Alek Minassian, who plowed a rental van through a busy Toronto sidewalk on Monday, left little doubt as to why he killed 10 people, most of them women. Minutes before his attack, he posted a message on Facebook lauding the mass murderer Elliot O. Rodger and warned of an "incel rebellion" — a reference to an online community of "involuntarily celibate" men who believe women unjustly deny them sex.
Mr. Rodger, who killed six people in Isla Vista, Calif., in 2014, recorded YouTube videos raging against "spoiled, stuck-up" women he called "sluts" who sexually rejected him. And before Mr. Rodger, there was George Sodini, who killed three women in a Pennsylvania gym in 2009. He left behind an online diary complaining that women ignored him and that he hadn't had sex in years.
Despite a great deal of evidence that connects the dots between these mass killers and radical misogynist groups, we still largely refer to the attackers as "lone wolves" — a mistake that ignores the preventable way these men's fear and anger are deliberately cultivated and fed online.
Here's the term we should all use instead: misogynist terrorism. Until we grapple with the disdain for women that drives these mass murderers, and the way that the killers are increasingly radicalized on the internet, there will be no stopping future tragedies.
Over the past decade, anti-women communities on the internet — ranging from "men's rights" forums and incels to "pickup artists" — have grown exponentially. While these movements differ in small ways, what they have in common is an organized hatred of women; the animus is so pronounced that the hate-watch group Southern Poverty Law Center tracks their actions.
The other dangerous idea that connects these men is their shared belief that women — good-looking women, in particular — owe them sexual attention. The incel community that Mr. Minassian paid homage to, for example, was banned from Reddit last year because, among other issues, some adherents advocated rape as a means to end their celibacy.
Pickup artists, on the other hand, believe they can manipulate women into sex. In the wake of the Toronto attack, a well-known member of the "pickup artist" community, Daryush Valizadeh, tweeted that "sleeping with only two or three Toronto Tinder sluts would have been enough to stop" Mr. Minassian's "urge to kill." Mr. Valizadeh has argued for the legalization of rape.
In some of these groups, men who kill women have become heroes. After Mr. Rodger went on his shooting spree, one men's-rights community called what he did "Going Sodini" — a reference to the 2009 shooting in a gym outside of Pittsburgh. Before his rampage, Mr. Sodini, 48 at the time, was seeking advice from pickup artists out of a frustration that women decades younger than he was wouldn't date him.
Later, after Mr. Rodger's 140-page manifesto was released — outlining his fury over still being a "kissless virgin" — his name became synonymous on misogynist forums with revenge on women who reject men. Chris Harper-Mercer, who shot and killed nine people at Umpqua Community College in Oregon in 2015, mentioned Mr. Rodger by name in a manifesto he wrote in which he complained about being 26 years old with "no girlfriend, a virgin."
And now, in the aftermath of the attack in Toronto, men on incel communities are hailing the killer as a "new saint," with commenters changing their avatars to Mr. Minassian's picture in tribute.
Feminists have been warning against these online hate groups and their propensity for real-life violence for over a decade. I know because I'm one of the people who has been issuing increasingly dire warnings. After I started a feminist blog in 2004, I became a target of men's-rights groups who were angry with women about everything from custody battles to the false notion that most women lie about rape. In 2011, I had to flee my house with my young daughter on the advice of law enforcement, because one of these groups put me on a "registry" of women to target.
I was far from the only one. In 2014, a gaming award ceremony set to honor the feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian received a bomb threat; an anonymous harasser threatened to detonate a device unless her award was rescinded. Before Milo Yiannopoulos was a well-known alt-right figure, feminists knew him as one of the primary architects of Gamergate, a movement of young men who harassed and threatened women in the videogaming industry. Two fans of Mr. Yiannopoulos were charged with shooting a protester outside of one of his speeches.
Part of the problem is that American culture still largely sees men's sexism as something innate rather than deviant. And in a world where sexism is deemed natural, the misogynist tendencies of mass shooters become afterthoughts rather than predictable and stark warnings.
The truth is that in addition to not protecting women, we are failing boys: failing to raise them to believe they can be men without inflicting pain on others, failing to teach them that they are not entitled to women's sexual attention and failing to allow them an outlet for understandable human fear and foibles that will not label them "weak" or unworthy.
Not every attack is preventable, but the misogyny that drives them is. To stop all of this, we must trust women when they point out that receiving streams of death threats on Twitter is not normal and that online communities strategizing about how to rape women are much more than just idle chatter. There is no reason another massacre should happen.
Jessica Valenti is the author, most recently, of the memoir "Sex Object" and the founding editor of Feministing.com. This appeared in The New York Times on April 26, 2018.
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April 27, 2018
