unfairness of, say, the view that East Asian men are less desirable in the West, and similar situations. Elliott Rodger, the incel murderer whom she framed the essay around, was half-east Asian.

Before her, bell hooks wrote of the sexual liberation movement, and how that changed views of sexuality. Though the movement did not materially increase access to sex for many people, it also created a sort of social pressure for people to have more sex with more partners. “Yet one aspect of sexual norms that many people find oppressive is the assumption that one “should” be engaged in sexual activity. The “should” is one expression of sexual coercion.⁶” The “should” also adds a new sort of social pressure: that people are judged for the amount of sex they’re having, and for their access to sexual partners. If you’re a person that doesn’t have great access — whether that be because you’re too not conventionally attractive, or busy, or because of race, disability, class/socio-economic status, or even something as simple as introversion — under the paradigm of sexual liberation and casual sex that came after…you might feel worse about yourself. That feeling worse leads to self-pity…one of the many factors that goes into the incel mindset.

In an interview, bell hooks said that she had been celibate for over sixteen years. This is a woman who wrote beloved books about love. She went over a decade without sexual and romantic love. Given the grace and fire with which bell hooks wrote, never shying away from hard truths but also welcoming and inclusive to all, I would imagine that she had other types of love and fulfillment in her life. Certainly, she had a career and work that must have given her satisfaction and joy. The incel men writing to one another online lack that, and have a sort of depressed/hopeless/catastrophic mindset, coupled with entitlement and misogyny, create negative feedback loops that make their problem worse.

When I wrote about the depressed/hopeless/catastrophic mindset of incels, I do not intend to make excuses for the misogyny that underlies the movement. Rather, I want to call attention to the full, complex spectrum of factors that underlie the movement and the people who are attracted to it. Part of that is misogyny, but there are underlying psychological factors that make that incel misogyny so virulently objectifying, dehumanizing, and dangerous.

As I hope I have made clear, I also think that feminist movements have a long way to go to change our culture to one that’s more safe for women and less misogynistic. One of the things I hope I make clear is that I don’t think the only tool we have is the law: I studied the law. It’s designed to uphold the powers that be. If we want change, I believe grassroots movements that try change the law but more importantly, to change our culture are what we need to work toward. And I think it’s also important that we don’t stop just because we achieve one goal or aim — we have to keep working to maintain that, and to further change.

Thank you for reading unknown canon. I write about andadvocate for intersectional feminist♀️and lesbian ⚢ literature, history, and analysis; and directly with survivors of assault.

I would appreciate it if you could please support by liking and sharing this or other posts. If you have the means, please consider becoming a paid subscriber — which helps grow my advocacy ♥️

1. Generally, I find that if I spend a few hours on social media, I become very depressed and anxious. This is why I don’t have a Twitter, use tiktok, deleted my Instagram (I had Facebook, but never used it, so I deleted it too). Jon Haidt’s work speaks to Tiktok and Meta knowingly targeting teenagers with less self-control/impulse control as users who spend hours online - at the cost of their mental health.

2. Srinivasan, Amia. The Right to Sex. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 2021). p. 74.

3. Mackinnon, Catharine A. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. (Boston: Harvard University Press. 1989) p 112.

4. Ibid.

5. Srinivasan, Amia. The Right to Sex. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 2021). p. 77.

6.