Alek Minassian is accused of driving a van into pedestrians in Toronto

"The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!"

These are the words Alek Minassian posted on Facebook just moments before he allegedly drove a van onto a packed pavement in Toronto on Monday, killing 10 people.

In that post, the 25-year-old praised Elliot Rodger, a college dropout who shot six people on the campus of the University of California in Santa Barbara in 2014.

A day before his killing spree, Rodger had uploaded a video to the internet complaining about his treatment at the hands of women.

He said: "Girls gave their affection and sex and love to other men but never to me. I'm 22 years old, and I'm still a virgin. I've never even kissed a girl."


Like Minassian, Rodger identified as an incel.

Image: Alek Minassian identified himself as part of a misogynistic community

Incel stands for involuntarily celibate, and it's an identity used by a subset of men who blame women for their inability to have sex or form relationships.

Incels are extremely misogynistic.

They meet on anonymous online message boards like 4chan and incels.me, where they use very specific vocabulary to vent about the perceived injustices visited on men by women.

Women are referred to as "roasties" or "femoids" in an attempt to dehumanise them, and incels call attractive, sexually successful men and women "Chads" and "Stacys". Ordinary, average people are "normies".

Women are also derided for their perceived shallowness, with many Incels using pseudoscience and controversial psychology to complain that women only value power, money and good looks in men.

Some incels accuse women of withholding sex simply to torment men. They frequently yearn for a time before feminism, when women were less able to be promiscuous or choose their own partner.

Incels fundamentally believe that men are entitled to sex - and some posts even go so far as to suggest that the state should provide men with girlfriends if they can't get them for themselves.

The groups objectify women to such an extent that they condone sex with underage girls and incel forum members openly fantasise about stalking, domestic violence and even rape in their written posts.

Last year, Reddit banned a 40,000-strong community dedicated to incel. Popular posts had titles like "all women are sluts"; "proof that girls are nothing but trash and use all men", and "reasons why women are the embodiment of evil".

Other posts gave users tips on how to avoid being caught after committing a rape and referred to the murderer Elliot Rodger as a saint.

Image: Ten people were killed when they were hit by a van in Toronto

Since Monday's attack, messages on incel forums have been claiming that women who did not sleep with terrorist attackers Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian have "blood on their hands".

In his Facebook post, Alek Minassian deliberately placed his action within the context of a so-called 'incel rebellion'.

That refers to a fantasy within the movement that one day, beta males - or men who are financially and sexually unsuccessful - will rise up to violently overthrow feminism.

Incel groups have said "there will always be more rampages because of the way society treats us" and have been celebrating the deaths of Minassian's female victims.

Image: A police cordon outside Alek Minassian's house in Richmond Hill, Ontario

Toronto-based feminist writer Anne Theriault said: "As gender roles change, some young men have a troubled relationship with masculinity, and incel fills a void.

"If we're going to deal with it, we need to encourage them to develop a more healthy relationship with masculinity, and to show them more healthy male role models.

"It's easy not to take incel seriously. You look at this stuff and go: 'Really? You're angry because a woman won't have sex with you?' But that's actually what drives them. They feel laughed at. They feel that nobody takes them seriously and they're angry about it.

"There's a danger with gender-based violence that the narrative shifts very quickly. People start to say, 'he was mentally ill, he's a lone wolf'.

"I think that's because men don't want to feel complicit in any way with acts like this. For a man to admit that there's a huge problem with violence against women makes it feel as though maybe you're complicit."