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. 2025 Jan;27(1):424-442.
doi: 10.1177/14614448231176777. Epub 2023 Jun 6.

Men who hate women: The misogyny of involuntarily celibate men

Michael Halpin  1 , Norann Richard  2 , Kayla Preston  3 , Meghan Gosse  1 , Finlay Maguire  1
Affiliations

Men who hate women: The misogyny of involuntarily celibate men

Michael Halpin et al. New Media Soc. 2025 Jan.

Abstract

This article uses computational data and social science theories to analyze the misogynistic discourse of the involuntary celibate ("incel") community. We analyzed every comment (N = 3,686,110) produced over 42 months on a popular incel discussion board and found that nearly all active participants use misogynistic terms. Participants used misogynistic terms nearly one million times and at a rate 2.4 times greater than their use of neutral terms for women. The majority of participants' use of misogynistic terms does not increase or decrease with post frequency, suggesting that members arrive (rather than become) misogynistic. We discuss these findings in relation to theories of intersectionality, masculinity, and sexism. We likewise discuss potential policies for mitigating incel misogyny and similar online discourse.

Keywords: Ambivalent sexism; femininity; incels; intersectionality; masculinity; misogyny; racism.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Percentage of participants using misogynistic terms, by total posts. Numbers represent all instances of misogynistic terms listed in thread titles and posts appearing on the “Inceldom Discussion” section of http://incels.is from November 2017 through April 2021. See Supplemental Appendix 1 for full lists of terms.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Change in average monthly term usage ~ months since first post on incels.is. The table reports the overall relationship between the change in average term usage and time spent posting on Incels.is for each term category. This table summarizes the regression models relating the difference in mean per-post term usage between the first and last month in which each user made posts (with or without the corresponding terms) with the number of months between their first and last post. Only users with posts (with or without corresponding terms) in ⩾ 3 months were included in this analysis, and confidence intervals were plotted based on the standard error of the models.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Percentage of participants using misogynistic terms, by number of posts. Numbers represent all instances of misogynistic terms listed in thread titles and posts appearing on the “Inceldom Discussion” section of http://incels.is from November 2017 through April 2021. See Supplemental Appendix 1 for full lists of terms in each subcategory.
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