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The monstrous-feminine in the incel imagination: investigating the representation of women as “femoids” on /r/Braincels
Abstract
This article presents a study of the discourses circulating /r/Braincels, the (now-defunct) forum on Reddit for self-proclaimed “incels,” that bolster the belief in the structural victimisation of men under a purported gynocentric order. Particularly, it uses feminist critical discourse analysis to explore perceptions created by the term “femoid,” a pejorative generated by incels to refer to women. It examines the dehumanising characteristics of “femoid” that construct women as an abject Other—a monstrous-feminine—thereby justifying the violence enacted on them. I demonstrate how, rather than being unique to online spaces, the misogyny expressed on /r/Braincels is linked to and enabled by broader social practices that similarly position women as inferior Others; these attitudes are symptomatic of, not anomalous to, the deeply misogynistic society we live in.
... 2020a). Indeed, Chang's (2020) analysis of 14 threads on a now-defunct Reddit board for incels details how their ubiquitous use of the term "femoid" (female humanoid or female android) constructs women as objects and facilitates violence and hostility toward women. Accordingly, a community started by a woman for a general experience transitioned into one that is dominated by misogynistic heterosexual men. ...
... Jane (2018Jane ( , 2014 demonstrates that women encounter considerable gender-based "cyberhate" and often have little recourse for reducing social media harassment, while Moloney and Love (2019) detail how men engage in gendertrolling and other forms of online oppression. Incels' participation in and celebration of these misogynistic activities is well-documented, as they harass, degrade, objectify, and encourage violence against women (Chang 2020;Jaki et al. 2019). As we demonstrate below, incels connect these platforms to inceldom. ...
... Incels essentializing discourse on masculinity is employed to both protect and justify misogyny in virtual spaces and beyond. Here, incels are participants in a larger environment of online misogyny, which endorses gender-based hatred (Jane 2018(Jane , 2014, while encouraging objectification (Chang 2020), harassment (Moloney and Love 2018), humiliation (Massanari 2017), and manipulation (Van Valkenburgh 2018) of women. Incels might blame emerging technologies for the inceldom, but their anger is firmly levied against women. ...
Involuntary celibates, or “incels,” are people who identify themselves by their inability to establish sexual partnerships. In this article, we use analytic abduction to qualitatively analyze 9,062 comments on a popular incel forum for heterosexual men that is characterized by extensive misogyny. Incels argue that emerging technologies reveal and compound the gender practices that produce involuntarily celibate men. First, incels argue that women’s use of dating apps accelerates hypergamy. Second, incels suggest that highly desirable men use dating apps to partner with multiple women. Third, incels assert that subordinate men inflate women’s egos and their “sexual marketplace value” through social media platforms. We argue that incels’ focus on technology reinforces essentialist views on gender, buttresses male domination, dehumanizes women, and minimizes incels’ own misogyny. We discuss findings in relation to theories of masculinity and social scientific research on the impacts of emerging technology.
Since the emergence of Web 2.0 and social media, a particularly toxic brand of antifeminism has become evident across a range of online networks and platforms. Despite multiple internal conflicts and contradictions, these diverse assemblages are generally united in their adherence to Red Pill “philosophy,” which purports to liberate men from a life of feminist delusion. This loose confederacy of interest groups, broadly known as the manosphere, has become the dominant arena for the communication of men’s rights in Western culture. This article identifies the key categories and features of the manosphere and subsequently seeks to theorize the masculinities that characterize this discursive space. The analysis reveals that, while there are some continuities with older variants of antifeminism, many of these new toxic assemblages appear to complicate the orthodox alignment of power and dominance with hegemonic masculinity by operationalizing tropes of victimhood, “beta masculinity,” and involuntary celibacy (incels). These new hybrid masculinities provoke important questions about the different functioning of male hegemony off- and online and indicate that the technological affordances of social media are especially well suited to the amplification of new articulations of aggrieved manhood.
How do men respond to feminist movements and to shifts in the gender order? In this paper, I introduce the concept of historical gender formation to show how shifting social conditions over the past forty years shaped a range of men's organized responses to feminism. Focusing on the US, I show how progressive men reacted to feminism in the 1970s by forming an internally contradictory 'men's liberation' movement that soon split into opposing anti‐ feminist and pro‐feminist factions. Three large transformations of the 1980s and 1990s – the professional institutionalization of feminism, the rise of a postfeminist sensibility, and shifts in the political economy (especially deindustrialization and the rise of the neoliberal state) – generated new possibilities. I end by pointing to an emergent moderate men's rights discourse that appeals to a postfeminist sensibility, and to an increasingly diverse base for men's work to prevent violence against women.
A heated debate about battered women who kill abusive male partners started in the 1970s. In this study, we tracked the public
discourse on battered women who kill by coding 250 newspaper articles published between 1978 and 2002. Using four typifying
models, we found that leading explanations for why battered women kill medicalized then criminalized their actions; they were
mad then bad. We also found that reporters used quotes from claims makers supporting conventional or medical typifications
of battered women to a much greater degree than statements from alternative, feminist sources. In conclusion, simplified,
sensational and conventional understandings of crime causation drove the social construction of “the battered woman who kills”.
She may be mad or bad, but rarely has she been portrayed as reasonable. Suggestions for promoting feminist narrative in the
media are also provided.
Some feminists have seen sex role theory as limited, even dangerous; others see it as useful mid-range theory. This article sheds light on this debate through an examination of the discourse of the men's liberation movement of the 1970s. Men's liberation leaders grappled with the paradox of simultaneously acknowledging men's institutional privileges and the costs of masculinity to men. The language of sex roles was the currency through which they negotiated this paradox. By the late 1970s, men's liberation had disappeared. The conservative and moderate wings of men's liberation became an anti-feminist men's rights movement, facilitated by the language of sex roles. The progressive wing of men's liberation abandoned sex role language and formed a profeminist movement premised on a language of gender relations and power. The article ends with a discussion of the implications of this case for debates about sex role theory, and urges the study of contemporary organizations whose discourse is based on the language of sex roles.
This chapter reexamines the scapegoat concept, distinguishing between 2 variants of the theory identified by G. W. Allport (1954). After explicating and critiquing these classic versions of scapegoat theory, the chapter presents an alternative, ideological model of scapegoating. The proposed model seeks to correct scapegoat theory's deficiencies more generally and to provide a greater understanding of the Holocaust more particularly, with special attention to the questions: Why genocide, and why did the Nazis focus so strongly and so persistently on the Jews? (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This paper presents a study of the (now suspended) online discussion forum Incels.me and its users, involuntary celibates or incels , a virtual community of isolated men without a sexual life, who see women as the cause of their problems and often use the forum for misogynistic hate speech and other forms of incitement. Involuntary celibates have attracted media attention and concern, after a killing spree in April 2018 in Toronto, Canada. The aim of this study is to shed light on the group dynamics of the incel community, by applying mixed-methods quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyze how the users of the forum create in-group identity and how they construct major out-groups, particularly women. We investigate the vernacular used by incels, apply automatic profiling techniques to determine who they are, discuss the hate speech posted in the forum, and propose a Deep Learning system that is able to detect instances of misogyny, homophobia, and racism, with approximately 95% accuracy.
An alt-right troll culture forms one of the most important supports for the Trump presidency, but Trump himself can be seen to incarnate this troll culture in his relationship with the mainstream media and his critics and his embrace of chaotic unpredictability. It is, however, at the level of satire that Trump remains weakest. His intellectual, political and media critics are easily dismissed but Trump has shown a remarkable preoccupation with and sensitivity to comedians. Trump himself, therefore has been trolled by both the mainstream media and by the global, online public. The Trump presidency, therefore, serves as a good case–study of the rise of a new form of mainstream ‘troll-politics’—a political conversation characterized by a reciprocal, ongoing memetic warfare.
Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s, this book argues that white segregationist women constituted the grassroots workforce for racial segregation. For decades, they censored textbooks, campaigned against the United Nations, denied marriage certificates, celebrated school choice, and lobbied elected officials. They trained generations, built national networks, collapsed their duties as white mothers with those of citizenship, and experimented with a color-blind political discourse. Their work beyond legislative halls empowered the Jim Crow order with a flexibility and a kind of staying power. With white women at the center of the story, massive resistance and the rise of postwar conservatism rises out of white women’s grassroots work in homes, schools, political parties, and culture. Their efforts began before World War II and the Brown Decision and persisted past the removal of “white only” signs in 1964 and through the anti-busing protests. White women’s segregationist politics involved foreign affairs, economic policy, family values, strict constitutionalism, states’ rights, and white supremacy. It stretched across the nation and overlapped with and helped shape the rise of the New Right. In the end, this history compels us to confront the reign of racial segregation as a national story. It asks us to reconsider who sustained the Jim Crow order, who bears responsibility for the persistence of the nation’s inequities, and what it will take to make good on the nation’s promise of equality.
While popular discourse often frames online harassment as an issue of individuals engaged in abhorrent behavior, harassing behavior is often networked in that it is coordinated and organized. When feminists and female public figures experience harassment, it often originates from members of a loose online network known as the manosphere, a set of blogs, podcasts, and forums comprised of pickup artists, men’s rights activists, anti-feminists, and fringe groups. While the particular beliefs of these groups may differ, many participants have adopted a common language. This paper explores the discourse of the manosphere and its links to online misogyny and harassment. Using critical discourse analysis, we examine the term misandry, which originates in the manosphere; trace its infiltration into more mainstream circles; and analyze its ideological and community-building functions. We pay particular attention to how this vocabulary reinforces a misogynistic ontology which paints feminism as a man-hating movement which victimizes men and boys.
This essay considers the origin and meaning of “social justice warrior” (SJW) memes. Despite each term within the phrase suggesting potentially positive connotations, we argue that as deployed within “alt-right” communities, it implies a kind of monstrous feminine: a woman who is unwieldy and out of control. We catalogue and analyze this meme using a visual discourse analysis of texts gathered through Google Images and Reddit. Our findings suggest that the SJW meme is deployed to emphasize opponents as having non-normative, problematic bodies, different brains (ones ruled by emotion rather than logic), and monstrous characteristics. We argue that such discourse is potentially dangerous, but that feminists may have the tools to recreate the SJW as an image of power.
Sara Mills is Research Professor in Linguistics at Sheffield Hallam University. She has published mainly in the areas of feminist discourse analysis and text analysis and also in the area of feminist postcolonial theory. Her main publications are Gender and politeness (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Discourse (Routledge, 2001), Feminist stylistics (Routledge, 1997), Gendering the reader (Longman, 1994), Language and gender (Longman, 1994), and Discourses of difference (Routledge, 1991); with Lynne Pearce, Feminist readings/feminists reading (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991); and with Reina Lewis, Feminist postcolonial theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2004).
I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel. I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my fore head, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed; when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shut ters, I beheld the wretch - the miserable monster whom I had created. (Shelley, 1992: 57)
This study measures the sexually violent content in magazine, video, and Usenet (Internet newsgroup) pornography. Specifically, the level of violence, the amount of consensual and nonconsensual violence, and the gender of both victim and victimizer are compared. A consistent increase in the amount of violence from one medium to the next is found, although the increase between magazines and videos is not statistically significant. Further, both magazines and videos portray the violence as consensual, while the Usenet portrays it as nonconsensual. Third, magazines portray women as the victimizers more often than men, while the Usenet differs sharply and portrays men as the victimizers far more often. A series of possible explanations for these findings are offered, with the conclusion that the competition among men on the Usenet is an under‐analyzed component of the differences among these media.
Reviews research on aggressive pornography and research that examines nonpornographic media images of violence against women. The question of whether pornography influences behaviors and attitudes toward women is considered. There is no evidence for any "harm"-related effects from sexually explicit materials. But research may support potential harmful effects from aggressive materials. Although messages about violence and the sexualized nature of violence may be part of some forms of pornography, they are also pervasive in media messages in general, from prime-time TV to popular films. It is concluded that the media is just one of many influences in society that contribute to men's callous attitudes about rape and sexual aggression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In the mid-1970s, Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW), the first national feminist organization to protest mediated sexual violence against women, pressured the music industry to cease using images of violence against women in its advertising. This article presents a case study of WAVAW's national boycott of Warner Communications, Inc. and documents the activists' successful consumer campaign. The study reveals that media violence was central to feminist organizing efforts, and that WAVAW and related organizations helped establish a climate of concern about violence that motivated scientific research on the relationship between exposure to media violence and subsequent aggression.
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