The apparent connection of recent murders in Toronto to the “incel” movement has led to a torrent of commentary. Too much of it has appeared to rationalise Alek Minassian’s actions. Just yesterday, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat made their major gripe – that the world denies them sex – into the basis of a kind of seminar room thought experiment, wondering whether a redistribution of sex might not be “entirely responsive to the logic of late-modern sexual life”.
But to accept this is to take their story of victimhood as read. We shouldn’t.
To get the measure of this movement, and its danger, we could turn to their sympathisers on Twitter, who have been busy blaming “‘empowered’ w*myn on oral contraceptives” and “anti-male culture” for the incel phenomenon, and warning of insurrection.
We could heed recent feminist work on incel ideology. Australian academics Lucy Nicholas and Christine Agius have written about how “involuntary celibates” and members of other, related subcultures find ways to “argue for men’s greater oppression, and justify male violence”. They show how contemporary “masculinism” is an explicit reaction to the gains of feminists, LGBTQ people, and others challenging white male supremacy, and how it is tied to right wing populism.
We could also turn to history, and see that radical misogyny is, and has always been the affective core of violent, reactionary political projects.
In 1977, Klaus Theweleit published a book in which he sought to understand the germination of fascism in interwar Germany. His method was to study the fantasy life of that era’s conservative revolutionaries, by reading the diaries, novels and letters of the men who joined the Freikorps militias, and fought against insurgent communists during the early days of the Weimar Republic.
Early on, the Freikorps – largely made up of the demobilised German soldiers who had lost the first world war – fought battles and carried out massacres of civilians in the Weimar Republic’s name. They also played a part in destabilising that same republic with assassinations, border skirmishes, and direct participation in attempted coups. The Freikorps are generally understood as a precursor to the Nazi party’s paramilitary force, the SA, which many of them would eventually join. Those who did aided the republic’s passage into a genocidal dictatorship.
Translated from German into English as “Male Fantasies”, Theweleit’s expansive book shows us how misogyny is at the root of fascism. In the writings of “soldier males”, as he calls them, we see women sorted into two types – the “white”, sexless, patriotic “sister” on the one hand, and the sexualised, threatening “red” woman on the other. In the latter category the young men put any women who they found discomfiting: prostitutes, the sexually active, proletarian women, the communist women who fought them, and Jewish women.
According to Theweleit, the reasons they wanted to destroy these women were not just, or not simply political. The women were understood as a threatening “other”, and they embodied the mens’ fears, including female sexuality, and the fecund multiplicity of life itself.
In the fantasies they committed to paper, the men associated the women they despised with floods of liquid and slime, and with dirt – substances that would threaten to overwhelm the defences of their ill-formed psyches. The solider male felt that he could only guarantee “his own survival, his self-preservation and self-regeneration”, through acts of violence against such women. (Another way of maintaining their fragile sense of self is by slotting themselves into enveloping external structures like the armed forces or fascist youth organisations.)
In the soldier males’ journals we see them taking great pleasure, and building fraternal camaraderie, by murdering women, pairs of lovers and leftists of all genders. We also see that many of them cannot reconcile acts of physical love with the nature of their own desires. When it came to these men, their murderous acts and their sexual problems were not coincidental, they were interrelated.
In explaining how, Theweleit takes exception with the left’s then-dominant explanation of fascism – that it was a result of pure irrationality, or repressed homosexuality. Some said it could be countered by the left mounting a renewed defence of progress and reason, or by beefing up alternative institutions that mirrored those of the fascists.
For Theweleit, this misses the central dynamic that propels the fascist male towards violence. Fascism derives its power from channelling the protean, potentially liberating force of human desire towards hatred, distorting it into a desire for death and blood. All of its institutions, its rituals, and the (male) bonds it promotes are bent to this purpose. We cannot beat fascists by aping their structures, any more than we can hope to rationally persuade them. The problem goes deeper.
On this theme, he says that classical fascism was not as distinct as we might want it to be from the culture surrounding it. It is not a departure from European history, but an intensification of some of its more pervasive traits.
At one point he asks, “Can we not draw a straight line from the witch to the sensuous Jewish woman? Is the persecution of the sensuous woman not a permanent reality, one that is not economic in origin, but which derives from the specific social organisation of gender relations in patriarchal Europe?”
Later, more succinctly, he comments that his soldier males are “equivalent to the tip of the patriarchal iceberg, but it’s what lies beneath the surface that really makes the water cold”.
Fascism, then, is an exacerbation, a more militant extension, of the patriarchal relationships between men and women that have persisted for centuries. It is a worsening of the fantasies, the violence, the misshapen desires that the whole system of gender relationships that have long pertained in European societies and those in the new world that are descended from them. Rather than a thing, which is categorically distinct from other social and political systems, fascism is a process, which can easily recur, and wherein we can see men, and groups of men, who have commenced the journey.
And murder under the auspices of fascism is not a mistake. Barbara Ehrenreich explains in her foreword to Theweleit’s book that it can’t be reduced, on his account, to merely a symbolic act, or a displacement of some other psychological or economic crisis: “the fascist is not doing ‘something else’, he is doing what he wants to do”.
Many accounts of the “incel” subculture published since Minassian drove his van into a crowd in Toronto, killing 10, have treated it as a sharp deviation from the normal state of affairs between men and women. Too easily, some writers have repeated the rationalisations of an incel “community” that, on Twitter and in its own forums, has spent recent days celebrating Minassian’s murderous spree, just as they earlier celebrated Elliot Rodger’s massacre in California in 2014. Rodger’s manifesto tried to justify his looming massacre as a result of his sexual and social rejection; Minassian’s briefer Facebook post simply referenced Rodger, his predecessor, as a “Supreme Gentleman”, and heralded the “incel rebellion”.
Too many people have taken the incels’ explanation of their own virulent misogyny at face value, and repeated the comfortable line that these men stand apart from all others. Along with influential columnists, even economists have endorsed the idea of “sexual marketplace”, wherein women are figured as a commodity, and some men have inadequate buying power to procure. (Most have been too polite to mention many incels’ accompanying belief that the world, and women, are so corrupted that sex is beneath them.)
It would be easier to to go along with this were it not for the fact that every day, women are subjected to violence for similar reasons to those that incels offer but without similar media attention. Women who deny men sex are raped and killed without the involvement of any oddball internet forums. Women are also subjected to murder and abuse when men decide that they are too sexually available to other men. Women are killed because some man or another, who may not be known to them, decides that they will be held to account for his own inability to make lasting social connections, or to live the life to which he feels he is entitled.
On a more basic level, many men endeavour to put women back in their place, and to unwind whatever freedoms that feminism has won. These freedoms include the freedom to speak in public. In Australia, ostensibly respectable media institutions hounded a young Muslim woman out of the country for speaking her mind about the country’s militaristic civic religion. More recently, a female comedian who spoke on the same topic was apparently paid a visit by far right thugs. Incels aren’t the only ones who line up to punish women.
What distinguishes their subculture is that they have developed a new way of codifying, disseminating, and radicalising a particular expression of misogyny. But their beliefs, and even their behaviours, are an exaggerated version of the structures of thought and feeling that characterise patriarchy.
What puts them adjacent to fascism is not only the copious links between incels, the “manosphere”, and the alt right, but the way that their culture, and their forums, work to shape their resentment, and channel their desires towards violence. This violence may not yet be organised on a mass scale but it is celebrated as a natural end-point of their endeavours, and as a positive political value. This is a misogyny that desires the death of the other, and the chances are that we will look back on it as the harbinger, and the heart, of an even more extensive program of violence.
The Freikorps soldiers were conditioned and produced by the militarised world of the late 19th and early 20th century, drilled and subjected to physical punishment in schools, clubs, basic training and the trenches. Their misogyny was patterned by that world. A snaky interwar republic gave them space and opportunity to enact this violence in particular ways.
The world that shaped misogynist online subcultures is different, and so is the mayhem that their culture has produced. Their vision of a “sexual marketplace” could be an extrapolation, or a mimicry, of the market discipline now imposed in every sphere of life. The lone wolf attacks – with easily-acquired military grade weapons in the case of Elliot Rodger, or a rented van in the case of Minassian – reflect the tactics of the other murderous men involved in contemporary terrorism and insurgency. Their forums are full of what the researcher of the far right, Chip Berlet, calls “scripted violence”, where men exhort each other to such terrorism.
As Talia Levin remarked in response to Douthat’s column, incel forums feature “the worship of murderers, calls for mass rape and ‘female genocide’”.
David Futrelle, a long-time observer of the manosphere, put it best in the wake of the Toronto attacks: “misogyny kills, quite literally, and we need to shut it down”. But how?
The worst thing we could do is to play into the cliches surrounding these radical misogynists, and not take them seriously. We should not take them at their word about the reasons they have taken the path they are on, nor should we negotiate with them on their demands, which are an affront to justice.
- Jason Wilson is a Guardian columnist and reporter