"I am not like all the other girls". Femcel, pinkpilled and women in the Incel communities. A qualitative analysis of the Italian ‘Il Forum dei Brutti’.

Incel is the acronym for “involuntary celibates”, a moniker to identify people – mainly heterosexual white men – who declare themselves unable to find a sexual partner, due to a non-canonical aesthetic or because judged unattractive (Maxwell et al., 2020; O’Malley et al., 2020). Unlike the socalled “redpilled”, Incels have a hard time establishing sexual relationships with the opposite sex. Born online and spread within platforms such as Reddit and 4Chan, Incels communities gradually become independent from the most popular social platforms. In fact, the needing to explicitly express their frustration about women, through extremist language, clashes with the anti-hate-speech policies wide adopted in recent years by the principal Social Network Sites. Reddit itself, which was originally considered the Incels’ favorite hangout, decided in 2017 to shut down the /r/incels subreddit for violating HS policies. The moderation measures, far from weakening the internal cohesion of the movement, have pushed the heterogenous communities to found private online spaces to host their members. Indeed, the new spaces are considered “oasis of peace where one can peacefully discuss issues that are too often considered taboo” (Il Redpillatore, 2017). Famous example of these is the “incel.is” website and, in Italy, “Il Forum dei Brutti”. While in recent years the phenomenon has attracted the attention of the academics in many fields, from Sociology to NLP (Farrell T. et al., 2019; Tranchese and Sugiura 2021), mostly due to the misogynistic tendencies, to our knowledge, little attention has been addressed to their female supporters. Known as Femcel or “pinkpilled”, they distinguish from Incels by their lack of sympathy for those women of the same conditions. Indeed, they are hostile both to men and to other women. The qualitative study seeks to investigate the discursive strategies adopted by women who have acquired status within the Italian Incel communities. We claim that women are accepted when self-defined as virtuous exceptions – under the Incels’ standards – to the rest of female gender. The language used is characterized by a high level of empathy expressed through advice “from the inside”, and by internalized male oppression, designed to limit the contrast with male members. The investigation is developed from some public accessible forum posts. Reported posts are protected from anonymity, in full compliance with ethical principles of research and privacy policies.