The term "incel," short for involuntary celibate, began life as a slur wielded online. Specifically the term refers to young, typically heterosexual men who claim they are unable to have sex because modern society, and particularly women, persecute men. In the past two decades, internet forums supercharged the idea's spread and made it into a community, replete with its own slang, ideology, and heroes.
If you haven't heard the term, you've probably heard of some of their adherents, who occasionally make headlines for public acts of violence. A recent example is Johnny Deven Young, a 25-year-old from Southern California who is charged with going on a pepper spraying spree against women who rejected his crude advances. Perhaps most memorably, there was mass murderer Elliot Rodger — a Santa Barbara City College student who, in 2015 went on a mass shooting spree that killed seven people and injured 13 others in Isla Vista, Calif. Rodger spent time on forums linked to the Incel Movement, as he documented. Then there was vehicle-ramming attacker Alek Minassian, who self-identified as an incel and who in 2018 murdered 10 people in Toronto when he drove a van through a crowd of pedestrians.
