Irresponsible Reporting On The Incel Community

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Irresponsible Reporting On The Incel Community
(By All Forms Of News Media)

I'm no expert on the subject and have no connection with the Incel community, but apparently I am more proficient with Google than the media outlets who are reporting on the Incel community. I didn't even know about the term "Incel" until earlier this year. Thirty minutes of Googling, however, quickly showed me that the media -- both your typical corporate conglomerate outlets and the small independent networks -- are grossly mischaracterizing an already at-risk community. This reminds me a bit of how the media commonly mischaracterizes my own transgender community.

I am not even going to include a bunch of citation links -- normally I try to include highly relevant citations -- because all the top results are heavily biased and one-sided. Just do a quick search yourself.

What is "Incel?"

In the most general description, an "Incel" is a woman or man who sees themselves as being involuntarily celibate. There could be multiple societal, physical, social and/or emotional/psychological factors playing into this, but it basically comes down to the following general definition:
Someone who would choose to have an intimate life partner (or multiple intimate partners), but who has been unsuccessful in achieving this for a prolonged period of time well into their adulthood.
Even the Wikipedia Incel page has a distinct tonal bias to it, which means you have to dig deeper into the community and the content of its individual members to really learn what the community is all about. 

What will the media tell you "Incel" is?

Just a quick Google search for news on the word "Incel" will tell you the following:
  • It's an anti-women movement
  • It's a misogynist society
  • It's a term hijacked by women haters
  • It's a group of socially inept men
  • It's a community of men who creep out women
  • It's a group of men who blame women for their inability to get laid
  • It's a community of men who think women owe them sex
  • It's a bunch of angry, sexually frustrated people
  • It's a hate group
What do all these statements have in common? They're all wrong and they all grossly mischaracterize an already marginalized and at-risk community.

Why am I writing this?

Usually I expect the various independent media outlets and networks I rely on to at least have better journalistic integrity than their profit-driven mainstream predecessors, but this is clearly not the case when it comes to the topic of Incels. Instead, I am seeing the same mischaracterizing of this community and much the same negative and generalizing language being used by independent media that I am seeing in the MSM's reporting.

When I use the term "at-risk," I am coming from personal experience being a member of the transgender community. We're a community of people whom the media often mischaracterizes and falsely claims are a community of misfits suffering from a shared mental illness. The reality is, we're a group comprised of individuals who often live within a society and environment that does not support us and is often hostile to us. Some members of our community suffer from mental illness, some do not. But the media takes the "some" and amplifies it, putting it in the spotlight and claiming, "this is what a transgender person is." Many transgender people are under constant threat of persecution and violence within their own homes and neighborhoods and the media's sensationalized approach to representing our community puts already at-risk individuals at even greater risk. And, unfortunately, many transgender people eventually give up and choose to end the constant suffering they face at the hands of their society by committing suicide. This is what I mean by "at-risk" and, from the basic research I have been doing over this past weekend and the videos I have been watching by self-proclaimed Incels, I see some of the same persecution and risks within their community.

The media is being irresponsible and negligent in their reporting on the recently popularized subject of Incels: They're using images of Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian as their headline and thumbnail images (as their poster boys) for their articles, articles that describe the Incel community to their readers as socially inept, misogynistic men. The media's narrative is crystal clear: Incels are dangerous men.

Why are Incels in the news right now?

The van attack in Toronto that occurred on April 23, 2018, was perpetrated by a young man by the name of Alek Minassian. Minassian apparently made claims about an "Incel Rebellion" and praised Elliot Rodger on Facebook and on the recently deleted (by Reddit's admins) "r/Incels" subreddit. When I looked up what Minassian wrote, it looked like satire to me, the way it was worded. Clearly there is something wrong with Minassian because of what he did in Toronto. What he wrote, however, was comical. If he was serious in what he wrote, then this must be an aspect of his mental instability.

Elliot Rodger, whom Minassian seemed to praise, was the young man who drove around Isla Vista in 2014 making a video about his confusion as to why women were never attracted to him, a self-described "supreme gentleman," and yet they instead run to "obnoxious men." He then set out and killed six people. If Minassian was truly celebrating Rodger, which his actions seem to somewhat indicate, the man is clearly sick.

There is another recent incident in the news of an Incel man lashing out at society for his celibacy, but it's too early to claim that this is a growing trend. There appears to be no community-wide or organized movement, but the media would have us believe otherwise.

If you look up "Incel Rebellion" on Google, all the top news results will tell you pretty much the same thing: That it was essentially created by or formed out of the ideals of the "Incel movement." There are two problems with this framing:
  1. Framing the Incel community as a movement leads the reader to believe that the Incel community is prompted into some kind of action in whole
  2. The the reader is led to believe that the entire community fosters toxic ideology
The media seems to have blown this one out of proportion, as far as I can tell. Everywhere I look for something specific about "Incel rebellion," it looks like a joke that the media is trying to morph into a sinister movement. Maybe for clicks?

You read my quick, simple description of what "Incel" means. Right? You also read what the media will tell you an "Incel" is. Right? So, let's ask some more specific questions and see what the answers are:
  • Are there misogynist Incels?: Yes
  • Are there non-misogynist Incels?: Yes
  • Are there misogynist non-Incels?: Yes
  • Are there female Incels?: Yes
  • Are there lesbian Incels?: Yes
  • Are there gay Incels?: Yes
  • Do some Incels blame women for their celibacy?: Yes
  • Do some Incels blame society for their celibacy?: Yes
  • Do some incels blame only themselves for their celibacy?: Yes
Adding up all of these questions and their answers, what can we say for certain about the Incel community? We can pretty much say for certain that ...
The Incel community is comprised of men and women who are diverse individuals and they do not all share the same ideals.
Almost all of the reporting I am seeing on Incels, recently, is completely ignoring this and painting the entire community as a "movement" of sexually frustrated men who blame women and/or society for their lack of social development. That may describe a subset of individuals within the community, but it in no way describes the whole of the community.

From what I can tell by reading their writing and watching their videos, a common couple of traits among members of the Incel community are anxiety and fear. And now the media is blasting the Internet, cable & TV, radio and newspapers with reporting and articles that mischaracterizes them and accuses them of being akin to terrorists and budding rapists.[1] Imagine how that feels.

Reddit does not define your community

Obviously we all know that online communities that center around commonly shared problems can become echo chambers that magnify those problems and develop unhealthy obsessions and foster negativity. What often start out as "support groups" can eventually devolve into dens of isolationism, mutual self-pity and resentment. Based on the archives of r/Incels, it looks like this was definitely going on there. The content of this subreddit is highly toxic, filled with racial slurs, derogatory invective about homosexuals and other classes of people, anger, hatred, loathing, externalizing blame and general unhealthy self-pity, trash talking and negative thinking. r/Incels does not define the Incel community, though, just as r/trans does not define my community. Reddit is not some magical thing that, once there is a subreddit on it for your community, it then ultimately defines your community. Why? Because most of us healthy people don't obsess over our problems on Reddit. As such, more often than not, it is the unhealthy people who will bubble-up and become the most noticeable and active members of the online community forums and subreddits while the healthy members of the community are out and about living their lives. And Reddit is well-known for its unhealthy echo chambers.

Unfortunately, though, the media's sheer volume of smear articles littering all the top search results has likely put a lot of the more benign contingent of the Incel community on the defensive and many of them are likely isolating themselves even more now than they were before. This means that the Incel contingent we're going to hear from are likely going to be of the more hostile variety. This will then reinforce the media's (and viewer's/reader's) belief that the entire community is a bunch of hostile misogynists.

As with most communities, it's the problematic and unhealthy members of these communities who tend to get the bulk of the media coverage and attention. If, however, you want to learn more about the community, you need to filter out the problem people from your results. To do this, watch for the loaded language of the "Manosphere". People who make heavy use of that kind of language are going to be difficult to deal with and, in my experience, tend to manifest the toxicity and negativity that these news articles are referring to. From what I have seen, these men are the ones who tend to externalize their problems and play the blame game, and are generally angrier and hostile to outsiders and women. If you ignore them or give their opinions and actions significantly less value, you'll get a clearer picture of the remaining bulk of the community whom the media is mischaracterizing.

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