Women Are Stories Men Tell About Themselves

Much like “double mutant variant”, “Jordan Peterson reacts” or “let me just share my screen real quick”, “vehicle ramming attack” is one of those word jumbles that reminds you just how just super it is to be a person right now.

In March this year, a Canadian court found software developer Alek Minassian guilty of 10 counts of first-degree murder and 16 counts of attempted murder for his 2018 “VRA” in Toronto, in which he rented a ven, jumped the kerb, and accelerated though two and a half kilometres’ worth of pedestrians.

Minassian identified himself to arresting officers as an “incel” (involuntary celibate), evoking the online sub-culture of angry, unsexed men. Spooked by the neologism, journalists combed his social media, and found a Facebook post praising “Supreme Gentlemen Elliot Rodger”, an incel folk hero who shot, stabbed, and ran over 20 Californians on a college campus in 2014, killing seven in the end, including himself.

Two years after Minassian, Google.ca searches for “what’s an incel” spiked again, when an unnamed male minor took a machete to a spa and killed a 24 year-old woman. Having confirmed a connection with the “Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremist (IMVE)” incel movement, authorities upgraded charges to misogynistic terrorism, the first use of such a classification in Canadian law. (The attack’s location and themes of sex and shame would be echoed in 2021’s massage parlours shootings in Atlanta, GA, by a religious 21 year-old man trying to eliminate…