In the run-up to the 2016 US election, the Red Pill subreddit, an online group of men’s rights activists, became increasingly politicised, helping to catapult the ‘alpha male’ Trump into the White House. Once in power, Trump met his voters’ male supremacist demands by weakening protections against domestic abuse and sexual violence, and appointed a Supreme Court that would ultimately end the right to nationwide safe, legal abortion.

But the Red Pill is not the only online subculture to bring together violent misogyny, conspiracy theories, and far-right beliefs that dreamed of pure male entitlement and an end to women’s rights. Perhaps the most extreme example is the incel group – another forum that started on Reddit and now flourishes on other platforms such as incel.net and incel.is.

Incel stands for involuntary celibates: a group of men and boys who feel sexually rejected by women and who are very angry about it. The subcultures’ violent fantasies have spilled out into real-life terror, with extremists driving vans into cafes, shooting men and women in California, murdering Asian sex workers in massage parlours, and stabbing people to death in Plymouth, UK.

When I went undercover on incel forums, doing a keyword search for ‘abortion’, the results were revealing.

Through my research I discovered that many incels believe in the far-right Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which, they claim, is fuelled by women’s reproductive rights, leading to extreme anti-abortion content. The baseless theory believes white people are being ‘replaced’ by migrant people, with that replacement aided by feminists repressing the white birth rate with abortion and contraception.

This conspiracy was popular even on the men’s rights Purple Pill forum – which is less extreme than the Red Pill or incel movement. One poster wrote, “whites have lost the will to live as a collective. Birthrates in steep decline ... full-scale embrace of culturally self-annihilating movements like feminism, socialism, globalism and multiculturalism. White guilt, white inaction in the face of rising violence and hatred of us.”

Great Replacement language was more extreme in an incel thread titled “What Pisses Me Off Most Is that Chad’s Bastards Are Being Killed”. The user GameDevCel, who has since been banned, rants that “the same foid who claim to have abortions for population control are the same who see nothing wrong in mass migration and feeding n*****s, to the point they breed billions.” (A foid or femoid is slang for woman; Chads are popular jock-style men who have lots of sex with women; Chad’s bastards are aborted foetuses.)

These sentiments are echoed on an incel thread called “Women Destroying Cultures and Countries.”

The user Uncommon posted on 17 October 2020: “The antifa and femoids support the invasion of africans and arabians [sic] in ALL Europe. In 50 years, thanks to the ‘diversity’ ... agenda, all Europe will turn into a third world shit hole full of wars and Sharia law everywhere.”

On another thread, titled “Remember FOIDs are more than willing to genocide to see their ‘rights’” (genocide refers to abortion), the poster GameDevCel writes how “foids” want the “right” to “fuck Chads”, but “they don’t care if this will destroy their entire race.”

The fantastical accusation is that women who choose to have sex and then have an abortion are responsible for a so-called ‘white genocide’.

You can see in this small selection of posts how the Great Replacement theory forms part of the far-right incel subculture – and yet, over and over again, the overlap between male supremacy and white supremacy in this closed-off movement has been ignored.

This ignorance has to stop.

The violent misogyny expressed in these spaces springs directly from the far-right agenda that proposes a perceived demographic crisis in the Global North is caused by women’s sexual and reproductive liberation. This means that, while incels’ hatred of women is primarily driven by their horror at women’s sexual and reproductive freedoms threatening male supremacy, it is exacerbated by the conviction that those same freedoms are threatening white survival.

The great decline

The belief in a fascist mythic past, an imaginary time when white men had unlimited access to women’s bodies for sex and reproduction and no man was forced to be involuntarily celibate, further drives incel ideas.

Unsurprisingly, incels believe that the route back to this imaginary past is achievable by removing women’s rights.

On an incel thread about abortion, the user Cofffeee asserts, “the woman shouldn’t have rights over her body”, and WelcomeToMyDNA adds, “I am against anything that benefits femoids”, including abortion. GameDevCel would concur: “there is no such thing as too many rights being taken away from foids.” In response to a post pointing out that banning abortion leads to unsafe terminations that cause disease, GameDevCel says, “so be infested with disease and illness.”

A thread titled “Strengthening Components in the Incel Brain” muses on the lost halcyon days of male supremacy.

Tupolev, a forum staff member, believes that “if we were born in an earlier timeline we would likely have wives and children ... Divorce used to be shamed and frowned upon. Abortion used to be ILLEGAL, and women used to know their place in the world. They carried out their gender specific duties.” On a thread called “Confess to Me Boyos”, the user Kaczor reveals that “my fantasy is to live in a normal world without feminism, LGBT, abortion. Every man would be guaranteed a wife.”

Linked to paranoia about the Great Replacement, incels think the rise of feminism and progressive movements is causing western society to degenerate.

In one contribution to an incel thread, “Women Destroying Cultures and Countries”, a poster claims that “women, especially young women, also want to destroy their countries and societies by voting for left wing degeneracy”, including support for LGBTIQ rights and abortion.

A comment from the Purple Pill forum also shares this belief that women’s participation in democracy is harming society: “the decline is not caused by female promiscuity but by female freedom and the right to work and choose.”

Another proposes, “what we have today is a decline which can be directly traced to the sexual revolution/feminist movement”, and yet another asserts that “the decline is because of the very high levels of female promiscuity” (that is, women’s sexual emancipation).

Fear of freedom

The belief that women’s liberation – from sexual and reproductive freedoms to the right to vote and occupy public space – is causing a decline in society is drawn from the anti- Marxist, fascist fear of freedom.

Marx argued that humans have the power and the freedom to change society – and crucially, he argued that people could also be changed by society. If a changed society has the power to change the people within it, populations can become still more progressive and more free.

Women’s freedom terrifies the far right because it means society can be changed, people can be changed in response to social progress, and white male supremacy is not a fixed, natural state. In other words, women’s liberation takes a wrecking ball to the entire worldview of the far right – so women must be stopped.

It’s important to understand how much hatred against women exists in these spaces.

Posters write about sending women to the slaughterhouse, keeping vaginas on leashes, and shoving grenades up women’s anuses. Women are described as “rape fuel”, as “scum” who should “rot in jail.” Men share videos of women being beaten, cheering on the violence, and they spread fantasies about child rape. When the Taliban recaptured Afghanistan in August 2021, the incels celebrated the “Talichad” and approvingly shared images of women being flogged. One post on abortion reads, “I care about abortion, women have to suffer and if they don’t wanna suffer, we make them suffer.”

On Reddit’s Purple Pill forum which, remember, is the less extreme space, a member wrote: “In theory I think all women should have access to abortion but to be honest I’ve learned to hate women, feminism and their sexual choices so much.” Another post says, “I don’t care if abortion becomes illegal and some women die.”

This extract is taken from the book Bodies Under Siege: how the far-right attack on reproductive rights went global.