Incels: The Ideology, the Threat, and a Way Forward

The term ‘invcel’—later shortened to ‘incel’—was coined in 1997 by a (female) Canadian university student who developed an inclusive online forum for individuals struggling with romantic and sexual inactivity. By the 2000s, incels began to inhabit spin-off forums like LoveShy and IncelSupport. With a relatively relaxed content-moderation policy, these forums began to house ‘the more extreme elements’ of the growing movement. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, the community became intertwined with similar online subcultures, including alternate manosphere groups hosted by websites like 4chan and Reddit.

As well as growing in toxicity, the movement has gained a substantial following. The first major incel subreddit group, ‘r/Incels’, grew from 11 members in 2014 to 42,000 before being shut down in November 2017 for housing content advocating rape and murder. ‘r/braincels’, the replacement subreddit, quickly amassed over 50,000 members before being quarantined and then banned in September 2019. There has also been a significant migration of men from other manosphere groups to the incel movement of around 8% per year since 2015.

It’s important to note that not all incels hold violent beliefs and not all misogynists are incels. To denote the difference, the term ‘misogynist incel’, or MI, describes incels who dehumanize women, glorify violence and adhere to a male supremacist ideology. As a result of this complexity, policy and implementation responsibility for dealing with each phenomenon is dispersed, so it’s useful to clarify lines of responsibility.

Misogyny is a threat to social cohesion but, for the most part, it is a societal issue and not a security matter. Domestic violence is an abhorrent crime but remains a law enforcement responsibility. Where violence against women involves an ideology, in this case, an MI ideology, it becomes a potential national security matter.

Determining how many individuals subscribe to the MI ideology globally is difficult. However, the online presence on popular incel forums provides an indication. incel.is, created hours after r/Incels was shut down, is the largest incel-specific forum and, as of June 2023, had over 21,000 members and more than 450,000 threads consisting of more than 10 million posts. One study indicated that between October and December 2018, incel.is amassed 1.754 million visitors globally. Within the same two months, alternative incel websites RedPillTalk.com, Lookism.net and Looksmax.org also experienced significant online traffic, housing 329,878, 3.124 million and 424,170 visitors, respectively. Another study found that Australians visited an unnamed incel forum 42,391 times between April and June 2022, accounting for 1.8% of the website’s traffic.

The online nature of the MI movement facilitates the transnational nature of the threat. Although studies have shown that MI violence has thus far only been reported as occurring in the US, Canada and the UK, there’s growing concern about the spread of MI ideology throughout Europe, Australia, and Asia, with studies demonstrating that incels exist across almost every continent.

Evidence suggests that between 2009 and 2022 at least 15 attacks in Western countries, including the US, Canada and the UK, potentially had MI ideology as a motivating factor. Apart from those in which targets were killed or injured, at least five interrupted plots have been linked to the MI movement across the US and Europe. This data doesn’t include violence perpetrated by male supremacists or misogynists outside the MI community.

This history of violent MI attacks demonstrates that they are motivated by a particular ideology advocating violence against women and wider society. The dissemination of manifestos by MI perpetrators of mass violence and their arguments urging other MIs to instigate a ‘beta uprising’ certainly constitute what ASIO refers to as ideologically motivated violent extremism—the ‘support for violence … in response to specific political or social grievances’.

The ASPI report makes six recommendations designed to reduce and, where possible, remove the risk of occurrences of incel and similar violence in Australia. The recommendations include greater awareness raising and policy changes designating incel violence as an ideological form of issue-motivated extremism. That would provide certainty that incels could formally fall within ASIO’s remit—in addition to law enforcement agencies—and would encourage tailored education programs focused on engaging young males at risk from indoctrination in this extreme subculture, along with their parents.

John Coyne is the head of ASPI’s Northern Australia Strategic Policy Centre and strategic policing and law enforcement program. This article is published courtesy of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).