It’s just one of many other online platforms created by and for men who describe themselves as “involuntary celibate” that exist within the so-called “manosphere.” I was accepted to become a member after a couple of weeks.

And then I began lurking around, scrolling through thousands of their posts and discussions, and joining different chatrooms to find out what’s really going on in the mind of an average incel and what they think about women.

It was bad. Really bad. And much worse than I initially imagined. RELATED: I Posed Online As A Male Incel — And Yes, It Was Disturbing Here’s what I discovered.

Everything and anything is a women’s fault.

You probably first heard about incels in 2014. This is when a 22-year-old self-described incel — Elliot Rodger — went on a stabbing and shooting spree in Isla Vista, California. He was then quickly dubbed “the king of incels” by the online incel community, which was still pretty small back then. Many other similar attacks later, that’s unfortunately no longer the case. And it looks like with each year, the “incelosphere” only keeps growing, diversifying, and becoming increasingly more toxic. So what’s it all about, really? According to the incel forum, I joined, “it’s a community for men that struggle with or are unable to get into romantic relationships with women despite trying.” Unsurprisingly, they primarily blame women for the fact that they can’t get what they believe to be “rightfully owed.” And that’s because women always go for “Chads” — men who, although they have below average IQ and tend to be aggressive, are also tall, physically attractive, have huge penises, and are generally sexually desirable. As one incel theory states, that’s apparently because they were breastfed as a child. (Yup, many incels also blame their mothers for the fact that they’re now unwanted by women.) And even though incels seem to be mad about many things in today’s society, and not only women and their dating preferences, regardless of the issue, somehow the culprit is always women. It’s women’s fault there’s a recession because it’s women — especially single mothers, disabled and fat women — who more often than men end up being “welfare leeches” and taking men’s hard-earned money to sit at home and do nothing. It’s feminists’ fault that men now have to compete with them in the workforce and thus have a lower chance of promotion. It’s women who “manufactured” an epidemic of domestic abuse because they injure themselves only to be then able to blame men and put them in prison. And, of course, it’s women’s fault men don’t have as much sex now as they should be having. As for their views on women, which they commonly refer to as “femoids” or “foids” — short for “female humanoids” — or “females,” well. Some of the things I’ve read are your typical Andrew Tate-level misogynistic stuff. It’s obviously bad, but nothing I’ve never seen before. Women are mentally and physically inferior to men. Women have to be in a constant position of servitude. Women are born into a life of privilege. And so on and so on. But most of the content there is on an entirely different level of violently misogynistic insanity.

They really don’t see us as human beings.

If there’s one thing that incels seem to believe in practically unanimously, it’s not only that women are inferior to men but that we are not fully human. Instead, we’re a “different species” created to serve and obey men, primarily as “sex objects.” And according to many incels, we’re also more like animals, which is an argument often used to justify why we don’t deserve rights. As one user writes: “Between the two sexes, women are more like animals than men are, it’s like they aren’t really conscious of their own existence, so easily manipulated by agendas and also still so easily manipulated by their own programming.” Another user in the same discussion thread focused on why women are inferior adds: “a foid would be like a dog or a sheep if you could dominate her totally.” And, according to another, “females are just evolved to be like soul-less flesh-lights.” But this assumption that we aren’t human has led incels to develop many other, even more disturbing, theories. According to one of the most popular posts on the entire forum — also included in their “Must-Read Content” page — since women aren’t fully human, they don’t actually feel pain. But even if they sometimes do, they “gain sexual pleasure from the pain that is inflicted upon them.” And apparently, the “proof” for that can be found in the story of a “historical foid,” Joan of Arc. This is what one user claims happened after she was sentenced to death: As she burned at the stake, the following signs were observed:

  1. Her muscles contracted and tensed up.
  2. Her breasts became full, and she began to heave violently.
  3. She cast her eyes to heaven, and her expression was not one of pain but something approaching spiritual ecstasy. 4, In the instant before she lost consciousness, Joan moaned out Jesus’s name three times, loud enough to be heard over the roar of the flames.
  4. Joan’s vagina, in contrast to the dry kindling that burned around her, became lubricated and wet. RELATED: What Happened When I Stopped Ignoring Sexist Comments For A Week The same user then explains all the other “evidence” for this theory. That includes women “preferring big penises” that hurt them, women frequently “resorting to bestiality with dogs, horses, and other animals with large c**ks,” and women being generally unable to orgasm unless they’re being harmed in some way, for instance having their genitals cut with a knife. Oh, and he also praises “German scientists” who made “great medical advances in the 1940s” for apparently coming to the same conclusions as incels did. Yes, he’s literally applauding Nazi scientists that performed some of the most unethical human experiments in the history of our world. But, unsurprisingly, the comment section under this post is filled with hundreds of incels enthusiastically agreeing with all that, and suggesting that “it should be a mandatory mission for everyone to kill or rape at least one foid” since they “essentially do not feel pain.” Some also suggest that anesthetics should stop being administered to women because that’s clearly “wasteful.” Plenty of other theories there suggest that it’s not actually possible to rape or sexually assault women since they’re not “sentient enough” to understand it, nor do they feel pain, and even if they do, they enjoy it. Here’s what some users have to say about this topic: “One reason women seek out and stay with attractive abusive men is that they enjoy being beaten up. Rape or any kind of sexual violence should not count as a crime because foids are begging for it. We must take foids by force like the animals they are. Females don’t care about consent very much; they care about Chadliness and the feelings they get when their instincts detect competitive genes. (…) that’s why females don’t mind going to frat houses where raping and roofing are known to be common.”

What do incels actually want?

You’d think that based on all the above, incels would want nothing to do with women. After all, we’re inferior, not even fully human, and frequently f*** horses, dogs, and other animals. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Incels might hate all women, but they still want to be with one. Not just any woman, though, but the type they refer to as “Stacy.” Stacy is a good-looking, thin “foid” usually with long, blonde hair who isn’t very deep, bright, or interesting. And she always goes for Chads, which is why incels both hate Stacys for choosing what they believe to be intellectually inferior mates but still want to be with them. Besides, Stacys are much more “valuable” than “landwhales” — that’s what they call fat women — “curryfoids” — brown women — “sheboons” — African-American women — or “noodlewhres” — East Asian women. Yup, much of their ideology unsurprisingly overlaps with white supremacy and the belief that white people are superior to those of other races; hence the forum is also full of all sorts of disgusting racial and ethnic slurs, including the M-word. However, since incels usually cannot get a Stacy, men claim they’re fine with settling for “lower value” women. And there are even a few threads dedicated to them bragging about sleeping with women who are just “sub-prime roast beef.” One of them that caught my attention is, as the original poster describes it, a “step-by-step guide on how to f** noodlewhres in Thailand for any hopecels out there.” (“Hopecel” is an incel that believes he can eventually escape “inceldom” by finally having sex with a woman.) What’s the most disturbing about this post, though, is that the guy who created it also posted pictures of all the girls he slept with, often while they were half-naked in their beds or bathrooms, as “proof” he “did it” with them, together with his rankings of the “foids.” Two were teenagers, but they were still “f**able enough.” But judging by the comments under that post, not many incels are convinced that the solution to their problem is going to Thailand. No, most of them believe that it shouldn’t be up to them to make all the effort, but… the government. Because what incels actually want isn’t women finally wanting to have sex with them, and that’s it. Instead, they want men to rule this world once again, and they want women to have no other choice but to be forced to have sex with them in order to survive. One of the most commonly proposed solutions to “inceldom” I found all over that forum is that “foids should be transformed into a public service reserved for incels” where taxpayers would pay them to perform the job of being an incel’s wife or girlfriend. They’d also be required to attend monthly STD testing, couldn’t legally refuse sex, and then once they “expire,” they should be “disposed of” in a female-only concentration camp so that the incel can take on a new partner, preferably a very young girl. RELATED: How Men’s Rights Activists Turned The World Against Amber Heard As one user writes: “If any government actually cared about incels, this is how they could help us. But they just don’t want to.” And another adds: “I actually think a lot of women would be interested in doing this as many broads these days are young, dumb, and lazy, and all they want is to be put in their place and raped over and over again anyway.”

We can’t keep dismissing the incel problem.

I’m not usually at a loss for words, but after spending hours and hours on that incel forum, I was. And it’s not like I wasn’t prepared for what could be there. I’ve previously read quite a few reports that analyzed similar forums and sites, like this recent one published by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which found that rape is mentioned, on average, every 29 minutes there. But it’s one thing to read a report. And entirely another to actually see thousands of boys and young men — some are allegedly as young as 13 years old — casually post about raping and abusing women and about putting them in concentration camps while quoting literal Nazi studies and far-right white supremacist beliefs. It’s… beyond disturbing. Yet many people continue to dismiss the threat of incels because they believe them to be “just a small group of misunderstood, lonely men who want to have a girlfriend.” And so if only we help them achieve that, they’ll stop being so angry and violent. Well. For one, if incels would indeed start getting into relationships with women, the rates of violence — in particular sexual violence — wouldn’t magically disappear. If anything, they’d likely only go up since, according to their twisted ideology, women want to be abused and raped. And no, this isn’t just a “small group” of sad men. The forum I joined has thousands of active users and gets millions of views per month. And that’s just one out of many similar ones. Not to mention that this type of rhetoric is no longer confined to the darkest corners of the internet. Last week, I wrote about the wave of “male empowerment” coaches on mainstream social media platforms — like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram — who, although they lean more towards Misogyny Lite, still feed boys many dangerous lies about women and relationships in general. Incels are also reportedly using bodybuilding forums, gaming websites, chatrooms, and Discord channels to recruit more boys to their movement. And if you look at all that together — the rise of mainstream media misogyny and incel ideology being pushed practically everywhere — it becomes clear that we can’t just keep turning a blind eye to it all. Because all this online content creates a rabbit hole that children are gradually drawn down over time and become radicalized by extremely misogynistic, racist, and violent individuals to believe women aren’t human beings. And that we deserve to be beaten, abused, raped, tortured, and controlled by men as they see fit. Incel ideology is only starting to be recognized as a terrorist threat by governments, charities, and academic experts. But we need to do more to understand how to respond to it effectively and how we can deradicalize young men who fall into its trap. Because, for now, there are hardly any incel-specific resources that address that. Where I live, in the UK, the government only recently issued a guidance warning to make teachers aware of incel ideology in schools and colleges and the growing risk of online radicalization. Some schools here now also started to hold a parents’ information evening on incel culture. But it largely remains an issue that many people don’t know about, and even if they do, they don’t know what exactly can be done about it. I do hope, though, that’ll change soon. Because if it won’t, I’m afraid we’ll likely witness many more mass shootings, stabbings, and other acts of violence inspired by the likes of Elliot Rodger. RELATED: What Is Internalized Misogyny & How To Fight It In Yourself Katie Jgln is a writer, satirist, social scientist, and activist whose work covers gender equality issues, pop culture, and trending news. She has bylines in Scary Mommy, Daily Mail, and others. This article was originally published at Medium. Reprinted with permission from the author.