Pathways out of Networked Misogyny for Incels: A Digital Ethnography of r/Incelexit

Background: Largely operating online, incels identify as involuntarily celibate men who are frustrated by their inability to get a romantic or sexual partner (Ging, 2019). Their worldview is grounded in a shared hatred of women and feminism (Baele et al., 2021; O’Malley et al., 2020). Although incels are commonly portrayed as upholding an inescapable ideology that promotes networked misogyny and violence against themselves (e.g., self-harm) and others (e.g., violence against women), there exists a unique online Reddit forum called r/IncelExit that aims to support self-identifying incels who are considering leaving inceldom. Seeing as over half of incels seek counseling and social work services (Speckhard et al., 2021), this research puts forth several implications for social work clinicians, educators, and policymakers by highlighting how online community support can be mobilized to encourage, share, teach, and sustain concrete exit strategies for incels who want to move away from hostile sexism and toxic masculinity.

Methods: Seeing as the r/IncelExit forum mobilizes community self-help to support individuals leaving the violent extremism of incel communities, our research was dually framed by deradicalization and disengagement theories (Horgan, 2009; Koehler, 2017) and a mutual aid lens (Nelson et al., 1998). Guided by digital ethnography methods (Pink et al., 2015), our exploratory study aimed to: (1) understand the topics that are being discussed within the most engaged posts on r/IncelExit, and (2) understand what behaviors and activities are promoted and discussed on the forum to support disengagement, deradicalization, and exit from inceldom.

On September 2022, we captured the top 25 most-engaged forums on r/IncelExit by filtering all discussion forums on this subreddit and selecting the top posts of all time. These 25 forums, which contained the forums with most up-votes and most comments, solicited over 2,070 comments from 709 unique users. Forum comments were treated as qualitative data and were imported into NVivo for analysis. The forums were analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s (2022) six steps of Reflexive Thematic Analysis using a team-based approach to deductive and inductive coding and theme formation.

Results: Sustained by the r/IncelExit community’s peer-support, findings illustrate various avenues for exiting inceldom that together focus on (1) working towards individual self-improvement (e.g., exploring new hobbies, furthering education), (2) working through one’s own mental health issues (e.g., pursuing counseling services), (3) and community involvement (e.g., making new friends, volunteering). Of key importance for incels who are trying to leave is the r/IncelExit community’s encouragement of incels to challenge and disrupt incel belief systems, including sexist and misogynistic thinking, as a key element of distancing from inceldom.

Conclusions: While countering violent extremism approaches typically focus on psychosocial or criminal justice interventions, our digital ethnography findings codified an alternative online response—one that is grounded in mutual aid, peer support, and inner-group collaborative encouragement. Our research encourages policymakers, educators, and clinicians to mobilize socio-technological ecosystems such as r/IncelExit for digital social work. For social workers supporting incel clients, study findings offer an important resource that harnesses incels’ capacity to change harmful behaviors and counter groupthink misogynistic beliefs.