美国国家公共电台 NPR What's An 'Incel'? The Online Community Behind The Toronto Van Attack

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LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

Last week, a van plowed¹ into a busy Toronto sidewalk, killing² 10 people, in what appeared to be a deliberate act. The suspect in the attack, Alek Minassian, was quickly linked to an online community of trolls and violent misogynists³ that called themselves incels, a term that stands for involuntarily celibate⁴. We wanted to know more. Arshy Mann is a reporter at Xtra, a Toronto-based LGBTQ online magazine, and he's been covering the incel community. And he joins me now. Hi.

ARSHY MANN: Thank you for having me.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: What is the incel community?

MANN: It's a online subculture of young men who feel very frustrated⁵ with their sexual and romantic lives. They get together online to kind of talk about this. But the way that they express that isn't through, kind of, working through their feelings or talking through their issues. Instead, they've moved towards a kind of really virulent⁶ misogyny. And they spend a lot of their time engaging in really violent ideation about the horrible things that they want to do to women and to sexually successful men. And they venerate⁷ a lot of these violent figures who have kind of come before, especially Elliot Rodger, who murdered a number of people in 2014 on the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara. And they see him as a kind of hero. And they talk about replicating⁸ that violence. It's quite a disturbing part of the Internet.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: You wrote in one of your articles about the incel community that, while misogyny is nothing new, the way these men organize and express it is.

MANN: Yeah, exactly. I think what really distinguishes them is the fact that they find each other online, and they escalate⁹ their rhetoric¹⁰ consistently until it reaches this kind of violent feverish¹¹ pitch. Obviously, there are a lot of young men and women out there who are not happy with either their romantic or sexual lives.

But what distinguishes the incel subculture is that they get together, and they really egg each other on. It's a kind of process that is similar to other forms of radicalization that we might associate with terrorism, whether it's, say, ISIS or white supremacist terror. These men are told that they're worthless. And they're told that by their peers in these communities. And if they try to improve or leave these kinds of communities, they're pushed back against even more by their fellow community members.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And does it cross with racist¹² rhetoric, like we may see in the "alt-right" and other communities?

MANN: Yes. And so it often has a kind of racial tinge¹³ or racial panic element to it. Elliot Rodger, in his manifesto¹⁴, talked about being especially horrified¹⁵ seeing, say, black men with white women. He had a feeling of entitlement to white women's bodies in particular. However, we shouldn't just - when it comes to incels specifically, they are not just limited to kind of young white men. There are men of all ethnicities who are kind of involved in this subculture. But, at least for a good number of them, these more misogynistic¹⁶ movements can often be an entry point into the more racialized or anti-Semitic branches of the "alt-right."

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Are these online communities, as far as you know, being monitored by law enforcement like an ISIS forum¹⁷ would be?

MANN: We really don't have a sense of whether or not law enforcement had been monitoring these communities. But from the ways in which law enforcement in the past have treated online misogyny, which generally has been to not take it very seriously, I would be shocked, frankly¹⁸, if these groups and these forums¹⁹ had been monitored in any kind of systematic²⁰ or substantial way.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Arshy Mann is a reporter at Xtra. Thank you very much.

MANN: Thank you.