The incel trap

Some men hate women. And some go online to talk about it. 

On Reddit, there are whole groups—subreddits—which appear to be dedicated to blaming women for everything. One group called “r/MensRights” has 363,800 members who post about why women have it easy, why women can’t be trusted, why women ruin men’s lives. A few months ago, I messaged a member who calls himself “misocockiny” (it’s like misogyny but with “cock” in the middle) and he wrote back.

Honestly I’m described as a pig of a Man; I’m fit and well endowed. I’m a misogynist as you know.

Why are you a “pig of a man”?

I don’t believe I’m capable of love. I’ve been reaching down to treating women like objects my whole life. I’ve been educated towards mistreating women.

Do you want to change?

I’d like you to use honorific while talking to me.

As in, “sir”? Why?

Sir with a capital. Because I’m Superior and I want you to acknowledge that… I have no desire to see a woman as an equal. I think we need to start opposing the feminist movement. I already started. Even women are against how far it’s gone. I believe women are below Men. In many ways.

May I show you, then we can proceed?… The symbol of my superiority.

Please don’t show me an explicit picture.

You mean, please show me?

And here is his penis, poking through the flies of tight grey jeans.

Now we can proceed.

The “manosphere” is a loose group of men who promote misogyny and antifeminism online. A lot of them are incels, or “involuntarily celibate” men, who are frustrated at their own lack of romantic options. Some have “traditional” views of masculinity, believing women should be stay-at-home mothers and have a duty to have babies. Others would rather shun women completely.

Online, they soak in their victimhood and rage at anyone who disagrees. But sometimes, it spills out into real life in violent ways. In England and Wales, 2.3 million people each year, around one in 20 adults, commit violence against women and girls. And it’s getting worse: in the past five years, violent crimes against women and girls increased by 37 per cent. This summer, a man has been charged with slaughtering his ex-girlfriend, her mother and sister with a crossbow. Three little girls were killed and 10 others stabbed at a Taylor Swift-themed dance. A female care worker was killed in a knife attack in Greater Manchester. An 11-year-old girl was put in a headlock in Leicester Square and stabbed eight times. Police believe the man accused of the crime had never met her.

But today radicalisation begins on the internet. I wanted to meet, in real life, the men who post misogyny online, to understand their hatred.

Outside Blackburn station, he looks mild and apprehensive—around 40 years old, with intense blue eyes and fading hair. We walk through an empty retail park, past sprawling grey homeware stores and gyms, to Pizza Hut, where we’ve agreed to have lunch. Alex is a radical. “I reject ‘objectification’,” he says, almost immediately. “I reject the term misogyny. That’s a feminist hate dog-whistle.”

About 10 years ago, Alex started to think that men were mistreated. He heard people talk about male violence and found it insulting. “It’s deeply fucking offensive, to be quite frank, me being told I’m responsible for the violence of other men,” he says. When Alex warms to a theme he talks faster and louder and vibrates with anger, like he’s orating from his Pizza Hut pulpit. He leans forward: “Should I tell you to take responsibility for other women and stop killing children? Fucking absurd.” He has tomato sauce around his mouth.

The average person is a misandrist, Alex informs me. Both men and women hate men. “Feminism is the most successful hate movement to ever exist, ever,” he says. “There’s loads of radical feminists cackling like hyenas in glee at the Ukraine war and hoping it spreads so men in the west get drafted and die.”

Dating is a big part of the problem. Alex thinks women practise something called “hypergamy”—selecting men who are richer, more successful or more powerful than them. “Men have to earn status for romance. That’s how women set it up because women actually control relationships.” 

The idea of hypergamy dates back 3,000 years, to the Hindu caste system, when it used to describe patriarchal systems where women’s only way of moving up in society was through marriage. But it’s now a buzzword in the manosphere for gold-digging. “So many men who don’t have status get deselected from romance,” Alex says. “They get excluded from social circles and they get looked down upon by society.” 

And Alex doesn’t “have status”. He’s been out of work for a while and lives in a council house on benefits. He hasn’t had a girlfriend in many years and has given up looking for one. The last woman he dated dumped him and called him lazy. Although Alex doesn’t define himself as an incel—he claims to have moved past the sexual desperation of his youth—his views sound pretty similar to one.

He sleeps weird hours and plays video games in the day and night. After we meet, he often messages me at two in the morning to send me articles about female supremacy. He posts about men’s rights on his X account, and enjoys reporting feminists for transphobia. He’s not personally invested in the conflict between feminists about trans rights, but if it’s a way to get some of them banned, why not? On his YouTube channel, he discusses the marriage trap and how men are persecuted. You should do a series with me, he says—“Feminist has meltdown over men’s rights.” “We’d get lots of views,” he says. “You could get famous.”

Alex joined a separatist movement in the manosphere once: men going their own way, or MGTOW. It emerged in the 2000s and urged men to distance themselves from women instead of trying to defeat them. MGTOW adherents believe a lot of men have found success by shunning women, who could only ruin their lives with false allegations, abuse and misandry. They cite Schopenhauer and Jesus as examples of high-achieving virgins. There are tiers to the MGTOW movement: level one is avoiding only long-term relationships, while level four means dropping out of society altogether. In her book Men Who Hate Women, Laura Bates traces MGTOW’s roots to Iron John, a 1990 men’s self-help book that argued men needed to reconnect with each other and the “deep masculine”.

It’s a bit like Lysistrata, an Aristophanes play in which the women of Athens go on a sex strike to force the men to negotiate peace in the Peloponnesian War. I ask Alex if that inspired the idea of a love strike. “It wasn’t that coherent,” he admits. “It was ego defence.” Alex eventually left the group. He found it too right-wing. 

Besides, he says, a lot of the men weren’t in it for the long haul. The real conviction and self-esteem needed to maintain a strike was lacking. “Most men view themselves as subhuman as well. A lot of men are self-loathing.”

I ask him if his views on women make him unhappy. He says it can be hard. “Maybe I’m a freak,” he sighs. “Maybe it is natural for me to tune this abuse out. I don’t know. It gets me fucking angry.”

In Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, he analyses “permanent misfits” like Alex who, because of some personal defect, feel unfulfilled in life. “Whatever they undertake becomes a passionate pursuit; but they never arrive, never pause,” Hoffer writes. Instead, they can only find their salvation in “the compact collectivity of a mass movement. By renouncing individual will, judgment and ambition, and dedicating all their powers to the service of an eternal cause, they are at last lifted off the endless treadmill.” Alex has more zeal than anyone I’ve ever met. And he resents anyone with less than a total commitment to his eternal cause.

Men who are drawn into hating and avoiding women are often born outsiders. A 2024 study by the Commission for Countering Extremism (CCE) found that 30 per cent of incels met the clinical requirements for being referred for an autism assessment—suggesting a much higher rate of autism than in the general population. “You can imagine that if you’re a young man with autism, you’re crying out for a rulebook” about dating, says William Costello, an academic at the University of Texas who specialises in mating psychology. Dating has got more difficult since it’s moved online, he adds. “It’s all pressure to do it on your own.”

On the internet, they can talk about their problems with people who will listen—and tell them who to blame

Some might say it’s easy for women—who can often face unwanted sexual advances and harassment—to dismiss men’s complaints about constant sexual rejection. “We don’t do well to recognise how painful this sexual invisibleness feels,” Costello says. “And when men in particular are in that poor mental health, they externalise their aggression. But we find that incels have an awful lot of toxic self-image too. So they have a lot of hate towards themselves. Loneliness is a hell of a drug.”

Some academic studies have indicated that men who are deemed to be of what Costello calls “low mate value” are more likely to become hostile towards women. And, consequently: “Women tend to not like misogynists, so you become lower mate value, then more misogynist, then more lower mate value, more misogynist… it’s a cycle.”

The CCE study also found that incels are likely to have “extremely poor” mental health. Many have depression and suicidal thoughts. They also score highly on a personality construct called the “tendency for interpersonal victimhood” which results in a lack of empathy, Costello says. “The way that manifests in victimhood orientation is, ‘No one cares about my pain. Why should I care about yours?’” 

On the internet, they can talk about their problems with people who will listen—and tell them who to blame. “Incels in particular try and drag each other down,” Costello says. “It’s a very self-defeating group.” For a lonely man who’s struggling to connect with women, joining online misogynistic communities has an appeal. “It’s always good to have a common enemy.”

We meet one afternoon in the foyer of a cinema. He’s wearing a checked shirt and has a shiny brown ponytail. He says: “I want to start off by saying that if things offend you, I’m sorry. If I do say anything offensive, I don’t intend to.”

Dan is concerned that there’s no healthy, positive masculinity anymore. It’s feminists’ fault, he tells me: they’ve torn down the traditional ideals of manhood—holding doors, being a gentleman—and left a space for new role models who might be worse. “And now they’re freaking the fuck out about that.”

Dan is speaking mainly about Andrew Tate, whose rants about why women should serve their partners, why he has sought out “fresh” 18-year-old girls, and why rape victims should “bear responsibility”, appear all over teenage boys’ social media feeds. Tate is facing trial in Romania for human trafficking, rape and forming an organised crime group to sexually exploit women. He was banned from most social media last year, but he still has an X account and livestreams with his brother, Tristan. He is “hit and miss”, says Dan—but what’s the alternative? And he appeals to men a lot more than “these fake, feminised, compliant doormats that feminism keeps shoving in men’s faces”. 

Some of Dan’s beliefs come from his own painful childhood. He blames his mother leaving his father for him being taken into care. “My dad couldn’t take care of me,” he says. “If I stayed with my mum, I probably could have stayed out of foster care.” 

When he was in the foster home, he says he was sexually assaulted by an older boy. The boy was removed from the home, but never arrested. Dan thinks this is because he was a male victim. “I mean, I’m angry of course. Angry at the police because they didn’t do anything, at social services because they didn’t do anything.” 

Dan thinks about the attack a lot. He tried searching for a men’s sexual abuse survivor group—but couldn’t find any in person, only a few on Zoom. When he searched for women’s groups, there were loads. He is concerned that allegations made by women are taken, if anything, too seriously. He says he has also seen lots of videos about women making false allegations of rape against men. “It’s everywhere.” He’s forced a strange inversion upon his trauma: he was failed by men, but has decided to be angry with women.

Dan finished school last year, where he was, he says, an “IT nerd” who wasn’t popular. “IT guys, we’re generally pretty lonely—we just talk to ourselves, stick to ourselves. But even when I did try and go out and talk to people, I did usually get rejected.” He’s continued in this vein—he now works in IT services and lives alone. He has rather strict opinions about female apparel. He doesn’t like makeup and “fake stuff”. I’m wearing makeup. “It’s not excessive,” he says, embarrassed. Dan says his dating life is “terrible”. He sighs. “Men like me can’t get anything.”

“Most girls my age, right? They look for those hard nuts, those ‘road men’, those people who don’t respect the other gender. Guys who just want some hot chick—tits out, really tight shorts and stuff like that. Always in a bikini.” Dan sees women like this all the time, he says. He shakes his head. “I’m like, ‘Whore. Dirty whore.’” The words, uttered in his mild, disapproving voice, hang in the air. 

I ask Dan if he thinks it’s okay to say that. It’s only some women, he says. “If you just want to show off your big tits, your fake tits, if you want to show off your plastic surgery, get out of my life.” These women are not in Dan’s life.

Dan hasn’t dated anyone in a while and doesn’t have any nearby friends. He doesn’t talk to many people these days. “I’m just sitting here, gaming most of the time, sleeping.” He calls places like Reddit and Discord his “haven”. “I do a lot of online gaming. So I do talk to people online. I mean, I like going out, meeting face to face people, but there’s just nobody really to do that with.”

The men’s rights community is helpful, he says. He’s keen to defend it when I mention the trolls I’ve seen posting on Reddit forums he uses. It’s not just slagging feminists off, he insists. Sometimes men are slightly off; sometimes there’s hate. But in general, he tells me, it’s not about misogyny, it’s about men sticking up for each other. And they make him feel like he has a right to be upset. “It’s a very supportive community,” he says earnestly. 

Costello argues that misogynistic hatred is primarily a mental health problem. “People who are in good mental health don’t spend their whole time on the internet complaining about how women are. That just doesn’t happen. And poor mental health often does look ugly.” But blaming misogyny on poor mental health provides a cover for their hatred which most people with mental health problems don’t share. Many of the 2.3m people abusing women in England and Wales may have poor mental health, but it’s difficult to assert that they all do. And there is agency in the choice to direct their negative feelings at women.

Nonetheless, Costello says, men need to be able to speak freely about these negative feelings in order to address them. “It’s all, ‘Men, talk about your feelings’,” he says. But then when men express anger and frustration with their lives, it’s dismissed. “Imagine if you’re going into therapy, and you just feel like you’re hanging on by a thread, and you’re told something about your toxic masculinity and your male privilege? I think I’d just walk out.” 

I ask Costello how you can approach deradicalising one of these men. He suggests internet forums for men who have left being an incel behind, such as Incel Exit, and giving men positive role models and sympathetic dating coaches. “It’s very easy for me to diagnose the problem. But it’s a lot harder to shift the needle.” There’s been very little academic research on how to eradicate incel culture.

I meet Harry on a sunny day in Huntingdon, at the local Wetherspoon. He’s in his mid-forties, bald and with a large black stud earring. He studied philosophy at university, where he read gender theorist Judith Butler, and now works in education, teaching social sciences. It’s an area dominated by women, he says, who were great at talking about women’s rights. And that made him think about the rights of men. 

It’s lonely being a men’s rights activist, Harry says. “If you go to a cocktail party and you say to somebody, ‘I’m a feminist’, most people won’t raise an eyebrow. If you say, ‘I’m a men’s rights activist’, people go, ‘Oh right, you’re one of them.’”

“Feminism,” Harry says solemnly, “has the social lubrication that male advocacy lacks.”

But he thinks it’s important to talk about men’s issues. “There’s a lot of commentary around men, but there’s not a lot of participation from men,” he says. In men’s rights forums, he talks about men’s issues: healthcare outcomes, mental health, crime. He was interested in what kind of role men have in relationships, the distribution of domestic responsibilities and pressures on men to be the breadwinner. He felt that societal expectations discouraged men from working in certain fields, such as teaching and psychology, and from taking on domestic workloads. And he minded that men rarely get more than two weeks of paternity leave, and if they do, it’s unpaid, or taken from the mother’s time off. “It creates this adversarial tone of ‘my rights are opposed to your rights’.”

But he is frustrated by the manosphere’s focus on who women want to go out with. “I don’t think dating is a men’s rights issue, because it’s not a right,” Harry says. “That’s a choice. That’s not really something where you can appeal to, like, the government.” And he wants men to move away from obsessing over women. “In a group that’s supposed to be for discussion of the rights of men, they spend 90 per cent of the time talking about what women are doing.”

He gets frustrated by men’s rights influencers who encourage vulnerable men to be cruel to women and blame women for their problems. “Rather than being interested in solving men’s problems, I think they actually profit off them,” he says. “They absolutely thrive off the fact that men can’t get dates, because if men can’t get dates, they will go to them for advice, they will pay money for their courses, then they will do all that stuff.” 

Harry sees these videos on social media all the time, where women are exposed for being shallow, gold-digging, cruel. He describes a typical plot: guy looks down and out, in comes a woman—she looks disapproving. Then he walks to a really expensive car. Now she comes back and is all over him. It’s so obviously fake. That guy was probably in another clip like this with another woman two days ago. But in the comments, men lap it up—oh yeah, typical woman. 

He mentions male body image—“an absolute wreck of an area”. A 2019 study by the Mental Health Foundation found that nearly a third of adult men in the UK have felt anxious because of body image issues. It’s not surprising: male fitness influencers tell men they’re failing if they aren’t in the gym every day. Andy Elliott, a ripped sales trainer, tells his 800,000 YouTube subscribers that he’ll only hire men with six packs. “How about you guys quit getting civilised and quit settling?” he roars. For men, not having a perfect body is portrayed as a failure of character, an inability to work hard enough. 

Harry puts a lot of men’s mental health issues down to a sense of failing at “practical endeavours”. I have too much debt. I don’t feel I’m a good enough provider. I don’t feel like I’m a good enough husband. I don’t feel like my job is good enough. 

When women are unlucky in love, they have sympathetic support networks, Harry adds. “So, yeah, I think both genders get lonely, but I just think one form of loneliness is pathologised, as an individual defect, while the other one is viewed as a victim of circumstance.” 

Jay Watts, a psychologist who specialises in men’s mental health, agrees with this sentiment. “Men have always struggled with having those kind of relationships that ward off things like loneliness,” she tells me. “That’s always been seen as women’s work.”

Men’s mental health organisations, such as the charity MANUP?, are working to find ways for men to talk to one another without feeling embarrassed about their feelings. “I think the word masculinity is becoming toxic, says MANUP? founder Daniel Somers. “I do think it’s becoming extremely difficult just to be a bloke in this day and age.”

They have an obvious shame over failing the things expected of them—get a job, get a girlfriend, get what they consider to be a ‘good life’

Other groups, such as the barbershop movement, which encourages men to speak about their feelings at the barber’s, and the Men’s Sheds Association, are designed to help men who are struggling to open up. Charlie Bethel, chief  executive officer at Men’s Sheds, says giving men practical projects, such as woodworking or metalworking, works as a distraction that allows them to talk about their feelings. “If you put 12 men in a room and say, ‘Talk about your feelings’, six will leave and the other six will try to find the corners,” he tells me over the phone. “If you put a lawnmower in the room, though, and say, ‘Could you repair it?’, after two hours, the men will all know each other intimately. They’ll know how they take their coffee, what ails them, what their children’s names are and their grandchildren’s names.”

Toxic elements of the men’s rights movement mean some men are too worried about being labelled a misogynist to talk about their issues. There is no male body positivity movement. Many men can’t find sexual partners. They are under greater pressure to earn more. Men and boys make up around 80 per cent of suicides in the UK. Two of the men I spoke to—Dan and Alex—are outsiders who talk openly about their loneliness. They have an obvious shame over failing the things expected of them—get a job, get a girlfriend, get what they consider to be “a good life”. And the manosphere feeds their anger and tells them that it’s women they should blame.

Labour is trying to tackle misogyny: in August, home secretary Yvette Cooper said misogynistic hatred would be included in the government’s extremism review, alongside Islamist and far-right extremism. The government also plans to help schools promote young male mentors who can teach pupils how to question influencers such as Andrew Tate. It’s hard to imagine peer mentoring countering an endless stream of online hate.

Some of this hatred leads to violence. But incels are less prone to violence than other extremist groups, Costello tells me. “We think they might just be pacified by the internet—the internet is their way of striving for status so they’re occupied there, and they channel their aggression there,” Costello says. While incels stir up hatred online in an ostentatious way, a lot of the men abusing women are “regular guys”, not extremists. Violence against women is normalised outside of internet forums. (There’s also a misconception that incels are far right. In fact, they tend to lean centre left, like Alex—although those who endorse violence are more likely to be right wing.)

As well as the harm it does towards women in their lives, misogyny is deeply harmful to the men themselves. As their loneliness feeds their resentment, they waste their lives away on the internet. It’s important to speak to these men. And it’s important to take their problems seriously—even if they’ve misidentified women as the cause. 

Besides, it’s always possible that they could change their minds. When I’m on the train home from meeting Dan, he texts me. “About calling women whores. I seriously don’t mean everyone.” 

It’s a start.

*Some names in this piece have been changed.