From Andew Tate promoting alpha-male dominance to House Speaker Mike Johnson, who’s blamed school shootings on women’s sexuality, incel rhetoric – characterized by male superiority, aggressive misogyny, and oftentimes white supremacy – has become visible beyond the comment section and Reddit forums to mainstream media, and even the White House.

There’s little research on how many incels exist, or how many people self-identify as incels, but an internal survey conducted by the moderators of incel.co, which harbored one of the largest online incel communities, showed that 82% of incels in the forum were males between the ages of 18 to 30.

Additionally, 8% of incels who took the survey were younger than 17, and 55% were white, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

Why are incels so mad? In the simplest terms: because women won’t have sex with them, according to community forums. The availability of social media and forum sites like Reddit has made it easy for communities to form around their frustrations, and even easier for widespread hate and aggression to spill off the screen and into the real world.

Just last week a self-proclaimed “former incel,” Michael Penchung Lee, 27, was arrested for threatening a mass shooting at the University of Arizona as revenge against fraternity and sororities.

“The day of Retribution is upon us, I shall get revenge on all the chads and stacies!!,” Lee wrote on Snapchat, according to HuffPost, using language birthed out of the incel community.

Recently published research, The Sense in Senseless Violence: Male Reproductive Strategy and the Modern Sexual Marketplace as Contributors to Sexual Extremism, by Harvard psychology postdoc Miriam Lindner dives into the world of the incel community, exploring their ties with extremist ideologies and sometimes violent behavior.

Let’s dig deeper: What is an incel?

Incel is the abbreviated version of “involuntary celibate,” a term created by a Canadian woman who formed a website called Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project for people struggling to find loving relationships in the late 90′s – pre-social media and Tinder.

The term today refers to sexually and/or romantically frustrated men who blame women and society for their inability to form these relationships. Some key elements of incel identity include antifeminism, the belief that women are too sexually selective, and the notion that one’s appearance determines access to sexual relationships and your role in society.

The incel community categorizes both men and women based on their attractiveness into several archetypes: the virgin, who represents the incel, Chad, Becky, and Stacy. In a breakdown by Vox, Becky is attributed to the average woman, wearing baggy clothes to hide her “small tits/flat ass,” while Stacy is unattainable to the incel, with “sexy, majestic, long blonde hair” and a naturally curvy body that “gives men instant erections.” Both Becky and Stacy want to sleep with Chad, the popular, muscular male archetype who sleeps with many women.

Finding community online has allowed for validation in these beliefs.

“I posit that hateful online communities allow low-status men to engage in virtual or simulated coalitional bargaining with a sympathetic audience of like-minded others, providing private but futile satisfaction,” Lindner writes in the study. “Existing accounts construe aggression as a response to the perceived failure to live up to male identity, such that aggressive acts [are] intended to ‘repair’ masculinity in the eyes of others.”

This has proven to go beyond hate speech and turned lethal in some cases, prompting the Secret Service to launch a terrorism threat investigation on the incel community.

Bringing online aggression into real world violence

Not all men who identify as incels resort to violence. According to a 2019 study Lindner cites, only 10% of those engaging in online fora produce most of the hateful content. But a common thread weaving together many mass shooters is sharing misogynistic views online and a history of violence against women.

A 2022 study of 178 mass shootings from 1966 to 2021 showed that one-third of mass shooters had sexual frustration problems. This includes the shooters involved in Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, Parkland, and Uvalde.

“When we examined the overall issue of mass shootings through this new lens, we realized the Columbine shooter’s statement that, ‘Maybe I just need to get laid. Maybe that’ll just change some shit around,’ the Virginia Tech shooter’s attempt to hire a sex worker shortly before his attack, and the Parkland shooter’s internet searches for Asian mail-order brides, ‘little teen pirn (porn),’ and ‘how to get a girlfriend’ might all be part of a much larger pattern,” study author Adam Lankford told PsyPost.

Sense in Senseless Violence asserts that from an evolutionary psychology standpoint, this desire to physically harm or kill others may be a modern adaptation of a way to intimidate potential female partners and sexual rivals.

“They are trying to prove their potency, their mattering, their ability to wield power by inflicting harm. This impression of potency could (in an ultimate sense) make them more respected and hence sexually successful,” writes Lindner.

There have been at least 565 mass shootings in the U.S. so far this year.

Journalist David Futrelle created “We Hunted the Mammoth,” a blog that tracks misogynistic and incel websites, and has spent years following these subcultures.

“You get a bunch of these guys who are just very angry and bitter, and feel helpless and in some cases suicidal, and that’s just absolutely a combination that’s going to produce more shooters in the future,” Futrelle told the New York Times.

Where does this fit into reproductive justice?

Lindner’s paper suggests that the rise in incels may be attributed to an evolved male psychology that’s eager to pursue mating opportunities, an increase in bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom for women in the West and modern technology that allows them to form community in sharing the perceived wrongs against them.

“We [women] can say I don’t want to get married. I don’t want to have children. I don’t want to be in a relationship with you. I don’t want to have sex with you, right, and that’s a grievance to male psychology that, in the past, has kind of responded by coercing women through intimidation, aggression, threats of aggression, and actual violence into that kind of sexual access,” said Lindner.

This isn’t to say that the solution to incel-driven violence is for women to “put out.” Lindner says part of the problem is that incels have a misconception that women want a physically strong, dominant partner. And this Chad or alpha-male persona has been propelled forward this year by the likes of Andrew Tate, the poster boy of toxic masculinity.

“I think that this is something that flies under their radar. Strength, in the common vernacular of women, does not pertain to the circumference of your biceps, or how chiseled your jawline is. Dominance, as they construe it, is not going to make us feel safe. You know, we love the Harry Styles of the world; and we’re weary of the Andrew Tates of the world,” said Lindner. “The male and female gaze diverge significantly and they are not seeing that their idea of masculinity is not what we’d go for or feel safe with.”

Incel aggression and hate is often aimed outwards, but in many cases it is internalized, which is what Lindner’s research will investigate next.

“We also need to talk about the fact that there is a very strong overlap or link between suicide and mass violence. Similar to mass violence, suicide is characterized by a stark sex difference,” she said.