The recent terrorist attack that killed ten people in Toronto, Canada was carried out by a man who has identified himself as an “incel.” In 2014, another member of this movement murdered six people and injured fourteen more near the University of California. Numerous attacks have been carried out by followers of the incel movement, and their motivation appears to be to draw attention to the “sexual revolution.” The incels believe they have an important message to society, and to be fair, they do. However, it is not at all the one they were hoping to make. Originally, the incels’ intent was to blare their struggles to the world, instead, they revealed just how embedded misogyny is in modern society. What exactly are the incels, and what do…show more content… The outrageous claim that it is the inherent right of men to demand sex from women is a clear indicator of just how ingrained misogyny is in the world today. For hundreds of years, most if not all of the world was controlled through patriarchy, and for hundreds of years, many challenged that very claim. Take the United States for an example, it took around seventy years for women to get the right to vote, and even then, that was only for white women. The struggle to see women as equal to men is one of the largest stains on social justice. Though there is still a significant disparity in the privileges between the sexes, the state of gender equality has improved from the past. However, people with the mindset such as that as the incels show that there is still an enormous amount of progress to be made. Shouldn’t society be past the point of treating women as only sex objects? Can the world truly call itself better off than before if a large portion of its population still looks upon women as subservient to men? Apparently not, and sadly, as long as groups like the incels hold a place in the world, society can never consider itself to be in a gender equal state. The absolute abolishment of sexism is most surely impossible. Nonetheless, when just one incel member has over 40,000 followers, the world has just proven that it still has leaps and bounds of progress to make towards a more gender equal status. In the long run, the incel movement will just be one of many obstacles society has overcome. The terrorist attacks that the incels have committed hurt their cause by branding themselves as extremists, therefore removing any legitimacy their message had (or believed to have). Putting the blame of the incels’ lack of action on women only aids in assuring that no woman will ever give sympathy to their “revolution.” The faces of the incel movement are those of terrorists, with some of which having
