The Pleasure of Misogyny – Incels, Castration, and Sexual Difference

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite social movement toward flattening the hierarchy and empowering women, a much different message has been proliferating in certain places online – a message of rage, envy, hatred, entitlement, and violence toward women. I propose that manifest forms of misogyny reflect both something deeply embedded in our human nature and something very specific about our contemporary dilemmas. If this is true, how are we to make sense of antifeminist backlash at this point in history? In this article I will focus specifically on the ways this hatred manifests online, the intersection between internet culture and sexed bodies, and what that relation reveals about the logic of misogyny writ large. Using Lacan’s writing about castration and sexual difference to study the incel culture (i.e., those men identifying as involuntarily celibate), I will argue that the current structure of misogyny, at its most extreme, does not reflect an ideology that women are lacking or lesser than, but rather that women are seen as the uncastrated object that promises (and withholds) complete fulfillment from those who feel entitled to have it all. First, I will outline the manifestations of sexism online and how it persists despite social, educational, and political movements toward equality. Then I will briefly trace the history of how women come to inhabit the place of Otherness in the mind – that is, the way sexism has become symbolically hardwired. Finally, I will put forth some ideas about the function of misogyny right now, the pleasure that sustains it, and what it reveals about the social ills of our time.