I Posed Online as a Male Incel — And Yes, It Was Disturbing

Here’s what I learned about taking the red pill

Carlyn Beccia
Fearless She Wrote
Published in
7 min readJun 16, 2021

--

Incels: I posed online as an incel
Photo by Danilo Alvesd on Unsplash

In 2014, Elliot Rodger, 22, parked his black BMW coupe, pressed record on his video camera, and spoke the words that would make him the anti-hero to thousands in the manosphere.

“The girls are not sexually attracted to me. And I have a major problem with that…That’s a problem I intend to rectify.”

And he meant it.

Rodger calmly bought himself a triple vanilla latte from Starbucks and then drove to the Alpha Phi sorority house in Isla Vista, California. He knocked on the sorority house door but no one answered. He then opened fire on the first two students outside the sorority who were unlucky enough to be in his warpath.

Over the following minutes, he killed six people and injured fourteen before turning the gun on himself.

Since that horrific killing spree, Rodger has become the hate champion for the group known as incels — “involuntary celibates.” Incels are an online community of cisgender men who share one trait — a failure to attract women. The stereotypical incel is white, male, young, identifies with the alt-right, hates everyone (women, minorities, the LBGTQ community, etc.), and is lonely.

--

--

Carlyn Beccia
Fearless She Wrote

Award-winning author of 13 books. My latest: 10 AT 10: The Surprising Childhoods of 10 Remarkable People, MONSTROUS: The Lore, Gore, & Science. CarlynBeccia.com