The startling Netflix hit Adolescence reminded me of “Liam”, a student I met while doing research for the book Gen Z, Explained. At the age of 11 Liam had begun hanging out with alt-right subcultures on the social media platform 4chan, which was notorious for pranks and illegal content. The communities he joined online were extreme examples of in-group bonding through overt hostility to other social groups viewed as weak and inferior. Before reaching puberty, he was conversant in hate speech.
He described spending hours, days, months and years in his bedroom engaged in hate-filled shitposting (posting absurd or offensive comments), shitlording (posting bigoted content in order to provoke a reaction), trolling female gamers and camgirls (young women who pose for porn webcams), and lurking on extremist forums which offered him anonymity and minimal moderation.
It was here that Liam became an “incel”, (short for “involuntary celibate”), a member of an online community of young men who blame women for their inability to attract sexual partners.
By learning the language of incels, he established a strong sense of belonging to a subculture rooted in male sexual entitlement, objectification of women, and violence. Beware that the seemingly innocent-sounding words he used do warrant a trigger warning.
Women were called “foids” (short for “female humanoids”, because the word woman connotes too much humanity). “Rapecels” were incels who rape a woman to resolve their sexual frustration, many of whom glorified the “hERo”—Elliot Rodger (ER), a 22-year-old who murdered six people in 2014 and wrote a 137-page manifesto blaming women for “my twisted life”.
The language Liam learned extended to a host of seemingly innocent-looking emojis used to avoid algorithmic censorship and moderation: kidney beans 🫘 became self-identification markers of an incel, as did the red pill 💊, a call to action for others to wake up from a world of ignorance (or the blue pill, as depicted in the 1999 film The Matrix) to see the reality of the world and “the truth” about men and women.
Based on a theory of hypergamy (marrying upwards into a higher social class), the 100-points emoji 💯 conveyed the idea that 80 per cent of all women are attracted opportunistically to only 20 per cent of men, characterising a female-dominated world (gynocracy) that incels believe is threatening men’s future. The solution? Looksmaxxing, as demonstrated by Andrew Tate (who has 10m followers on X), ie getting fit (gymmaxxing), making money (moneymaxxing) and then manipulating, harming and dominating women.
The website “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project” was begun in Canada in 1997 as a supportive online community for lonely virgins. The site’s eponymous founder abbreviated the site to “invcels”, involuntary celibates. It was this term, long after Alana herself had drifted away from the site, that morphed into the word “incel”.
Liam's life as an incel ended when he arrived at university and lived in a dorm with “IRL [in real life] women”. He was transformed by the personal connection. Looking back at his journey away from incel hate speech, he said he could “chronologically trace myself being-a-terrible-person to not-being-a-terrible-person”. “I could see points at which certain conceptions that I had—that I am now diametrically opposed to—were just being shed off slowly over time as my engagement [with women] extended.”
As with all slang, the language of incels is about creating in-groups and out-groups. Now that their codes have been revealed to the wider world through the popularity of Adolescence, incels may be forced to reinvent themselves on new platforms and with new language. The message will remain the same, of course, because the incel culture is merely a recent manifestation of the ancient Greek concept of μισογύνης—“misogyny”—and sadly that’s not going anywhere.
