‘I’m not sex deprived. I’m love deprived’: An interview with an incel

Mo says he is too ugly to find a girlfriend, that he will be alone his whole life, but that he could never support violence committed in the name of inceldom. Does his dark online community have the potential to push members to their limits? By Tilly Gambarotto

'You should know that everything is about looks, money and status, and don’t try if you don’t have it. Give up' (Getty/iStock)

Mo (not his real name) will be alone his whole life. He is, ironically, not alone. Since he surrendered to the draw of online incel communities, he has joined other men who wallow in the certainty of their future in celibacy and solitude. ​Incels were thrown into the spotlight most recently in April, when Alek Minassian drove a van on to a pavement in Toronto, killing 10 pedestrians. The night before the attack, he wrote on his Facebook page: “The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” Four years previously, Elliot Rodger stabbed and shot six people in a murder spree in California, leaving behind a 141-page manifesto expressing his frustrations over his virginity and his hatred of women.

Incels, or involuntary celibates, are men who are unable to form a romantic or sexual relationship, believing themselves too ugly, deformed and unmasculine. They are the self-professed victims in a Hunchback of Notre Dame-style fairytale in which women boast their professed interest in men’s personality while consistently choosing only handsome, alpha-male sexual partners. Incels are the protagonists, the "nice guys", the ones who should have got the girl but were burdened by genetic misfortune.

Their existence is almost entirely confined to the cesspits of social forums and chat pages, from where sexless keyboard warriors mould bizarre theories explaining the biology of physical attractiveness, lament of their personal experiences of romantic rejections, and spit out a verbal cascade of hatred for "chads" and "staceys", the terms adopted to describe men and women from the outside world.