Reddit Bans Community of Celibate Men for Making Rape Threats

Reddit has banned the men's community r/Incels because it wouldn't stop issuing rape threats and calling women animals, sluts, or "the embodiment of evil." The discussion board had more than 40,000 users who blamed their "involuntary" celibacy on women.

Former users of r/incels have responded to the ban by writing that "the Chads have won," using a term the community coined for alpha males, or men who have no problem attracting female partners. Other terms used by r/incels include Staceys (beautiful, promiscuous women), hypergamy (women's drive to seek out the most powerful alpha male), and cucks (men who allow their female partners to exercise desire toward another man). That last term is beloved by Rush Limbaugh and Steve Bannon, and has been embraced by the alt-right as a way to insult critics and opponents.

Reddit told The Guardian that it shut down r/Incels because it violated site policy. "Communities focused on this content and users who post such content will be banned from the site," a spokesperson said. Yet the site seems to be okay with men's rights activist (MRA) communities that go after feminisits and treat women as second-class citizens.

One such group is Men Going Their Own Way, or r/MGTOW. It says it seeks to foster a supportive community among biological men. On the surface level, that seems fine. But the board also equates feminism to "bullshit." There's also r/theredpill, an anti-feminist community with more than 200,000 subscribers. It invites women to join—as long as they're cool with being naturally subservient and agree to stick to outdated gender norms. The mods running r/theredpill say their movement exists because of what feminism did to the dating world, marriage, and the economy.

Saturday Night Live writer Sam Jay describes this male mindset in her stand-up. She points out that white men who feel something has been taken away from them in 2017 are remembering the era immortalized in AMC's Mad Men. "[Men] could wake up in the morning, bourbon on their breath, another woman's smell on their body [...] kiss their wife, swerve all the way to work, [...] have sex with their secretary right in the middle of the office."

Harvey Weinstein claimed it was that lifestyle that led him to act in sexually inappropriate ways with women. But as he discovered, those days are gone. And, if enough people have their way, they're not coming back.