The Red Pill, Unicorns and White Knights: Cultural Symbolism and Conceptual Metaphor in the Slang of Online Incel Communities

Abstract

The paper focuses on one particular and rather extreme branch of men’s rights activism—the online incel community, which has recently made headlines in the mainstream media after the infamous attack of a self-proclaimed incel, Alek Minassian, in April 2018. The collective of mostly male individuals identifying as involuntarily celibate who gather on various blogs, subreddits, Facebook groups, and forums in order to discuss their grievances on a large scale has often been described as a hate group, mostly due to the extreme language used in online discussions. The slang used by this relatively unknown group, while undoubtedly controversial, is indeed interesting from a linguistic perspective, as it employs several processes in the process of coinage, resulting in neologisms aimed at delineating the boundaries of in-group identity and making the content of the exchanges unintelligible to outsiders. The paper is an attempt to analyse the jargon of the incel community from a linguistic perspective, investigating the various sources for the coinage of in-group terminology in the scope of the Discursive Worldview framework proposed by Waldemar Czachur (Explorations 4, pp. 16–32, 2016). In an attempt to uncover the ideology fuelling the discursive worldview shared by the group, the analysis focuses on collective symbols, conceptual metaphors and metonymies, or rather strings of conceptualisations resulting in the emergence of a particular term or expression, as well as the implications for the target stemming from cultural connotations of source domains. Particular attention is given to the various cultural symbols that have been incorporated into incel slang, ranging from well-established Western mythological concepts and symbols of popular culture, to scientific and pseudo-scientific research, including the theory of evolution and evolutionary psychology. The results of the analysis lead to conclusions about the links between mainstream anglocentric cultural concepts and the subculture of fringe groups such as the incel community, as well as the implications of metaphorical transfer for both in-group members and those targeted by them.