This Insight is part of GNET’s Gender and Online Violent Extremism series, aligning with the UN’s 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence.
Content warning: This Insight contains discussions of rape.
The use of religious arguments to legitimise radical ideology has been a long-standing extremist tactic. Both Islamist and far-right actors have employed culturally valued religious arguments from Islam and Christianity, respectively, to legitimise their cause as a divine duty.
This Insight argues that actors within the Manosphere, incels specifically, have adopted a similar approach by employing Christian fundamentalist sexual narratives to bolster their cause. This is done in two ways: some incels directly cite scripture to justify ideology, and others construct their arguments through the lens of culturally digestible fundamentalist ideas, such as purity. This Insight focuses on the latter. This tactic is particularly effective in lending their ideas legitimacy in cultural settings which value Christian morality frameworks, such as the USA.
Sexual Market Value
The concept of ‘Sexual Market Value’ is rooted in purity narratives. Leidig (2023) defines the term as the idea that “women are born with a high sexual value based on fertility and beauty that decreases as they get older and can no longer bear children” (p. 68). ‘Sexual Market Value’ suggests that a woman’s social worth is inherently tied to her status as a sexual commodity, specifically as a virgin. Women who have had more sexual partners are considered ‘used up’ and thus possess a low market value. The concept is particularly prominent in the incel community, which engages in a glorification of underage women, for both their sexual and social naiveté.
While incels are typically more visceral in their obsession over virginity in comparison to real-world purity norms, they occupy part of a broader cultural obsession over women’s ‘worth’ being tied to their status as a virgin, which is plainly evident in fundamentalist purity culture. Klement et al. (2022) explain that groups considered to have a ‘purity culture’ generally “prize the maintenance of virginity” and view “sexual exploration as a lapse on the part of the women” (p. 2074). One thread on a popular incel forum discussed a study suggesting that women who are virgins are less likely to be sexual assault victims. Comments include:
If you are not a virgin, rape crime or any kind of sexual violence should not count. (User A).
If [rape victims] aren’t virgins that what exactly is the big deal, it’s not like anything of value is being taken away from them at that point. (User B).
While the rhetoric is certainly more extreme than what would typically be seen in fundamentalist arguments, they share an underlying assumption that virginity equates to moral cleanliness. As a result, incels set their arguments within culturally familiar lines of reasoning. The users argue that rape only exists in the context of violating a woman’s purity (virginity), not in terms of her consent; it is unacceptable because she has been ‘spoiled’ for her future partner, not because rape in itself is wrong. The disdain towards rape victims with previous sexual partners is a reflection of incels upholding a brutalised and extreme interpretation of purity culture’s ‘prizing the maintenance of virginity’. By mirroring familiar purity narratives around virginity, Manosphere actors can construct their arguments more convincingly within a Christian American cultural context.
By tying a woman’s value to her virginity, the body becomes commodified. This commodification is also reflected in purity narratives. Owens et al. (2021) cite the common nature of contamination metaphors within purity culture, “as unmarried women who engage in sexual activity are compared to half-eaten candy, tape covered in debris and trampled flowers”. The idea that women are ‘spoiled’ after sexual encounters is the underlying logic behind the disdain exhibited by incels towards rape victims; while incels carry this logic to a more extreme means, both share the concept that women who have had sex have lost their worth.
Linda Kay Klein’s memoir, recounting a childhood in the evangelical movement, supports this interpretation of Christian fundamentalist narratives. She describes ‘object lessons’ whereby “virgins are described as shiny new cars everyone wants to buy, and all those who have had sex are described as used cars nobody wants” (Klein, 2018, p. 7). Within fundamentalist narratives, the female body is routinely objectified by comparing sex to a form of consumption, whereby the woman is inevitably damaged or ‘used up’ by sex. Thus, the Manosphere concept of ‘Sexual Market Value’ relates directly to purity culture, as a woman who is not a virgin is considered ‘unclean’ and of less value.
Feminine Gatekeepers
Incels construct women as sexual gatekeepers. Narratives within the Manosphere reflect the idea that women are, by nature, sexually manipulative. Women withhold or provide sex, ‘luring’ men into temptation or immorality, and thus are responsible for the sexual morality of society. This draws strong parallels to the fundamentalist idea of women as ‘stumbling blocks’, meaning that women acting ‘impurely’ may cause male members of the community to succumb to sexual temptation, or ‘stumble’ (Klein, 2018).
For incels, women are considered “in control of the sexual marketplace, and therefore responsible for any sexual failures of incel men” (GNET, 2024, p. 7). While these ‘sexual failings’ typically refer to failure to find a sexual partner, they also extend to rape. When a woman is sexually assaulted, it is deemed her own fault due to her moral failing to uphold sexual boundaries. One user on a thread on the incel forum in question, discussing rape statistics, said:
Ironic, that to stay safe, all they need to do is be moral, and not be a whore. And yet, they just can’t seem to handle that very simple solution (User C).
Masculine Gatecrashers
To uphold the expectation of women as sexual gatekeepers, incels take from purity culture in positioning men as sexual ‘gatecrashers’. This is the idea that men are sexually uncontrollable and subsequently incapable of bearing responsibility for their sexual appetites. By following the fringe fundamentalist concept that men struggle to control their sexual appetite, incels can further justify violent misogyny in a familiar cultural context. One comment in an incel forum read:
… Sexual assault in 2021 is a choice… if you still want to go to parties full of sexually aggressive men then don’t blame the rest of the guys who warned you. It’s like sticking your hand in a shark tank and being surprised when a shark bites your hand off. Then trying to train the shark not to bite. (User D).
The comparison of attending ‘parties full of sexually aggressive men’ to ‘sticking your hand in a shark tank’ reinstates the idea that men are sexually uncontrollable, to an animalistic level. By reducing men to biting sharks, this user mirrors the fundamentalist idea that men cannot be held accountable for sexual assault if they are presented with an ‘easy opportunity’, in the same way as a predator cannot be held accountable for hunting prey. Furthermore, the idea that sexual assault is a ‘choice’ resonates strongly with the idea that only ‘ungodly’ women are assaulted, and that women are responsible for their own assaults.
Upholding Men’s Wellbeing
Incels lean strongly into nihilistic narratives. Many perceive themselves as failures due to their lack of sexual success, not just due to the sense of loneliness, but also the additional social shame. Some express suicidal thoughts and discuss self-harm in detail. Incels broadly blame women, as part of a broader social dating hierarchy, for their low self-worth. They argue that women force men into isolation by only providing sex and intimacy for a small sub-section of the male population (the 80/20 rule). This rhetoric is also visible in hyper-conservative forms of fundamentalism, like that presented by Stormie Omartian in her marriage guidance text The Power of the Praying Wife (1997). Omartian refers to a lack of sex in a relationship as a “neglect” and states that “for a husband, sex is pure need… a man can easily be made to feel insignificant, beaten down, discouraged, destroyed or tempted in this area of his being” (p. 61). Incels reflect Omartian’s concept that men’s poor mental health is down to a lack of sexual access. This concept rests on the assumption that women have a duty to provide sexual and social support for men, else men’s well-being suffers.
According to Srinivasan (2021), a similar contradiction was visible in the aftermath of the 2014 Isla Vista shooting, where incel Elliot Rodger killed 6 people. He justified his attack in a 103 page manifesto, where he “fantasised about a political order in which he rules the world and sex was banned”, owing to his frustration that women “refused to see value in him” (p. 74). Srinivasan describes a widespread belief amongst incels that if a woman had simply had sex with Rodger, he wouldn’t have ‘had’ to kill anybody. In this case, incels saw Rodger’s violence as a failing on the part of women to sexually provide for him, and other men like him. While of course Omartian does not go as far as to legitimise mass violence, in both scenarios, the failings of men are put down to women’s refusal to provide them with sexual access. Sex is reduced to a servicing process, a task which women must complete willingly, but not pleasurably – for the benefit of her husband, not for her own satisfaction.
Tech Platform Responses
The biggest threat posed by this emerging tactic is that it lends extremist misogyny mainstream political traction. Incels, for the most part, operate on small-scale platforms, often anonymously. On the other hand, the broader manosphere spans multiple scales of platforms, ranging from medium-sized sites like Rumble to large-scale video platforms. Due to the palatability that purity narratives give to incel arguments, their ideology can graduate from small-scale forums onto large platforms where it thrives under the guise of ‘Christian values’. Within the Western American context that the majority of mainstream platforms are governed, it results in a sinister ideology being able to take hold.
From a practical perspective, there are two main suggestions. The first is that technology companies take extremist misogyny seriously as an individual category of extremism. Often, misogyny is viewed as a byproduct of other forms of extremism, or of gender dynamics in general. There has been some progress on this front from tech regulatory platforms like OFCOM, which have pursued specific guidance on preventing violence against women and girls. However, the take-up from these ideas on large platforms – where these ideas are most easily accessible – seems limited. As incels begin to mask themselves under culturally attractive frameworks like Christian fundamentalism, it becomes all the more important to regulate such content as it spills into more public forums. Furthermore, regulation protects both those who would be impacted by its hate, but also Christians as a community, who currently stand to be exploited as a guise for extremism.
Secondly, practitioners and academics alike must widen their perspective of online misogyny to understand how it intersects with forms of misogyny which existed long before the internet. Misogyny is not new, and it is unsurprising that Manosphere actors are beginning to root their arguments in tried-and-tested methods to legitimise their cause. That is not to say that inceldom does not have unique challenges in its online presence, but that it exists across a wider cultural landscape of misogyny. In order to understand how the Manosphere legitimises and constructs its arguments, one must look at the broader scope of societal sexism.
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Erin Stoner is a researcher specialising in the British anti-migrant movement. She has specific interest in the intersection between Christian Nationalism and the far right, as well as the use of Christian rhetoric to justify extremism more broadly. She holds a Masters in Terrorism, Security and Society, where her thesis discussed the use of Christian fundamentalist sexual narratives within the Manosphere.
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