Move over, terrorists! There is a new bad guy in town.
The U.K. government program Prevent will for the first time consider “extreme misogyny” in its work “to combat the radicalisation of young men online.” A recent Telegraph article describes the slate of, er, “interest groups” that the government is looking into these days.
There are several extremism categories ranked by the Home Office as an area of “concern”, including Islamist, extreme Right-wing, animal rights, environmental and Northern Ireland related extremism. There is also a category for “incel.”
I do have some questions about “animal rights” extremism . . . but the last designation is just delicious.
What is an incel, you ask? The term, a portmanteau of “involuntary celibate,” was popularized in the 2010s as a way to describe an online herd of males who can’t get why they can’t get it. Why do women refuse their advances? Sure, they might live in their parents’ basement — unemployed, unhealthy, and unwashed — but that can’t be the reason, they think. The women themselves must be to blame! (Christ was right: Take the log out of your own eye, pal.)
On online messaging fora such as 4chan and Reddit, incels support each other by hating women, together. Only because all women are inherently cruel, manipulative, and coquettish are these men barred from romantic success. (There’s also some weird belief among incels that they’ve lost the genetic lottery and must therefore suffer forever.)
Under the watchful eye of Prevent, no incel is safe.
Teachers, healthcare professionals and local authority staff are under a legal duty to make a referral to the Prevent scheme if they believe someone is susceptible to becoming radicalised.
Getting arrested might be the most exciting thing to ever happen to an incel. While a dystopian governmental oversight program can’t be the right answer — some kind of intervention in such cases could be healthy.
While incels are by definition misogynists, their misogyny is a symptom — not the cause — of their core defect. Incels are, fundamentally, antisocial (and I mean that in a clinical, not a middle-school, way). Most are loners, recluses, friendless. Anyone who lives in such an isolated environment — whose only “acquaintances” are anonymous accounts spewing verbal toxic waste — risks morphing into something less than human.
Tight-knit families and communities are the best defense against such behavior, as they are for many social ills. But, hey, with an overly zealous surveillance state on the job, what could go wrong?