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“You Don’T Understand… It’S Not About Virginity”: Sexual Markets, Identity Construction, And Violent Masculinity On An Incel Forum Board, Joshua A. Segalewitz

Honors Theses

The “manosphere” is an online collection of antifeminists and men’s rights activists. Incels, short for involuntary celibates, interact in this space and have been labeled as extreme misogynists, white supremacists, and domestic terrorists. I engage with popular sociological theories of masculinity (including hegemonic, hybrid, and inclusive masculinities) to analyze dominant discourses on the website incels.is. The data for this project are comments from 100 threads randomly sampled from 4,532 total threads posted in 2018. Using a grounded theory approach, I first explore how incels think about sexuality as an economy, devising a scheme that places everyone in a sexual hierarchy …