“Men Who Hate Women” by Laura Bates

The misconstrued image of incels

TW: Mentions of misogyny, rape, violence, and sexual violence against women.

I recently started reading a book, Men Who Hate Women, by Laura Bates and the first chapter has already hooked me and has me thinking about male violence against women. It was published in 2020, not that long ago, and I can see the connections between what she wrote — even in the first chapter — and the violence occurring today.

Bates opens up the book talking about how online communities of men hating on women are not just dark corners of the internet. They cause real, tangible harm. People talk about the online sphere as some out-of-reach place that could never bleed into reality. It’s just trolls, men venting their frustrations, a throwaway account that wants to cause controversy; they would never actually harm women in real life, right?

She transitions this into a chapter talking about the incel community and how people usually diminish it to a few online weirdos that are easy to laugh off. Bates says this is a mistake. This is what the incel community really is:

“The incel community is the most violent corner of the so-called manosphere. It is a community devoted to violent hatred of women. A community that actively recruits members who might have very real problems and vulnerabilities and tells them that women are the cause of all their woes. A community in whose name over one hundred people, mostly women, have been murdered or injured in the past ten years. And it’s a community you have probably never even heard of.”

Maybe you have actually heard of incels before. I have (because of TikTok), but Bates opened my eyes to the horrors in this so-called “community”. Because I have fallen into that trap of thinking that incels are some weirdos of the internet that just cry about women not wanting to have sex with them. Oh, how I wish that were the extent of it.

Bates goes into the horrors she saw in different online incel forums posing as a man named “Alex” and it is very hard to read. If you do decide to read this book I suggest approaching it with extreme caution because of the amount of absolute vitriol she describes from men talking about women.

Most of the rhetoric coming out of the incel forums she spoke of were men blaming women for their shortcomings, saying that the reason they never have sex is because women are whores who only have sex with attractive men. How ironic that incels call women “whores” for having sex with “attractive” men and not the incels themselves. Bates notes this, saying that incels don’t actually care about who women have sex with, it’s that they have a choice in the first place. In the incel community there is literally a “subcategory” called “rapecels” who “simply resort to rape to ‘resolve’ his sexual frustration” (Bates, 2020). It is disgustingly common.

I think these two quotes from Bates pretty much sums up the incel community:

“… it never seems to occur to these men that their hatred of women might be related to their lack of romantic success. In fact, even to suggest such a thing is a banning offence in many incel forums. Instead, incels see themselves as innocent and tragic victims, creating a vivid portrait of a bleak society irreversibly stacked against them.”

A real example of it on Substack (I recommend you to block and report this person)

“… a classic hallmark of incel ideology:

I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. It’s an injustice, a crime, because I don’t know what you don’t see in me, I’m the perfect guy, and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman.”

We can see the irony in the incel community, and maybe this is why so many people just laugh them off, thinking them ridiculous and not taking it seriously. Like I said before, I fell into this trap too. But these communities foster real harm towards women; Bates mentions several attacks from men on women that happened because of their involvement with the incel community.

She mentions Elliot Rodger, a man who drove to a sorority house near the campus of the University of California, shooting at female students nearby when the sorority wouldn’t open its doors to him. He shot three sorority sisters, killing two of them, named Katherine Breann Cooper and Veronika Elizabeth Weiss. Elliot didn’t stop there, though, killing six people in total and wounding fourteen (Bates, 2020).

Afterwards, he pulled the gun on himself and left behind a 100k+ word manifesto on his life and, unsurprisingly enough, blamed women for his misfortunes and unhappiness. Bates mentions a lot of other horrific incidents but this one stood out to me, mainly because of the way the incel community celebrated — yes, celebrated — his actions. Nikolas Cruz, one example, commented that Rodger would not be forgotten on a YouTube video before murdering seventeen people. Alek Minassian killed ten people in a drive-by after posting, “… All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” (Bates, 2020).

There are more harrowing stories of men being “inspired” by Rodger to kill women as a sort of “retribution” for never experiencing romantic and/or sexual intimacy from them. I don’t want to summarize the chapter, since this will be way too long (and I encourage you guys to read this book too), but the overall message here is that the incel community is dangerous and needs to be treated as such. Bates said it best:

“This evidence firmly refutes the idea that we need to pay no attention to incels. This is a radical, extremist movement, at least tens of thousands of members strong, that deliberately spreads a doctrine of hate-fueled misogyny and male supremacy and actively advocates for the violent rape and murder of women.”

Another part I wanted to touch on was the way social media frames these attacks and how it is very relevant to the way violence against women gets reported today. In the incidents I talked about earlier, mainstream media reported them very neutrally and seldom mentioned the extreme misogynistic views the men held when committing these acts. Again, from Bates (sorry I know there are a lot of quotes but this book is really so good in explaining these phenomenons):

“When Minassian killed ten people and injured sixteen in the name of ‘incel rebellion,’ headlines read “Toronto Van Driver Kills at Least 10 People in ‘Pure Carnage,’” and quoted authorities as saying, ‘The driver’s actions…appeared intentional, but did not seem to have been an act of terrorism. “The city is safe.” said the Toronto police chief, Mark Saunders.’

[…] How are we supposed to fight against this terrifying wave of violence if we can’t even point out the very obvious fact that these killings had a misogynistic motive?”

This rings true for the recent stories of Gisèle Pélicot and Rebecca Cheptegei. In both cases, the men who perpetrated violent actions against them go unnamed. In the case of Pélicot, some news outlets even go as far as to try and excuse Dominique Pélicot’s disgusting act by saying he had a ‘split personality’ as a way to explain why he would rape his wife.

Men raping women, husbands raping their wives, is not unusual or in need of an ‘explanation’. He was not a ‘nice guy’ who suddenly decided to rape his wife because of a ‘split personality’ (which isn’t even the correct term anymore). He’s a deceptive, cruel, and evil man who even gaslighted Gisèle by accusing her of cheating on him when she found out she had STDs from the men who raped her.

In Cheptegei’s harrowing murder, the news outlets are, again, very neutral. He is never correctly identified as her ex-partner, just ‘a man’, he goes unnamed — I don’t even know who he is — and his crime is always labelled as “alleged”. Call it what it is: femicide. He committed femicide because of his hatred towards Rebecca. To commit such a vile act of burning her alive is not something a ‘partner’ would do.

Media outlets need to put more fault on the men who carry out these violent crimes against women. Similarly, incels are never correctly portrayed in media or in everyday life, even when their actions and messaging are crystal clear.

These men were a part of Gisèle and Rebecca’s everyday lives; the men who committed horrid acts in the name of incel rebellion were seemingly normal and a part of society. I say this because a lot of the time these men are usually characterized or thought of as a deviation or an exception from other men. Another incel named in Bates’ book, Chris Harper-Mercer, shot eight people dead, a ninth died later in the hospital, and injured eight others. He left behind a warning:

“And just like me, there will be others… we are your sons, your brothers, we are everywhere.”

Incels are not just random weirdos on the internet. As Bates stated earlier, there are tens of thousands of these people in this community across multiple forums on the internet. These spaces are not separate from reality and should not be portrayed as so.

I don’t want this post to come off as fear-mongering. To avoid the “not all men” crowd, yes, obviously not every single man is an incel or a misogynist or violent towards women. But it is enough. This community in particular is malicious and should not be written off so haphazardly. Bates even interviewed a man, Jack Peterson, who was a part of the incel community in 2016 and felt that the term resonated with him. Peterson defended the incel community after the attack by Minassian happened, saying that the incel community was being misrepresented and it is not about violence or misogyny; he found real camaraderie and mutual support (Bates, 2020).

How did the incel community react? Horribly. They attacked Peterson, angry that he had misinterpreted them and undermined their real hatred for women (Bates, 2020). So make no mistake, I am not generalizing the incel community when I say they are exceedingly filled with hatred towards women. Sure, men may identify as an incel in the very technical sense of the term, but the community itself is toxic.

Again I will say that you guys should read the book yourselves. I got it off Libby, which if you don’t know, is an amazing app that connects to your library so that you get access to several books and other media. I don’t even touch on the racism aspect of the incel community or the very despicable colloquial terms used in their forums (for example, ‘Foid’; female humanoid). The rest of the book will be incredible as well, I can tell.

To end this post off, I have the perfect quote (again) from Bates:

“If the questions we ask about incels only extend as far as the likelihood of them committing mass acts of violence, we are missing the point. But the biggest problem is this: at the moment, we aren’t asking any questions at all.”

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Source: Bates, L. (2023). Men who hate women: From incels to pickup artists: The truth about extreme misogyny and how it affects us all. Sourcebooks.

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