Incel

Incel (/ˈɪnsɛl/ IN-sel; a portmanteau of "involuntary celibate") is a term closely associated with an online subculture of people (mostly white, male, and heterosexual) who define themselves as unable to get a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one. Originally coined as "invcel" around 1997 by a queer Canadian female student known as Alana, the spelling had shifted to "incel" by 1999, and the term later rose to prominence in the 2010s, following the influence of Elliot Rodger.

For other uses, see Incel (disambiguation).

The subculture is often characterized by deep resentment, hatred, hostility, sexual objectification, misogyny, misanthropy, self-pity and self-loathing, racism, a sense of entitlement to sex, blaming of women and the sexually successful for their situation (which is often seen as predetermined due to biological determinism, evolutionary genetics or a rigged game), a sense of futility and nihilism, rape culture, and the endorsement of sexual and nonsexual violence against women and sexually active people. Incel communities have been increasingly criticized by scholars, government officials, and others for their misogyny, the endorsement and encouragement of violence, and extremism. Over time the subculture has become associated with extremism and terrorism, and since 2014 there have been multiple mass killings mostly in North America perpetrated by self-identified incels, as well as other instances of violence or attempted violence.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) described the subculture as "part of the online male supremacist ecosystem" that is included in their list of hate groups. The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism states that "the incel community shares a misogynistic ideology of women as being genetically inferior to men, driven by their sexual desire to reproduce with genetically superior males thereby excluding unattractive men such as themselves" which "exhibits all of the hallmarks of an extremist ideology", and that it is the combination of a wish for a mythical past where all men were entitled to sex from subordinated women, a sense of predestined personal failure, and nihilism, which makes the worldview dangerous. Estimates of the overall size of the subculture vary greatly, ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands of individuals.

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