Incels: As if hating women could get you a girlfriend
Incels evolved out of the men's rights activism that emerged on the heels of the 1960s feminist wave to advocate for such legitimate issues as men's rights in child custody cases.
Since then we have seen an array of online communities -- men's rights activists, pick-up artist "seduction" communities and others -- amounting to "male supremacist" movements, according to Alex DiBranco, a Yale doctoral candidate who writes about incels and other extremist groups for The Public Eye, a progressive publication of the progressive Political Research Associates.
She sees a sense of "aggrieved entitlement" at play in explicitly misogynist attacks similar to white supremacist groups "which tell white men that they have been unfairly deprived of their rightful place in society," she told me in a telephone interview.
Citing sociologist Michael Kimmel, author of such influential critiques of male culture as "Guyland" and "Angry White Men," she notes that entitled killers need "to believe that they were justified, that their murderous rampage was legitimate."
Kimmel, citing former prison psychiatrist James Gilligan, also has observed that shame and humiliation underlie virtually all violence: "Because I feel small, I will make you feel smaller."
What is to be done? Robin Hanson, a George Mason University economist, provocatively argues that "the desire for some sort of sexual redistribution" may be no more ridiculous than the notion of redistributing income to the less advantaged.
Sex adviser Dan Savage proposes the incel phenomenon offers an argument for loosening our laws and attitudes toward professional sex workers. Others have proposed stepping up development on sex robots.
None of these alternatives strikes me as particularly satisfying in the long run. Among us "normies," incel slang for normal non-incel folks, young people often discover that their desire for sex masks an underlying deeper desire to be loved. An inability to love and care about other people may be the real tragedy of the incel world.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
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