There’s a lot of competition for the title of “worst subreddit,” but the “Incels” forum—that’s short for “involuntarily celibate”—was a strong contender. Particularly toxic even for a men’s rights group, unlike the PUAs (pickup artists), who obsess over seduction techniques, or MGTOWs (men going their own way), who have sworn off women in favor of sex dolls or anime pillows or whatever, the Incels want to have sex with women, except they intensely hate them because those horrible bitches won’t let them.
That led to the open advocacy of rape, intensely misogynist language that would be comic if it wasn’t so violent, and the deification of Elliot Roger—the 22-year-old who killed six people and wounded 14 at the University of California Santa Barbara in 2014 and whose “manifesto” blamed his killing spree on women who rejected him—on the subreddit. The group—40,000 strong, according to The Guardian—was also fond of making up words, as cults often are. On r/Incels, women became “Femoids” and the men who date them “Chads,” a classic dehumanization tactic a la Scientology’s rebranding of concerned family members as “SPs” or “suppressive persons.” Recent highlights on the r/Incels forum include “female sexual freedom was a mistake,” “How do fathers/brothers with hot daughters/sisters cope?,” and “reasons why women are the embodiment of evil.”
Anyway, a few weeks after beginning a push to crack down on hate speech that also saw subreddits devoted to National Socialism (a.k.a. Nazis) and bestiality banned, this week Reddit finally got around to kicking these charming gentlemen—and the subreddits they tried to set up in the wake of r/Incels’ ban—to the digital curb. According to Wonkette’s Robyn Pennacchia, who regularly tracks this garbage, the “Incels” have decamped to a bulletin board on their own site, incels.org, where they can complain about being rejected by Reddit just because they were engaging in violent hate speech. We’d like to say that’s the last of them, but it’s probably not. But at least they have to try just a little bit harder harder to find (and radicalize) each other now.