The Toronto van attack and how porn fuels the incel movement

By Jonathon Van Maren

On May 23, 2014, a twenty-two year old man named Elliot Rodger left his California home and murdered six people, stabbing three and shooting three others. He wounded an additional fourteen people. He then uploaded a video to YouTube describing the reasons behind his “Day of Retribution,” emailed a document titled “My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger,” and then shot himself in his car.

Last week, a twenty-five-year-old man named Alek Minassian drove a rented van down a busy sidewalk in Toronto, killing ten people and wounding another fifteen. The motivation for this attack has not yet been confirmed—those who knew Minassian or had any interactions with him describe someone who seemed to have profound mental issues—but one clue is a post he uploaded to Facebook just before the attack, which reads in part: “The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” Facebook Canada has confirmed that the post is genuine.

The “incel” movement—the term stands for “involuntary celibates”—is an online community of angry young men who see much of society as complicit in a grand conspiracy to deny them the physical affections of women. “Chads” refers to men who do receive female attention, and “Stacys” refers to women who reject “incels” but seem perfectly happy to grant their affections to other men. There does not appear to be any coherent logic to this framework—after all, if an “incel” successfully managed to attract the attention of a woman, he would presumably become a “Chad.”

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