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My name is Dr. Stuart Lucy a postgraduate researcher currently residing at the University of Southampton. I have recently completed a PhD which both mapped the journey young men and adolescent boys take toward an incel identity as well as the digital network of incel websites, forums and associated social media platforms that facilitate this journey. I have published in both top tier academic journals and edited book collections and have secured a contract to write a book entitled now to Make an Incel that will draw on my PhD findings.
I offer evidence to the committee as someone who has spent a significant amount of time immersed in incel digital space and adjacent misogynistic content, and as one of the few UK researchers who have spoken to both current and former incels. I have encountered first-hand the online misogyny and antifeminism that undergirds this community and have developed a theoretical model to understand the totality of incel related space and the relative relationship of different types of online platform and website in the overall ‘Incel Network’. I offer evidence below that briefly details the structure and content of this network, and the mechanisms that are employed within to communicate, normalise, and encourage misogyny. I conclude with preventative and interventional recommendations that should be to successfully mitigate the rising prevalence of performative misogyny, both in online and offline settings as a direct result of the media and modes of communication contained within the Incel Network and wider manosphere content to which this subsection is associated.
Redpill neoliberal political economy commodifies ‘erotic capital’[2] performed within a sexual marketplace (SMP). Men and women are understood as ‘prosumers’ - simultaneously producing and consuming, in this case, heterosexual interpersonal intimacy and sex as commodified and marketized goods. Romance and sex are reconfigured into a series of transactional interactions, a relentless and ubiquitous economization characteristic of late-stage capitalist political economy. Social life is configured through hierarchical physical and ascetic ‘sexual market value’ (SMV), allocated through reductive numerical ratings based on specific masculine presentations, improved via ‘maxxing’ practices; the (e)valuation and entrepreneurial modification of self to conform to heteronormative tropes of desirable physical appearance. Redpill ideology purports a rigid framework of social truth predicated primarily upon dis/misinformative reading of academic research concerning evolutionary biological and psychological proximate mating behaviours and anecdotal life experience. SMV is framed explicitly within fixed physical traits, with women supposed as universally attracted to only the genetically fittest alpha males known as ‘Chads’. Finally, a postfeminist sentiment produces a gynocentric understanding of gendered social relations. Feminism, a site of resistance to gendered structural power, is transformed into a site of oppression of men perceiving suffering and loss due to feminist victories in institutional and sociopolitical transformations. Antifeminism is a key component of understanding consequential misogyny communicated in the manosphere. Women are subsequently characterised as hyper-sexualised, self-indulgent, and power hungry. Redpill postfeminist sentiment refutes and obscures unequal gender relations, via this transvaluation of gender power imbalances and sexual (em)power(ment) of women, obscuring men’s structural dominance behind claims of biologically determined, ‘lookist’[3] discrimination and victimhood within a sexual marketplace dynamic.
Incels extend this pill social ontology further to the blackpill. Blackpill ideology retains misogynistic categorisation of women but rejects redpill political economy of maxxing self-improvement of SMV, refuting agentic capacity, favouring instead a defeatist attitude towards this social structuring. Consumers of the blackpill remain eternally sociosexually unsuccessful as a self-identifying, immutable ‘loser’ at the bottom of this sexual marketplace dynamic, as redpill game and 'alpha male’ presentation necessary for sexual success is considered either invalid or unachievable. To be ‘blackpilled’ is to exist in self-denigration, ideologically transfixed upon a societal dynamic purportedly constructed through biologically determined social ordering in which one embodies a physicality too unattractive to achieve heterosexual intimacy. Women become the central antagonist in this way of seeing the world, as the agents responsible for the rejections these men experience or perceive to likely experience if they were to attempt to engage in finding a partner. Subsequently women become dehumanised as a collective other governed by genetic impulses denying these men access to sex and intimacy.
These ideologies are readily available across mainstream and niche digital space, accessible to both adults and children. While the manosphere contains redpill ideology and a broad array of other masculine groups espousing misogyny and antifeminism, my expertise and evidence specifically concerns incels and the network of digital space that contributes to sexist and misogynistic attitudes and behaviour, and violence against women and girls both online and offline.
I offer evidence to the committee as someone who has spent a significant amount of time immersed in incel digital space and adjacent misogynistic content, and as one of the few UK researchers who have spoken to both current and former incels. I have encountered first-hand the online misogyny and antifeminism that undergirds this community and have developed a theoretical model to understand the totality of incel related space and the relative relationship of different types of online platform and website in the overall ‘Incel Network’. I offer evidence below that briefly details the structure and content of this network, and the mechanisms that are employed within to communicate, normalise, and encourage misogyny. I conclude with preventative and interventional recommendations that should be to successfully mitigate the rising prevalence of performative misogyny, both in online and offline settings as a direct result of the media and modes of communication contained within the Incel Network and wider manosphere content to which this subsection is associated.
Background
As I am sure you will be aware from other evidence, The manosphere grew from an aggrieved victim rhetoric which simultaneously denied the disadvantages of women in male-centred societies, while complaining of the unjust suffering men endured due to women’s progressive gains in the latter half of the twentieth century. The manosphere can be understood as clustered performances of reactive antifeminist misogyny, containing, among others, incels, men’s rights activists, pick up artists, men going their own way, tradcons[1]. Metaphoric ‘pill’ social ontology lies at the heart of these manosphere performances. Derived from the popular film The Matrix, a foundational redpill/bluepill dialectic facilitates the encapsulation of specific and rigid ways of understanding the social world, fixing three core social ontologies into the redpill: neoliberalism, biological determinism, and postfeminism. To take the redpill in manosphere culture is to awaken to the ‘truth’ of the unjust gynocentric society men find themselves repressed within. The bluepill exists as a dialectical-relational structure to the redpill; an amorphous theoretical trashcan in which all perspectives that challenge or contradict a biologically determined, neoliberal, and postfeminist conceptualisation of sociosexual relations are expelled into.Redpill neoliberal political economy commodifies ‘erotic capital’[2] performed within a sexual marketplace (SMP). Men and women are understood as ‘prosumers’ - simultaneously producing and consuming, in this case, heterosexual interpersonal intimacy and sex as commodified and marketized goods. Romance and sex are reconfigured into a series of transactional interactions, a relentless and ubiquitous economization characteristic of late-stage capitalist political economy. Social life is configured through hierarchical physical and ascetic ‘sexual market value’ (SMV), allocated through reductive numerical ratings based on specific masculine presentations, improved via ‘maxxing’ practices; the (e)valuation and entrepreneurial modification of self to conform to heteronormative tropes of desirable physical appearance. Redpill ideology purports a rigid framework of social truth predicated primarily upon dis/misinformative reading of academic research concerning evolutionary biological and psychological proximate mating behaviours and anecdotal life experience. SMV is framed explicitly within fixed physical traits, with women supposed as universally attracted to only the genetically fittest alpha males known as ‘Chads’. Finally, a postfeminist sentiment produces a gynocentric understanding of gendered social relations. Feminism, a site of resistance to gendered structural power, is transformed into a site of oppression of men perceiving suffering and loss due to feminist victories in institutional and sociopolitical transformations. Antifeminism is a key component of understanding consequential misogyny communicated in the manosphere. Women are subsequently characterised as hyper-sexualised, self-indulgent, and power hungry. Redpill postfeminist sentiment refutes and obscures unequal gender relations, via this transvaluation of gender power imbalances and sexual (em)power(ment) of women, obscuring men’s structural dominance behind claims of biologically determined, ‘lookist’[3] discrimination and victimhood within a sexual marketplace dynamic.
Incels extend this pill social ontology further to the blackpill. Blackpill ideology retains misogynistic categorisation of women but rejects redpill political economy of maxxing self-improvement of SMV, refuting agentic capacity, favouring instead a defeatist attitude towards this social structuring. Consumers of the blackpill remain eternally sociosexually unsuccessful as a self-identifying, immutable ‘loser’ at the bottom of this sexual marketplace dynamic, as redpill game and 'alpha male’ presentation necessary for sexual success is considered either invalid or unachievable. To be ‘blackpilled’ is to exist in self-denigration, ideologically transfixed upon a societal dynamic purportedly constructed through biologically determined social ordering in which one embodies a physicality too unattractive to achieve heterosexual intimacy. Women become the central antagonist in this way of seeing the world, as the agents responsible for the rejections these men experience or perceive to likely experience if they were to attempt to engage in finding a partner. Subsequently women become dehumanised as a collective other governed by genetic impulses denying these men access to sex and intimacy.
These ideologies are readily available across mainstream and niche digital space, accessible to both adults and children. While the manosphere contains redpill ideology and a broad array of other masculine groups espousing misogyny and antifeminism, my expertise and evidence specifically concerns incels and the network of digital space that contributes to sexist and misogynistic attitudes and behaviour, and violence against women and girls both online and offline.
