Quote:This article seeks to establish the connection—via shared discourse—between Incels and mainstream pornography. With an interdisciplinary approach which involves a Corpus Linguistics analysis of Reddit forum data, research into digital behaviors, and a feminist critique, this article focuses on the commonalities between the language of pornography and that of Incels. In doing so, it demonstrates how both pornography and Incels are different manifestations of the same misogyny. The findings of this study highlight the normalization of violence against women (VAW), which continues to be endemic in society, enabled and exacerbated by contemporary technologies.

Quote:Studying the discourse of r/incels allowed us to unveil the ideological context that underpins this community, to identify how assumptions that underpin “extreme” discourse are also present within the mainstream majority, and to demonstrate how these flow into each other in a mutual process of production and reproduction of language, behaviors, and attitudes. While perhaps less pervasive and persistent than other forms of misogyny, Incels’ sexism is one of the faces of societal misogyny based on biological determinism and a binary gender distinction. It is rooted in the same misogyny of ordinary sexist jokes, assumptions, everyday division of labor, and media representations, including mainstream pornography and, for this reason, should not be conceptualized as exceptional or unusual. By continuing to focus on what makes the community “extreme,” the risk is ignoring what makes it similar to the mainstream, thus contributing to the belief, often spread by mainstream media, that misogyny is only a problem of specific individuals and their specific circumstances (Tranchese, 2019, 2020), rather than also linked to institutionalized misogyny, ingrained in the fibers of society. In fact, while some members of the Incel community have committed acts of VAW, informed by their misogynistic attitudes, most crimes against women are not performed by members of this community, but by the mainstream majority. As suggested by Connell (2005), “[o]n a world scale, explicit backlash movements are of limited importance, but very large numbers of men are nevertheless engaged in preserving gender inequality” (pp. 1816–1817).

The issue, therefore, is a broader one and a cultural one; neither Incel ideology nor mainstream pornography should be problematized separately or insulated from discussions of women’s equality, because these practices are not detached from other forms of misogyny but are an extension of these and symptoms of structural misogyny. Neither pornography nor Incels created misogyny, but misogyny underlies and correlates both practices, which, therefore, should be understood as part of a “networked misogyny” (Banet-Weiser & Miltner, 2016) that, separately or cumulatively, causes harm and is not limited to the online world. While the internet, as a “site of social and cultural reproduction that reflects real-world patterns” (Lewis et al., 2017, p. 1464), enables the exponential replication of misogyny by inventing, spreading, and reproducing techniques to attack women (online and offline), online misogyny is not a product of the technology, but a result of the society that shaped it.