His manifesto, called My Twisted World, is full of absurd but no less fascinating declarations that lend themselves to widespread quotation and ridicule—in particular, his sweeping, almost gnostic, denunciations of women and sexuality as the source of all evil and suffering in the world. This was what initially drew me to it. I have always been interested in “extreme” texts, and before I had taken an interest in the short plays that the 2007 Virginia Tech shooter, Cho Seung-hui had written. The Elliot Rodger text is far richer. For years I have spoken and written about and I still feel so far from expressing all its nuances. But I can sum up why I approached it as a “serious” text as soon as I began reading it. It reminded me of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.

To me, but one of the biggest misconceptions that the media has of incels is that they’re a unified group. In your opinion, what are some of the biggest misconceptions that “the mainstream” has of incels?

The idea of the incel means many different things to many different people. Even on the incel forums, where the various voices are, for the most part, in general agreement on the meanings of the terms they use, it’s clear that there are huge gaps in how everyone understands each other. Much of the most toxic and abhorrent stuff is written with an intent that is not exactly “serious.” It’s not exactly all a joke either, but there is not enough space here to get in to the semiotics of online trolling. In short, what animates the online incel community is basically a shared enjoyment of all this negativity. And some incels could even be said to have a quite refined and sophisticated enjoyment of it.

By contrast, Elliot Rodger himself, the “saint” of the incels, was an outsider even in the world of these internet forums. The way he wrote in his few forum posts—which weren’t exactly on “incel” forums per se but in related parts of the “manosphere”—would creep out the prolific incel forum posters because he wouldn’t have any sense for the sort of irony at play in their discourse. Even as they now exalt him and celebrate the latest story of a mass shooting or Daily Mail article about a girl who falls to her death while taking a selfie, most would still feel uncomfortable when faced with the bizarre and humorless immediacy of the genuine killer.

Someone like Elliot Rodger can’t “enjoy” being an incel. Perhaps a contemporary Dostoevsky might compare Elliot Rodger to Jesus in that, were Jesus to appear again in contemporary America, the ostensibly Christian and virtuous Americans would find him intolerable and crucify him just as the Romans did.

The other big misconception of the incels is that they are all just “angry white men.” For some reason Americans tend to have this idea that only white men, and not women or people of color, can harbor hateful resentments toward others. The incels do often speak very frankly about racial differences just as they do about sexual ones—but this is because of, and not in spite of, their own diversity. Elliot Rodger, the paradigmatic incel, was half-Asian, and this background has a lot to do with the frustrations he had about himself. He saw being Asian as something that made him less of a man, something that made him less like the English aristocratic gentleman he desired to be. I think the sort of racism he articulates is an expression of the unconscious hierarchies that our society operates according to but that “proper” people do not admit.

Elliot Rodger was not simply an angry white man that hated women and minorities in a vacuum—he was the literal byproduct of a racist and inegalitarian society. On the incel forums, there are incels of all races and nationalities, and they vent about the “intersectional” particularities of their situations. These discussions are often genuinely insightful, and more often than not they tend toward a sense of solidarity across racial and national boundaries. But this solidarity often ironically reinforces the hegemonic masculinity it critiques—and of course, it has to come at the expense of women.