I. The Problem of Incel Ambivalence

One of the most baffling things about incels is the way they direct violent hatred toward those they obsessively desire. Beautiful women are so important to them that their rejection is a life-ending tragedy. But these “goddesses” are also “evil, slutty bitches” and disgusting “whores” (Rodger Reference Rodger2014, 76; Tolentino Reference Tolentino2018). Incels are fixated on sexualized and sexually available women, “hot model-like girls” with “tantalizing” bodies, but they revile “sluts” who “throw themselves at” men (Rodger Reference Rodger2014, 110). They seem to both put women on pedestals of desirability and throw them down to the depths of repulsion. Rodger famously articulated this ambivalence: “I will attack the very girls who represent everything I hate in the female gender: the hottest sorority of UCSB [University of California, Santa Barbara's Alpha Phi]” (132, my emphasis).

How do we explain this apparent contradiction? One initially appealing strategy is to deem it an acute case of sour grapes. Their ambivalence is only superficial: incels’ disdain and anger are a way of coping with loneliness. However, feminists have pointed out that this is an inadequate explanation. Many other women and men face systematic and prolonged sexual rejection and struggle with a lack of intimacy (Tolentino Reference Tolentino2018). The contingents of female incels, or “femcels,” online are a vivid testament to this (Chester Reference Chester2018; Kohn Reference Kohn2020).Footnote ⁵ But they do not all respond by declaring war on the people they desire or going on killing sprees. Feminists have maintained that this swing from love to hate cannot be explained by appealing to an individual, gender-neutral psychology (Manne Reference Manne2018, 37–41; Bates Reference Bates2020, 3, 50). Incels turn from attraction to violence because, like other perpetrators of misogynistic violence, they see women in a particular way.Footnote ⁶ What is this representation that fuels incel desire and incel hate? Two answers have emerged. The first is that incels desire women as objects without the capacity for choice. Call this objectification. The second is that incels see women as loyal servants who owe them sex and love. Call this entitlement.Footnote ⁷

The core idea of objectification is that incels are driven by a patriarchal conviction that “women are decorative sexual objects, and that male worth is measured by how good-looking a woman they acquire” (Tolentino Reference Tolentino2018). They dehumanize women because they regard them as lacking characteristically human capacities, like the capacity to choose, to have a subjective point of view, or to have complex emotions (Radford Reference Radford, Radford and Russell1992, 5; Bates Reference Bates2020, 29; Kohn Reference Kohn2020; Baele, Brace, and Coan Reference Baele, Brace and Coan2021, 1675).Footnote ⁸ In this way, incels expect women to be like dolls, ready to be picked off the shelf. And social norms, economic dependency, and other constraints meant that, until relatively recently, men could just pick women off the shelf. However, over the last century, women have gained substantial “economic and cultural power.” These changes

Women have independent incomes, their social status is not determined by marriage, and, in the era of “dating apps,” they too can swipe right or left. These supposed objects are now choosing, expressing feelings and preferences. Incels are then men who desire women qua “inconveniently sentient bodies” and find themselves taken aback by a changing reality (Tolentino Reference Tolentino2018).

However, as Kate Manne has pointed out, the attitudes and actions of someone like Rodger “not only presuppose but seem to hinge on women's presumed humanity” (Manne Reference Manne2018, 150; Reference Manne2020, 25). The point here is twofold. First, objectification misses what is attractive about women for incels. It is true that Rodger talks of women as things that “should be his” (Rodger Reference Rodger2014, 69, 100). But what he wants are not just “inconveniently sentient bodies.” He wants the attention of women as choosing agents, capable of genuine “subjectivity, preferences, and . . . deep emotional attachments” (Manne Reference Manne2018, 150; Reference Manne2020, 25). He wants women to notice him, to admire him, “to check him out” (Rodger Reference Rodger2014, 98, 122).Footnote ⁹ And a mere simulation of this attention will not do. For example, when his parents hire a “pretty looking blonde” as his counselor, Rodger says:

What Rodger wants then is the genuinely free exercise of distinctively human capacities in selective and directed ways. A hired simulation provides fleeting comfort, but quickly proves profoundly unsatisfying.Footnote ¹⁰

Second, objectification does not make sense of why incels’ complaints against women are so distinctively second-personal, centered around notions of “fault” and “blame.” In a video uploaded before his attack, Rodger said “I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. It's an injustice, a crime. . .” (quoted in Manne Reference Manne2020, 15).Footnote ¹¹ If women are just mindless objects, why blame them and punish them? Rodger's moralistic tone and his charges of personal wrongdoing presuppose that women are human. They must have “agency, autonomy, and the capacity to be addressed by him” (Manne Reference Manne2018, 150; Reference Manne2020, 26). Therefore, objectification misses both key aspects of incel desire and incel hatred.

This brings us to entitlement. On this hypothesis, incels desire women not as objects, but as subordinated humans, bound by patriarchal social norms to offer them sex and love. The incel is the kind of “sexless man . . . who is convinced he is owed sex, and is enraged by the women who deprive him of it” (Srinivasan Reference Srinivasan2018). Much like a feudal lord sees his servants as personally owing him their loyalty, incels represent women as owing them a similar hierarchical allegiance. Put differently, what Rodger “wanted and felt entitled to” was a “human giver”: “a woman who is held to owe many if not most of her distinctively human capacities to a suitable boy or man, ideally, and his children” (Manne Reference Manne2018, 301; Reference Manne2020, 11). Incels’ hatred is then a reaction not to unrequited love, but to thwarted hierarchical expectations. When women fail to behave as adoring subordinates, they are punished for this disobedience (Srinivasan Reference Srinivasan2018; Bates Reference Bates2020, 17; Baele, Brace, and Coan Reference Baele, Brace and Coan2021, 1684).

What enrages incels, then, is not that women today assert themselves as humans, but rather as equal humans. On this reading, incel violence is a way to keep women in line and is a prime example of the reactionary phenomena theorized by feminists as “backlash” (Faludi Reference Faludi1991; Caputi and Russell Reference Caputi, Russell, Radford and E1992, 17–18), “aggrieved entitlement” (Kimmel Reference Kimmel2013), and “misogyny” (Manne Reference Manne2018; Reference Manne2020).

Although there is something deeply intuitive about this hypothesis, it has two crucial weaknesses. First, entitlement leaves unexplained the exterminatory character of incel violence. Incel attackers do not just want to put women back in their proper place. They want to rid the world of women altogether. This seems too extreme to be just punishment. Consider the delusional fantasy that Rodger sketches at the end of his manifesto: a “fair and pure world” where women have been rounded up and starved to death in concentration camps, sex is outlawed, and a few women are “kept and bred” in secret labs. There is no “creature more evil and depraved than the human female”; she is a “plague” that must be eradicated (Rodger Reference Rodger2014, 136). If the problem is an insolent servant, why fantasize about a world purged of all servants and the great work they do? If incel rage is nothing but a reaction to a violation of hierarchical expectations, we are forced to write off this language as inconsequential rhetoric. However, the lethal attacks that these words have spawned make this move unappealing.

Second, the claim that incels are punishing the assertion of women's equality seems untrue. Incel attacks are notoriously not directed at feminists or women perceived as bucking patriarchal norms.Footnote ¹² On the contrary, they target “hot” sororities, yoga studios, and erotic massage parlors. These are not just places where you are likely to find women (Hoffman, Ware, and Shapiro Reference Hoffman, Ware and Shapiro2020, 570); they are places associated with the very hyperfemininity that incels are obsessed with and that they encapsulate in the “Stacy” meme.Footnote ¹³ The Stacy is described as “naturally curvy” with a body that can “give men instant erections,” “sexy, majestic long blonde hair,” “makeup on point,” and as letting “Chad” (her alpha-male counterpart) “dominate her” and abuse her. She is also unintelligent, vain, fake, sociopathic, and “never works a day in her life.” For most men, she is out of reach and dangerous, exploiting them for money and favors (Jennings Reference Jennings2018; Maxwell et al. Reference Maxwell, Robinson, Williams and Keaton2020; Incels Wiki 2020; 2021). At the end of the day, the Stacy organizes her life around pleasing the most patriarchal men. And yet she is reviled. When Rodger declares war on women, it is the Stacys he is talking about: those “hot, beautiful, blonde” women throwing themselves at domineering men (Rodger Reference Rodger2014, 132). Minassian made this clearer: “The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys!” (Hoffman, Ware, and Shapiro Reference Hoffman, Ware and Shapiro2020, 570). It seems then that, if something is being punished by incels, it is not feminist-inspired insurrection, but high compliance with patriarchal norms.

Entitlement theorists may reply that punishment does not always target those who break the rules. Sometimes it is displaced onto women who are particularly vulnerable, regardless of their “good behavior” (Manne Reference Manne2020, 52). Could the Stacys be an easy target for men frustrated by feminists? This seems unlikely. They are more accepting of masculine authority, but only from Chads, who can abuse them at will. Stacys inhabit different social circles and even different physical spaces. These are women whom incels see from afar, and who are often aggressively guarded by their male partners. Moreover, the manipulative, self-interested Stacy feels no sense of obligation toward “lower” men. Targeting them is not easy. Rodger himself headed for the “hottest sorority” on campus but, in the end, did not manage to kill a single woman inside (Manne Reference Manne2018, 35–36).

The problem of ambivalence remains. Why do incels hate what they love and love what they hate? Feminists are right to criticize individualistic, gender-neutral, sour-grapes narratives. However, the representations they have claimed drive incels—women as nonhuman objects or women as “human givers”—cannot account for the ambivalence that characterizes their attacks. In what follows, I propose an alternative feminist explanation that employs a different model of patriarchal representation.

II. Beauvoir on Woman as “Other”

The extreme ambivalence that incels exhibit toward women may seem odd, but it is far from idiosyncratic. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir points to it as central to patriarchal social relations and to the culture that sustains them.

Men have represented women in a myriad of ever-changing, contradictory ways. According to Beauvoir, this oscillation between love and hate is the only constant content of patriarchal representations over time (Direk Reference Direk2011, 68).Footnote ¹⁴ One of the things she does in The Second Sex is then explain how these contradictory attitudes hang together.

According to Beauvoir, the key to understanding the way men see women is to first understand the way men see themselves. As human beings, all of us experience our existence as both active agents in the world and fixed beings under the eyes of others—as both subjects and objects. This gives rise to “a tension between our drive to transcend ourselves and our drive to cement our identities in ways that we and others will find ceaselessly praiseworthy” (Bauer Reference Bauer2015, 47). We want to do things in the world, but we worry about the uncertain judgment of others. We would like to be successful. But success requires taking the risk of doing things. Many men try to resolve this “phenomenological dilemma” by embracing a certain cultural myth of masculinity that dissolves this problematic human ambiguity.Footnote ¹⁵ They become, in their own eyes, what Beauvoir calls “sovereign subjects”: pure active agents in the world (Bergoffen Reference Bergoffen2002, 412; Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2011, 86, 159; Kruks Reference Kruks2012, 16–17, 69; Mann Reference Mann2014, 42–45).Footnote ¹⁶

Sovereign subjects refuse to think of themselves as objects. They see themselves as only subjects in the world, unconstrained by facts about who they are, what they have done, or what their bodies are like. At the same time, sovereign subjects attempt to make their capacity to transcend themselves a “cemented” characteristic of who they are. This means they experience their capacity for action as if it were a fixed characteristic of who they are, like a deep and stable essence.Footnote ¹⁷ These two things—being just a subject and being a fixed subjectivity—are deeply connected. To think of yourself as just an actor, and never as someone who has done certain actions, is to experience your capacity for acting in a very distorted way, as if it were a static feature of who you are. In adopting this attitude, sovereign subjects are trying to be successful without taking any risk. Failure is something we experience only as objects of evaluation. If you are never an object, you can never fail. And, because their only fixed feature is subjectivity itself, sovereign subjects can think themselves permanently successful. They are, by nature, great actors, who can never be disgraced by their actions.

The problem is that this dreamed “sovereignty” is impossible. To say we experience ourselves as subjects is to say we experience ourselves as an active process of self-fashioning, of becoming ourselves. The idea of a fixed subjectivity is therefore profoundly incoherent: “to “be” something, once and for all [for example, a sovereign subject] is precisely not to be a subject” (Bauer Reference Bauer2015, 48). Put differently, to experience oneself as a praiseworthy actor, one must also be open to the risk of evaluation as an object. There is no heroism without the possibility of failure. But what these men seek is to be heroes, regardless of the quality of their actions. They are engaged in a form of “bad faith”: an ethically reprehensible denial of their ambiguous freedom, of its risks and its responsibilities (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2011, 208, 263, 27; Bauer Reference Bauer2015, 48). They are thereby alienating themselves from their own agency and identifying with a flattering fiction.Footnote ¹⁸

Men who see themselves as sovereign subjects need to have their paradoxical self-conception shored up constantly. They need an impossible confirmation that they are only activity, once and for all, to drown out their constant experience of human ambiguity. Beauvoir points to two kinds of entities to which these men can turn. The first is “Nature”: the natural world of impersonal forces, of life and death, of geological and organic processes. Sovereign man can experience himself as being only activity in some ways of relating to Nature: as its master, reaping its fruits, contemplating its landscapes, conquering its mountains. However, according to Beauvoir, this conquest will always be unsatisfying for an aspiring sovereign. Either he is not successful, and Nature remains a foreign obstacle; or, if Nature is successfully conquered, it is destroyed or assimilated: “in both cases, he [that is, the sovereign subject] remains alone; he is alone when touching a stone, alone when digesting a piece of fruit” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2011, 159). There is no one there to confirm that he has indeed shaped and surpassed the forces of the world. He can be only a subject, but he cannot experience his subjectivity as something he is in the fixed, object-like sense.

After all, it is only by being captured in the eyes of other humans that we find confirmation of what we are.Footnote ¹⁹ Unlike Nature, other humans are capable of judging us, praising us, and of making us experience ourselves as fixed beings of some kind or other. It is this experience that the sovereign subject needs to accomplish himself as a fixed subjectivity. But humans pose another problem. A judging peer can never confirm him as only an active subject. By the mere act of judging, the other makes the aspiring sovereign a constrained object of their gaze. To be confirmed as a subject by another human, we must also embrace the fact that we are objects in the world, in relation to them (Bauer Reference Bauer2001, 186). Sovereign subjects are incapable of this. They want to be praised but they cannot stand the risk of scrutiny. They will therefore try to eliminate this risk, by attempting to completely master others, like they did Nature. But, unlike natural objects, humans can always make a similar claim to mastery. For self-alienated men, interaction with others turns then into a ceaseless conflict (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2011, 159).Footnote ²⁰

Sovereign subjects are caught in a bind. They can reign over Nature, but this will do little to shore up their precarious sense of themselves. Among their peers, they can find confirmation of their subjectivity, but only by being objects of judgment. For a sovereign man, the natural world is too unlike him, and the human peer resembles him too much (160). He has then a “dream.” He wishes he could experience himself as just a subject, in relation to another consciousness who would confirm him as such. “This embodied dream is, precisely, woman. . . . She pits neither the hostile silence of nature nor the hard demand of a reciprocal recognition against him; by a unique privilege she is a consciousness, and yet it seems possible to possess her in the flesh” (160).

“Woman”—or, strictly speaking, this representation of women—is the perfect creature that uniquely enables men to accomplish themselves as sovereign subjects. This is the representation that Beauvoir terms woman as “Other.”Footnote ²¹ Feminist readings of Beauvoir have often interpreted this term as referring to a representation of women as objects or “things” (LeMoncheck Reference LeMoncheck1985, 31–32, 115; Langton Reference Langton2009, 1–2, 316; Cahill Reference Cahill2010, 2–4; Garcia Reference Garcia2021, 125). However, the passage above tells a more complex story. In Beauvoir's technical sense, a feminine “Other” is an entity that is both another human consciousness and an embodiment of Nature.Footnote ²² She is like other humans in that she can judge and give man the confirmation that mountains and pieces of fruit cannot. But, unlike other men, she can be truly dominated because she embodies Nature.Footnote ²³ In being Nature and a peer, the Other is neither. She is “a perfect intermediary” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2011, 160), a sui generis invention, an “interesting amalgam” (Mussett Reference Mussett and Simons2006, 280). She is an impossible, paradoxical entity: “nature raised to the transparency of consciousness; she is a naturally submissive consciousness” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2011, 161).

This myth of woman as Other provides sovereign subjects with a “marvelous hope”: to escape the silence of Nature and the struggle with other men (217, 161). Unlike Nature, she offers him not just the experience of doing things, but of seeing himself as a doer in her eyes. Unlike other men, she is fully conquerable, meaning that he can relate to her as just a subject. Even when he is being judged by her, sovereign man is never a helpless object. He can always conquer her judgment, just like he can conquer mountains. Therefore, in her eyes, he can never fail. But this great power is purchased at a price. Woman is only Other if she is assimilated to Nature. And Nature can only be gloriously conquered because it is a dangerous obstacle. “Man seeks the Other in woman as Nature and as his peer. But Nature inspires ambivalent feelings in man. He exploits it, but it crushes him; he is born from and he dies in it; it is the source of his being and the kingdom he bends to his will” (163, my emphasis).

The promise of the Other ultimately depends on her embodiment of the risk and danger of impersonal and uncontrollable natural forces (Griffin Reference Griffin1981, 12–14). Man can accomplish himself as sovereign by shaping Nature, but he can also feel trapped or crushed by it in ways that make him an object. Man's ambivalent attitude toward Nature becomes then an ambivalent attitude toward woman as the embodiment of Nature. As Other, she becomes “the stuff of action and its obstacle, man's grasp on the world and its failure,” and she acquires a permanent “double face” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2011, 213, 163).Footnote ²⁴ This produces an eroticism that is possessive but also profoundly ambivalent, marked by “hesitation between fear and desire, between the terror of being possessed by uncontrollable forces and the will to overcome them” (172). Man's desire for woman as Other is always then already a desire for an ambiguous projection of his deepest “hopes and fears” (162).Footnote ²⁵

One of Beauvoir's key insights is that, in chasing this impossible fantasy, men doom themselves to a bitter disenchantment (211, 184). Because “man seeks himself entirely in her and because she is All,” woman as Other “is never exactly this that she should be; she is everlasting disappointment” (213). Just like his aspiration to be onlya subject once and for all, man's desire for woman as Other is impossible to fulfill. He wants the lush beauty of Nature, but not its destructive forces.Footnote ²⁶ He wants a docile alterity, but not a full subjectivity facing him. He wants “to subdue her, as an untamed animal” (Vintges Reference Vintges2017, 139). He dreams of a real victory without risk, of a glorious conquest without possible failure, of being a subject without ever being an object. But these aspects cannot be detached from each other. This is why Beauvoir claims that these self-alienated men are trapped in a disappointing “game” in their relationship with women (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2011, 201, 208). In this game, woman as Other must act aloof. The man must then “tame” her not into subjugation, but into a willing adoration.Footnote ²⁷ However, if he wins the “game,” she is “had”—her danger is neutralized, and so is her desirability. Submissive wives, annexed as property, quickly lose their erotic interest (204–5). Sovereign man needs to move on to yet another affair. But if the Other remains aloof, then this is not just a “game,” but an actual refusal (208). Man's insecure sense of himself crumbles faced with this. The Other becomes then a natural obstacle, like a crushing rock. Her dangerous allure turns into an uncontrolled threat and she “becomes praying mantis or ogress” (262). Sooner or later, the Other inevitably reveals herself to be nothing but a “mirage” (272).

Woman as Other is then a patriarchal myth tailor-made to fulfill the needs of masculine bad faith. Men want to do things in the world, but they worry about the risk of failure. She gives them hope of evading this risk altogether by enabling them to embrace the cultural myth of masculinity as pure, unconstrained activity. Through the Other, men can distance themselves from their experience as objects of others’ judgment. They can instead see themselves as essentially heroes, as fixed transcendent subjectivities. To fulfill this function, woman as Other must be simultaneously another subject and an embodiment of Nature: someone who can judge, and someone whose judgment can be completely conquered. But this representation is paradoxical, unstable, and always bound to collapse. To experience oneself as a hero, one must be open to the risk of evaluation. Men cannot help but be aware of this. Hence their ambivalence toward Nature and toward women. This “is why woman has a double and deceptive image: she is everything he craves and everything he does not attain” (213).

What Beauvoir gives us is a model for thinking about patriarchal representations of women that incorporates what is intuitive about objectification and entitlement, but remains distinct from them.Footnote ²⁸ As Other, woman is both an object and a vassal, in a certain sense. But in being both, she is neither. She is a freedom, with a subjective perspective. But, unlike other men, she is not another competing rival. She is an object to be possessed, but not a mere tool to be used for one's purposes. She is a natural object filled with ambiguous powers: like the ocean that is calm and submissive but can engulf and kill you; or the ripe and fragrant fruit that can contain disease and putrefaction. For Beauvoir, “nymphs, dryads, mermaids” and other animistic goddesses are paradigmatic Others (174–76). They are impossible feminine figures that embody the natural world, with its promise and peril, while retaining a distinct human consciousness.

III. Elliot Rodger or the Dream of Sovereignty

I have argued that existing feminist proposals to explain incel violence fail to adequately do so. Objectification misses the fact that incels presuppose women's agency in important ways. Entitlement cannot account for why women excelling by patriarchal standards are singled out for extermination. I want to suggest that we can get a better understanding of incel attacks by thinking of these as self-alienated men pursuing the myth of woman as Other.

Consider Elliot Rodger's infamous manifesto, “My Twisted World.” One of the central themes of this autobiographical narrative is a search for a sense of accomplishment as a great actor: “as I've always believed, I am destined for great things” (Rodger Reference Rodger2014, 79, 81). Rodger narrates his life as a heroic tale, driven by a clear sense of not just superiority, but extraordinary agentic power. In Beauvoirian terms, Rodger seems to think of himself as a sovereign subject. He constantly talks about himself as “a creator” and a “living god” (109–10, 113–14, 117–18, 131, 133, 135). These are tropes Beauvoir associates explicitly with this masculine attitude. A sovereign subject, attempting to identify exclusively with his transcendence, will often repudiate his “carnal condition” and consider himself a “fallen god” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2011, 164).Footnote ²⁹

Recounting his early childhood, Rodger revels in the security and stability of this sovereign self-image. He describes climbing a “Big Rock” when he was eight years old, having “already conquered every other rock in the area.” It was a “challenge,” he was “nervous,” but it was “exhilarating,” and we find him marveling at the “sense of accomplishment” he felt. The “dread” of looking down only added to his pride (Rodger Reference Rodger2014, 12–13). We get similar descriptions of flying a kite, or “conquering” faraway lands traveling with his family (3, 14). Encountering Nature and mastering it gives the young Elliot a satisfying feeling of control and activity. However, what he really craves is not just the experience of making it to the top, but the acknowledgment by others—including the readers of his manifesto—of that feat. Childhood is an idyllic time because he can easily gather that acknowledgment. “As kids, proving our self-worth and gaining validation among our peers was achieved in a fair manner, by how good we were at games we played, or how big our collection of Pokemon cards were” (13). Life is good because others always assure him of his sovereignty.

Problems arise when Rodger starts noticing he may not always be seen as the best. At nine years old, he realizes he is short for his age and that tall boys get more “respect.” These are his “first feelings of inferiority” (15). Soon he discovers that school hierarchies are not based on card collections, but on wealth, race, height, and “coolness” (17). Rodger finds himself judged by others in ways he cannot control and that threaten to make him a “loser” (31). His reaction is then to double down. To maintain his godlike view of himself, he adamantly refuses to be an object of appraisal. He tries to turn all facts about who he is into new games that he is determined to win. This is when he becomes obsessed with social status and competition—something common to many incels (Baele, Brace, and Coan Reference Baele, Brace and Coan2021, 1676). “Life is a competition and a struggle, and I was slowly starting to realize it” (Rodger Reference Rodger2014, 17). He takes up skateboarding, dyes his hair blonde, buys new clothes, and demands that his parents become rich overnight. But, try as he might, he cannot fully dictate what others think of him. He is still an object of their uncertain, and often negative, scrutiny.

Rodger's classism and racism are a central part of this attempt to reassert himself as sovereign. His family is not as well-off as their upper-class friends in the Los Angeles film industry. This is a source of shame for the young Elliot, who is mocked by other boys for “living in a ‘poor’ house” (30). And yet he maintains that “wealth is one of the most important defining factors of self-worth and superiority” (102). Since his parents cannot get rich, he tries instead to experience himself as rich. He insults others as “low-class” (55, 89–90), and revels in temporarily entering hyperaffluent circles. When his mother receives tickets to a private concert “held for extremely wealthy people,” or his father gets invited to a “red carpet premiere,” Rodger finds confirmation of his sense of himself as unconstrained, always able to control the facts. But this does not last: “I loved attending exclusive events; it made me feel special. . . . I tried to pretend as if I was part of a wealthy family. I should be. That was the life I was meant to live. I WOULD BE!” (102).

Race is another highly salient social category for Rodger. His father is white and British, and his mother is Malaysian of Chinese descent. His mixed-race background makes him feel watched and judged by the racist eyes of his peers: “I am half White, half Asian, and this made me different from the normal fully-white kids that I was trying to fit in with” (17). To rectify this vulnerability, he employs the same strategies he applied to class. Rodger embraces a white-supremacist outlook, selectively identifies with his British ancestry, and lashes out at racialized men.Footnote ³⁰ He contrasts himself with his Latino roommate: “I am a beautiful, magnificent gentleman and he is a lowclass, pig-faced thug” (90). He puts down a black acquaintance: “I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves” (84). But, once again, his sense of control does not last. His stories about his own superiority fall apart when he sees “racially inferior” boys gathering admiration by skating or acting confidently (33, 84). Faced with societal prejudice, Rodger does not challenge it, but embraces it. Standing up against racism and classism would require some acceptance of his existence as an object, bound by some facts. Instead, Rodger asserts himself as essentially a transcendent subject, always able to control all things, including his position in these hierarchies.

In obsessing about rank and status, Rodger turns resolutely inwards. First, he locks himself into an isolating, irresolvable conflict with others. He needs confirmation of his sense of himself as a great actor, but the unpredictable judgment of others is unbearable to him. All social situations become a competition that he must win. Because he does not, he feels acutely jealous and envious of everyone (16). He leaves rooms crying in frustration, ends friendships, and spends more time alone. Second, Rodger stops doing things in the world. He dedicates himself to nothing, refuses to get a job, drops out of college. Because he sees life mainly as a competition that he cannot stand to lose, he flees risk altogether and ends up as a passive thing shut in his room. He even turns to paradoxically nonactive ways to try to accomplish himself, like self-help books, or playing the lottery to become a millionaire (78, 104). These are ways of trying to win by magic, of being acclaimed as a hero without heroic deeds. Needless to say, none of these schemes work. Rodger becomes living proof that to try to be a sovereign subject is precisely not to be a subject at all (Mussett Reference Mussett and Simons2006, 282; Bauer Reference Bauer2015, 48).

IV. “Hot Blonde” Others

Where do women fit into the story? Early in Rodger's childhood, girls are just ordinary friends (Rodger Reference Rodger2014, 5, 7). However, in elementary school, they become part of a “separate reality” (13). When they show up again, they are enigmatic bestowers of status: “getting girls” is integral to gaining the respect of other boys (11). But Rodger quickly learns that, more than just a trophy, a girl is someone who can herself make you feel like a winner. In middle school, he “was one hundred-times more satisfied from getting a hug from a pretty girl than getting a high five from a popular boy. It was a new experience that enraptured every fiber of [his] being” (28). Gaining “female validation” is uniquely satisfying (13). It is itself a conquest—like climbing a “Big Rock”—and a recognition of that conquest—like a “high five.” This is a conception of woman as Other, as a natural thing to be conquered and, at the same time, a docile freedom that admiringly smiles back. She is an escape from hierarchical struggle, a promise of glorious rest and heroic victory once and for all. Navigating the world with a “beautiful girlfriend” becomes, then, Rodger's ultimate dream. “I pictured her in my mind all the time; her cascading blonde hair, her beautiful face, her sensual body . . . Everything. I imagined us walking hand in hand through the college, looking at the magnificent view of the mountains in the distance as the sun sets behind them. That would be heaven” (69, see also 75–76, 79, 85, 94).

Rodger's descriptions of the ideal girlfriend are always vague and brief. This is because, as an Other, she is a device to shore up his sense of himself. The only thing that matters is how she makes him feel. Given this, it is significant that the “cascading blonde hair” is her only distinctive characteristic. As Beauvoir herself noted, this fixation on styled blonde hair is a common cultural trope associating femininity with Nature in American culture.Footnote ³¹ To have this woman is then to also have the “mountains in the distance.” But her hair is long and blonde for yet another reason. If the Other is to provide ultimate victory, she must provide Rodger with control over the gaze of others along lines of race and class. She must be a repository for his socially situated dreams of transcendence over the salient facts of his life. Because American blondeness strongly encodes whiteness, Rodger fixates on it: “white girls are the only girls I'm attracted to, especially the blondes” (Rodger Reference Rodger2014, 121; hooks Reference hooks2015, x, 158–59; Hobson Reference Hobson2018, 7–10). The long blonde hair also evokes the stereotype linked to sororities like UCSB's Alpha Phi, where Rodger finds “the kind of girls I've always desired” (Rodger Reference Rodger2014, 132). This sorority femininity is culturally associated with being “thin, white, and cute,” but also, importantly, with being conspicuously affluent (DeSantis Reference DeSantis2007, 21–24, 115; Davis Reference Davis2018, 7; Ispa-Landa and Oliver Reference Ispa-Landa and Oliver2020, 908).Footnote ³² Rodger's Other is then an embodiment of Nature and a symbol of whiteness and wealth. To have this imagined sorority girl would be a complete experience of acknowledged mastery over Nature, race, class, and reality itself.

One could object that white femininity in America has been traditionally viewed as the opposite of Nature: as “pure” and “civilized,” in contrast with “natural” and “primitive” black womanhood (DuBois and Dumenil Reference DuBois and Dumenil2019, 281–82). Given this, how can these hyperwhite women embody Nature and be Others? On Beauvoir's picture, the Other embodies ambiguous Nature. She, like Nature, can be pure or dirty, tamed or wild, beautiful or terrifying, to-be-transcended or already-transcended. She is “both physis and anti-physis; she personifies Society as well as Nature; through her the civilization of a period and its culture is summed up” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2011, 200). Woman as Civilization is a negative form of woman as Nature but remains an Other. It is therefore plausible to read historical distinctions between white and black American women as distinctions between two sides of Nature. One side is beneficent and fully controlled and another is threatening and needs to be controlled: black women are “obstinate mules” and white women are “obedient dogs” (Collins Reference Collins1986, S17–S18).Footnote ³³ Note also that, within the colonial imaginary, these distinctions between white and black womanhood were far from stable. White women were sometimes seen as threatening “savages” (McClintock Reference McClintock1995, 54, 107). And black women were sometimes seen as beautiful and delicate “Black Venus[es]” (Sharpley-Whiting Reference Sharpley-Whiting1999; Hobson Reference Hobson2018, 17, 21). This instability is itself symptomatic of their Otherness and the ambivalent oscillation that remains at its core.

The idea that what Rodger is after is this blonde, Beauvoirian Other sheds light on his bizarre approach to romantic conquest. Like other incels, he is remarkably passive. He is not at bars hitting on women, he disdains “pick up” skills and paying for sex (Rodger Reference Rodger2014, 117, 120, 127; Nagle Reference Nagle2016). He does not even approach women. Instead, he sits alone on park benches and goes for walks, “in the desperate hope that I might possibly cross paths with some pretty girl who would be attracted to me” (Rodger Reference Rodger2014, 64). He does not want an object to be taken, nor a vassal to be at his beck and call. What he needs is something more complicated: an Other who can judge him and confirm his being. He wants to see a fixed image of himself as a great man in the eyes of this other consciousness. For that, it is important that she choose him, that he “feel her love” (85). Her spontaneous choice, her freely given admiration, is part of the acknowledgment he seeks.

But how could Rodger expect any woman to give him this kind of validation just by sitting around? At least as a child he understood that the admiration of others needed to be gained by showing off card collections. Now, women are supposed to be attracted to him for no reason. This is yet another symptom of their Otherness. As Rodger gets older and does less and less with his life, his need for admiration becomes harder to satisfy. This is precisely why he comes to have “an absolute need” of woman as Other. Only she can recognize him as a “god” now. “A man is judged by his fellow men by what he does, objectively and according to general standards.” But a woman's regard is different, “it allows itself to be charmed” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2011, 202–3, 200).Footnote ³⁴ Woman as Other holds the unique promise of validation without achievement. She can praise him without turning him into an object of appraisal. In this sense, she is another form of magic, like the lottery.

However, invested with this power, woman as Other becomes both the be-all and the end-all of existence. If her regard can bestow ultimate triumph, it can also bestow ultimate failure. She cannot be a subject without the risk of negative judgment creeping back in. This leads Rodger to have an increasingly “intense fear of girls” (Rodger Reference Rodger2014, 42). Consider his description of passing a woman on a beach:

The gaze of the Other is so powerful that Rodger's desire becomes ambivalent, involving an almost religious “fear of her judgment” (99). The smile from a goddess is a high accomplishment because it is freely given to those who are worthy. But if a smile leads to euphoria, a frown can lead to the depths of despair.Footnote ³⁵ In Rodger's first example of women's “cruel” treatment, he accidentally bumps into a girl who curses and pushes him back. “It made me feel like an insignificant, unworthy little mouse . . . and I thought it was because she viewed me as a loser” (32). Feminine reactions become then unbelievably momentous. They are the doing and undoing of men like Rodger.

The reaction we see most often from these blonde, attractive women is indifference. They go about their lives, taking no notice of Rodger. However, because these are Others, their indifference is an intolerable rejection. Invested with all this importance, their lack of response makes Rodger's sense of himself as sovereign crumble. He has not been anointed by them as a living god, secretly destined for greatness. What is even worse, he sees their admiring smiles directed at “lower” men. This undercuts one of his key strategies to re-assert sovereignty: his effort to reposition himself in a white-supremacist hierarchy by contrasting himself with other men. This is why he cannot stand to see a blonde woman talking to “an ugly black boy,” or “an inferior Mexican guy” (84, 87). And he is particularly enraged to see “white girls” pass him, “a beautiful Eurasian,” for a “full-blooded Asian” (121).Footnote ³⁶ If the choice of the feminine Other is a conferral of ultimate worth, then the “inferior” have become the elect. His world is turned upside down and his dreams of being confirmed as pure transcendence are destroyed.

When confronted with this disappointment, many people would rethink their attitude toward life. But Rodger is so unwilling to take on the risk of being a subject in the world that he just keeps going down a spiral of self-alienation. Whenever he hits rock-bottom and starts doubting his god-like nature, he retreats into the temporary “sanctuary” of online computer games. There he can experience a clear acknowledged mastery over a virtual world and renew his sense of sovereignty (39, 74).Footnote ³⁷ By the end of his manifesto, it seems too late to step back from this entrenched delusion. He is cut off from the world, with no friends, and no accomplishments. There is no alternative source of meaning to start rebuilding a sense of himself as something other than a fallen god. The Other and the magical victory she could bring are his only way out.

We can now see how Rodger arrives at his declaration of “war on women.”Footnote ³⁸ First, recall that, within the myth of woman as Other, fear and desire are always intertwined. In making the Other such a powerful figure by having an absolute need of her, Rodger also amplifies her threatening side. Second, recall that men can only confirm themselves as sovereigns through a feminine Other insofar as they can conquer her, thereby experiencing themselves as pure subjects in relation to her. But, for Rodger, there is no hope left of taming this “hot” blonde Other. She is now only an amplified and uncontrollable threat. She is no longer a radiant savior goddess, but only a destructive “praying mantis” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2011, 262). Rodger's only way to control the uncontrollable, to triumph over this great threat, is to destroy her (Rodger Reference Rodger2014, 112). His extreme violence is his way of finally accomplishing himself as sovereign through woman: “on the Day of Retribution, I will truly be a powerful god” (135).Footnote ³⁹ Rodger is then what Beauvoir calls a “false hero” who, “to convince himself he goes far and flies high, always looks back, at his feet; he despises, he accuses, he oppresses, he persecutes, he tortures, he massacres” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2011, 228).

“Hot”, blonde sorority girls are first in Rodger's firing line. If they were the be-all of life, now they are the end-all for precisely the same reasons. In this mode of extermination, they continue to be Others. They are still a choosing subjectivity—one that Rodger can resent in a distinctively second-personal tone. As “the main instigators of sex,” “they control which men get it and which men don't” (Rodger Reference Rodger2014, 136). But, alongside this logic of agency and moralistic blame, there is also a logic of immutable and natural evil (89). Women are “flawed creatures,” “wired” wrongly, and “the ultimate evil behind sexuality” (136). This is because they also embody ambiguous Nature. If before they were its promising, beautiful face, now they are its dark and threatening side.

Indeed, this association with the natural world explains why, at the end of “My Twisted World,” the most desirable women become “vicious, stupid, cruel animals” (177). This characterization of the Other as an “avid and devouring beast” is precisely one of the tropes Beauvoir associates with masculine disappointment (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2011, 208). Rodger goes on to depict women as capable only of “animal-like thinking,” “completely controlled by their primal, depraved emotions and impulses,” attracted to “beast-like men,” and “beasts themselves.”Footnote ⁴⁰ They should not be given any rights in a society that sets itself above Nature and that is “civilized.” They “must be quarantined” in order to attain a “pure” world (Rodger Reference Rodger2014, 117, 136). Women as Others become then a troubling “object of disgust and reverence at the same time” (Direk Reference Direk2011, 67).Footnote ⁴¹ They are a profoundly threatening, unruly, contagious Other: a plague that can be resented. Against such a threat, Rodger casts himself as a civilizing force, transcending Nature, heroically reclaiming mastery over the world. He becomes the “wronged, avenging hero,” “fighting evil forces against the odds” that incel communities have come to idolize as a martyr (Bates Reference Bates2020, 13).Footnote ⁴²

V. Unbecoming Sovereign

On this Beauvoirian reading, incel violence is not a reactionary form of backlash against feminism and the sexual revolution. It is the predictable implosion of a profound form of self-alienation. There could never be a woman that satisfied Rodger because his desires are unsatisfiable. What he wants is not a woman, a relationship, or a sexual encounter. What he wants from women is a way of being acclaimed and adored, while also escaping the perils of being judged by others. That is something no real person can provide. Only “Woman,” as a paradoxical myth, can give him this hope. However,

In desiring women as chimerical Others, Rodger eventually turns them into his most haunting “enemies” (Rodger Reference Rodger2014, 125–26). This is the price he pays for his vanity. In seeing himself as sovereign, he becomes engaged in the doomed pursuit of a mirage.

This Beauvoirian account has two major advantages. First, it gives us a more complete analysis of incel violence by filling in the gaps left by other feminist explanations. Unlike objectification, it explains why incels are attracted to women as choosing subjectivities, and why they seek to punish them. For Rodger, it is important that women freely choose him to confirm he is special. When hope of this confirmation vanishes, this freedom licenses ascriptions of blame. Unlike entitlement, the Beauvoirian model can tell us why incel attacks target women excelling by patriarchal standards and why they are not just retaliatory, but also exterminatory in tone. The Stacys are contemporary Others. They are both alluring and threatening, distinct consciousnesses that appear to be fully conquerable. But when one loses hope of taming them, the only way to assert oneself as sovereign through them is annihilation. Note that, like objectification and entitlement, this Beauvoirian account remains committed to seeing incels as part of a broader landscape of gendered violence. Its focus on ambivalence highlights the continuity with perpetrators of intimate partner violence. These are often men who also oscillate between contradictory attitudes: they “fear women's power even as they dominate them, and beat them even as they idolize them” (Caputi Reference Caputi2004, 184–85).Footnote ⁴³ Serial sexual murders are another form of highly ambivalent violence that, as Jane Caputi has argued, represent an assertion of god-like masculine control (185fn3, 182–206).Footnote ⁴⁴ In this way, the Beauvoirian model continues to frame incel violence as “a vivid symptom of a much broader and deeper cultural phenomenon” (Manne Reference Manne2020, 18).

The second advantage of an account in terms of Otherness is that it gives us a deeper understanding of what we should do to tackle incel violence. Objectification strategies insist on the need for men to see women as fully human, and entitlement approaches push for a vehement assertion of gender equality.Footnote ⁴⁵ Beauvoir would certainly agree that the way men see women matters and that a more gender-equal world changes that. However, the problem lies not just in how men see women, but in how they relate to themselves and to the world. The embrace of the myth of woman as Other is rooted in a more fundamental rise in masculine self-alienation. And that is what we must ultimately confront. For Beauvoir, sovereignty is a form of bad faith bound to be appealing to any human being.Footnote ⁴⁶ But men disproportionally take up this attitude because of the way societies and cultures are organized. Therefore, we must ask ourselves: what sociocultural conditions encourage and enable men like Rodger to adopt this delusion of sovereignty and inhabit it so deeply?

The answer is bound to be complex. Some of it will have to do with how our cultural mythology still perpetuates the “marvelous hope” of a magical triumph without risk, especially through heterosexual love. For example, the early 2000s “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” trope in popular movies was arguably a contemporary Other, a feminine archetype that existed only “to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures” (Rabin Reference Rabin2007).Footnote ⁴⁷ But other cultural narratives that encourage a sovereign self-image are less explicitly gendered. Think of the myth of becoming rich overnight, peddled by self-help books like The Secret, which claims you can realize all your dreams effortlessly by visualizing them. This is the book nineteen-year-old Elliot Rodger received from his father, who was confident it would help him develop “a positive attitude.” What it actually did was feed the fantasy of success by magical means that was at the heart of his misogynistic violence (Rodger Reference Rodger2014, 78).

Part of the explanation for this rise in masculine self-alienation will also involve material conditions. Beauvoir herself speculates that a feminine Other is a “luxury”: “it is understandable that woman is divinized in a country that is rich and where the citizens are uncertain about what meaning to give to their lives: this is what is happening in [1940s] America” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2011, 272, 161). Angela Nagle has pointed to more specific factors such as our “toleration of a computer-enabled detachment” and an “extended adolescence of videogames, porn, and pranks” (Nagle Reference Nagle2016).Footnote ⁴⁸ Certainly, in the case of Rodger, his parents’ financial assistance meant he was never forced to work. If his livelihood had depended on accepting the judgment of others, he might have learned to deal with it. The “sanctuary” of online games was also crucial. Once he could play from home, “his social life ended completely” and he became very bored at school (Rodger Reference Rodger2014, 40–41). Without this escape from the real world, he might have had to figure out a way to live in it. The Beauvoirian emphasis on self-alienation highlights, then, how seemingly innocuous social arrangements shape the men who end up hating women.

Finally, what does Beauvoir have to say to incels already in the grips of this delusion of sovereignty? Importantly, quite a lot. Although Rodger was fully consumed by self-alienation, it is not too late for many men to live better lives. According to Beauvoir, this requires a kind of “conversion.” They must renounce the vanity of viewing themselves as fallen gods, and assume the risk of existing as human beings (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir, Borde and Malovany-Chevallier2011, 159–60). This involves moving away from an appropriative, conquering attitude toward a stance of openness and reciprocity. It requires cultivating a healthy sense of competition and fair play, of personal responsibility, humility, “friendship and generosity” (159–60; Direk Reference Direk2011, 70). It also means foregoing the certainty of a world with fixed hierarchies—including those based on race and class—and viewing interpersonal relations as always to be made and remade. To relinquish sovereignty, a man needs to accept that, in addition to being a freedom, he is part of Nature and of other people's plans, that he is a body and a history that can be evaluated.Footnote ⁴⁹ Importantly, he needs to accept that there is no action without judgment, and no praise without risk.

For incels this “conversion” may be particularly difficult. They may have to undo deeply established habits. But this is a change squarely in the interest of these men. To be anyone at all, they must relinquish their aspirations to be essentially heroes and instead gather the courage to exist in the world: to stick to a class, to get a job, to talk to people. Otherwise they will remain, like Rodger, mired in envy, jealousy, and emptiness. Crucially, relinquishing sovereignty will also mean the end of their ambivalent fixation on women. If there is no Nature to master, there is no need to incarnate it. If life with others is not a ceaseless struggle, there is no need to escape it. If one is engaged in meaningful projects, there is no need for a miracle to accomplish oneself. Without masculine alienation, there is no need for woman as Other. And it is only by giving up this pursuit of mythical goddesses that these men can stop hating women and actually talk them, and have a shot at a romantic and sexual relationship.Footnote ⁵⁰ The key to both ending incel violence against women and exiting the nightmare Rodger inhabited is waking up from this self-destructive masculine fantasy.