The Deadly Incel Movement’s Absurd Pop Culture Roots

The Deadly Incel Movement’s Absurd Pop Culture Roots:



“Is it unpredictable that someone who buys into this kind of thinking — about how women owe men sex, about how women are worthless except for their ability to provide sex, about how force and cruelty can get you sex because women are ‘depraved’…actually just killed people?” I wrote in a 2009 blog post responding to the Sodini shooting. “No. No, it’s not.”



This is to say nothing of the role that toxic masculinity plays in mass violence generally — the history of domestic violence that is common among mass shooters, or the countless shootings that begin as crimes of domestic violence. If we’ve failed to take incels’ violence seriously, that is in part because we’ve failed to recognize this broader connection between misogyny and mass killing.