What once described an isolated internet subculture is now used as shorthand for any expression of male resentment. If you’ve been on the internet within the past few years, chances are you’ve probably run into the term “incel,” whether that be in a comment section on a chauvinistic post or a meme mocking a particular worldview.
But the term’s origin is surprisingly innocent.
In 1997, a queer Canadian woman named Alana created “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project,” a forum meant to connect lonely people in a culture that mocked singleness. It was, as described in her words, “a friendly place.” Over time, “involuntary celibate” was shortened to “invcel” and then “incel.”
Alana said in an interview with BBC, that it wasn’t until April 2018 when a man from Toronto posted on Facebook, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun… All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” and killed 10 people via vehicular manslaughter that she realized how starkly different her community had become.
Today, the incel community is largely populated with men and boys expressing sexual frustration, directing their anger toward women and “Chads” — the archetypal attractive men they blame for their exclusion and perceived sexual failure.
A prime example of the term’s misuse appears in the Netflix’s 2025 show “Adolescence.” The series follows Jamie Miller, a preteen boy who murders his female classmate, Katie, after experiencing bullying and slowly withdrawing into misogynistic online spaces. Early on, Katie publicly calls him an “incel,” on social media, in response to his misguided inappropriate romantic advances.
By definition — Jamie wasn’t an incel — rather a 13-year-old boy navigating the nuances of puberty and insecurity. Deeming Jamie an incel mislabels his confusion as ideology and reinforces the alienation that extremist forums prey upon. Although Katie’s actions were cruel, her use of “incel” reflects how the word now functions as a shortcut to ostracize rather than understand.
The insult becomes almost prophetic later in the series: Jamie, already influenced by the manosphere’s messaging, responds to the rejection by retreating further into the very echo chambers that validate his resentment toward women. Perhaps if someone had recognized his behavior as reflective of the manosphere but not fully aligned with inceldom, intervention might have been possible in addressing the specifics of his misguided thinking.
We see this mislabeling occur in real life as well. Following the 2021 Plymouth shooting in the United Kingdom, many media outlets quickly branded the perpetrator an “incel,” despite later investigation which noted a mix of grievances rather than a clear-cut subculture allegiance.
What’s more, in 2023, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue observed the term “incel” has entered mainstream discourse and cautioned that its growing use may hinder nuanced understanding of misogynistic pathways to radicalization.
What we miss in this flattening is complexity. Treating every strain of misogyny as inceldom obscures the broader ecosystem it belongs to: the manosphere, a network of overlapping but distinctly male-supremacist ideologies. Unlike Alana’s sincere desire to connect, these factions are rooted in hatred and aversion of women.
Take Men’s Rights Activists, for example, a group of male supremacists who wholly believe there is a prevailing feminist conspiracy aimed to oppress men. Despite their persistence in advocating for men in a “gynocentric society,” they tend to neglect men in MRA spaces seeking support. They ignore intersectional factors in men’s struggles and frame gender equality as a zero-sum game.
So, the answer is no: Not every misogynist is an incel.
While misogyny is affirmatively alive and prevalent on the internet and in real life, calling every bitter man or boy an incel risks doing more harm than good. This doesn’t mean we have to be too careful and not call misogynists out, of course — in fact, it’s more or less the opposite.
We label behaviors accurately and confront their ideological roots, rather than collapsing them into a single buzzword. A more productive approach may be to teach ideological literacy early on, in an effort to help people recognize different strains of online extremism and how they spread.
If we want to prevent boys and young men from falling down the same rabbit holes requires more than just outrage — rather the language and the literacy to name what we see.
