The overthrow

It’s possible that the Toronto sidewalk-murderer is one of those guys who thinks he’s entitled to sex and thus that women are required to say yes to his demands for sex.

Shortly before a rented van ploughed into a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto, killing 10 and wounding 14 others, a short and cryptic message was posted on the Facebook account of Alek Minassian, the man accused of carrying out the attack.

The post referred to another mass killer – Elliot Rodger, who shot dead six people and wounded 13 others in Isla Vista, California, in 2014 – and said that the “incel rebellion has already begun. We will overthrow all the Chads and the Stacys”.

What’s “the incel rebellion”? You know, it’s where men who think women owe them sex are going to unite and fight and just take it.

As in other reactionary subcultures that reject consensus liberal beliefs, those who take on the incel creed are said to have taken “the red pill” – referring to the scene in the science fiction movie The Matrix where the protagonist chooses to leave his illusions behind.

Frequently such ideas lead to a generalized bitterness towards women. Indeed, the big incel hubs are often viciously misogynistic and regularly feature calls for rape or other violence.

It couldn’t be anything else. If a man believes a woman – any woman – has no right to refuse to have sex with him, he is by definition calling for rape, and that of course is misogynistic.

Some with this mindset take it upon themselves to commit horrendous violence. In videos and a manifesto, the Isla Vista shooter Elliot Rodger justified his own mass homicide in 2014 by presenting it as revenge for his own romantic rejections, and the fact that at 22, he was still a virgin.

It’s such a bizarre belief, this idea that because you have a burning desire to stick your penis in someone, therefore that someone is obliged to let you stick her penis in her, quite regardless of her thoughts on the subject. Bizarre yet utterly pervasive.

Behind the layers of irony and disavowal, then, some incels have constructed a kind of violent, insurrectionary rhetoric from romantic failure and the belief that they are owed sex.

If only they could just put all the women under some kind of house arrest so that every man would be able to stick his penis in at least one of them whenever he wanted to.

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