Extreme misogyny is a plight that has plagued society for centuries. Despite the advancements in women’s rights and the movement towards a progressive view of society, there still exists an underlying threat to women in the form of misogyny. With the development of the internet and online culture comes a population of men hiding behind screen names in dark corners that believe that women are an evil to blame for their lack of sexual and dating experience. My dissertation examines the current known beliefs of involuntary celibates, or incels, investigating young women’s views on inceldom, their extremism status, and the effect the group has on the mental wellbeing of young women.

Chapter one lays the foundations of the project, asking who are incels, what do they believe in, and what is being done about them? For this section, I analysed existing literature that focuses on the history, existence and beliefs of incels, as well as the efforts in place by the government and platform moderators to limit their effects. To summarise, incels believe that women have too many rights and freedoms in the 21^st century. Due to the advancements in the rights of women, incels believe that they have now been given too much choice and are picky about the men they choose to form relationships and have sex with. As a result, incels believe they have been ‘left behind’ by women, as a result becoming ‘permavirgins’ – meaning they will never have a sexual encounter or romantic relationship with a woman – due to them being deemed too unattractive and at the bottom of society. While conducting this section of the dissertation project, it was found there is currently a lack of literature that examines the effects of inceldom on the wellbeing of women, and most literature fails to consider how young women feel about the existence of the group. Upon this discovery, I adapted the initial aims of the project to instead focus on women and their experiences of misogyny online and how it had affected them.

To gather the data required for my dissertation, I conducted nine interviews with women aged 20-23, averaging around 35 minutes each. Each interview began with establishing the participant’s degree of familiarity with incels and asking them how they felt about their existence. Participants were then made aware of the ‘reality’ of incel groups, discussing their real-world attacks and extremism status before gauging their thoughts on whether they should be labelled as extremists. The interviews concluded by showing participants a selection of posts from a small incel forum, before repeating the earlier questions about their views to discover if their feelings had changed, and what the cause for this was.

It was found that generally, women are not aware of the beliefs of incels and how much of a threat they could potentially pose to women and other minorities globally. While most of the women interviewed were already worried about incels, this worry grew with the expansion of their knowledge. Once they had witnessed the nature of incel posts online and the prolific numbers of posts that are made by the users, all but one participant agreed that incels should be regarded as extremists, and one went so far as to call them terrorists, demonstrating the feeling of urgency and worry that incels are inflicting on women. This is also solidified with the feelings brought up in the interview, with the women in the study expressing they are worried and angry about the existence of incels and their views toward women. The women within the study also felt as though they were not at all safe from extreme misogyny either on or offline. Seven of my participants reported that they had been victim to misogyny in some form, with many of them expressing that they now felt anxious to enter the same spaces and have modified their behaviour to avoid a similar situation. Finally, it was expressed that more was required from platform moderators and the government to ensure the safety of everyone online. The most frequent suggestion was the improvement of algorithms and AI to catch posts that manage to evade tactics to remove offensive and obscene posts.

My dissertation discovered that there needs to be an increased effort to protect women and girls from misogyny online. Violence against women and girls is prolific in society in every space and despite the UK government working to escalate the seriousness of extreme misogyny, it is only the beginning. Women are terrified to live their lives and often must adapt their behaviour in order to protect themselves from misogyny. It is simply not good enough.

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