How loneliness and isolation has spurred incels to cause harm in the real world
A new documentary delves into the secret world of incels and shows how people can spiral outside of reality
The Secret World of Incels airs on CBC December 6 at 8pm (8:30 NL).
It is a disturbing documentary, but not entirely in the way you might expect.
For The Secret World of Incels, filmmaker Benjamin Zand spent several months in incel chat rooms, where violent content and brutal misogyny are normalized. Incels, or "involuntary celibates," are a community of mostly heterosexual men who cannot find romantic partners.
In these chat rooms, the men laughed at videos of women being murdered, and egged each other on to commit acts of violence. As Zand wrote for the Guardian, it might be the most depressing documentary he's ever made.
"I do a lot of stories about bad things," Zand said. "You know, that's kind of my trademark and my company's trademark. But I think what was so sad about this was just hopelessness — just complete hopelessness for everybody."
He met a young man who had never had a proper conversation with a woman before, other than his mother; another who had hit himself in the face with a hammer — an extreme form of "looksmaxxing," which involves becoming as attractive as you can by creating more defined cheekbones or a jawline, for example; and a third who believed women would shoot him if he came within 10 feet of them. Men from this community were often cut off from the outside world — no school, job or friends — and many rarely left the house.
Zand reached out to hundreds of incels online — most didn't respond, and of those who agreed to an interview, only a fraction actually showed up.
As Zand was driving with one incel, called D, the young man was surprised to see so many people on the street. D believed there was a loneliness epidemic and no one left their homes — and because he was so profoundly isolated, he didn't realize young people still went out.
"I find it really hard to talk about this because it sounds like you're making it up," Zand said. "But, like, these were men who went out [of the house so] few times that they had started to effectively lose their grip on reality."
For all the bravado and rage online, Zand felt the people he met were fundamentally hopeless, lonely and even suicidal. They had given up on life and happiness. Recent studies support that — self-described incels had exceptionally high rates of "clinically diagnosable" depression and anxiety.
But in another way, Zand felt these people were also somewhat ordinary.
"You're kind of looking at this person and you're like, 'You seem pretty normal. You might be a little bit socially awkward, but a lot of people are,'" he said.
How does a relatively "normal" person become an incel?
'They're just pushing each other further and further'
Incels believe in the "blackpill" ideology (an allusion to the 1999 movie The Matrix, "pill" references have become part of the vernacular of far-right and misogynistic communities): physical attractiveness alone determines whether someone can find a sexual partner. And nothing they do — including improving their status or character — will change that fact.
Incels have an irrational hatred for "Chads" (attractive men) and "Stacys" (attractive women), and many see violence or suicide as their only options. Zand said it's a nihilistic ideology fuelled by anger.
"You're really insecure on your own; you've kind of found this clan, this community," he said. "It's like a death spiral. You know, they're just pushing each other further and further to worse and worse things."
It's also dangerous. Last year, the U.S. Secret Service's National Threat Assessment Center released a study on the growing terrorism threat from incels, and an organization that monitors online hate found incel communities were rapidly growing more radicalized, even normalizing sexual assault against children.
Here in Canada, a 25-year-old self-described incel drove a van onto a busy Toronto sidewalk in 2018, which ultimately killed 11 people, nine of them women. It was one of the worst mass murders in the country's history. In a similar vein — although it predates incel communities and online radicalization — a gunman killed 14 women at Montreal's École Polytechnique in 1989, blaming feminism for ruining his life.
And in November 2023, a man was sentenced to life in prison for stabbing a young mother to death in a Toronto spa when he was 17. Justice Suhail Akhtar ruled the murder an act of terrorism, likely the first time a Canadian court reached a finding of incel terrorist activity. The young man had no friends, did not attend school and lived in his father's basement.
Preventing incels in an increasingly online world
Zand's documentary examines how incels are made — they've often had a troubled family life and isolated upbringing, were bullied at school, and fell into alternate realities online. He sees some similarities with other subcultures that have found a place on the web, like far-right extremists.
"Ultimately, we're looking for solutions," Zand said. "You don't want there to be victims of this kind of really horrific ideology. So it starts with understanding guys like that and trying to basically say to them … 'How the hell do we pull you out of this? Because, you know, you didn't start out being a monster.'"
Teaching internet literacy at a young age, outreach, therapy, forming supportive communities, and encouraging at-risk youth to participate in the real world — this is how Zand suggests we can pull incels out of the despair of the "blackpill" world view. And, he added, the situation is urgent.
"I don't want to be some kind of doomsday apocalyptic individual, but it is only going to get worse," Zand said. "People will only be more on the internet — they will only be more disconnected from the real world.…
"And I think it's a big — much bigger — societal issue around what to do about lonely young people."
