‘Rape Isn’t Real,and If It Is,Foids Deserve It’: The Complex and Contradictory Articulations of Rape and Gender-Based Hate Among Incels

Abstract

Sexual hate and violence are core tenets of incel ideology, yet few studies have examined in detail how rape is understood and articulated within these digital communities. This article addresses this gap through a critical discourse analysis of 3,353 posts published in one of the largest international incel forums. It investigates (1) how women are portrayed in the context of rape; (2) how rape is understood among incels and how these understandings are substantiated; (3) how incels situate themselves in these discussions; and (4) how claims about women and rape are mitigated or reinforced through user interactions. The analysis highlights the contradictions and inconsistencies embedded in incel discourse about sex, rape and women, as well as incels’ strategic use of victimhood. The article further demonstrates the extremism of gender-based hate and the abhorrent language used to construct meaning around women and rape. Importantly though, the article shows how incel articulations of rape do not fundamentally diverge from mainstream misogyny. Instead, they are intensifications of ideas about rape and women which persist through the rape culture and rape myths in mainstream society, but are exacerbated by collective culture, lack of moderation and the separatist nature of the incel communities.

Introduction

Some violence is regarded by society as expected and commonplace – not least when it concerns women (Harju & Kotilainen, 2023), and especially when it is perpetuated digitally (Dunn, 2021; Harris, 2020). In this vein, the routine use of everyday misogynist language in the so-called incel ¹ movement tends to attract little public attention. Yet, once every half-hour, a user in one of the biggest of these forums posts, almost always supportively, about rape (CCDH, 2022).

The frequency with which rape is promoted within the incel community should be a great cause for concern. Sexual violence, including that which is facilitated through digital technology, has been found to have a detrimental impact on individual victims as well as society at large (Champion et al., 2021; Moor et al., 2013). Beyond this, research also shows that exposure to violent discourse can lead to desensitisation and even radicalisation (Bilewicz & Soral, 2020; Munn, 2019; Wolfowicz et al., 2022).

Although there is a growing body of literature exploring the violent language use of incels (Jaki et al., 2019; Pelzer et al., 2021; Scaptura & Boyle, 2020), there remains limited research into their preoccupation with rape specifically, and how it relates to the wider ideology of the incel movement. The current article addresses this gap by exploring how rape is understood and articulated among incels. It is guided by the following research questions:

• RQ1. How are women portrayed in the context of rape?

• RQ2. How is rape understood among incels, and how are these understandings substantiated?

• RQ3. How do incels situate themselves in these discussions?

• RQ4. How are claims about women and rape mitigated or reinforced through user interactions?

The article addresses these questions through a critical discourse analysis of a substantial dataset of posts from one of the largest international incel forums. Through the analysis, I identify the many inconsistencies and contradictions embedded in incel discourse about sex and rape. The article also demonstrates the extremism with which gender-based hate is articulated and the abhorrent language used to construct meaning about women and sexual abuse. Moreover, the article illustrates that incel articulations of rape are not diametrically different from, but rather an intensification of, the misogynist ideas about rape that continue to be perpetuated through the rape culture and rape myths in mainstream society, with the help of digital technology.

Perceptions of Rape

Rape legislation varies greatly across the Western world. For instance, in some jurisdictions, an act is not legally recognised as rape if committed against one’s spouse or against men. In many countries, rape requires the presence of violence, while in some, rape is defined as any sexual act where consent is absent (Eurostat, 2023). Despite various public and private interventions and initiatives to increase awareness, protection and rights, rape and sexual violence, most often involving male perpetrators and female victims, remain serious global societal issues (Horvath & Brown, 2022; World Health Organization (WHO), 2021).

An important reason for this is that acts of hate and violence against women are not coincidental; they are situated within rigid societal systems. Misogynistic practices are closely intertwined with broader societal beliefs about gender roles, femininity and masculinity (Banet-Weiser & Miltner, 2016; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005; Waling, 2019). The continued societal tolerance of sexual violence, specifically, has often been conceptualised as ‘rape culture’. From this perspective, there is a built-in societal acceptance for aggression towards women, and men are seen as naturally more violent, in need of, and entitled to sex compared to women (Lonsway & Fitzgerald, 1994; Phipps et al., 2018). Even though the notion of ‘rape culture’ was popularised around 50 years ago (Williams, 2015), it remains a real and pervasive issue throughout the Western world to this day (e.g. Durham, 2021; Mayeza, 2024).

Rape culture is explained, justified and cemented in society at large through a set of myths and falsely held beliefs about men, women, violence and sex (Lonsway & Fitzgerald, 1994). These widely accepted ‘rape myths’ reflect societal perceptions about rape, and work to distance people from it (Hänel, 2018). For men, they help to rationalise violence and neutralise collective responsibility, and for women, they work to dismiss potential victimhood. On a structural level, these myths serve to control and suppress women (Lonsway & Fitzgerald, 1994), to trivialise the societal pervasiveness of rape and to create a façade of justness and fairness in society (Persson & Dhingra, 2022).

Broadly, rape myths often fall into one of two categories. First, an act is argued not to qualify as a ‘real rape’ because, for instance, it was not violent, took place between partners, or because the parties had at a prior or later point in time had consensual sex. Second, the act is claimed not to be rape because the victim ‘asked for it’ through their way of acting, dressing or physically reacting, and it was therefore on some level consensual (Hänel, 2018). These myths force an exceedingly narrow frame for what rape can be, where it is often discredited unless it has the properties of a specific ‘ideal’ kind of act and victim. An ‘ideal rape’ takes place outside and at night, as an unknown man attacks an innocent, young and attractive (white) woman, and overpowers and penetrates her after she has unsuccessfully tried to physically resist the attack (Bows, 2018; Christie, 1986; Hänel, 2018). Rape victims and perpetrators who do not fit into this template have seldom been understood as such by publics, media or even legal systems (Cuppini, 2024; Loxton & Groves, 2022; O’Neal, 2019).

While rape legislation varies across places and time, rape culture and rape myths remain oddly consistent, highlighting how deep-seated societal understandings of men, women, violence and sex really are. Yet, research so far has mainly centred on mainstream society’s understandings about rape (e.g. Adair & Senn, 2026; Loxton & Groves, 2022). Against the backdrop that incels operate under different ideological circumstances than mainstream society – having their own, separate belief system which organises their social identity, goals, norms, cultural values and activities as a group in opposition to the mainstream (Heritage, 2023; Hoffman et al., 2020; Zimmerman, 2024) – there is need to explore how incels relate to conventional perceptions about the causes and consequences of rape to form their understandings.

Incel Ideology and Discursive Violence

While some men’s perceived entitlement to women’s attention and bodies is not a new phenomenon per se, misogynistic hate has in recent years come to thrive with increased intensity and in more organised and global ways through the internet (Aiolfi et al., 2024; Baele et al., 2024; Czerwinsky, 2024).

Among the notable changes that the internet has brought for gender-based hate is the development of the so-called ‘manosphere’ – a loosely connected and heterogeneous ecosystem of actors, sites and groups united in, albeit disparate, beliefs in misogyny and anti-feminism (Dickel & Evolvi, 2023; Ging, 2019; Ribeiro, Blackburn, et al., 2021). Parts of this network are dedicated to men seeking to master contemporary dating and sexual relationships by enhancing their physical appearances (Halpin, Gosse, et al., 2025; Sousbois, 2025) through manipulative seduction coaching (Bratich & Banet-Weiser, 2019) or simply coping through voluntarily disassociating from women altogether (Jones et al., 2020). Incels are another subgroup of the manosphere, comprising men self-identifying as involuntarily celibate (Sugiura, 2021). These communities have proven particularly violent in their language use, and especially prone to transforming hateful words into violent action (Baele et al., 2024; Hoffman et al., 2020; Lockyer et al., 2025; Zimmerman, 2024).

Incel culture is a digitally born phenomenon operating primarily in separatist online discussion forums. Like in related toxic, fringe settings (Jasser et al., 2023; Rogers, 2020), incels’ worldviews are reinforced through minimal moderation, anonymity, a lack of insight and scrutiny from mainstream society and the assurance that the community is composed of likeminded others (Jaki et al., 2019; Maryn et al., 2024; Ribeiro, Jhaver, et al., 2021). Their ideology is based on gender essentialist beliefs in men’s natural superiority and entitlement to women and sex, and that women are biologically programmed to only be attracted to the most good-looking men (Vallerga & Zurbriggen, 2022). In contemporary society, where women themselves can choose partners after their liking, incels believe that most men are disadvantaged and inevitably denied their natural rights to sexual relationships with women (Menzie, 2022). For many incels, attractiveness has biological explanations, and this insight can prompt beliefs in the permanence of ‘inceldom’ (Bratich & Banet-Weiser, 2019).

Incels blame society for enabling women’s economic and social independence from men (Tranchese & Sugiura, 2021) and advocate for a return to traditional gender relations wherein men are more in control over women’s bodies and their freedoms (Ging & Siapera, 2019; Heritage, 2023). Above all, incels consider women (as a homogeneous group) to be the ultimate culprit in their disadvantaged situation (Ging, 2019; Hoffman et al., 2020). Because (all) women are believed to be the cause of incels’ suffering, they are the primary targets of their hate and violence (Hoffman et al., 2020).

Previous research has shown how incels see women as opportunistic, cold, manipulative and incapable of complex emotions, and especially unsympathetic to – and even mocking of – the suffering of incels (Baele et al., 2021; Chang, 2022; Menzie, 2022). This unfavourable representation of women serves to justify their hatred, and at times even acts of physical violence, as retaliatory behaviour (Halpin, Richard, et al., 2025). Thus, it also helps validate their own perceived victimisation (Zimmerman, 2024).

With little hope for change, suicide and vengeful acts of violence are encouraged within the most dedicated factions of the incel community (Baele et al., 2021), and as noted by Scaptura and Boyle (2020, p. 290), ‘[f]antasizing about rape and mass murder are stepping-stones to perpetuating violence in real life’. More than this, the incel community has been known to celebrate acts of violence and hold incel perpetrators in such high esteem that they can receive a form of sainthood status within the community (Baele et al., 2021; Witt, 2020).

Although far from all incels or incel forums embrace physical violence towards women (Lounela & Murphy, 2024), previous research has shown an extensive use of misogynistic labels and dehumanising and objectifying descriptions of women in incel forums (Halpin, Richard, et al., 2025; Pelzer et al., 2021; Tranchese & Sugiura, 2021). The rationalisation for these beliefs, in turn, is important for strengthening the community against its collective female enemy and helps to normalise and encourage gender-based hate and violence towards women (Heritage, 2023; Lindsay, 2022). Therefore, when incels post sympathetically about rape, although it might not always take physical form, it is nevertheless discursive violence – a form of harm committed through language use.

Research shows that what is articulated (or not) through discourse has the power to cause harm by impacting others’ perceptions about certain forms of violence, to reinforce certain ideas and minimise victims’ experiences (Holling, 2019; McMillian, 2025). This discursive violence is contextual and embedded with social, cultural and political meaning and is related to struggles of power (Dwyer, 2017). Analysing incel articulations of rape can thus provide insights into how these ideas are part of the broader ideology and power struggles of the incel movement and how these communities work to amplify them (Ging, 2019; Lucy, 2024; Zimmerman, 2024).

Methodological Approach

The Site of Study

The study is based on data from one of the largest, currently active international incel forums in the world (Halpin, Richard, et al., 2025; Lockyer et al., 2025). The site was launched in November 2017 from a supposed need to create an uncensored and protected male-separatist incel space; it allows only heterosexual men claiming to struggle with sexual relations into its community. Women are not welcome, and neither is LGBTQ-related content, unless criticised. By January 2026, the site claims to have grown to around 36,000 anonymous members, with an archive of over 20 million posts and 770,000 threads. According to Similar web ² the site has around 540,000 monthly visitors during this time.

The platform is run by an undisclosed number of administrators and moderators, and although user activity is guided by a set of rules and regulations, including the ban of child sexual abuse materials and illegal content, the forum is known for its toxic and misogynistic language use (Halpin, Richard, et al., 2025).

Data Collection and Analysis Method

To ensure that rape was the primary focus of discussion, the dataset consists of threads with ‘rape*’ in their titles. Because the forum does not accommodate a function for keyword searches on the site, the dataset was instead retroactively collected through the Google search string ‘site:https://[website URL] rape*’, in the first week of October 2024. In total, I collected 117 threads holding 3,353 posts published from 1 January to 1 October 2024.

The posts were manually analysed using critical discourse analysis (CDA). CDA provides a framework for understanding language use by unveiling ideology and power relations, and in doing so, attempts to (re)define what is considered politically as well as socially normal, through text and talk (Wodak et al., 2009). In this article, this means that by exploring how incels carry out discursive violence in their forum communication and representations of rape, the analysis can uncover how incels seek to (re)define and (re)construct gender relations within the incel community, and potentially beyond.

I take a starting point in five key forms of discursive strategies – nomination, predication, justification, perspectivisation and modification (Wodak & Reisigl, 1999). By exploring these five dimensions, the analysis can uncover how rape is constructed and the framing of the key actors involved. Focusing specifically on references to rape in the forum posts, I read the texts multiple times, identifying (a) how persons, events and things are named (nomination); (b) what qualities and characteristics that are attributed to the things that are named (predication) (cf. RQ1); (c) how the qualities and characterisations of the things are justified (justification) (cf. RQ2); (d) from what perspective these justifications are articulated (cf. RQ3); and finally (e) if the statements are intensified or mitigated when interacting with other users in the forum (modification) (cf. RQ4) (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009, pp. 93–94). In these readings, specific focus was on collocated adjectives and adverbs modifying key nouns (e.g. ‘women’) and verbs (e.g. ‘rape’) as a means of understanding how persons and things were described, including the incel perspectives from which the texts originated.

The work carried out in this article has undergone ethical vetting with the Swedish Ethical Review Authority. In accordance with this vetting, no consent has been acquired from the user accounts studied. The data volumes collected are one reason for this, but mainly this is due to concerns for researcher safety (see also franzke et al., 2020; Massanari, 2018). Although the collected posts are all publicly available, it is important to note that individuals are often unaware and uncomfortable with the information they perceive as personal and contextual that is used outside the digital context for which it was intended (Ravn et al., 2019; Zimmer, 2018). Therefore, care has been taken throughout the article not to expose users, and all quotes have been slightly altered so as to complicate tracing them back to their sources (Markham, 2012).

Naming and Characterising

In this first section, I identify how rape and women are named by the incels and what qualities and characteristics are attributed to them (cf. RQ1).

Rape, Sex or Kink?

Incel definitions of rape seem largely centred on heterosexual, male-perpetrated penetration of a female victim. The idea of other perpetrators or victims often seems difficult for them to comprehend:

Are they talking about cases where women tie up male victims and use foreign objects to penetrate them? Or about situations where men are ‘forced’ into sex by females? These are completely different scenarios, but normies label both as ‘rape’ without distinction.

What would gang rape by females even involve? Raping men? Do a bunch of them beat them up, tie them down, and ride them against their will?

Although the forum members imagine victims in an idealised manner, and despite a handful of users who acknowledge that rape involves a lack of consent, there remains confusion about the differences between rape and sex. In many instances, they use the terms interchangeably in the same posts.

Their confusion (or strategic labelling) becomes especially evident when it comes to consensual forms of dominance or fetishes in sex. Often, the incels describe rape as nothing more than a ‘kink’ or ‘fetish’. These ideas, in turn, are legitimised by anecdotal ‘proof’ about how many users there are in the ‘rape fantasies’ subreddit and about the popularity of books like Fifty Shades of Grey. There are also frequent references to research on (involuntary) physiological responses victims can experience during rape (see Levin & van Berlo, 2004). By referencing rape as a form of ‘sex’, ‘fetish’ or ‘kink’, users blur the boundaries between sex, rape and consensual forms of dominance. This (re)constructs rape not as a criminal offence, but as something normal, healthy and commonplace (Walling-Wefelmeyer & O’Neill, 2021).

In incels’ descriptions of the concept of rape, they also show difficulty in accepting why someone would be so averse to the idea of ‘sex’. Users argue that no matter the form it takes, sex/rape should be considered a more positive experience than a negative one because ‘when it all comes down to it, getting raped is actually a privilege’. Or as another user phrases it, ‘at least they were wanted enough by someone for them to be raped’. In framing rape aversion as a matter of ingratitude for being sexually desired, incels (re)construct rape as a concept tied to sexual attraction rather than exploitation. As such, the distance between assault and attraction is narrowed. This, in turn, serves as an important foundation for justifying rape.

Incapable, Calculating and Pea-Brained Strategists

Women are unsurprisingly at the centre of focus in incel discussions about rape. As in previous research, they are seldom named as ‘women’ and rarely referred to as individuals or by name (Chang, 2022). Instead, women are most often referred to as ‘femoids’ or ‘foids’ for short – a derogatory term used to signal women as android-like and ‘not fully human’ (Incel Glossary, 2025). This label serves as an important basis for the characterisation of women in the forums, as exemplified by one user who notes that ‘things that are not human shouldn’t have human rights’. In the forum, there also circulate more explicitly racist and derogatory terms, like the ethnic slur ‘pajeeta’ used for Indian women and ‘noodle whore’ as a collective term for Asian women, as well as overtly dehumanising variations where women are referred to as ‘worthless semen suckers’, ‘toilets’ and ‘holes’. Not only are these labels reductive, diminishing and frame women as consumable ‘things’ (Halpin, Richard, et al., 2025), but the use of niched – and here specifically extremely misogynist – jargon also serves an important role to signal belonging and cultural knowledge towards fellow community members (Åkerlund, 2021; Nissenbaum & Shifman, 2017).

As expected from the ways in which women, as a supposed uniform and unvaried group, are named, incels project a seemingly endless contempt for them. This takes several forms in the material, which impact the understanding and justification of rape. In one strand of these categorisations, women are stripped of their capability and skill to make decisions about themselves and their lives; or, as one user puts it, women ‘can’t do anything right because they are all incompetent idiots’ ³ with ‘childlike minds’ (see also Chang, 2022). Women are, in general terms, consistently described as ‘braindead’, ‘pea-brained’ and ‘inferior’ to men. In the context of rape, this label is often used to indicate that women do not deserve self-determination. Relatedly, they are also labelled by the users as ‘deeply confused’ and ‘don’t understand what they want’ or who might say they want something, but that is ‘NEVER what they actually want’. Because of this lack of believability (see also Banet-Weiser & Higgins, 2023), users argue that women’s opinions and thoughts cannot and should not matter in issues that concern them, including when it comes to their bodies. At the same time, this declaration of incompetence also serves as a way for incels to collectively construct an inflated image of themselves as smarter, better-informed and free from the primitive drives of women (Lindsay, 2022).

In contrast to women’s ineptitude for independence, in the other strand of these categorisations, women are attributed opposite characteristics. According to users, women are also attention-seeking ‘drama queens’ who ‘love to play the victim’. They are cunning and callous strategists who intentionally ‘exploit’, ‘deceive’, ‘gaslight’ and ‘manipulate’ men, using them for ‘attention and resources’ (see also Heritage, 2023). Some users go as far as describing women’s behaviour as sick, labelling them as ‘pathological liars’, ‘schizos’, ‘narcissists’ and ‘psychopaths’. This is also closely related to representations of women as cruel and sadistic, being the ‘pure’ and ‘ultimate’ evil, and even responsible for driving men to suicide. These descriptions of women serve to distance incels from establishing contact with women, who, unlike the community, can never be trusted (see also Meier & Sharp, 2024).

Despite these traits, women are often described as holding an exceedingly privileged position in society – or ‘soyciety’, a term used to suggest that society ‘has lost its strength and integrity by pandering to left-wing and progressivism’ (Incel Glossary, 2025). Incels note, for instance, that women are ‘protected by society’ and that ‘no matter what, laws will always be on foids’ side’. Users also argue that women never have to take accountability and that they cannot be trusted because ‘they have so much power to ruin other people’s lives’. This power, in turn, has compromised institutional neutrality to target men (Price, 2024). When it comes to rape, specifically, incels argue that women’s special treatment in contemporary society has afforded them (and feminists more generally) opportunities to push the boundaries of what constitutes rape to such a ridiculous extent that seemingly everything falls within its definition. This makes incels’ chances of attracting a partner even slimmer because men are no longer allowed to even ‘look at’ women without being accused of rape. According to the forum members, women’s accusations are always treated as ‘completely true’. These descriptions not only lack acknowledgement of structural and historical marginalisation and disbelief in sexually assaulted women’s stories (Aissa, 2021; O’Neal, 2019), but they also completely displace the focus onto men’s potential victimisation due to women’s false accusations (Kettrey et al., 2024; Rennie, 2023).

The analysis shows that incels draw on both forms of established societal myths to rationalise rape by disqualifying it and through victim-blaming. The portrayal of women – as simultaneously incapable of making decisions about themselves and their lives, while also being calculating, cruel and overly privileged – illustrates the leaderless or ‘connective’ character (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013) of the forum where contradictory stories are constructed in parallel by users with slightly different motives and allowed co-exist because they serve an ultimate community aim to justify rape and vilify women (see also Merrill & Åkerlund, 2018).

Justifications

In this section, I analyse how the qualities and characterisations ascribed to the notions of rape and women in the previous sections are justified by the incels (cf. RQ2).

Disqualifying and Diminishing

Given that women’s statements about their wants and needs are unreliable, what women express about rape should have underlying, hidden layers of meaning, too, according to the forum members. They argue that there is always a possible contradiction between what women say they want and what is objectively correct when it comes to sex and rape. Most notably, users repeatedly argue that women ‘fantasise about’ and ‘secretly want to get raped, despite saying otherwise’. They just ‘can’t admit it’. Given that the forum strictly forbids women, and because users are highly concerned with their anonymity, this ‘proof’ tends to be anecdotal. One user even argues that ‘there is no need for proof because it is an unquestionable fact’.

The forum members also argue that if a woman has ever had a fantasy, this invalidates any potential future victimhood of sexual assault. Furthermore, the incels state that for an act to be considered rape, it requires physical pain exerted on the victim. Feeling physical enjoyment, on the other hand, disqualifies it as a criminal act, even if the victim is not consenting to it. Because of this contradiction, users often claim that rape actually cannot exist at all:

You can’t really rape them, since foids always end up enjoying it, which makes it basically consensual anyway.

I’ve said it before: by raping a foid you are just giving them what they want. In any sexual situation, she’s getting more out of you than you’re getting from her.

Women fantasize about ‘rape’ constantly, it isn’t even real. What they call ‘rape’ is just sex they didn’t like. It’s a total contradiction.

This justification is closely related to a line of reasoning wherein rape is a ‘natural’ and ‘biological’ phenomenon that should not be denied or resisted. Some of these arguments draw parallels to supposed animal behaviour, arguing that ‘it’s natural for animals to rape’ and that it is ‘seen all the time in nature’. Some incels also emphasise how the female body is supposedly ‘built to be raped’, again drawing on arguments about women’s involuntary physiological responses during some sexual assaults:

Foids have evolved to enjoy rape. It is such a natural phenomenon so that they’re mostly drawn to aggressive men as sexual partners.

A female’s consent or arousal isn’t necessary for sex or reproduction, but a man still needs to get hard and finish for it to work.

If rape wasn’t part of nature’s design, then why does it trigger a release of dopamine?

Others argue that rape is completely natural because, in the ‘old days, it was totally normal with rape’. These retrospections are also tied to even more antiquated ideas about women’s value as dependent on their sexual ‘purity’. If she is no longer a virgin, ‘you have taken away pretty much all her fundamental value’. This value, they argue, is that of an unspoilt commodity or inanimate object, because a rapist is ‘contaminating the vagina of someone’s wife’. In the same vein, women’s levels of purity also determine whether they are seen as worthy of victim status when they are raped. Users often argue, as if women were damaged goods (Tranchese & Sugiura, 2021), that ‘one extra dick’ added to collective estimates of women’s ‘10’, ‘100’ and even ‘400’ previous sex partners ‘could not possibly be that awful’ and feel no different from previous sexual encounters ‘if you close your eyes’. Accordingly, the idea of rape victims as ‘survivors’ bothers them. They seek to diminish rape victims’ experiences by denying that their ‘lives are at risk’ or through whataboutist comparisons to ‘soldiers in the WW1 trenches’.

Through these justifications, the incels portray an idea that rape is something inevitable and natural, even enjoyable for the victim. By diminishing and decontextualising rape in this way, female victims are marginalised, and their bodies commodified (Gosse et al., 2025; Halpin, Richard, et al., 2025). By discussing the range of different ways in which rape does not exist (or at least is not the problem it is made out to be), incels neutralise their support for it as morally justified (see also Hänel, 2018).

Victim-Blaming and Shaming

In parallel to the justifications seeking to downplay the very existence of rape, there are also those which display a diametrically different and considerably more contemptuous and vindictive representation of women in the context of sexual violence. One prominent justification, in classic rape-myth fashion, is that women are themselves to blame for ever getting raped in the first place (Adair & Senn, 2026; Suarez & Gadalla, 2010).

Commonly, incels argue that women are to blame for rape due to how they present themselves, wearing ‘revealing clothes’ or more bluntly ‘dressing like whores’ and by ‘partying’ and being ‘sluts’. Women are, according to the users, ‘asking to be raped’ because of how they are purposefully ‘teasing’ men. According to incels, women are also to blame for being raped because of the company they keep, for instance if they are attracted to ‘bad guys’ and actively ‘pick violent rapist men’ instead of finding ‘nice, respectful guys’ (like the incels themselves) (Witt, 2020; see also Jordan et al., 2022).

A key dimension here is that male rapists are not the problem; the issue is that women are incapable of ‘properly detecting personality’. One user goes as far as arguing that incestuous rape is not the perpetrator’s fault: ‘If a father rapes his daughter that shouldn’t be society’s fault. The mother should have done a better job at vetting’. These ideas are in line with victim-blaming myths that rapists are a certain type of ‘bad’ man with distinct perpetrator characteristics (Bows, 2018; Christie, 1986; Hänel, 2018).

Since women themselves bear the responsibility for being raped in the community’s mind, they could just as easily thwart these actions by simply ‘saying yes’. In this sense, the incels argue that the problem is merely women’s attitude; surely if someone ‘did not want to be raped she could have just consented to sex’ because ‘if they simply provide consent, it isn’t rape anymore’. In this sense, consent is the mere presence of the word ‘yes’, not the actual will of the victim. The displaced blame onto women for sexual assault sometimes stretches as far as them being at fault for being killed by someone after refusing to be raped:

Rather than giving sex to men for a few minutes, women would prefer to die. Alright then, have it your way bitch.

Relatedly, the most overtly violent justification for rape by the incels in the forum is that women deserve whatever harm comes their way, due to their shrewd character. Strikingly, there is a sense of schadenfreude when women get what they are believed to deserve. For instance, in one thread, a user notes that a gang rape had resulted in the victim’s intestines falling out, whereupon another user replies, ‘I’m happy to hear that, the bitch got what she deserved’. In another thread, a user describes how a child had been raped and murdered, whereupon others exclaim that it is ‘good’ and that at least now she would not grow up to be a ‘degenerate whore’. Notably, the perpetrators who rape and kill women and children are missing throughout these descriptions. The only exceptions are when they are used as positive examples of retaliation.

Not only are women in these descriptions at fault for ‘causing’ rape, but they are, in fact, using the fake victimhood that rape affords them as a tool to victimise men and to gain different types of advantages. Users argue that it is common for women to fabricate rape accusations to get attention, ‘for easy money’, and to get a chance to ‘play the victim’ (see also Chang, 2022; Cockerill, 2019; Vallerga & Zurbriggen, 2022). In fact, many users claim (anecdotally) that in the majority of cases, rape allegations have been made up as a result of women having changed their minds after the fact. The forum members argue that most often, women redefine an act as rape when ‘regretting sex the next morning’ because they ‘feel bad about it’. Women use this tactic to intentionally victimise men, and it is seen by incels in the forum as far more serious than rape itself. Again, this not only portrays women as deceitful and unworthy of being believed (Banet-Weiser & Higgins, 2023) but also diminishes their sexual victimhood in favour of men’s potential – and seemingly much more serious – victimisation at the hands of women (Kettrey et al., 2024; Rennie, 2023).

By drawing on women’s supposed manipulative and degenerate character, incels are able to explain and justify rape as something retaliatory and fair. These depictions are not only a powerful means to ‘Other’ women, but the fact that such abhorrently misogynist posts remained accessible on the platform at the time of data collection highlights the high social tolerance for hate in the community as well as a seeming complete lack of moderation (see also Åkerlund, 2025; Zannettou et al., 2018).

Perspectives

In this section, I analyse how incels situate themselves and their perspective in their justifications of rape (cf. RQ3).

Chads and Incels/Lovers and Perpetrators

The incels return, time and again, to a claim that the distinction between what constitutes rape and what constitutes sex is about who is carrying out the act. Incels argue that when masculine, muscular and physically flawless ‘alpha males’ – known as ‘Chad’ (Meier & Sharp, 2024) – have intercourse with women, it can by default only be sex, because women will always want to sleep with these men. In contrast, the same act is simultaneously always rape if it is carried out by an unattractive man:

It isn’t rape when Chad does it but if I were to do it would be a crime.

They’re in heaven with Chad’s dick in their pussy but if a rapist puts their dick in their pussy, it’s suddenly worse than being killed by a wild bear.

Women love to be raped but they hate if it someone does it who is not Chad.

From this perspective, women decide their willingness for sex/rape based on the perpetrator’s appearance. This idea that rape would be conditional on the perpetrator provides further insight into incels’ understandings of rape. They frame it as something that has to do with physical attraction, flirtation and intimacy, rather than violence, power and subordination. In the same vein, incels argue that men who are ‘guaranteed a woman’ do not need to rape (see also Pascoe & Hollander, 2016).

Throughout the dataset, incels describe being deprived of the right to act on their ‘sexual impulses’ and ‘rape’, due to women. Or as one user argues, ‘nobody would need to rape if foids’ standards were lower’. This perspective, as seen throughout incel ideology, is grounded in a disadvantage and injustice at the hands of better-looking men, society at large and especially women (Zimmerman, 2024). These ideas, in turn, are exacerbated because of the separatist nature of the forum, which works for its members as an echo chamber of unconditional agreement and seemingly endless self-perceived victimisation (de Roos et al., 2024; see also Törnberg & Törnberg, 2024; Zannettou et al., 2018).

In the context of rape, specifically, incels do this by positioning women’s exposure to rape in contrast to the male experience, juxtaposing men’s and women’s contributions to society and expressing their frustration over women’s apparent privileges over men. For instance, despite all that men have done for women, like ‘dying for them on the Titanic’ and ‘getting killed in wars’, incels claim that women respond by ‘laughing at male suicide’ and treating ‘non-chads like shit’. This follows the conservative masculinist trope wherein men take on the role of protectors and women are expected to show gratitude for these sacrifices and are deserving of punishment when they do not (Sager & Mulinari, 2018; Young, 2003).

There is also a consistent sense of frustration that rape is supposedly a minor problem compared to ‘what the average man has to deal with on an everyday basis’. In particular, inceldom is perceived as incomparably worse than being raped:

Being raped one time if you’re a foid, is probably not as bad as being an incel for a month.

The experience of being an incel can’t be compared to a foid who is desired and has never known what it’s like to be completely rejected.

Faced with the choice between feeling totally unwanted and invisible to the gender you desire and being raped one time . . . It isn’t difficult to imagine what most people would prefer.

This sense of unfairness is accompanied by a sense of being mocked by women (Baele et al., 2021; Chang, 2022; Menzie, 2022), although there are no actual examples in the dataset of incels providing proof that women are targeting them. Still, the forum members believe that women are actively conspiring against them, and as a result, they have no obligation to treat women with any sort of respect:

I get so pissed when women look at me and laugh. I want them to get raped.

Foids don’t have any empathy for us so why should I? Bitches deserve what they get.

Women and society always take pleasure in our pain so I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t do the same to them.

Again, this stretches as far as arguing that because women cannot see incel’s kindness, they (paradoxically) are thought to deserve whatever harm comes their way (Witt, 2020; see also Jordan et al., 2022):

Women always choose men who are insufferable over gentlemen like us, who are nice and calm, so they deserve any bad thing that comes their way. I have no compassion for them.

The undisputable fact that incels are more deserving and ‘real’ victims than women is the result of both women’s oblivion and simple-mindedness, and their deliberate callousness. Both of which serve to reinforce the distance between incels and the incel community as an in-group against women as an out-group, and contribute to justifying violence against women.

Intensifications and (Reprimanded) Mitigations

There are various ways in which claims about women and rape are reinforced through user interactions in the incel forum (cf. RQ4). On the surface, the discussions in the forum appear supportive. There are no built-in functions on the platforms for users to ‘like’ content. Instead, users show support and agreement by responding to threads and posts that they like, describing them as ‘great’, ‘well-written’, ‘amazing’ and ‘eye-opening’ or ‘high IQ’ – which is a common way of naming something as particularly smart. The fact that the posts being promoted in this way are almost exclusively in support of rape and other forms of gender-based sexual violence serves to legitimise and encourage violent discourse in the forum (see also Åkerlund, 2021).

Many times, emotions seem to escalate over the course of the threads. Specifically, stories and descriptions about women and their actions which are not overtly violent can often entice explicitly violent responses from others (see also Åkerlund, 2020). Most often, this takes the form of shorter calls to action, especially to ‘rape’ and ‘kill’ women. There are also examples of how posts have prompted longer and more detailed retaliatory comments. For instance, in response to a thread in which a forum member claimed to have been accused of sexual assault, one user, for instance, noted that,

Females have benefited too much, for too long, it is completely ruthless. Their day of reckoning is coming and when it does all their rights, liberties, and special treatment will be taken away. They’ll be reduced to the role they were always meant to serve, for fucking, nothing more.

Although the complete anonymity of members in the forum allows them to make misogynist claims explicitly with little risk of personal consequence or accountability, there are instances where incels seem aware of their antagonistic and, at times, even potentially illegal language use in the forum, as it pertains to rape. Although the incels speak with a certainty that the community as such consists of likeminded others, and users are highly concerned with maintaining their anonymity, to mitigate the appearance of their support for sexual assault, it is common that users acknowledge their visibility to potential outsiders, especially to the ‘anti-incel’ subreddit r/IncelTear ⁴ (IT) (Andersen, 2023), but they also show an awareness that law enforcement might be reading their content. Users often nod to this potential visibility by simply greeting their imagined audiences:

Hi users from IT (and federal agents)!

Everything shared from this address is entirely fictional. To any relevant authorities: all posts associated with this IP address, whether past, present or future, are produced solely for satirical or research-related purposes. None of the content reflects actual intent or plans to cause harm or commit acts of violence toward any individual or group, whether real or fictional.

It is also common for incels to use video game references to suggest that their violent fantasies are fictional, most often added as a parenthesis and seeming afterthought, to temper a violent post (Gosse et al., 2025):

I want to rape their corpses (in GTA)

We will only ever achieve what we want through a revolution (in Minecraft)

Who would you rape first if it was legal? (of course in Roblox)

Rather than illustrating any actual realisation that their representations of women and rape are problematic, they seemingly just want to limit any accountability for their content. The formatting of these mitigations reoccurs between users and threads, and thus appears to be part of the learnt jargon of the forum (see also Nissenbaum & Shifman, 2017; Törnberg & Törnberg, 2024).

In these cases, other users do not protest these (pseudo-)mitigations. However, in the few instances when users are genuinely protesting content that encourages violence and rape, others are quick to reprimand them. Normally, this is done by questioning their intentions in the forum, often by calling them out as not being full-fledged members of the community (graycel), or even as impersonators – so-called ‘fakecels’ (Price, 2024):

Go fuck yourself graycel

You’re a FAKECEL from IT

You are a fakecel and deserve to be punished for your betrayal

Throughout the dataset, even the most overtly misogynist representations receive little pushback. Users quickly and forcefully discredit the intentions of any user who protests the perspective on women and rape that has been (informally) agreed upon by the collective. Accordingly, there is little room for any impactful resistance or disagreement to the misogynist and violent representations of women and rape discussed in the forum (see also Åkerlund, 2021, 2025). The few times that users are seemingly mitigating their thoughts, this seems more for show than anything else.

Discussion

This article has sought to analyse how rape is understood and articulated among incels, through a CDA of over 3,300 posts posted on an international incel forum in 2024. In sum, the analysis shows that incels convey highly conservative views on rape, understanding it through narrow conceptions of ideal victims and perpetrators, seeming to lack understanding (or willingness thereof) of the distinctions between abuse and sex (cf. RQ1). They frame women as both incompetent and manipulative (cf. RQ1), which allows them to justify rape in diverse and contradictory ways, as they see fit. The findings show how forum members imagine women as inconsistent in their desires to portray rape as something inevitable, natural and even enjoyable for female victims. This diminishes and decontextualises rape while also working to trivialise women’s experiences. The analysis also illustrates how incels reference women’s supposed callousness to justify rape as retaliatory and fair (cf. RQ2). Incels, in turn, use these violent representations of women and rape to construct their own contrasting (and much more oppressive) victimhood (cf. RQ3). Finally, the analysis shows that users continuously encourage and intensify misogynist ideas about rape. Even the most overtly violent of these representations receive only minimal pushback, and a few users who protest are quickly mocked, discredited and silenced by other users (cf. RQ4); this is exacerbated by community culture, a lack of moderation and the separatist nature of the forum.

In contrast to how the visibility of gender-based violence has elsewhere prompted recognition and meaningful intervention (Carroll, 2021; Clark-Parsons, 2019), the visibility of sexual violence among incels seems to mainly serve anti-social purposes. The findings of this article show how rape not only serves community-building purposes but also fuels contempt for women’s self-determination. Incels cast themselves as misunderstood protagonists and voiceless outsiders who suffer an existence that is incomparably worse than that of female sexual assault victims (Halpin, 2022; Witt, 2020; see also Jordan et al., 2022). This suffering is co-constructed as a collective experience shared among community members and self-centredly positions their suffering as something diametrically different from the supposed social and sexual experiences of members of mainstream society (Chang, 2022; Zimmerman, 2024).

Male rape perpetrators and patriarchal structures are strategically erased in favour of demonising generalisations of women’s culpability in their exposure to sexual violence, and in incels’ victimisation. Focusing on women’s perceived responsibility fosters a retaliatory atmosphere that rationalises and justifies gender-based hate and violence as a welcome act (or at least a fantasy) of rebellion (Chang, 2022). Simultaneously, incels undermine their claims of oppression and marginalisation in their construction of women as inferior and primitive (Lindsay, 2022; Witt, 2020). These descriptions entirely erase women’s humanity, structural disempowerment and perpetual victimisation to rape and sexual assault.

Beyond the misogyny of individual users, hate is facilitated here, as in other similar ‘free speech’ settings, through the feature of ‘toxic technoculture’ (Massanari, 2017) involving community culture, design and platform politics alike (see also de Roos et al., 2024; Hess & Flores, 2018; Massanari, 2017; Munn, 2020). The fact that these narratives are contradictory is largely disregarded among the forum members, who collectively support and reinforce each other’s stories as long as they are misogynistic. In fact, the analysis shows that even extremely violent content is allowed by the community and condoned by platform moderators. The representation of women sometimes serves to marginalise the impacts of rape and, at other times, to exacerbate them. In the end, and as exemplified by one user, ‘rape isn’t real and if it is, foids deserve it’. Those who do not ascribe to this basic tenet are not treated as rightful and legitimate members of the forum, and collectively policed and moderated by the community (see also Åkerlund, 2021, 2025). This, in turn, highlights the force of community norms in these kinds of settings.

Given the contempt with which incels conceptualise women and sexual violence, it is easy to sensationalise their ideas and beliefs. However, as this article shows, incels nevertheless express the same rape myths and victim blame as seen in mainstream society, albeit in a more blatant and exacerbated form afforded by the incel forum. Detaching the misogyny of incels from mainstream society places an undue distance between ‘normal’ misogyny and ‘abnormal’ misogyny.

We need to explore the incel community not as an exceptional digital subculture or peripheral extremist outlier (Tranchese & Sugiura, 2021), but instead as symptomatic of deep-seated societal issues which have found new and more efficient outlets through digital technology. In fact, misogyny, sexual violence and gender-based hate have proven to be core dimensions of digital existence, manifested as harassment, stalking, defamation and threats, through the malicious sharing of intimate images and videos or threats thereof, and in unsolicited sexual content, in the most diverse of digital settings (Araújo et al., 2022; Karagianni & Doh, 2024; Kasimov, 2025; O’Malley, 2024; Paasonen et al., 2019; Porter et al., 2025; Zhong et al., 2020).

Incels’ sexually violent discourse is situated within a societal context where perpetrators are excused and understood, and where victims are routinely met with disbelief and blame (Powell & Henry, 2014). Thus, incels’ misogynistic practices are not a problem applicable only to a few bad (misogynist) apples (Bates, 2020) but must be thought of as closely intertwined with broader societal views of women as inferior to men (Banet-Weiser & Miltner, 2016; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005; Waling, 2019). Future research would do well to further analyse not only how incel ideology deviates from mainstream misogyny but also the ways in which they also intersect (Tranchese & Sugiura, 2021).

Furthermore, this article has, due to space restrictions, largely left out the racial dimensions of incel rape discourse. Yet, as has been identified in relation to other issues, racism and race-based hate speech are rife in incel forums (Gheorghe, 2023; Heritage, 2023). There is a need for further research to explore incels’ understandings of rape from an intersectional perspective. There is also a need for future research to explore the role of whiteness in the perpetuation of rape myths and the construction of (ideal) victims and perpetrators.