For some time now, there has been a shared feeling in our country that everything (absolutely everything) is possible… and most of the time, not in a good way. It's no news that Argentina is going through not only a change in government but also a change of era, marked by violent discourses, some of which are foreign to the Argentine idiosyncrasy, that is, to our way of being and conducting ourselves as a society.
Although there is a widespread consensus that the current state of politics facilitates a wide variety of violent expressions, some of these are not a product of our own problems as a country but are part of a foreign subculture that is slowly starting to take its first steps to generate fear in places that were previously safe. What happened this last weekend, when the authorities of the Faculty of Exact Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires canceled a student party due to a threat from a group of self-described libertarian students known as “incels”, goes in that direction: many things can happen in Argentina, but this type of “yankee”-style violence, imported along with foreign concepts and customs, cannot… at least not until now.
The incels (short for involuntary celibates) are individuals, generally men, who self-identify as involuntary celibates. That is, people who wish to have romantic or sexual relationships but fail to establish them, blaming society and mainly women for their unwanted celibacy. "I’m going to the Exactas party with a shotgun. This is not a joke. I have a shotgun, and I'm going to use it at the Exactas party. Go if you have the guts". The threat, which fortunately remained just a virtual statement, is enough material to question what makes a young man want to bring a weapon to a festive gathering and massacre his peers for partisan, ideological, or gender-related reasons.
A first approach to the phenomenon suggests that this is one more of the hate discourses currently seeking revenge against the expressions and feminist policies of recent years. However, it is surprising, and even ridiculous, to discover that the term "incel" was born, nothing more and nothing less, from a Canadian woman who in 1997 launched a website called Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project. This space aimed to include and support individuals of any gender experiencing loneliness and difficulties in finding partners, something that curiously resembles the communities that have formed today, more than two decades later, around the great offer of psychologists and love gurus on social networks, who provide emotional guides and interactive spaces to reflect on relationships and love in the 21st century. Perhaps this woman already anticipated what was to come; perhaps she “saw” it coming… or maybe, despite our tendency to seek self-isolation as a means of survival, we still need to form communities, even if they include individualistic expressions within them.
The reality is that over time, what started as a supportive community space transformed into a series of virtual groups, where openly violent discourse toward women proliferated and the social order resulting from gender equality policies and new narratives emerged. It is certainly noteworthy that a group, initiated as a space of containment and solidarity, has so quickly migrated to a stance of frustration that justifies and promotes extreme violence as a form of justice (or revenge?) for the oppressed of the new order, that is, the failures of the system. Impotence, in every sense of the word, seems to explain why a twenty-something libertarian has no better plan for the weekend than to fantasize about the death of his peers, in whom he identifies the cause of all his woes.
The incel subculture, globally reaching, uses right-wing parties and institutionalized spaces of an anarcho-capitalist nature as a diffusion platform, also known as the libertarian trend in Argentina. However, despite identifying with such spaces, incels do not endorse the values of meritocracy or the active role of men in seeking their personal triumphs, especially when it comes to explaining why they are not successful with women (or in general). For them, their celibacy is the result of social “hypergamy”, a theory that suggests on one hand that women have superficial choices regarding their potential partners and on the other hand, that they always seek partners of a higher status, both economically, educationally, culturally, and socially, thereby leaving “average” or “inferior” men (that is, themselves) without romantic or sexual options.
By considering this reality as unchangeable, these men not only adopt a stance of inaction but also self-proclaim as victims of the system, which can gradually lead to violence against the object of their desire. But, even accepting that this theory has some solid foundation and does not lead to a simplification and stereotyping of the complex dynamics of human relationships, under libertarian principles, one could not blame women for freely choosing who they want to be with or for selecting the “best man” within the logic of supply and demand in the market of sexual-affective relationships. In any case, if for incels hypergamy leads to a kind of sociological division of “classes of men”, where successful men are on one side and socially marginalized men are on the other, it should only be a matter of personal effort for these men to become more desirable to be chosen, within a competitive framework, by the women they so desire (and whom they so hate for being unable to possess). Or, in the words of our libertarian-liberal president: “with me, you will have to compete: you will have to serve your neighbor with better quality goods at a better price… or you will go out of business” (... or go into celibacy).
As these discourses begin to gain ground, fueled by great frustration and the deterioration of social ties, it becomes crucial to reflect on how it is possible that this new wave of violence, with repetitive hints toward domestic terrorism, has emerged from ideological currents that, paradoxically, promote principles of non-aggression, or that, curiously, started as spaces of containment and solidarity for different ways of life and feelings. Perhaps it would be wise to recall the stance of the most influential theorist of liberalism regarding the effects of resentment, jealousy, and bitterness, not only in a man's private sphere (or in economic relationships) but in the public realm: “envy is the desire to lower our competitors for the mere fact of seeing them degraded” (Smith, A. 1759/2009)... if the father of liberalism says so, it must be true.
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