“Foids have no soul, they are not human.” A sociological examination of the language used by an online male supremacy group.

Abstract

The online incel community has seen a rise in participation and mainstream media attention, largely due to recent mass murders targeting women committed by self-identified members. Scholarship has therefore focused on the community’s relationship to violence and its highly misogynistic nature. Jock Young’s theory of human behavior underlying criminality, as described in The Vertigo of Late Modernity, was used to trace the path from globalization to liquid modernity to othering and, finally, to violence. Young’s work is key to understanding how an outgroup, in this case women, evolves from “us and them” to “us versus them” and finally to “threat”, using a dictionary created and maintained by online male supremacy groups. This thesis found that women are presented as sexual commodities, male and female hierarchies of value reflect gender-based criteria, and significant contradictions in worldview may be resolved through the presence of Hopeful and Hopeless pathways.