How a masculine culture that favors sexual conquests gave us today’s ‘incels’
This article originally appeared on The Conversation on June 6, 2018.
After the recent shooting at the Santa Fe, Texas, high school, the mother of one of the victims claimed that the perpetrator had specifically killed her daughter because she refused his repeated advances, embarrassing him in front of his classmates. A month prior, a young man, accused of driving a van into a crowded sidewalk that killed ten people in Toronto, posted a message on Facebook minutes before the attack, that celebrated another misogynist killer and said: “The Incel Rebellion has already begun!”
These and other mass killings suggest an ongoing pattern of heterosexual, mostly white men perpetrating extreme violence, in part, as retaliation against women.
To some people it might appear that these are only a collection of disturbed, fringe individuals. However, as a scholar who studies masculinity and deviant subcultures, I see incels as part of a larger misogynist culture.
Masculinity and sexual conquest
Incels, short for “involuntary celibates,” are a small, predominately online community of heterosexual men who have not had sexual or romantic relationships with women for a long time. Incels join larger existing groups of men with anti-feminist or misogynist tendencies such as Men Going Their Own Way, who reject women and some conservative men’s rights activists, as well as male supremacists.
Such groups gather in the “manosphere,” the network of blogs, subreddits and other online forums, in which such men bluntly express their anger against feminists while claiming they are the real victims.
Incels blame women for their sexual troubles, vilifying them as shallow and ruthless, while simultaneously expressing jealousy and contempt for high-status, sexually successful men. They share their frustrations in Reddit forums, revealing extremely misogynist views and in some cases advocating violence against women. Their grievances reflect the shame of their sexual “failures,” as, for them, sexual success remains central to real manhood.
The popular 2005 film “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” nicely illustrates the importance of sexual success, or even conquest, to achieving manhood, as a group of friends attempts to rectify the protagonist’s failure while simultaneously mocking him and bragging about their own exploits. “Getting laid” is a rite of passage and failure indicates a failed masculinity.
Cloaked in the anonymity of online forums, incels’ frustrations become misplaced anger at women. Ironically, while they chafe under what they perceive as women’s judgment and rejection, they actually compare themselves to other men, anticipating men’s judgment. In other words, incels seek to prove themselves to other men, or to the unrealistic standards created by men, then blame women for a problem of men’s own making. Women become threats, cast as callous temptresses for withholding sex from, in their perception, deserving men.
Entitlement
If heterosexual sex is a cultural standard signifying real manhood for a subset of men, then women must be sexually available. When unable to achieve societal expectations, some lash out in misogynist or violent ways. Sociologists Rachel Kalish and Michael Kimmel call this “aggrieved entitlement,” a “dramatic loss” of what some men believe to be their privilege, that results in a backlash.
Noting that a disproportionate number of mass shooters are white, heterosexual and middle class, sociologist Eric Madfis demonstrates how entitlement fused with downward mobility and disappointing life events provoke a “hypermasculine,” response of increased aggression and in some case violent retribution.
According to scholar of masculinity Michael Schwalbe, masculinity and maleness are, fundamentally, about domination and maintaining power.
Given this, incels represent a broader misogynist backlash to women’s, people of color’s and LGBTQI people’s increasing visibility and representation in formerly all-male spheres such as business, politics, sports and the military.
Despite the incremental, if limited, gains won by women’s and LGBTQI movements, misogyny and violence against women remain entrenched across social life. Of course not all men accept this; some actively fight against sexism and violence against women. Yet killings such as those in Toronto and Santa Fe, and the misogynist cultural background behind them, remind many women that their value ultimately lies not in their intelligence and ideas, but in their bodies and sexual availability.
Fringe men or mainstream misogyny?
Dismissing incels and other misogynist groups as disturbed, fringe individuals obscures the larger hateful cultural context that continues in the wake of women’s, immigrants’, LGBTQI’s and people of color’s demands for full personhood.
While most incels will not perpetrate a mass shooting, the toxic collision of aggrieved entitlement and the easy availability of guns suggests that without significant changes in masculinity, the tragedies will continue.
The incel “rebellion” is hardly rebellious. It signals a retreat to classic forms of male domination.
Associate Professor, Grinnell College
This article originally appeared on The Conversation.
Does Hollywood Need Guns?
Guns have been an iconic prop of Hollywood storytelling since the early days of the industry. The genre of gangster movies of the 1930s could not have existed without guns, and the same for the popular TV Westerns of the 1950s. What made those stories engaging was the melding of guns with narratives that were true to their genre. Gangsters need guns just as much as the inhabitants of the Wild West. But in today’s world, the proliferation of guns is creating a crisis of major proportions. The ease with which Americans can obtain assault-style guns is turning our cities into the wild west once glorified in the Westerns of the 1950’s.
While it is difficult to disentangle the role that Hollywood storytelling has on the growth of gun use in the U.S., there is no doubt that gun use has proliferated in popular movies and TV shows, especially in crime-related genres. In our research over the past decade at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, we have documented the rise in gun portrayal in popular PG-13 movies and TV-14 television shows. We have also shown that the use of guns in popular screen narratives is seen as acceptable by parents of children ages 15 and older when the guns are used for justified reasons. These include defending oneself or friends and family from others who pose a threat. When Bruce Willis in the Die Hard franchise shoots the bad guys even indiscriminately, he is seen as a hero worthy of emulation.
These attitudes are also observable in young viewers of these kinds of violent entertainment. In a study we conducted with late adolescents, ages 18 to 22, we found that viewing movie clips of justified gun violence was tracked by areas of the brain typically associated with approval. But when the gun violence was seen as unjustified, young people’s brains displayed a pattern more in keeping with disapproval.
We think these findings point to problems with Hollywood’s glorification of guns. Unlike other consumer products, guns are not advertised to the general public on major forms of media. You will not see an ad for a gun on TV or in popular magazines. The gun industry doesn’t need those sources of marketing when it can rely on Hollywood to feature guns as a justified form of self-defense. Not only does Hollywood promote guns, but it also increases fears of crime when it shows the need for guns as a form of protection.
We know that such portrayals are more likely to influence young viewers who are learning about the world through screen media. Research conducted in the 2000s found that adolescents who viewed a lot of films that featured smoking were more likely to initiate smoking. We do not have similar research on guns. But we have looked at changes in gun use in popular TV shows from 2000 to 2018 and found that as the proportion of gun use in violent scenes increased over that time, the proportion of homicides committed with guns also increased, especially for young people ages 15 to 24.
The film industry responded to concerns about featuring smoking in movies by reducing the use of unnecessary use of cigarettes, especially in PG-13 movies that do not restrict viewing. Why can’t the industry do the same for guns? In other words, do we really need to rely on guns to make violent stories appealing? Can’t Hollywood tell compelling stories about crime without overdoing the use of guns?
Dan Romer
Research Director, Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania