If Alek Minassian was inspired by the misogynistic ‘incel’ movement rather than Isis, it still counts as terrorism

How long can the basement-dwelling dregs of the internet be ignored as sex-hungry nerds when between Rodger and and Minassian, 16 people have been killed?

If we were participating in a particularly sinister episode of Sesame Street, today would be brought to you by the letter I for “incel”. Logging onto Twitter this morning, the word was flying around, passed between news outlets and some of the biggest feminist names on the internet. It had spread like a mystery infection (“what is this?”) and was now on everyone’s tongue, impossible to get off.

The word is being scrutinised in relation to the Toronto van attack, in which 25-year-old Alek Minassian has been charged with 10 counts of murder and 13 counts of attempted murder after he mounted a curb and appeared to intentionally strike pedestrians. At a press conference, Toronto Police Detective sergeant Graham Gibson said the victims were “predominantly women”.

Minutes before carrying out the attack, police say that Minassian posted on his Facebook page, praising Elliot Rodger – who shot and killed six people in 2014 on a revenge rampage, blaming all women for the fact he was a virgin aged 22 – as well as paying tribute to the “Incel Rebellion”.

Incel is shorthand for “involuntarily celibate” and is the name used by a community of extreme online misogynists to describe themselves. According to the New York Times: “Incels are misogynists who are deeply suspicious and disparaging of women, whom they blame for denying them their right to sexual intercourse.”

And they are known: Rodger’s crime brought them to mainstream attention four years ago and there was a Reddit incel group of over 40,000 members until the platform tightened up its fight against the glorification of violence against women and banned them. Somewhat tragically “incel” was actually coined far more innocently by a single woman in 1993 and has been horrifically abducted by the woman-hating community.

In recent times, there’s been growing awareness around the links between terror and violent misogyny. Mass killers or shooters have been revealed to have a history of domestic violence, such as Devin Patrick Kelley who shot 26 people in a Texan church last year; or Omar Mateen who killed 49 people in a gay club in Orlando in 2016; or Khalid Masood of the Westminster Bridge attack which saw five people killed in 2017; or Robert Lewis Deer, who killed three people and wounded nine at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs in 2015. And that shouldn’t come as a surprise – domestic violence and abuse is a form of terrorism, exactly how Luke Hart, whose sister and mother were shot dead by their father in 2016, described their experience: “Our father was a terrorist living within our own home.”

Broadly speaking, domestic abuse and violence against women is firmly rooted in the notion of control, and for incels a loss of control has been translated into the ideology of blame. Of course, all of this overlaps into the vile swamp of misogyny, but incels are a specific network, united in blaming women for their lack of sex and have their own distinct behaviours, tropes, memes and language. They call men who can sleep with women “Chads” and women who won’t have sex with them are known as “Stacys”, everyone else is a “normie”. They play out violent fantasies online, threatening rape and acid attacks, and according to journalist Arshy Mann, who has been reporting on the “manosphere” corners of the internet, “incels differ in important ways from Men’s Rights Activists. While both movements are misogynistic at their core, MRAs deploy a human rights framework to argue men are oppressed. Incels don’t talk about rights, they just hate”.

Misogyny is a broad brush. Any woman can tell you that. Incels are clearly a specific and extreme manifestation of it. But despite the fact that they seem like a minority of individuals festering in forums the rest of us ignore, their manifesto of blame actually taps into the most everyday expression of misogyny – trying to retain power. And this ties them with any man who seeks to abuse a woman. These men feel that women are undermining their power and their right as a man to have sex and they cannot control the situation. Women withholding sex is a redistribution of power and a loss of male control: a theme that seems to lace all corners of our world in 2018.

There is a valid argument that by referring to their chosen name, explaining their “ideology” and recognising them as a legitimate terror group, we are giving air to a bunch of self-loathing, lonely and hateful young men who just want to get laid – it’s a tricky line to tread. If you were the loved ones of Minassian’s victims, I’m sure incels would feel very real indeed. And how long can the basement-dwelling dregs of the internet be ignored as sex hungry nerds when between Rodger and Minassian, 16 people have been killed? Why are we always finding a way not to call young white men terrorists?

Fundamentally, the semantics around violence against women is so important for numerous reasons. Too long has our collective refusal to talk about the issue cost women’s lives; we’re stuck knee deep – still – in cliches about what abusers and violent men can and do look like; and we’ve yet to give preventing violence against women the time, resources, gravitas and language it so urgently needs. Call them what you will, but this is a politicised terror attack against women and we need to find a way to talk about that.