Many people may not initially realise that the term ‘incel’ itself was coined originally in 1997 by a Canadian college student known only by her first name, Alana, when she created a website and mailing list, titled “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project”, detailing her sexual inactivity. She abbreviated the mailing list name to “INVCEL”, later shortening it further to “incel”. Over time the word itself has become completely divorced from its original intent, associated with what many brand as a ‘violent and misogynistic hate group’, and is also beginning to bleed its way into the lexicon of controversial ‘celebrities’ such as Graham Linehan and Bill Maher, who have both very recently begun to use the term as a misattributed slur for anyone who expresses even the mildest of disagreements with their uninformed personal opinions.

As for the actual origins of how the community itself came to be, the reasons why so many men across several continents came to the beliefs that have become synonymous with it, appears to be a mystery to many, which resulted in my positing 3 hypotheses to both Joey and Cory during my time speaking to both. One theory I suggested to them was that the incel movement came about as a frustrated reaction to being trapped in the middle ground between perpetuated toxic masculinity and the current barrage of societal ‘positivity’ movements like body positivity and mental health positivity, the frustration stemming from one’s inability to insert oneself into either group. Cory seemed to broadly agree on this as a possible origin. ‘I believe that there’s a lot of confusion and lack of identity among the incel community, that when they’re trying to find something to identify with, it’s hard for them to find that elsewhere.’ Joey also felt that this was a possibility, but related it more to an unintended side-effect of an encroaching 3rd wave feminist movement: ‘The mental health and the body positivity [movements] are for women more so than for men, so obviously they don’t have a place in that. The toxic masculinity part? [Incels] want to be more masculine, I think. [Incels] refer to the world as being ‘gynocentric’; that’s a term we use a lot, and we see it very differently, because feminists see the world as ‘everything’s for a man’, and you have some statistical evidence for that. But, men, especially young men, say ‘the world is for women now’, and it’s already changing. Incels see the world as a woman’s world now, and there is statistical evidence for that as well. There’s statistical evidence that men have always been killing themselves at a higher rate. Men are killing themselves with drugs all the time now. Every crime is more likely to happen to you in America, except for sexual assault, to a man. Men die earlier, men die more at work, more men are homeless, and more men are in poverty.’

A second possibility I suggested was that the growing trend of inceldom is an unforeseen after-effect of the Baby Boomer Generation, specifically as a result of components like participation trophies, instant gratification and other perceptions of entitlement. This is where both Cory’s and Joey’s opinions began to diverge slightly, with Joey categorising many more movements as being the fault of Baby Boomers, and Cory shifting his focus to the proliferation of constantly-changing media formats and the growth of social media. ‘Because of the way that [incels are] looking at this, and the way that they’re seeing this as a kind of hyper-misogynistic form of entitlement, I wouldn’t necessarily pin it entirely on the Baby Boomers’, Cory acknowledged. ‘I would say that this kind of thinking has occurred throughout Western history, and the reason it’s becoming more pronounced, more forming in these groups right now, is because of the ease of communication that we have today. These people that maybe would’ve had these thoughts, but not been able to find other people with these thoughts, are now able to do so through the internet.’ Joey expanded on this theory a bit further to include other modern social mobilizations: ‘This is the cause of ALL these movements. This is the cause of the ‘alt-right’, this is the cause of the identity politics movements, the Black Lives Matter movement. This is the cause of 3rd wave feminism, and the cause of inceldom. This is at the heart of it all, and this is what has left everyone so sensitive and so obsessed with this ‘compassion/harm’ axiom of morality, and about being just a victim. A renowned sociologist who’s not an incel or anything, he’s a centre-liberal sociologist, named Jonathan Haidt talks a lot about this. He just wrote a book about it actually about how, essentially, your feelings are anti-fragile, meaning that it’s just like your immune system. You need to be exposed to opposing, and even offensive, opinions because you’ll come back stronger from them, but because kids their whole lives are told ‘they’re great, this, that, the other’, when they go to college, then all of a sudden just the slightest offence or micro-aggression sends them into hysterics, so I agree that that has a lot to do with the problem.’

The final theory was that its materialization is the result of a perfect storm of the aforementioned causes, coupled with rising cases of body dysmorphic disorder, the growth of 3rd wave feminism, rise in so-called ‘PC culture’, growing culture of entitlement, crackdown on toxic masculinity, apparent sexual liberation, and social media’s growing obsessions with appearance, status and wealth. ‘It is a culmination of all those’, insisted Joey. ‘I can try to add some here. One is the rise of autism [diagnoses]. I think a lot of it has to do with consumerism and commodity, and a lot of autists I talk to are smart guys, and they deserve better lives, and I wish they could get them. [Modern society has] destroyed monogamy, pretty much. Divorce rates are huge, super high. Single fathers, single parenthood is up way high here [in the US]. Kids are going to school earlier and earlier, which is all shown to be bad, through years of clinical literature from psychology.’ Cory once again related it more to the proliferation of social media: ‘As we’re entering into another era of social movement with acceptance and this type of thing, you’re gonna see pushback to any major social movement, and I think that there’s a case to be made that this is the -I wouldn’t say the ‘logical’ reaction to any of this because it’s not- but it’s very much the kind of thing that you saw with people becoming upset here in the United States during the Civil Rights era, and during the Women’s Liberation movement in the 1960’s and that kind of thing. So it’s sadly expected that there will be some pushback when there is social change. However, in this case, it is a result of all of that coming together with the new media available, with social networking and that sort of thing. I don’t think it would’ve been as coherent and coalesced without that, but I also don’t know if we would actually have the type of social movements we do without social media and the internet either.’

Even with those possible hypotheses to explain the incel community’s genesis, the broader view among many members of the incel community is that their involuntary celibacy is caused entirely by the rise of 3rd wave feminism and the apparent increase in ‘leftism’ in modern society. Almost from the beginning of my contact with Joey, he was adamant to reiterate this line of thinking: that feminism, and the fear of social ostracism that comes with criticizing feminism, is to blame for many men’s inceldom. ‘Basically criticizing women is pretty much socially taboo, so we have to do it in these echo chambers. We have to talk about it, and then it grows and gets worse, but if it was more socially acceptable to be anti-feminist, or to be a reasonable anti-feminist and say ‘hey, these are my complaints’, then you wouldn’t have people forming these echo chambers, I don’t think, because containment doesn’t even work anyway, it’s just gonna spill back over. Containment doesn’t work at all.’ One comment left on a posting of the Vice video suggested that ‘sex is only a small component of this’, which Joey agreed with. ‘Incels misdiagnose their own problem when they say it’s about sex. It’s not about sex; it’s about love, and it’s about wanting a relationship and being able to breed. I mean, imagine living with the thought of ‘no girl will ever want me, I’ll never be able to have a kid. My life dies with me’. I mean, it’s a rather sad thing. I think that drives people a little bit crazy when they get into thinking like that.’ The inalienable view across the community is that incels are the product of a feminine society, that modern feminism and identity politics have destroyed the nuclear family, and that being an incel could be seen by some as a form of rebellion against an encroaching predominantly feminist civilization. The main problem with this viewpoint is that many detractors have already framed it in a fascist bent, and observe a certain level of bleed-over to the rising alt-right. Ryan, who backed out of the community shortly after the Toronto van attack in April 2018, felt that tying the community with fascists was a fair comparison: ‘I think that it’s a very sexist and racist community and I think that such forums are dangerous, since there have been several incel attacks that can be traced back to such forums, and that they can often radicalize vulnerable men like they did to me.’ Cory echoed some aspects of this viewpoint: ‘One of the issues that I personally believe we’re having in society right now is this desire to paint anyone who believes in the ideals of any community as believing in the worst ideals of that community. We do not have the point now, and I don’t think we ever will, where every single person who declares themselves as an incel is going to commit violent acts, or even going to commit suicide or anything like that. But what we do have is we have the radicalization within that community where some people will. When you’re putting together groups like this, one of the things that I’ve noticed is that there’s a lot of similarity between the way that ISIS has recruited and radicalized people, and the way that incels have as well, utilizing the internet and this type of thing. You’re not gonna see every single person go and become the worst of it, but you will see the people who do that be praised within that community, and there is a kind of a worship of violence, a worship of death that comes out of the incel community, and I think that’s the most dangerous aspect to it. As long as that continues, sadly we are gonna keep having them as a threat to us.’