“All women are like that”: an overview of linguistic deindividualization and dehumanization of women in the incelosphere
-
Ewelina Prażmo
Abstract
This article provides an overview of linguistic strategies used in the incel community to deindividualize and dehumanize women. Among the most common ways of referring to women there is the use of generic labels (Stacy, Becky), conceptual metaphor (warpig, landwhale) including creative metaphorical morphology (foid, femoid), conceptual metonymy (hole, extrahole), and conceptual metaphtonymy (roastie). The consistent use of such terms within the incelosphere contributes to perpetuating harmful attitudes and potentially even justifying violent and abusive conduct towards women. For this reason, the language of dehumanization in general, and the misogynist discourse of incels in particular, warrants closer attention. This study is carried out within the methodological framework of cognitive semantics and adds to the expanding research on the discourse of the manosphere and the incelosphere.
References
Bogetić, Ksenija. 2022. Race and the language of incels: Figurative neologisms in an emerging English cryptolect. English Today 39(2). 89–99. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078422000153.Search in Google Scholar
Bogetić, Ksenija, Frazer Heritage, Veronika Koller & Mark McGlashan. 2023. Landwhales, femoids and sub-humans: Dehumanising metaphors in incel discourse. Metaphor and the Social World 13(2). 178–196. https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.23005.bog.Search in Google Scholar
Byerly, Carolyn M. 2020. Incels online reframing sexual violence. Communication Review 23(4). 290–308. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2020.1829305.Search in Google Scholar
Casey, Gretchen Liljeberg. 2019. Ending the incel rebellion: The tragic impacts of an online hate group. Loyola Journal of Public Interest Law 21(1). 71–106.Search in Google Scholar
Chang, Winnie. 2022. The monstrous-feminine in the incel imagination: Investigating the representation of women as “femoids” on /r/ Braincels. Feminist Media Studies 22(2). 254–270. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1804976.Search in Google Scholar
Ging, Debbie. 2019. Alphas, betas, and incels: Theorizing the masculinities of the manosphere. Men and Masculinities 22(4). 638–657. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X17706401.Search in Google Scholar
Gotell, Lise & Emily Dutton. 2016. Sexual violence in the “manosphere”: Antifeminist Men’s rights discourses on rape. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 5(2). 65–80. https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcjsd.v5i2.310.Search in Google Scholar
Halpin, Michael. 2022. Weaponized subordination: How incels discredit themselves to degrade women. Gender and Society 36(6). 813–837. https://doi.org/10.1177/08912432221128545.Search in Google Scholar
Haslam, Nick. 2006. Dehumanization: An integrative review. Personality and Social Psychology Review 10(3). 252–264. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr1003_4.Search in Google Scholar
Haslam, Nick, Steve Loughnan & Pamela Sun. 2011. Beastly: What makes animal metaphors offensive? Journal of Language and Social Psychology 30(3). 311–325. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X11407168.Search in Google Scholar
Heflick, Nathan A. & Jamie L. Goldenberg. 2009. Objectifying Sarah Palin: Evidence that objectification causes women to be perceived as less competent and less fully human. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45(3). 598–601. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2009.02.008.Search in Google Scholar
Heflick, Nathan A. & Jamie L. Goldenberg. 2014. Seeing eye to body: The literal objectification of women. Current Directions in Psychological Science 23(3). 225–229. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721414531599.Search in Google Scholar
Helm, Brenna, Ryan Scrivens, Thomas J. Holt, Steve Chermak & Richard Frank. 2022. Examining incel subculture on Reddit. Journal of Crime and Justice 47(1). 27–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/0735648X.2022.2074867.Search in Google Scholar
Heritage, Frazer & Veronika Koller. 2020. Incels, in-groups, and ideologies: The representation of gendered social actors in a sexuality-based online community. Journal of Language and Sexuality 9(2). 152–178. https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.19014.her.Search in Google Scholar
Hoffman, Bruce, Jacob Ware & Ezra Shapiro. 2020. Assessing the threat of incel violence. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 43(7). 565–587. https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2020.1751459.Search in Google Scholar
Jaki, Sylvia, Tom De Smedt, Maja Gwóźdź, Rudresh Panchal, Alexander Rossa & Guy De Pauw. 2019. Online hatred of women in the Incels.me forum: Linguistic analysis and automatic detection. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 7(2). 240–268. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00026.jak.Search in Google Scholar
Kimmel, Michael. 2017. Angry white men: American masculinity at the end of an era. New York: Bold Type Books.Search in Google Scholar
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2015. Where metaphors come from: Reconsidering context in metaphor. New York: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190224868.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Kraska-Szlenk, Iwona. 2014. Semantic extensions of body part terms: Common patterns and their interpretation. Language Sciences 44. 15–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2014.02.002.Search in Google Scholar
Krendel, Alexandra, Mark McGlashan & Veronika Koller. 2022. The representation of gendered social actors across five manosphere communities on Reddit. Corpora 17(2). 291–321. https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2022.0257.Search in Google Scholar
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Search in Google Scholar
Menzie, Lauren. 2022. Stacys, Beckys, and Chads: The construction of femininity and hegemonic masculinity within incel rhetoric. Psychology and Sexuality 13(1). 69–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/19419899.2020.1806915.Search in Google Scholar
Musolff, Andreas. 2010. Metaphor, nation and the holocaust: The concept of the body politic. London: Routledge.10.4324/9780203847282Search in Google Scholar
Newman, Leonard S. 2019. Confronting humanity at its worst: Social psychological perspectives on genocide. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oso/9780190685942.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
O’Donnell, Catharina & Eran Shor. 2022. “This is a political movement, friend”: Why “incels” support violence. British Journal of Sociology 73(2). 336–351. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12923.Search in Google Scholar
O’Malley, Roberta Liggett, Karen Holt & Thomas J. Holt. 2022. An exploration of the involuntary celibate (incel) subculture online. Journal of Interpersonal Violence 37(7–8). NP4981–NP5008. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260520959625.Search in Google Scholar
Panther, Klaus-Uwe & Günter Radden. 1999. Metonymy in language and thought. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/hcp.4Search in Google Scholar
Pelzer, Björn, Lisa Kaati, Katie Cohen & Johan Fernquist. 2021. Toxic language in online incel communities. SN Social Sciences 1(8). 213. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545–021-00220-8.10.1007/s43545-021-00220-8Search in Google Scholar
Prażmo, Ewelina. 2019. “Leftie snowflakes” and other metaphtonymies in the British political discourse. Journal of Language and Politics 18(3). 371–392. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.17073.pra.Search in Google Scholar
Prażmo, Ewelina. 2020. Foids are worse than animals: A cognitive linguistics analysis of dehumanizing metaphors in online discourse. Topics in Linguistics 21(2). 16–27. https://doi.org/10.2478/topling-2020-0007.Search in Google Scholar
Prażmo, Ewelina. 2022. In dialogue with non-humans or how women are silenced in incels’ discourse. Language and Dialogue 12(3). 383–406. https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00119.pra.Search in Google Scholar
Sugiura, Lisa. 2021. The incel rebellion: The rise of the manosphere and the virtual war against women. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited Howard House.10.1108/9781839822544Search in Google Scholar
Szymanski, Dawn M., Lauren B. Moffitt & Erika R. Carr. 2011. Sexual objectification of women: Advances to theory and research 1ψ7. Counseling Psychologist 39(1). 6–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011000010378402.Search in Google Scholar
Teunis, Niels. 2007. Sexual objectification and the construction of whiteness in the gay male community. Culture, Health and Sexuality 9(3). 263–275. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691050601035597.Search in Google Scholar
Tietjen, Ruth Rebecca & Sanna K. Tirkkonen. 2023. The rage of lonely men: Loneliness and misogyny in the online movement of “involuntary celibates” (incels). Topoi 42. 1229–1241. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09921-6.Search in Google Scholar
Tipler, Caroline N. & Janet B. Ruscher. 2019. Dehumanizing representations of women: The shaping of hostile sexist attitudes through animalistic metaphors. Journal of Gender Studies 28(1). 109–118. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2017.1411790.Search in Google Scholar
Tranchese, Alessia & Lisa Sugiura. 2021. “I don’t hate all women, just those stuck-up bitches”: How incels and mainstream pornography speak the same extreme language of misogyny. Violence Against Women 27(14). 2709–2734. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801221996453.Search in Google Scholar
Vance, Kaylee, Megan Sutter, Paul B. Perrin & Martin Heesacker. 2015. The Media’s sexual objectification of women, rape myth acceptance, and interpersonal violence. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment and Trauma 24(5). 569–587. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926771.2015.1029179.Search in Google Scholar
Waśniewska, Małgorzata. 2020. The red pill, unicorns and white knights: Cultural symbolism and conceptual metaphor in the slang of online incel communities. In Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (ed.), Cultural conceptualizations in language and communication (Second Language Learning and Teaching), 65–82. Cham: Springer International.10.1007/978-3-030-42734-4_4Search in Google Scholar
Zand, Benjamin. 2022. “The ultimate enemy is women” – inside the fear-filled world of incels. The Guardian, 7 November. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/nov/07/the-ultimate-enemy-is-women-the-secret-world-of-incels.Search in Google Scholar
Zimmerman, Shannon. 2022. The ideology of incels: Misogyny and victimhood as justification for political violence. Terrorism and Political Violence 36(2). 166–179. https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2022.2129014.Search in Google Scholar
© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial 2024
- Phonetics & Phonology
- The role of recoverability in the implementation of non-phonemic glottalization in Hawaiian
- Epenthetic vowel quality crosslinguistically, with focus on Modern Hebrew
- Japanese speakers can infer specific sub-lexicons using phonotactic cues
- Articulatory phonetics in the market: combining public engagement with ultrasound data collection
- Investigating the acoustic fidelity of vowels across remote recording methods
- The role of coarticulatory tonal information in Cantonese spoken word recognition: an eye-tracking study
- Tracking phonological regularities: exploring the influence of learning mode and regularity locus in adult phonological learning
- Morphology & Syntax
- #AreHashtagsWords? Structure, position, and syntactic integration of hashtags in (English) tweets
- The meaning of morphomes: distributional semantics of Spanish stem alternations
- A refinement of the analysis of the resultative V-de construction in Mandarin Chinese
- L2 cognitive construal and morphosyntactic acquisition of pseudo-passive constructions
- Semantics & Pragmatics
- “All women are like that”: an overview of linguistic deindividualization and dehumanization of women in the incelosphere
- Counterfactual language, emotion, and perspective: a sentence completion study during the COVID-19 pandemic
- Constructing elderly patients’ agency through conversational storytelling
- Language Documentation & Typology
- Conative animal calls in Macha Oromo: function and form
- The syntax of African American English borrowings in the Louisiana Creole tense-mood-aspect system
- Syntactic pausing? Re-examining the associations
- Bibliographic bias and information-density sampling
- Historical & Comparative Linguistics
- Revisiting the hypothesis of ideophones as windows to language evolution
- Verifying the morpho-semantics of aspect via typological homogeneity
- Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics
- Sign recognition: the effect of parameters and features in sign mispronunciations
- Influence of translation on perceived metaphor features: quality, aptness, metaphoricity, and familiarity
- Effects of grammatical gender on gender inferences: Evidence from French hybrid nouns
- Processing reflexives in adjunct control: an exploration of attraction effects
- Language Acquisition & Language Learning
- How do L1 glosses affect EFL learners’ reading comprehension performance? An eye-tracking study
- Modeling L2 motivation change and its predictive effects on learning behaviors in the extramural digital context: a quantitative investigation in China
- Ongoing exposure to an ambient language continues to build implicit knowledge across the lifespan
- On the relationship between complexity of primary occupation and L2 varietal behavior in adult migrants in Austria
- The acquisition of speaking fundamental frequency (F0) features in Cantonese and English by simultaneous bilingual children
- Sociolinguistics & Anthropological Linguistics
- A computational approach to detecting the envelope of variation
- Attitudes toward code-switching among bilingual Jordanians: a comparative study
- “Let’s ride this out together”: unpacking multilingual top-down and bottom-up pandemic communication evidenced in Singapore’s coronavirus-related linguistic and semiotic landscape
- Across time, space, and genres: measuring probabilistic grammar distances between varieties of Mandarin
- Navigating linguistic ideologies and market dynamics within China’s English language teaching landscape
- Streetscapes and memories of real socialist anti-fascism in south-eastern Europe: between dystopianism and utopianism
- What can NLP do for linguistics? Towards using grammatical error analysis to document non-standard English features
- From sociolinguistic perception to strategic action in the study of social meaning
- Minority genders in quantitative survey research: a data-driven approach to clear, inclusive, and accurate gender questions
- Variation is the way to perfection: imperfect rhyming in Chinese hip hop
- Shifts in digital media usage before and after the pandemic by Rusyns in Ukraine
- Computational & Corpus Linguistics
- Revisiting the automatic prediction of lexical errors in Mandarin
- Finding continuers in Swedish Sign Language
- Conversational priming in repetitional responses as a mechanism in language change: evidence from agent-based modelling
- Construction grammar and procedural semantics for human-interpretable grounded language processing
- Through the compression glass: language complexity and the linguistic structure of compressed strings
- Could this be next for corpus linguistics? Methods of semi-automatic data annotation with contextualized word embeddings
- The Red Hen Audio Tagger
- Code-switching in computer-mediated communication by Gen Z Japanese Americans
- Supervised prediction of production patterns using machine learning algorithms
- Introducing Bed Word: a new automated speech recognition tool for sociolinguistic interview transcription
- Decoding French equivalents of the English present perfect: evidence from parallel corpora of parliamentary documents
- Enhancing automated essay scoring with GCNs and multi-level features for robust multidimensional assessments
- Sociolinguistic auto-coding has fairness problems too: measuring and mitigating bias
- The role of syntax in hashtag popularity
- Language practices of Chinese doctoral students studying abroad on social media: a translanguaging perspective
- Cognitive Linguistics
- Metaphor and gender: are words associated with source domains perceived in a gendered way?
- Crossmodal correspondence between lexical tones and visual motions: a forced-choice mapping task on Mandarin Chinese
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial 2024
- Phonetics & Phonology
- The role of recoverability in the implementation of non-phonemic glottalization in Hawaiian
- Epenthetic vowel quality crosslinguistically, with focus on Modern Hebrew
- Japanese speakers can infer specific sub-lexicons using phonotactic cues
- Articulatory phonetics in the market: combining public engagement with ultrasound data collection
- Investigating the acoustic fidelity of vowels across remote recording methods
- The role of coarticulatory tonal information in Cantonese spoken word recognition: an eye-tracking study
- Tracking phonological regularities: exploring the influence of learning mode and regularity locus in adult phonological learning
- Morphology & Syntax
- #AreHashtagsWords? Structure, position, and syntactic integration of hashtags in (English) tweets
- The meaning of morphomes: distributional semantics of Spanish stem alternations
- A refinement of the analysis of the resultative V-de construction in Mandarin Chinese
- L2 cognitive construal and morphosyntactic acquisition of pseudo-passive constructions
- Semantics & Pragmatics
- “All women are like that”: an overview of linguistic deindividualization and dehumanization of women in the incelosphere
- Counterfactual language, emotion, and perspective: a sentence completion study during the COVID-19 pandemic
- Constructing elderly patients’ agency through conversational storytelling
- Language Documentation & Typology
- Conative animal calls in Macha Oromo: function and form
- The syntax of African American English borrowings in the Louisiana Creole tense-mood-aspect system
- Syntactic pausing? Re-examining the associations
- Bibliographic bias and information-density sampling
- Historical & Comparative Linguistics
- Revisiting the hypothesis of ideophones as windows to language evolution
- Verifying the morpho-semantics of aspect via typological homogeneity
- Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics
- Sign recognition: the effect of parameters and features in sign mispronunciations
- Influence of translation on perceived metaphor features: quality, aptness, metaphoricity, and familiarity
- Effects of grammatical gender on gender inferences: Evidence from French hybrid nouns
- Processing reflexives in adjunct control: an exploration of attraction effects
- Language Acquisition & Language Learning
- How do L1 glosses affect EFL learners’ reading comprehension performance? An eye-tracking study
- Modeling L2 motivation change and its predictive effects on learning behaviors in the extramural digital context: a quantitative investigation in China
- Ongoing exposure to an ambient language continues to build implicit knowledge across the lifespan
- On the relationship between complexity of primary occupation and L2 varietal behavior in adult migrants in Austria
- The acquisition of speaking fundamental frequency (F0) features in Cantonese and English by simultaneous bilingual children
- Sociolinguistics & Anthropological Linguistics
- A computational approach to detecting the envelope of variation
- Attitudes toward code-switching among bilingual Jordanians: a comparative study
- “Let’s ride this out together”: unpacking multilingual top-down and bottom-up pandemic communication evidenced in Singapore’s coronavirus-related linguistic and semiotic landscape
- Across time, space, and genres: measuring probabilistic grammar distances between varieties of Mandarin
- Navigating linguistic ideologies and market dynamics within China’s English language teaching landscape
- Streetscapes and memories of real socialist anti-fascism in south-eastern Europe: between dystopianism and utopianism
- What can NLP do for linguistics? Towards using grammatical error analysis to document non-standard English features
- From sociolinguistic perception to strategic action in the study of social meaning
- Minority genders in quantitative survey research: a data-driven approach to clear, inclusive, and accurate gender questions
- Variation is the way to perfection: imperfect rhyming in Chinese hip hop
- Shifts in digital media usage before and after the pandemic by Rusyns in Ukraine
- Computational & Corpus Linguistics
- Revisiting the automatic prediction of lexical errors in Mandarin
- Finding continuers in Swedish Sign Language
- Conversational priming in repetitional responses as a mechanism in language change: evidence from agent-based modelling
- Construction grammar and procedural semantics for human-interpretable grounded language processing
- Through the compression glass: language complexity and the linguistic structure of compressed strings
- Could this be next for corpus linguistics? Methods of semi-automatic data annotation with contextualized word embeddings
- The Red Hen Audio Tagger
- Code-switching in computer-mediated communication by Gen Z Japanese Americans
- Supervised prediction of production patterns using machine learning algorithms
- Introducing Bed Word: a new automated speech recognition tool for sociolinguistic interview transcription
- Decoding French equivalents of the English present perfect: evidence from parallel corpora of parliamentary documents
- Enhancing automated essay scoring with GCNs and multi-level features for robust multidimensional assessments
- Sociolinguistic auto-coding has fairness problems too: measuring and mitigating bias
- The role of syntax in hashtag popularity
- Language practices of Chinese doctoral students studying abroad on social media: a translanguaging perspective
- Cognitive Linguistics
- Metaphor and gender: are words associated with source domains perceived in a gendered way?
- Crossmodal correspondence between lexical tones and visual motions: a forced-choice mapping task on Mandarin Chinese
