The concept of the incel – a community of men embittered by their perception of rejection at the hands of women – has haunted the popular imagination since Elliot Rodger’s mass shooting ten years ago. The conventional view is that incels resent feminism for disempowering men – here, Filipa Melo Lopes argues that incels are instead motivated by a thwarted craving for feminine approval better understood by Simone de Beauvoir than contemporary feminist discourse.

Nearly a decade ago, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger killed 7 people, including himself, in Isla Vista, California. In his lengthy manifesto, “My Twisted World”, Rodger laid out an epic tale of rejection, isolation, resentment, and vitriolic misogyny which started a public conversation about ‘incel’ extremism — violence connected to online communities of self-proclaimed ‘involuntary celibate’ men.

Feminists have typically insisted that incel attacks should be understood as backlash against feminism and gender equality. Some have argued that what incels want is a world where women can be treated as sex objects, rather than full humans with preferences and desires. Others have claimed incels feel entitled to women’s loving attention and want to put them back in their place as loyal servants. On both views, what is bothering men like Rodger is not being single or sexless, but seeing that women today have independent lives of their own.

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However, these feminist explanations don’t really work. First, saying that incels see women as sex objects misses the fact that men like Rodger want admiration and love, not just a woman’s body. It also does not make sense of their aggrieved resentment towards women and of the way they feel wronged by them as moral actors. Second, the idea that incels want women to be obedient servants doesn’t explain why Rodger claims “all women must be quarantined like the plague they are”. He ends his manifesto with the dream of a “fair and pure world” where women have no place at all: sex is outlawed, and only a few women are “kept and bred” in secret labs.