According to a study published in New Media & Society, misogynistic language is pervasive within online communities of involuntarily celibate men (incels), with more than 80% of threads containing misogynistic terms.
Michael Halpin and colleagues examined how members of the online incel community express misogyny. This community, composed mostly of men who identify as unable to find romantic partners, shares a belief that their romantic rejection stems from systemic discrimination based on physical appearance, or “lookism.” This perspective has fueled discourse that promotes hostility toward women and dismisses gender equality, often through “black pill” ideology, which argues that incels are condemned to remain alone due to their physical traits.
This research builds on previous findings that incels participate in a hybrid form of masculinity by embracing both hegemonic and subordinate traits. Rather than simply adopting a victim identity, incels tend to position themselves as “failed men” who weaponize their perceived rejection to justify hostility against women.
The researchers collected and analyzed data from one of the largest incel discussion boards, incels.is, covering posts between November 2017 and April 2021. This dataset included nearly 3.7 million comments from a total of 8,130 unique participants. Using web scraping software, the research team extracted all public posts within the primary discussion section of the site, capturing each post’s content, thread title, user identification, and the order of comments within threads.
The authors focused on assessing the prevalence and nature of misogynistic language, particularly as participants interacted and commented over time.
To categorize the language, they developed a glossary of misogynistic terms, informed by terms commonly used on the forum, incel-specific lexicons, and other misogyny tracking sources like Hatebase. The misogynistic terms were divided into categories based on type, such as “racist misogyny,” “benevolent sexism,” and “pariah femininities.” Variations of a particularly high-volume term, “foid,” (shorthand for “femoid”) was categorized separately, as it represents an in-group incel term used to dehumanize women.
To compare the use of these derogatory terms with more neutral terms for women, like “woman” or “women,” the research team coded neutral references as a distinct category, enabling a side-by-side assessment of misogynistic versus non-misogynistic language.
The study revealed that misogynistic language permeates the discourse within incels.is. Misogynistic terms were used almost one million times across all posts, equating to 17.3% of all comments and 82.3% of threads, meaning the vast majority of conversations on this platform contained at least one derogatory reference to women. Participants overwhelmingly favored misogynistic language, using it 2.4 times more frequently than neutral descriptors for women. This pattern extended to individual post histories, with 81.2% of participants using at least one misogynistic term and 67.7% of participants using neutral terms.
Misogyny within the incel community was also racialized. Among all misogynistic terms, 33,000 instances fell under “racist misogyny,” specifically targeting women of color with slurs and language that framed them as sexual objects. Terms such as “Stacy” and “Becky,” derogatory labels for white women, were also frequent, appearing 41,000 times in total.
Further analysis suggested that the majority of users arrived with misogynistic attitudes rather than developing these beliefs through forum participation, as there was no increase in misogynistic language over time with increased engagement.
The study also highlighted that hostile sexism, or overt aggression toward women, dominated discourse, with participants using terms associated with hostile sexism more than those reflecting benevolent sexism, such as “girl.”
One limitation is that the study could not capture the full context of each term’s use.
Overall, this research shows that misogynistic attitudes are widespread in incel communities and further suggests that community members enter with established biases rather than becoming radicalized over time.
The research, “Men who hate women: The misogyny of involuntarily celibate men”, was authored by Michael Halpin, Norann Richard, Kayla Preston, Meghan Gosse, and Finlay Maguire.