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As the women’s rights movement undermined the patriarchal status quo in the 1970s, the seeds for new ideologies and movements aiming to reinstate men’s dominance were planted in the United States and Canada. This included new secular misogynist ideologies, like the men’s rights movement, which denies the existence of patriarchy and presents men, not women, as the true victims of sexism and discrimination.¹ The so-called “seduction” industry developed, an enterprise to sell seminars and media promising to teach men how to seduce or pick up women, leading to these men being called pick-up artists (PUAs).

Women face disproportionate gender-based violence, from domestic abuse to sexual violence to serial killings. Their movements for equality have also been met with violence. Men—including police officers—assaulted women suffragists protesting for their right to vote in the early 1900s, responding to the threat to men’s dominance. As the feminist movement further transformed the system of men’s control, in 1989 a Canadian man perpetrated the first solo act of mass violence documented as primarily motivated by misogynist ideology. He stated his motivation for an attack on women engineering students at Montreal’s École Polytechnique, as "fighting feminism." (Until 2020, the 14 women killed marked Canada’s most deadly act of mass violence.)²

The expansion of internet access and online discussion forums in the 1990s and 2000s enabled new online communities and wider spread of ideologies—including cross-pollination by users bringing ideas and beliefs across forums. The first PUA forum, alt.seduction.fast, founded in 1994, facilitated the industry’s expansion to a community subculture.³ Among the new forums emerging in the 1990s was Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project, where the term incel was coined. Founded by a bisexual woman in Toronto, the forum aimed to support people who wanted but lacked romantic relationships.⁴ While this forum was not designed from a misogynist worldview, the audiences for pickup artist and incel communities overlapped with respect to men dissatisfied with their sexual experience and shaped by the sexual entitlement and dehumanization toward women endemic in society. (The anonymous forum 4chan, founded in 2003, became another favored space for pickup artists (PUAs), incels, and varied misogynist and racist perspectives to interact.)⁵

Founded by a bisexual woman in Toronto, the forum aimed to support people who wanted but lacked romantic relationships.

PUAs’ belief in a “sexual marketplace” influences the misogynist element of the incel community. According to this framework, every person has a “sexual market value” (SMV) informed by characteristics including, but not limited to: physical looks, fitness, age, wealth, and social class. PUA forums claim that feminism brought about and women control this system, seeking men with a higher SMV than their own (termed “female hypergamy”). This leads, they assert, to a distribution of women following the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of women pursue the top 20 percent of men, leaving the bottom 20 percent of women for the remaining 80 percent of men.⁶ PUAs suggest men improve their SMV by learning “game” (techniques to seduce women), earning more money, and/or improving their physical appearance through working out. This presents women as shallow, manipulatable, and undeserving of respect or empathy, and men as victims of an unfair feminist system. These beliefs also feed red pill philosophy (discussed later), which “awakens” men to the supposed reality of feminist control.

In the mid-2000s, game strategies and PUA culture gained pop culture recognition through the best-selling 2005 book The Game by journalist Neil Strauss, who immersed himself in PUA culture, followed by a 2007 VH1 reality show The Pick-Up Artist.⁷ PUA sexual entitlement, objectification of women, and dismissiveness toward consent encourage sexual harassment and assault, and has been connected to mass violence. In August 2009, a 48-year-old white man, a devoted follower of the seduction industry, killed three women at an aerobics class in Collier Township, Penn. His blog recounts his justifications for the attack: lack of sexual and romantic relationships, anger at sexually active girls and women, and rejection by all “30 million” single women.⁸ Following PUA industry advice, he emphasized working out and financial security, expecting this formula should deliver women. PUA forums, which advise men in coercion and force under euphemisms such as defeating “last-minute resistance” (LMR), are rife with personal accounts of actions that amount to committing sexual assault. In a rare occurrence in which the perpetrators faced criminal repercussions, two instructors with a pickup artist company and their student were convicted for the 2013 rape of a San Diego woman, committed as part of their “bootcamp” training. Faced with police investigatory negligence, the survivor herself investigated and discovered her assault detailed in the student’s online “field report” on a PUA forum.⁹

PUAHate.com launched a couple months after the Collier Township attack as a forum for men angry at the PUA industry for failing to deliver the promised results (sex with women), but unsurprisingly became a space for hatred against women. The vitriol toward women attracted incel men who had unsuccessfully attempted PUA techniques and those who never tried “game." One such 22-year-old perpetrated the first attack connected to the incel community, killing six people in Santa Barbara in May 2014. He wrote that PUAHate “confirmed many of the theories [he] had about how wicked and degenerate women really are” and “how bleak and cruel the world is due to the evilness of women.”¹⁰ PUAHate shut down after the spotlight from the attack, relaunching as SlutHate.com, a name that reflected its focus on women, becoming a major forum for misogynist incel men.

The Santa Barbara attack marks a point at which the men’s misogynist incel ideology begins to coalesce as a separate movement organized online, characterized by dehumanization of women, male sexual entitlement, and glorification of violence. (Though little demographic data is available, user surveys and qualitative review suggest that the community comprises mostly boys and men in their teens and twenties, a slight majority of whom are white.¹¹) Misogynist incels laud the Santa Barbara perpetrator, who killed himself after the attack, as a patron saint and martyr. His autobiographical manifesto became a foundational movement document. While it does not use the term incel, the perpetrator posted on PUAHate.com encouraging incel violence and implying his identification. “If we can’t solve our problems, we must DESTROY our problems,” he wrote. “One day incels will realize their true strength and numbers, and will overthrow this oppressive feminist system.”¹²

In assessing this movement, it is vital to distinguish identification as an incel, in line with its original meaning, from the misogynist incel ideology that develops later. Men, like women and non-binary people, can identify as incels or involuntarily celibate, or struggle with finding sexual relationships, without following male supremacist ideology. For instance, the subreddit r/ForeverAlone, named after a 4chan meme depicting (a man’s) loneliness, intentionally distanced itself from the misogynist iteration of incel beliefs.

Men, like women and non-binary people, can identify as incels or involuntarily celibate, or struggle with finding sexual relationships, without following male supremacist ideology.

The 2014 Santa Barbara attack was one manifestation of the growth of misogynist online mobilization, as membership of male supremacist forums grew to the tens of thousands. The attack preceded, by a few months, the well-known #Gamergate incident, a harassment campaign that targeted women and feminist video game developers and reviewers under the guise of defending ethics in journalism.¹³ It brought initial mainstream media attention to the growth of misogynist and racist mobilization online, which by 2016 would be widely known as the alt-right and part of the support for the election of the then-President Donald Trump.¹⁴ While #Gamergate turned mainstream media attention to this phenomenon, it was but a symptom of a mobilization already well underway.