Radicalization within a network of misogynist extremists: a case study of an incel forum
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Incels (involuntary celibates) are a group of people, linked to online misogyny and violent acts of terrorism, who mobilize around their inability to form romantic and/or sexual relationships. They have been shown to display signs of a violent extremist ideology. We conceptualize the ideology promoted by incels as misogynist and by bringing together different theories of gender and the gender order to formulate how the hetero-patriarchal and cisgenderist understanding of gender becomes an extremist worldview. We call this gender-based extremism misogynist extremism because misogyny is the most obviously violent structure of hetero-patriarchal gender order. Then, drawing on radicalization research and the social network analysis paradigm, we answer the research question: what are the communication patterns (network connections and actor attributes) that predict misogynist extremism among incels? We conduct our analysis on publicly visible posts from the forum incels.is, creating an undirected, unweighted network and then answering our research question using the auto-logistic actor attribute model to understand what individual attributes and network configurations predict user extremism. This study finds that extremists online form closed all-extremist communication triads. Consequently, they are significantly less likely to start new threads in the forum, suggesting that bonding social capital plays a more important role in an individual user’s extremism than bridging social capital.
Misogyny and antifeminism are often factors in terrorism regardless of ideology (Gentry, 2022), yet only recently have they been noticed by terrorism and extremism experts (O’Hanlon et al. 2024; Perliger et al. 2022). Notably, one’s sexual life (or its absence) serves as a powerful catalyst for extremism among young men (Hoffman et al. 2020) and a perceived threat to manhood; the subsequent quest to reaffirm masculinity through violent acts is recognized as a shared factor among terrorists of any ideology (Ferber and Kimmel, 2008; Kimmel, 2013). We argue that looking at patterns surrounding violence motivated by extreme misogyny and acknowledging this ideology for what it truly is—gender-based extremism (Berger, 2018: 34)—is crucial. The role of misogyny and antifeminism in radicalizing young men leads us to label this form of gender-based extremism as misogynist extremism. In naming it so, we aim to highlight the direct anti-women agenda (Tranchese and Sugiura, 2021), misogyny and antifeminism that is central to this ideology. In contrast, there is no comparable evidence of violent political mobilization in the name of misandry, even when considering cases like femcels (Kay, 2022). However, despite ample similarities in the misogynist movements with far-right, this alone fails to capture the full potential for extremist mobilization fueled by hetero-patriarchal cisgenderistFootnote 1 masculine frustration. Scholars emphasize that overlooking the radicalizing power of misogyny results in the systematic erasure of violence committed in its name (e.g., Hoffman et al. 2020; Tranchese and Sugiura, 2021; Gentry, 2022; Green et al. 2023; Miller, 2024).
Content retrieved from: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-05161-8.
