Inside Aotearoa's Misogyny Problem

It’s a weeknight when I begin trawling incel chat boards. "“F*****g had enough of these f*****g sl*ts, one says. "Us bros need to stick together,” says another.

Mary O’Sullivan finds the violence by incels – those men with a murderous hate for women – is rooted in pervasive and everyday misogyny.

---

There is a dark online world unknown to most of the general population. It is shadowy, isolating and violent. It is a community whose members call themselves incels, or involuntary celibate – young boys and men who blame women for their lack of romantic success. It goes further than that, though. Most incels really do hate women. They hate what freedom and autonomy women have, and they have conjured up the idea that women control the fate of a man. Now this hatred is affecting our communities here.

Once a predominantly North American issue, it might be easy to believe that incels don’t have a place in New Zealand society, but that isn’t the case. One academic told me she had expected the problem to be isolated to the States and Canada, but that it was everywhere, even here. In our small island nation, we tend to believe we are more progressive than most, and maybe we are. But incels have made headlines on a few occasions in New Zealand and misogyny reeks in our communities. Recently, a 26-year-old man appeared on attempted murder charges after purposely driving into two schoolgirls, angered that he had never had a girlfriend. At the other end of the scale, a terrorist who murdered 51 people in two Christchurch mosques in 2019 frequented incel sites regularly and live-streamed his attack to viewers. Is incel culture merely speaking to a dark underbelly of our society offline and reflecting back what already exists in our communities?

---

It’s a weeknight when I begin trawling incel chat boards. I find myself staring at a server that looks as dated as early-2000s MySpace or Bebo. The interface is a dark navy blue, hosting its site name and a stick figure turned to the right with its head down. I’m already confronted with the extremism these individuals feel. It feels proud. “Ah ha, you’ve found us,” it seems to be saying.

One day I read: “Women deserve to be hurt”. The next day I stumble across incels confessing to killing their pets as children. “F*****g had enough of these f*****g s**ts. Us bros need to stick together,” another says. When I read an incel asking, “Who wants to come along on a looting raping killing spree,” I decide I need to close my laptop for the day. I feel something reacting within me, panic maybe.

Later, I manage to speak with a few self-proclaimed incels. More on this soon.

“According to incels, women’s mating choices must be controlled. They think women are inferior to men, they think women are mindless animals, uncaring robots, or objects. They think women of colour are all ‘whores’.” That is from research by Canada-based professor Michael Halpin. It might be comical if it weren’t so prominent. “I was surprised by how caustically misogynistic the community is,” Halpin says. “I’ve heard plenty of misogynistic comments before, and I’ve known misogynistic people, but the level of vitriol was on another level.

“They encourage violence against women, including sexualised violence and murder.” Halpin is referring to Marc Lepine, a mass murderer who killed 14 women in 1989, when he says incels can “celebrate someone specifically because he killed women ‘more effectively’ than other murderers.”

The males on these sites who speak of women in such a way are so violent in their speech that it is shocking, but is it only a more outward version of the way boys think of women in ‘real life?’ Offline? Liz Gordon of the non-profit agency Pukeko Research thinks so. Normalised misogyny is the “little frights, like the young woman walking down the busy road and the guy on the bike calling her names and telling her what he wants to do with her”, she said. This was an actual case Gordon discovered in her 2021 study initiated by Christchurch Girls High. The college asked Gordon to look into sexual assault and harassment in the school after students had approached senior staff in a cry for help. Gordon says the young women were extremely upset, and there were “some really serious incidents”. Her study would find 2677 incidents of sexual assault in the first five months of the year and create a chain reaction in neighbouring schools. Avonside Girls High School took part in the research, seeing 572 participants, 21 of whom said their experience of sexual assault “ended in rape or near rape”.

“I tentatively concluded that at the time we were doing the study and for a couple of years after that, there were a group of boys who went from party to party, identifying girls, separating them from their friends, taking them into a room and gang-raping them, because it happened more than once,” Gordon said. “I suspected that there was a methodology about it.”

It had echoes of the infamous Roastbusters scandal, when two men boasted online about assaulting drunk, underage girls in Auckland.

The study found a student who had walked past Shirley Boys High School had a young boy scream at her, “I want to f**k you till your back breaks.” Gordon said the school’s male students were resistant to the study and “very threatened by it”.

“We’ve got a real gender problem in our society and that gender problem is the problem misogyny and misogyny unfortunately breeds violence and the view that men can hurt women physically, intellectually and sexually.”

Halpin said the vast majority of incels use misogynistic terms. He said the community practices “stochastic gender-based violence – which is an adaptation of the term stochastic terrorism.” In short: random violence linked to harmful social attitudes about gender. Even though no one can predict exactly when or where these violent acts will happen, the spread of hateful ideas or stereotypes in society makes them more likely to occur. “The community provides excuses and justification for men to commit violent acts against women,” he said.

But males, too, are caught up in a world where gender roles do not serve them. Incels are born out of this very disconnect. Traditional ideas of masculinity dictate that men should be romantically involved with women, and when they aren’t, some may feel inadequate or perceive themselves as less masculine. This can translate to resentment towards women, Alyssa Maryn, of Calgary University, suggests. And their anger is rewarded in society, she says. “Seeing women as sexual objects to be conquered is already rooted in a lot of the systemic misogyny that permeates our culture.

“Of course, women aren’t the actual causes of their issues – what really needs to be challenged is the sexual objectification of women and the harmful expectations society has for men and boys.”

The problem is so real, so severe, that by just scratching the surface on an incel subreddit, I came across a post of a teenager who had performed an at-home buccal fat removal procedure on himself. The image was graphic, looking more like a makeshift hospital in a war zone, which made it hard to comprehend that this was all because of looks, because of an online forum that encouraged these absorbing ideas, because of incel culture.

Halpin says members of incel communities view themselves very poorly. Believing strongly in a societal hierarchy, they believe women will always choose the most physically appealing potential partner, something they don’t see themselves as ever being. “They refer to themselves as ‘genetic trash’ ‘losers’ and ‘hopeless’, as a means to justify their calls for interpersonal and systemic violence against women. The interpersonal violence they discuss are things like assault and murder, while the systemic violence they discuss are things like removing women’s rights, or turning women into property to be owned by men.

“Of note, incels are not challenging masculine hierarchies – they accept that some men are above others – what they want to challenge is that any woman should be above any man,” Halpin says.

Incels are bothered by the rise of feminism and the undeserved attention women supposedly receive on social media. But it is just that – male attention – that so many women and girls do their best to avoid.

“Nobody else is going to help them, let's face it. In the end, they have to do it themselves.”

In her 2022 study, Gordon discovered how girls altered aspects of their lives to protect themselves from boys and men, changed things about themselves because of someone else’s behaviour. She suggests such adjustment is a loss of youth. “They change their routes home, make sure they’re always in well-lit, populated areas. They make sure someone picks them up. They have a whole range of tools,” she said.

“Nobody else is going to help them, let's face it. In the end, they have to do it themselves.”

The responsibility for misogyny continues to fall on women. Is that why the cycles keep repeating? Women arm themselves with a toolbox on how not to get raped, how not to get catcalled, how to be equal in the office – while particular groups of boys and men are creating online forums encouraging rape and boys in high schools are catcalling their peers or assaulting them at parties. Sexism may not be outwardly acceptable in the boardroom anymore, or in preventing women from voting, but it still exists here.

It exists in the dark corners of the internet where most of functioning society won’t venture. It exists in locker rooms and on sports fields. It is the constant ridiculing of womens bodies online. It’s a teenage boy sharing intimate photos he has received from a teenage girl with his friends. It’s a teenage boy making jokes about Jacinda Ardern’s or Kamala Harris’s ability to lead because she is a woman. It’s a teenage boy blaming an OnlyFans creator for the violence she receives. It’s a teenage boy mocking the girl who stands up for feminism. And of course, it is the boy who rapes the girl and the group who shames her into silence.

And while all that goes on, there is a rabbit hole twirling quietly in the background. Gurgling up as if choking on a dark secret. Influencing these behaviours we are seeing in our communities – or vice versa.

“I hope she gets raped and beheaded that f*****g whore.” While trawling the website I mentioned earlier, I come across a thread by several incels mocking a woman’s request that people stop sending her crude messages. “Women like this should be mass culled by the government, they are loyal to nothing but their own body,” one incel said.

Through Reddit forums, I find a few incels who are willing to talk to me. I am given an automated cryptic name ‘Embarrassed-Cold-206’ and begin chatting under this alias to someone who requested they stay anonymous. He tells me he has hated women for most of his young adult life, and that most boys his age feel the same way. “Women have developed a sense of grandeur in recent years that has allowed them to believe they deserve the best of everything without really working for it,” he said. “I feel like it would be easier if women had less freedom. I believe women should not be in positions of power or be able to vote.”

This person explains he has seen incel communities online for a long time but has recently begun interacting with them because he is “tired of being wronged,” and frustrated at “how easy women have it”.

The next person I speak to is a 25-year-old man in a forum asking how he can stop hating women, a position he has only just realised he holds. “When I got first involved [with incels], I experienced belonging to a group for the first time, since I was always used to being the bullied punching bag [in real life] not having had real friends for so long,” he says. “The thing with incel forums or communities is just that it gets monotone/boring after some time, it’s always the same topics, I feel like.”

These incels would reply almost instantly, despite many of the posts I was referring them to being several months old.

---

Where does incel culture sit in New Zealand? We know we have a culture of casual misogyny, even of violent sexism. We need only to look at Gordon’s research to be reminded of that, but are there incels lurking among us?

At the time of the Epsom attempted murder case, University of Auckland senior lecturer Chris Wilson said that because of a lack of details, the incident itself couldn’t label perpetrator Caleb Bell as an incel, but that “he’s right on the edge of it.” Bell crashed into two schoolgirls at 50kmh. Both victims were taken to Auckland Hospital on a late January afternoon in 2022 after one struck her head on the windshield and broke several bones. The driver said his actions were born out of annoyance that others seemed happy when he did not, and due to a sense of unfairness that he had never had a girlfriend. He wanted to take his life in the crash as well.

Last year Bell was sentenced to three years and seven months in prison.

With much of this issue unfortunately under-reported here, we might look to our neighbours in Australia to understand how close to home this issue is. This year, one woman in Australia is murdered every four days. Last year it was every 11 days by an intimate partner. Recorded sexual assaults reached a 31-year high in 2023. Fourteen of the seventeen people stabbed in the Bondi attack in April this year were women. The attacker ran towards multiple men but redirected his attention to women. Back home, rape cases are four times less likely to be pursued in court in this country, compared to other violent offences. Experiences of assault often go unreported. We have a culture of ignorance towards the protection of women – we have a culture of casual misogyny that grows into a harmful beast when at its worst. Alyssa Maryn expected the former incels that participated in her study to be from the United States and Canada, but that wasn’t the case. “I talked with incels from around the world,” she said. “I do get the sense that a lot of the culture lives online, and is in some ways defined by online spaces more so than physical ones.”

“With the internet and online spaces, there’s a real shift we’ve seen in the ease of accessing echo chambers,” says Imogen Stone, of HELP Auckland “Once upon a time, it was your boy's club or your nightclub that only let in guys or something like that, and you actually had to physically take yourself to the space to engage in those echo chambers.”

“Now you can log onto Reddit, log onto Discord, [or] somewhere, and really easily access this nice little echo chamber where everyone is sharing that harmful view with each other and that justifies your experience, justifies your view and strengthens that misogynistic take on the world.”

“Why is it that we bear the brunt?” the women and girls in Gordon’s study asked her. “Why are you coming to us to do a survey? Go get the perpetrators, go teach them they cannot do it.” Gordon believes the misogyny so embedded in society is what fuels the behaviours we are seeing in our communities – what we are seeing in incel forums. “In terms of the belief that you can take a young woman and just have her for the taking, [it is the] engine room underneath. It is the attitudes in society,” she said.

Misogyny has changed from 50 years ago. Gordon reminds me that she and I would not be having this conversation then. “The flower is unfurling but it is also showing many flaws and many issues,” she said. “[Misogyny is] huge and it’s everywhere.”

---

Who wrote this?

Mary O’Sullivan is a freelance journalist from Tāmaki Makaurau who writes long-form and social issue stories. Graduating with a major in Journalism from Auckland University of Technology in 2024, she has also worked as an intern reporter for NZME.