The Beta Rebellion? Incels and the World of Men’s Seduction Training
On Monday, April 23rd, a 25-year old man named Alek Minassian drove a rented van down a sidewalk in Toronto, killing eight women and two men. Perceiving himself as unable to sexually attract women, Minassian belonged to an online subculture called “incels” (involuntary celibates). Incels offer a terrifying glimpse behind the computers of thousands of men across America. What these guys feel is a cocktail of fear and loneliness coupled with entitlement and stifled desire. At the root of their frustrations are cultural norms of masculinity that are breaking under the strain of unprecedented transformation.
Just before his massacre, Minassian posted a note on Facebook announcing: “Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161, the Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” Minassian’s post paid homage to a young man named Elliot Rodger. In 2014, Rodger shot and killed six people in Isla Vista, California, before taking his own life. Minassian and Rodger were both incels. So too was Chris Harper-Mercer, who in 2015 killed nine people in an Oregon Community College classroom. After the Oregon killings, a user of a popular incel forum posted on 4Chan.org: “The first of our kind has struck fear into the hearts of America… This is only the beginning. The Beta Rebellion has begun. Soon, more of our brothers will take up arms to become martyrs to this revolution” (Nagle 2016). Like a reboot of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), these men were killing women because they felt sexually rejected by them. But the language they were using was less Norman Bates and more like what Americans have come to associate with ISIS and Islamist extremism.
Incels are a radical subculture of the so-called manosphere, a male-centric digital ecosystem of blogs, podcasts, and online forums. Here you’ll find a motley crew of men’s rights activists, white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, disgruntled dads, male victims of abuse, self-improvement junkies, bodybuilders, bored gamers, alt-righters, pickup artists, and alienated teenagers. While rape and sexual abuse are rampant in U.S. society, not all guys in the manosphere are resorting to harassment or outright murder. Some of them are trying to fix their dating lives through men’s dating coaching and seduction training. This is a story about these men.
As a cultural anthropologist, I conducted twelve months of interviews and observation in men’s dating and seduction training communities in New York City for a book I’m writing. As a heterosexual guy, I found myself hanging out with men who were asking questions I could relate to: What’s the best way to meet women for dating? How does flirting work? What do women want? These guys feel like their dating life sucks. More accurately, they feel deprived of intimate and supportive human contact — not just in their sex lives, but also in their friendships and family lives. And something is standing in their way: North American values of masculinity.
Men today are asked to be both stoic and vulnerable, strong and sensitive, competitive yet emotionally attuned to others. At the same time, they feel their once-unquestioned status and privileges are under threat. They feel lost, even humiliated. Anger against women disguises their feelings of male inadequacy. Awkwardly but insistently, they’re searching for a guide to tell them what it means to be a man. In this essay, I’ll take a close look at seducers and how they engage with the manosphere. What they have to tell us reveals a lot about how to put an end to murderous misogyny. The answer is simple but not easy. It’s nothing less than changing the meaning and value of masculinity in America.
Trolling the Manosphere
In nearly every major city of North America there exists a seduction community: a community of men who train each-other to pick up women. Trained by a seduction coach, these guys participate in self-help rituals to transform their personality in hopes of getting laid. The point is not just learning to attract women. It’s also about embodying an empowered masculine sense of self. Together with online dating, these communities have emerged over the past 10 years from a subculture to become a globalized industry in seduction spanning from Brooklyn to Beijing. Hundreds of thousands of men participate in these groups at different levels of engagement — from online forums and subscription-based clubs to week-long intensive training courses known as bootcamps — and often at a personal cost of hundreds, often thousands, of dollars.
Guys who join men’s dating and seduction training communities are ethnically diverse. They’re typically young men in their 20s and 30s. They’re nerdy, analytic types who do all kinds of work. In fact, they look surprisingly average. They’re the everyman, the boy next door. These guys have enormous anxiety about meeting women. This feeling is rooted in sexual shame. They meet for flirting training in rented spaces like performance studios, private lofts, and hotel suites. After a seminar on how to flirt they usually venture out to meet women: in bars and nightclubs (so-called “night game”), as well as parks, bookstores, coffee shops, grocery stores, and sidewalks (“day game”).
How do these guys even find out about seduction training? The same place you find noodles and pornography: the internet. As digital natives, pickup artists and the men who idolize them are steeped in digital communication from a young age. Many of them grew up in the 1980s and 1990s playing first and second-generation videogames. They’re drawn to gaming genres like action, strategy, and role-playing (RPG). Some of them find their way to manosphere websites and anonymous online forums where guys discuss seduction techniques. They get hooked, addicted to the feeling of power that comes from chatting with other guys who reframe their fears and anxieties about women as hurdles they can overcome by becoming so-called “alpha males.”
The “beta uprising” that Alek Minassian celebrates in his Facebook post began as a meme on one such forum, 4Chan.org. 4Chan is just one digital playground for isolated, nerdy guys. 4Chan is notorious for its locker room jokes, memes, generalized vitriol, and rampant trolling. The site was created in 2003 by a young American named Christopher Poole. Poole was inspired by Japanese website 2Channel, an online meeting ground for young Japanese who felt lonely, adrift, and marginalized by mainstream consumer culture. They joined virtual subcultures and settled for the second-place prize of feeling alone together — whether as otaku (curatorially obsessive super-fans of anime and manga cartoons), hikikomori (radically shy or agoraphobic people who rarely leave their homes), or shoshoku danshi (“herbivore men” who have no interest in finding a girlfriend or getting married; Beran 2018).
Believe it or not, ten years ago the meme-happy culture of 4Chan was actually being celebrated in the mainstream media. This was part of a broader surge of hype about the internet not seen since the 1990s dotcom boom. On the cusp of the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, and activist movements like Wikileaks, viral content seemed like a harbinger of the internet’s democratizing potential. Optimism surged that the internet was an inherent force for spreading knowledge, civic empowerment, and social mobility. Soon enough, memes went mainstream on social media where people could freely trade doge memes, LOLcats, and rickrolls with ludic reverie.
4Chan members’ testosterone-fueled self-regard as digital revolutionaries only deepened as other users of the site managed to coordinate some remarkably well-coordinated pranks, flash mobs, and activist stunts. For example, they organized DDOS (designated denial-of-service) online attacks that temporarily shut down the web traffic for organizations like Paypal, Mastercard, and even the Church of Scientology. Then more unhinged things started happening. In 2014, two girls in Wisconsin stabbed a friend almost to death to impress a fictional character on online comedy forum SomethingAwful.com. Suddenly, people became aware that memes might actually encourage impressionable or mentally unstable people to violence. The FBI prosecuted or jailed some of the most influential members of the Anonymous who were responsible for its anti-corporate DDOS attacks. As for 4Chan, guys who previously enjoyed the feeling that they were avant-garde hacktivists retreated to their keyboards. While some guys disavowed the manosphere and went into more mainstream types of self-help — exemplified by reformed pickup artist and uber blogger Mark Manson — others slipped into more unhinged currents of the manosphere.
The meme “beta uprising” first cropped up on the site in 2014, soon after a young man named Elliot Rodger mowed down and shot innocent bystanders from his car in Isla Vista, California. After crashing at an intersection, Rodger shot himself in the head in what N+1 writer Sarah Nicole Prickett (2014) called a “virgin suicide.” After the attack, going postal had a new name on 4Chan — to “go ER” meant to murder those they deem “Chads” (sexually successful men), “Stacys” (the women who date them), or “normies” (vanilla bystanders). By his very attack, though, Rodger wanted people to take note that he was special. Do incels hate “Chads” and “Alpha Males” or do they idolize them?
Outwardly, incels claim men have lost their place in society. But their communication styles are steeped in irony. Pranking makes it hard to pin down truth from fiction. It can also make it hard to distinguish who’s plotting a real massacre from who’s just joking. When they talk about the attacks, incels use words — like “rejoice” and “retribution” — that seem almost religious. But references to church and ceremonies are more akin to a rhetorical play on words. For incels, they just heighten the punchline.
Many of these guys value transgression for its own sake. They espouse a mixture of progressiveness and hatefulness that manages to fit progressives (think Bernie Sanders) and reactionaries (think Milo Yiannopoulos) under the same tent. This irony perfectly reflects an age in which male privilege is both common and normatively unacceptable. After all, as campus sexual assault researcher Vanessa Grigoriadis writes, “You can’t mock your own masculinity if you’re not supremely confident in it” (2017, 40). Being self-deprecating can be an ironic way to assert male privilege. On the other hand, this haze of playfulness creates plausible deniability for members who bully other guys on the forums. Joking conceals the fact that, for guys like Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian, violence might seem like a cleansing and regenerative force not unlike the emotional logic of racist eugenics, Nazism, or even jihad.
Lacking sex might make anyone feel insecure, lonely, and frustrated. For many men, though, these feelings are exacerbated by what sociologist Michael Kimmel calls the “bro code” (2008). The bro code is a cultural norm that tells American men they should be aggressive, emotionally self-controlled, and able to secure sexual opportunities with women. For guys who are more vulnerable or suggestible than others, missing out on sex can fill them with shame, resentment, and a sense of unmanliness. Behind the toxicity of Rodger and Minassian’s beliefs is shame coupled with what Kimmel (2017) calls “aggrieved entitlement”: the idea that they deserve access to women’s bodies. It’s notable that incels aren’t just complaining about not having sex. Instead, they think they deserve sex with “HB9’s” and “HB10’s” — women they rank on a numerical scale of attractiveness. Ironically enough, it’s those same women they revile for supposedly seeing them as undesirable nerds that makes these men objectify women for their looks or perceived promiscuity.
Like the weekend warriors guys who populate David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club, these guys feel left out by society. And they’re very, very angry about it. As criminologist Simon Cottee (2018) explains, this is the stuff of terrorist recruitment. Guys like Alek Minassian and Elliot Rodger exhibit what psychoanalysts call narcissistic rage. They feel consuming sexual shame and project it onto others, whom they come to see as deserving of violent annihilation. Of course, not all men are this violent. Very few men are psychopathic to the point of committing murder. But behind computer keyboards all across America, men nurse grudging resentment of women. This has registered on a massive scale through the #MeToo movement. MeToo has shined a spotlight on men who abuse their power to harass and rape women — though mostly only the rich and successful men. What about the rest of the disgruntled guys?
Many guys in the manosphere lament what they perceive is the decline of historical male privilege. And on the internet, men’s emotions — their anxiety, confusion, or anger — are easy targets for manipulation. In this sense, the way that incels goad each other on is not so different from more conventional “outrage media” like Fox News, Breitbart News, and Rush Limbaugh (Berry & Sobieraj 2016). Paranoia and resentment come equally from alt-right provocateurs like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos as from the posts of anonymous internet denizens. Both can lead to political polarization, extremism, and radicalization. Many men’s pickup and seduction coaches whom I interviewed believe that getting men’s ear requires shining a light on their pain. As a coach named James told me, “You have to know the guy very well. You have to know what they’re scared of, what they want, what their worries are.” Another coach, Eric, used the analogy of addiction to describe how formerly polite and respectful guys become seducers: “Being a nice guy is sort of like being an alcoholic. You can’t get help unless you’re ready to get help.”
Getting Over “Nice Guy Syndrome”
November 19th, 2015. “What’s the difference between a guy who’s super successful with women and a guy who’s just mediocre?” I’m sitting in a rented dance studio in the middle of midtown Manhattan. A pickup artist named Nate is standing in front of an audience of men at his weekly free Meetup that teaches men dating and seduction skills. The men reply to Nate in unison, “Their belief in what they deserve!”
Then he gives the guys a visualization exercise. Nate asked the men to close their eyes and imagine the sights, scenes, sounds, and feelings that take hold when they go out for a night out in New York. As soon as they’d grown quiet and absorbed in the reverie, he pulls the rug out from under them: “Now imagine you’ve just seen a beautiful woman nearby. You’re both waiting there. What are the thoughts going through your mind?” The guys think about it for a second, then reply one by one: “She probably has a boyfriend”; “I’m not good enough for her”; “What could I say to her if I wanted to say something to her? How would I do it? Would I be interrupting something? What’s the right way?”; “What’s gonna be [her] reaction? Will I scare her away? What kind of fool am I gonna look like?”; “I want to talk to her, but I don’t know what to say”; “She’s too hot. She’s way out of my league.”
Many young men today, just like young women, face huge peer pressure to project a sexualized self. Guys who join pickup and seduction communities tend to feel the dating game is rigged in favor of financially successful, well-connected, and conventionally handsome men (so-called “alpha males,” whom incels call “Chads”). In other words, they feel like “beta males.” Many of these guys just want to hook up. But not all of them. Some want to explore their sexuality. Some want to learn different models of sexual relationships than what they were exposed to growing up. Others are divorcees looking to find a partner to settle down with. Most are starved of self-confidence. They believe women don’t, or couldn’t, find them attractive.
Many of these guys are new to their adopted city. Broadly speaking, these guys are nerdy, shy, analytical types. They’re drawn to systems, puzzles, and mastery. Maybe they’re bored in faceless corporate jobs. Since the Great Recession of 2008, eighty percent of all jobs lost were jobs held by men. A string of recent books with titles like The End of Men, Men on Strike, The Descent of Man, and Angry White Men spell out that American guys are in trouble. At the same time they’re losing their once-unquestioned social privileges, their sex role is shifting beneath their feet. How are guys responding to these changes? Many are confused. The flipside of being a self-made man, after all, is being a nobody.
What causes these guys to want to learn pickup and seduction rather than, say, getting into meditation, extreme sports, or Habitat for Humanity? Many of the guys I spoke to cited a romantic breakup. They wanted to get back with their ex. If not, they wanted to get back at their ex. Many others see themselves as having missed out on sexual adventures their friends were having during high school and college. Some are virgins or late bloomers. They often identify as introverts. They feel anxious around women and girls they’re attracted to. These guys see seduction as a way to have the fun and adventures they missed out on when they were younger. They become opportunists. To use a millennial catchphrase, they’ve got “FOMO” — fear of missing out.
Other guys interpret these missed opportunities as a personal weakness. For them, there’s something wrong with their own sense of masculinity. Often idealistic and sensitive young men, they describe their feeling of beta masculinity as what they call “nice guy syndrome.” Like the 19th Century concept of neurasthenia, nice guy syndrome bundles together a sense of submissiveness, meekness, and social anxiety. The common meaning that unifies all the attributes of a “nice guy” is perceived dependency or submissiveness towards women. These men are already sensitive — too sensitive, they say. Stemming from childhood feelings of shame, resentment, or even trauma, they feel they’ve been trodden on their whole life. Seduction lets them feel empowered to pursue their desires.
The most striking example of this comes from Daniel, 31, a white male software engineer. Daniel is thin, sweet, and boyish. He speaks deliberately and cautiously, but his tone is a velvety southern drawl. He looks younger than 31. He describes how seduction promised him relief from maternal abandonment:
“I came from a really tough childhood. I stopped my mom from suicide a number of times. Ultimately, though, my mom succeeded in that, and it was just me and my father and sister. I’ve always had good relationships with guy friends, and women have been attracted to me, but I was terrified of women from my psychological trauma. I reached the point where I wanted a girlfriend in high school, and I got into seduction. I learned pickup, you know, sarging. I’ve done all kinds of crazy shit. And I did pickup for a good ten years, honestly. I struggled, had challenges. That wasn’t working for me. I went into a mindset of ‘alright, I’ve gotta try something different.’ I did NLP, hypnosis, using fuckin’ crystals, whatever under the sun that I could do. …I’ve got notebooks full of affirmations and crazy shit, like, nonstop visualization exercises. It became a job.”
Another trainee named Teddy told me “When I was growing up, I had a very distant relationship with my mother. She never told me she loved me, she never hugged me. So growing up, I just assumed to interact with girls that way. Don’t talk to them, don’t touch them.” For Teddy and Daniel, seduction straddles the line between play and aggression in a way that seems to play out childhood family dramas. Learning seduction allows them to feel they are finally becoming their own men.
Ryan, a white 32-year old seduction coach who left his job working in the subprime insurance industry after the 2008 financial crisis, tells me,
“It’s just loneliness in general. It’s a lack of social connections, I think, that draws people to seek out this seduction advice. I don’t even have to ask, ‘Do you have a strong social network?’ No! Of course they don’t. There’s an incredibly strong correlation between my easiest cases and how strong the social circle they already have is; and, likewise, between my more difficult cases and how little of a social network they have.”
Ryan makes an important point. For many guys, seduction is a solution for social alienation and a sense of loneliness. This loneliness can express itself differently for different guys. As a seduction coach named Max puts it: “There are men who don’t feel worthy of women, and there are men who feel like nobody else is worthy of them. These are actually the same thing, just from different perspectives.” These guys are not just looking for sexual adventures. Above all, they’re searching for a sense of human connection that gives life meaning. As millennials, they were told they were special. Now that the world seems none too impressed, they want to be the stars of their own movie.
Fight Club
August 22nd, 2015. I’m at a three-day training bootcamp, called No Limits, led by a seduction coach named Adam and his assistant coach Jeff. In a beige hotel suite in Arlington, Virginia, I watch as Adam led his group of male clients in a confidence-building exercise. The trainees are a racially mixed group of middle-class young adults: Rohan, a men’s sexuality coach born of Filipino and Sri Lankan parents; his friend Suraj, a stock trader, who is ethnically Sikh (and who kept his hair and beard swathed in a white turban throughout the bootcamp); Hakim, an African-American online marketer; Mark, Italian-American, who lives in Staten Island and works as a physician’s assistant; and Ted, from Birmingham, England, who works in real estate.
Lining up facing each other, each guy holds another guy’s gaze while standing an arm’s length apart from him. The coach, Adam, instructs them:
“We’re going to start hitting each other right now. You are gonna take turns, find out how hard you like to be hit. Tell the guy harder or softer, whatever makes you wake up. Because if you break your connection, your eye contact, you’re gonna get hit. Everybody calibrated, everyone happy with their hit? Now, deliver a compliment to your partner. If you don’t believe that the compliment is genuine, hit him. The guy that delivers the compliment, if you don’t believe that he’s letting it in, hit him. If you guys break connection, hit each other. If you know you broke connection but the person in front of you didn’t catch it, hit him. Basically you have to remain fully present while you’re doing this. Any twitch, any flinch, anything, you hit him, because he’s breaking the tension and the connection. You’ve gotta become vulnerable. In the midst of all this pain we want to practice opening. If your guy is completely walling off, hit him.”
Then the exercise escalates, as Jeff (Adam’s assistant coach) explains: “Now we’re going to deliver a guttural-based ‘fuck you’ to your partner. And if your partner doesn’t believe that it’s real, you’re getting hit. …Allow the ‘fuck you’ to come in [and] ground it. Don’t take it personally. Just remain present with him.”
Fuck you’s ring out in the room. They’re chased by a rain of dull thuds. “Once the person in front of you has accepted it, that’s all you have to do,” Adam advises. He walks around the room, adjusting the men’s posture. He stops to check out my partner and I. “Tilt your pelvis [forward]. Become aware in here. Lower your head,” he coaches me. With his hands pressing on my chest, he massages in a line from my throat down towards my stomach to evoke the emotional quality of focus he wanted. I think to myself, he wants me to speak less from my throat and more from my belly. It seems almost like a yoga technique. “Feels like the circuits are turning on,” he says.
This type of guy-on-guy violence is reminiscent of David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), in which men create anarchist and libertarian-themed underground bareknuckle fighting clubs to release pent-up aggression and find a sense of self they feel has been corroded by consumerism and politically-correct niceness. As Fincher describes the meaning of his film, “[Men are] designed to be hunters and we’re in a society of shopping. There’s nothing to kill anymore, there’s nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman [the narrator] is created” (in Kimmel 2017, 220).
For the guys at No Limits, like the guys in Fight Club, the punch offers a simple lesson. Lean outside your comfort zone and embrace tension, Adam seems to be saying, and you can do anything. You can live a fuller, richer, and more satisfying life now that you’re not shackled within the invisible prison of your inhibitions. On a visceral level, though, the pain does something brutally simple. It cuts through numbness. It makes them feel alive.
In ten minutes the exercise is over. A thick silence envelops us. The air itself seems to have congealed. “We want to sit in this level of energy and groundedness that we have now,” Jeff advises us. Then the guys sit down in a circle to share their feelings.
Ted: “I feel more relaxed now.”
Rohan: “One thing I notice is my voice.”
Adam: “Your voice is deeper.”
We laugh as it dawns on us Rohan’s voice had changed. His voice sounds low, gravelly, like a totally different person. “Yesterday I was definitely speaking from up here [throat] in a really high pitch, and I felt like a kid throughout the entire exercise,” he said. “I felt literal pain in my chest at points. And now I don’t.” Adam replies,
“You keep your heart closed very well. You’ve got some serious repressed anger. Every nice guy does. Your anger is your power, so is your arrogance and cockiness. All that repressed intensity is your shadow material that’s been pressed down into your body because you were told you couldn’t have it. The masculine should have access to all that intensity all the time, ready to go. If you surrender to the body to do the work, if you hold the intention clearly and you’re in alignment with it, the body will handle it no problem. It’s going to go into flow. If you try to contain or trap it you’ll lose it. You’ve got to surrender to keep it. Anything you try to hold on to, you lose.”
At first glance, the punching game seems all about teaching the guys to master their poker face. It seems like a skill in hiding one’s advantages and disadvantages behind a cool, stoic façade. But Adam’s comments suggest they’re not just shutting down and tuning out. Instead, they have to learn to accept risk and uncertainty and be real in the moment of anxiety. Staging a war between the nice guy and the alpha male allows these guys to take responsibility for being nice guys. It displaces and temporarily heals their shame for failing to live up to changing cultural expectations of masculinity. Adam summarized this heady mixture of machismo and softness, saying, “The more we surrender to the process, the faster we grow. Pain is a sign of the process. It’s a signal of tension and a mark of growth.” We should feel this pain, he added, but not get attached to it.
Over time, some pickup trainees condition themselves to a hardcore view of seduction as a game (“you’re only as good as your last pickup”). Others feel more in tune with their emotions and less burdened by sexual shame. Rohan had a committed girlfriend when he took the No Limits bootcamp. When he came back to New York after the weekend in Arlington, she noticed he had changed:
“She told me I was way more present, and way more open and available emotionally. I felt more grounded, more in my body, like I can take on her emotions more, and pay better quality attention to her. But that weekend kind of reminded me that I was still interested in sexual conquest. Honestly, I think that is part of why we broke up. She and I were on a path to settle down, and I went to that bootcamp, and it was like ‘I’m not ready to settle down yet.’ So the bootcamp was a double-edged sword for our relationship.”
Some guys experiment with polyamory. Others get burned out by sexual conquest and withdraw into anhedonia, a numbing inability to feel pleasure in the face of compulsive behavior. (One online course for seducers, questionably titled “The No-Women Diet,” tackles this demographic). Still others get disenchanted with the game and choose to settle down with “the one.”
At the end of Fight Club, the schizophrenic protagonist played by Edward Norton blows up a bank. Although both men were driving a white van, Minassian’s move is more Timothy McVeigh than Alek Minassian. What I discovered through my research was something more mundane, if no less troubling. Seduction promises men a flawed and often selfish way of gaining intimacy when traditional expectations of masculinity seem unworkable. If it recruits guys with the promise of getting more sex, the seduction bootcamp I visited is all about teaching men self-confidence. Ironically, for a course that’s supposed to teach men how to flirt, women are nowhere to be found. Instead, it’s all about men being with other men.
The bootcamp is like arch-masculine group therapy, a social-phobic support group that teaches guys to access their emotions while keeping their cool. It also allows them to process their fear and shame. They can acknowledge that these emotions are real, while stripping away the resentment imposed by repressed fears and desires. This allows them to bond with each other, being vulnerable in ways that seems taboo in their everyday lives. Misygonystic online subcultures are only the fuel on a fire that is already raging in the hearts and minds of thousands of American men. Until we change our definitions and values of masculinity, we’ll continue seeing innocent victims dying at the hands of guys like Alek Minassian and Elliot Rodger. Until we give men a different gender script, they’ll continue nursing hidden grievances that affect their health and the wellness of everyone in their lives.
Author Bio:
Anders Wallace is a PhD Candidate and design anthropologist at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He has taught as a Professor at Brooklyn College and is currently preparing a book manuscript about his research in men’s pickup and seduction communities. He has won prestigious grants in the social sciences; written up his research in academic journals; presented his work at conferences around gender, sexuality, and online dating spanning across Europe and North America; and has published his work in mainstream outlets like The Good Men Project, Psychology Today, The Fashion Studies Journal, and Cheeky Scientist. You can reach him at anders.a.wallace@gmail.com.
Works Cited:
Beran, Dale. 2018. “Who Are the ‘Incels’ of 4Chan, and Why Are They So Angry?” In Pacific Standard. Retrieved from: https://psmag.com/news/who-are-the-incels-of-4chan-and-why-are-they-so-angry.
Berry, Jeffrey and Sarah Sobieraj. 2016. The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cottee, Simon. 2018. Sex and Shame: What Incels and Jihadists Have in Common. In The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/opinion/sex-shame-incels-jihadists-minassian.html.
Grigoriadis, Vanessa. 2017. Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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Kimmel, Michael. 2008. Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. New York: Harper Perennial.
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