Incels: As if hating women could get you a girlfriend
What are we to make of "incels," the oddball community of frustrated guys who go online to complain about how they can't find women who want to have sex with them?
Gee, I wonder why?
There's room for all sorts of opinions on the web, I like to think. But this one has turned deadly. An incel, which stands for "involuntary celibate," is blamed for driving a rented van that jumped the sidewalk and plowed into pedestrians on a Toronto street on April 23.
Police charged Alek Minassian, 25, of Toronto with killing 10 people and injuring 15, most of whom were women. Before the attack, authorities say, he posted a message on his Facebook page to announce his incel ties.
"The Incel Rebellion has already begun!" it said in part. "We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!"
That's incel-speak. "Chads" in their world are guys who are cool and good-looking enough to attract what incels feel unfairly denied, sex with attractive and sexually active "Stacys." "Supreme gentleman" and "perfect guy" is how Elliot Rodger, perversely an incel patron saint, described himself in a lengthy manifesto before he killed six people and injured 14 others in a 2014 shooting rampage in Santa Barbara, Calif.
He wrote a manifesto blaming women for his loneliness and the fact that he was still a virgin. "I'm the perfect guy and yet you throw yourselves at these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman," he wrote.
Now, that sad, delusional loner appears to have posthumously inspired his own sick, posthumous personality cult -- and at least one copycat, Minassian.
Other mass murderers are treated like heroes in the looniest incel chatter. "Going Sodini," for example, refers to George Sodini, 48, who opened fire in a women's dance class at an LA Fitness gym near Pittsburgh, killing four -- including himself -- and wounding nine others
Incel postings sometime include disturbing reverence for Marc Lépine, a Canadian who opened fire at the Ecole Polytechnique, a Montreal engineering school, in 1989, killing 14 women and wounding ten other women and four men before killing himself.
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