From Parkland to the Toronto van attacks, elements of a simmering hatred toward women lie just below the surface. But, in a country where Supreme Court justices hold credible accusations of sexual assault and the President himself boasts about grabbing women “by the pussy”, these connections are either overlooked or downplayed. Contrary to conventional wisdom, an underlying current of misogyny flows throughmany North American mass shootings. In the words of feminist writer Clementine Ford,
“Perpetrators of mass violence do not spring out of the ether… The aggression men display … needs to be seen as a giant red flag for potential future acts of violence, not treated as some kind of random blip that exists in opposition to who they truly are”
(Ford 2018)
Predominantly perpetrated by men, mass violence is no “blip”: blatant support for such atrocities can be found on chat rooms like incels.me, a forum for self-identified “involuntary celibates” or “incels” — a group united by the shared view that women and society have unfairly denied them sex. Prior to shooting six people and injuring fourteen others in Isla Vista, California in 2014, Elliot Rodger was an active member of the now defunct PUAhate.com, “an online community of men who share and commiserate about their inability to ‘pick up’ women” (Vito 2018). In his manifesto, Rodger claimed that the reason he targeted women from the Alpha Phi sorority was because they were the ‘hottest’ and the “kind of girls I’ve always desired but was never able to have” (BBC News 2018). Through their close reading of the manifesto Rodger left behind, Vito (2016) concluded that Rodger was frustrated by an inability to uphold hegemonic masculinities marked by sexual prowess and physicality and compensated for this failure by branding himself as a “nice guy.” When he received no affirmation of this identity, he underwent a “crisis of masculinity whereby he misdirected his feelings of anger toward those lower on the social hierarchy, particularly women and men of colour” (Ibid).
Rodger is one of many self-identified “incels” who have constructed an identity around the idea that women owe them sex and are to blame for their depression and lack of sexual partners.By locating the cause of violent acts in sexual frustration, the incel community fails to acknowledge the very social conditions that enable that sexual frustration. In reality, what perpetuates mass violence is the indoctrination into an ideology rooted in social privilege that has more to do with power and a perception of victimhood than the seemingly more gender- and race-neutral problem of libido dissatisfaction; the latter is merely a consequence of the former. The link between sexual frustration and violence is therefore a symptom of misogynistic and oppressive cultural values that mask the problematic societal forces that engender sexual frustration and its violent expressions within the incel community. The result is that less privileged groups take on the undue burden of enacting social change to remedy the problems faced by the dominant group. Moreover, perpetuating rhetoric that society should fear a man who is unable to have sex, because his frustration might manifest in terroristic violence, reinforces this invidious cultural trope: it affirms the idea that society must accommodate him; make him more comfortable; centre his allegedly “sociobiological” needs in order to avoid upsetting him and therefore triggering violence. Rather than questioning why men feel entitled to sex in the first place, this “blue balls theory” of terrorism obscures the very problem by erasing its gendered and racial aspects. Meanwhile, violence against women becomes collateral damage, pushed to the background as something taken for granted within the profile of a mass shooter, rather than something worth problematizing in and of itself. Indeed, despite claims to the contrary by incels and counterterrorism analysts alike, terrorism is never a direct result of “pent-up sexual frustration” (Caluya 2013). If that were true, we would likely see far more women than men resorting to outbursts of violent extremism.
The misogyny displayed within the rhetoric of some of the worst perpetrators of incel-related terrorism is not unique, nor an individual character flaw, but rather an extreme iteration of an American ideology founded on white supremacy and patriarchy. Misandry, the concept of discrimination against men that is falsely equated with structural misogyny, is regularly deployed within the online manosphere to justify networked harassment (Marwick 2018). The term was used by Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) as a synonym for feminism to indoctrinate and “orient readers to their beliefs” (Ibid) and has travelled from the fringes of online discourse to mainstream rhetoric, systematically deflecting conversations about misogyny and re-centring them back onto the adverse experiences of cisgendered men (Ibid). As a technology strongly associated with white supremacist movements, misandry resonates especially well with cisgendered white men who perceive themselves as victims of ‘man-hating feminists’ and social justice movements, thereby justifying violence as a defence against perceived persecution (Ibid). From online harassment to mass shootings like the Isla Vista massacre, “the extremist and the mundane versions of various ideologies are in fact the same ideology” (Lilly 2016); an ideology through which aggrieved white men can misappropriate narratives of resistance and victimhood to repackage their same old misogynistic violence as a virtuous freedom fight.
However, misogyny is so normalised that to consider it an ideologyis almost laughable to many, especially high-level security institutions like the Department of Homeland Security. Adopting a gender- and race-blind analytical lens to mass shootings reflects the dominant paradigm of government organisations. In fact, many mass shooting events and other acts of mass violence are classified as non-ideological, and thus excluded from being classified as “terrorism” at all. This includes terrorism motivated by misogyny. Even the Anti-Defamation League did not update its database of extremist attacks to include those tied to the misogynistic incel/manosphere movement, such as attacks perpetrated by Rodger, Minassian, and the yoga-shooting spree, until 2019.
Concerningly, thislack of attention to misogyny as an ideology within the U.S. context may not be mere negligence, but rather purposeful design. Online cultures of misogyny, such as those found in the alt-right, are a useful tool of those in power to enable other far-right and neoliberal goals:“far from being a movement beyond the clutches of neoliberal conservatism—an ideology it seeks to disavow—the alt-right may be better understood as a particularly successful and thus utterly insidious performance of neoliberalism itself” (Kouloris 2018).Vitriolic online misogyny is not merely a side effect of other right-wing ideologies, but rather acts as the foundational mechanism through which far-right populist movements ensnare the working class into legitimising and valorising the neoliberal status quo (Ibid).
If, as the literature shows, gender is inextricably linked to mass violence and its subsequent public interpretations, then race is also implicated. Many studies have shown, for example, how perpetrators who are white are often assumed to be “lone-wolf” shooters, motivated primarily by mental illness, and therefore “anomalous” instances. The perceived banality of whiteness within a white supremacist society means, “while (mainly) white serial killers are profiled through their individual actions, mass killers who are not defined as white are notable through their racial, religious, or ethnic identities” (Cooks 2017).White men commit mass shootings more than any other group (Follman 2019) and yet the fact that this does not lead to discursive stereotypes of all white men as violent and volatile in mainstream culture is a testament to their privileged position in society. In contrast, perpetrators who are identified as Arab or Muslim are often immediately classified as “terrorists” — the ideological motivation for their actions is assumed instantly.
Oddly, in the past, academics, security advisors, and practitioners within the U.S. security community have been hyper-attentive to the potential for sexual frustration (via sex ratios, women’s empowerment, etc.) to radicalise young, unmarried, mostly Muslim men in Global South countries to engage in ideological terrorism (Caluya 2013). But if the U.S. seemed poised to finally problematize toxic masculinity as an indicatorof violence, it only did so when the perpetrator’s identity was already racialized in dominant discourse, while conveniently averted discussion on the gendered aspects of terrorism at home. When confronted with domestic attacks like those of Rodger — those with connections to a social movement that explicitlyclaims to target women based on an ideology of sexual frustration — this same security community fails to offer the same gender-attentive diagnosis it employed abroad. Thus, there emerges a glaringly racialized double standard in the ways U.S. security paradigms problematize social motivations for men who engage in terrorism. That U.S. practitioners readily pathologize crises of masculinity in foreign countries, but not in domestic cases of violent extremism mirrors the same double standard through which U.S. foreign policy instrumentalizes liberal values of “equal rights” abroad when convenient for foreign policy goals, while failing to confront its own problems of racial and gender inequity back home.
Indeed, the U.S. Department of State Counter-terrorism strategies are almost wholly outward looking and focused on countering radical extremism in other (predominantly Muslim) countries (Bureau of Counterterrorism 2017; U.S. Dept, of State and USAID 2016). Racial bias in state counterterrorism paradigms reflects wider cultural stereotypes wherein white, male perpetrators often do not satisfy the imagined profile of a “terrorist” (Cooks 2017). Meanwhile, appeals to the government to incorporate domestic mass violence into the category of “terrorism” also fall on deaf ears; when a group of Boise State University students proposed tackling violent misogyny online as part of a government counterterrorism project to brainstorm countering radicalisation on social media, the Obama-era Department of Homeland Security “rejected it, saying that violent misogyny and violence against women did not rise to the level of violent extremism the kind of thing that they were tackling” (Castellano 2018).Despite growing evidence to suggest that the online manosphere is a breeding ground for violent expressions ofmisogyny and white supremacy, government responses continue to treat white male perpetrators as ‘anomalous’, overlooking this crucial ideological angle.
That said, perhaps an utter lack of attention is preferable to the misguided diagnoses security paradigms may have offered. Post-9/11 counter-terrorism strategies employed by the U.S. were justified by the U.S. government through the same “blue balls theory” present in incel narratives. A significant amount of US security analysis during the War on Terror has rested on shallow assumptions of sexual frustration and social repression within Muslim countries (Caluya 2013). Neocolonial implications aside, Western theories that claim that young, predominantly Muslim men who engage in global terrorism are primarily motivated by intense sexual frustration within a sexually repressed society sound strikingly familiar. In many ways, the same logic underpins incel subculture, which justifies violence as retribution for sexual frustration and victimisation by unattainable versions of masculinity. In linking a lack of sexual release to “violent rebellion” and reducing women to “sexual release valves” (Caluya 2013), incel rhetoric and the U.S. security community both fail to interrogate how violence perpetrated under the guise of “sexual frustration” actually belies ideologies rooted in social privilege and perceived victimhood that enablessuch sexual frustration to manifest in the first place; again transferring the burden of violence prevention onto women.In summary, misogyny is so embedded within American culture that it is scarcely problematized as an ideology in dominant discourse, much less interrogated for its filial connection to white supremacy and domestic terrorism. The double privilege of perpetrators being both white and men means that each incidence of violence is allowed to occur in isolation, without the usual stigmatisation of racial or gender identity common to their racialized counterparts. But, if the conversation around mass shootings wereto shift from say, guns, to an interrogation of whiteness and toxic masculinity, power structures far beyond the scope of domestic terrorism would begin to face scrutiny.If they are truly committed to countering violent extremism, studies in security and counterterrorism ought to develop more comprehensive theories on harmful constructions of whiteness and masculinity and how a radicalisation of those identities plays out in what can be considered a distinct brand of domestic terrorism.Feminist theories in particular could offer frameworks that refocus solutions to mass shootings toward strategies for social and cultural change, addressing the tangled network of misogyny, toxic masculinity, and white supremacy in the process. Framing incel-related mass shootings in North America as ‘blips’ conveniently obscures the connection between mass shootings and structural gender and racial inequality, abrogates state responsibility for endemic gender-based violence at home, and upholds the white supremacist, capitalist, and patriarchal state apparatus.