This research provides insight into the ways that masculinities develop in online contexts. Incels also showed negative outcomes associated with these masculinities, as evidenced by posts reporting violent hatred of both themselves and women. Incels performed a specific version of hybrid masculinity in which they claim lower status than women while also calling other men weak and powerless using comparisons to women. We performed a content analysis of a sample of 400 top-rated posts from the Incel forum on Reddit called r/Braincels.
The Incels are a self-proclaimed group of beta males who claim a position at the bottom of the social hierarchy due to their continued romantic and sexual rejection by women. In this article, we analyze the Incel community through a lens of hybrid masculinities, as originally proposed by Ging.
Men who perform hybrid masculinities claim distance from masculine hegemony while actually reproducing patriarchal power.
