Uncover - S14: "Boys Like Me" E3: Boys Will Be Boys

Episode Date: January 5, 2022

Alek frequented incel sites for years, lurking in forums that celebrated or even encouraged the kind of attack he’d go on to commit. What draws young men into this toxic world? Ellen connects with a prominent incel who takes her down the rabbit hole. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/boys-like-me-transcripts-listen-1.6732152

From CBC Podcasts and The Fifth Estate, Brainwashed is a multi-part investigation into the CIA's experiments in mind control. From the Cold War and MKUltra to the so-called War on Terror, we learn about a psychiatrist who uses patients as human guinea pigs and what happens when the military and medicine collide. Listen to Brainwashed on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. This series contains descriptions of violence and suicide.

If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please contact the Canadian Suicide Prevention Service. In the U.S., reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Please take care. Can you hear me? I can hear you. That's good. You all right?

Ellen? Yes. Yeah, you got it. Yeah. I didn't forget. This is Frail. That's short for Frail, Pale, Stale Male. It's the handle he uses on incel forums.

After Alec Manassian was arrested, it became clear that he'd spent years lurking on incel sites. He rarely posted, but he'd read through them whenever he was feeling low, absorbing incel ideology from the periphery. I wanted to get a better understanding of what draws young men into this world, and why they keep coming back to it. I knew I needed to find someone inside the incel community, so I started reaching out to people I knew who had connections. And that's how Frail's name came up. He's been active on incel sites for the past

few years, and my connection thought he might be open to an interview. So I reached out to him on Discord, and we exchanged messages for a few weeks. Then, late on a Friday night, I got a call. How's it going over there? Um, let me look out the window. Oh shit, the sun is going to come up soon. So I was thinking, oh, just say it's pitch black, but no, actually the sun is coming up. It's nearly 4am.

I want to be clear that I can't corroborate anything Frail told me. I don't know his real name or even where he lives. But I was able to piece together a few things about him before we spoke for the first time. He'd recently turned 30. His relationship to the incel community was beginning to change. He's also been struggling with drug and alcohol addiction for a while and severe depression. I mean, I fucking love alcohol, but I know it's a fucking bastard. Have you drank for a long time? Like consistently, probably like maybe about five or six years.

Unfortunately for me, my organs are physically dependent on alcohol at this point. If I don't drink, I die. I used to deal sometimes when i was younger and some of the people that you'd meet who were buying fucking heroin but sometimes they'd be they'd be all fucking pissed out their face and they'd be like oh mate come on join me let's go to the fucking club and we'll all fucking take speed and i was like uh okay then and then like 10 minutes later they're like oh mate honestly sorry about this but like no one else wants you to go i'm like typical what why would that happen that's that's the ugliest shit like have you ever like

seen like a pile of vomit or like dog shit on the floor and you could probably like visibly wince at that kind of stuff like that's kind of gross but like that's that is basically the same kind of thing like I'm not aesthetically pleasing to look at so how does that make you feel just when people like shit yeah I mean to be honest when i was younger i didn't even fucking process it because i still had like this really optimistic mindset i was like oh in my mind it was like oh yeah i know i'm like the best fucking person but that shouldn't stop me you should it like everyone's always told me it's just about how you are and if you're a good person people are going to accept you and

You know, I kind of believed that for like years and I was like, oh someday someday Someday everything will be alright like people people will look past it. It won't be a problem Think I probably believed that for a bit too long and it didn't do me any good to be honest and it sucks so is that why is this why you joined the the insult community i say it was a catalyst i'm ellie chloe bateman this is boys like me This is Boys Like Me. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons,

but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. The aftermath of the Toronto van attack was the first time I'd heard the term incel. It was a new one for a lot of us. At the time of the attack, I'd been working on a documentary with my co-producer Evan

Mead. Incels were also new to him. I thought incels was like related to a video game of some kind. I thought it's just Alec being a nerd. Evan and I wanted to understand why Alec Manassian, his former classmate and friend, had murdered 11 people and injured 15 more. Understanding incels seemed crucial to understanding Alec. As best as anyone can tell, the term incel was coined by a Canadian woman known as Alanna. It was 1997 when I started a website called Involuntary Celibacy. when I started a website called Involuntary Celibacy. And it was a very friendly, supportive community that we created way back when.

The site was a forum for people who were having trouble finding romantic and sexual connections. It gave them a place to work through their loneliness and frustration in a positive way. But Alana eventually moved on, and the term incel took on a life of its own. And I was pretty shocked because when I was organizing it, incel was a thing that could be women or men or it could be anybody. And it was pretty shocking to see that it had become one gender and a hateful version of it. And I didn't really find out about all that

until after the Elliot Rodger murder in 2014. Our top story tonight, a 22-year-old taking the lives of six others in a shooting rampage near UC Santa Barbara. Two women standing outside a sorority and one man outside a deli were gunned down last night, 13 others injured, and three others were stabbed to death at his apartment. The shooter, Elliot Rodger, a student at Santa Barbara City College. Isla Vista killer Elliot Rodger blames his day of retribution on the women who never paid attention to him. I'd heard of the word insult around 2014 after Elliot did his thing.

And I saw all this stuff on the news about what they were and all this kind of stuff. I was like, God, these people are fucking stupid. Like, worshipping a mass killer or just being completely stupid online. Like, you'll have the occasional person that thinks, oh yeah, Elliot Rogers, a god or something like that. No, he was a fucking idiot. Roger was active on a number of sites popular with sexually frustrated young men. The kinds of sites where guys mixed workout tips with pseudoscientific theories about how women's brains are wired. Roger thought women were genetically inferior to men and resented them

for denying him sex. Before his attack, he sent a 137-page manifesto to media outlets. In it, he wrote about how he'd found an online community who supported his beliefs. A community that, quote, confirmed many of the theories I had about how wicked and degenerate women really are. Suddenly, involuntary celibacy became worldwide news. That's Alec Manassian being interviewed by police a few hours after his arrest. That's Alec Manassian being interviewed by police a few hours after his arrest. Just before the van attack, Alec had published a post on Facebook that included the following line. All hail the Supreme Gentleman, Elliot Roger.

Police wanted to know if there was a connection between the two attacks. Specifically when, in 2014? May 23, 2014. How were you able to remember that? Because I remember that was a very significant day. Okay, what was that? That was when Elliot Rodger decided to essentially commit an uprising, a beta uprising, if you will. Right.

Manassian is lying to the police here. He learned about Roger a few years after the attack, once he'd already started reading incel forums. Roger's attack wasn't the thing that brought him to 4chan or Reddit. But the fact that Alec brought up Roger in this first police interview points to something bigger. By the time of the Toronto van attack, Elliot Rodger had become revered in the more extreme corners of the incel community. Some guys started calling him a saint, and the expression going ER became a common piece of incel slang.

Once the incel forums introduced Alec Manassian to Rodger, he became obsessed. He'd read Elliot Roger's manifesto over and over again, and he told psychiatrists that he identified with Roger's frustrations. They were both lonely. They were both virgins. They were both autistic. Alec Manassian did that fucking stupid van thing, and then the word came up in the news again and it was constantly there it's like until this until that i was like oh okay like i get the gist of it like these are lonely people let's have a look let's just jump down the rabbit hole so to speak and i look and i was like actually a lot of this kind of stuff is relatable. If that makes sense, it's like being completely fucking talked down and shat on and normally giving a fuck about you and talking shit about how you look

and all this kind of shit. But I was like, to be honest, these people will probably get me. I understand a lifetime of bullshit. So that's how I found it, and that's why I joined. Honestly, like, it was just, like, a nice place to be at. I mean, like, some of the people there are actually pleasant to talk to. Like, they don't post on the actual message boards often but if you actually got in a private message chat with them for a while and then i end up move on

to discord it's brilliant like actually you've got some friends there you can have some movie nights with them and just see how their day's going, like they've been at work or whatever. It's just nice, you know. It's like an emulation of what normal people should enjoy. I don't know a lot about you, and so I guess I'm missing some context. Do you have family or friends? I have family that exist. I don't talk to them.

But pretty much my only friends nowadays are online because all of my old ones ditched me as soon as they got partners. Like, was it difficult watching them build and fall in love? At the time, I think, well, I was deluded as shit back then. I was happy for them. I was like, oh, this is brilliant. I'll be next.

This is going to be great. We can all go and, like, fucking date together. It's going to be wonderful. It didn't happen. Yeah. But, you know, I would always be, like, the fucking weird looking fuck so it was like oh I don't want him fucking hanging around it'll just fucking cram the style third wheeling whatever

and I remember getting asked to like oh you can come out with this book could you like hang back a couple of years or so. That's really insulting. I think it's helpful to think about it in sort of specific reasons that someone can be an incel. The first is, you know, this is an accident of birth that you are sort of physically unattractive, that you sort of lost the lottery and you're not going to be able to be seen as physically or sexually attractive to the opposite gender. That's Jen. She's an analyst for an organization called Moonshot that focuses on countering violent extremism online. Jen's not her real name.

Jen's been following activity on incel sites for close to a decade, paying attention to how young men get drawn in. The second reason is that incels believe that women are sort of evolutionarily predetermined to seek out the most attractive, most alpha man that is out there. And that this is sort of an uncontrollable biological response within women, which means that therefore they're not going to be seeking out sex with these genetically inferior, physically unattractive men. And the third reason that incels see themselves as an incel is because of societal structures. 70 years ago there were societal structures in place that meant that women, you know, couldn't have a job, couldn't sort of make their own money, they didn't have sort of reproductive health rights and therefore were essentially forced to

trade sex through marriage with a man in order to sort of keep themselves and their children financially and sort of physically secure. So incels really see that sort of keep themselves and their children financially and sort of physically secure. So incels really see that sort of rise in what they believe is a rise in inceldom as a result of the emancipation of women. After he was arrested, psychiatrists pressed Manassian about his motive for the attack. They wanted to know if there had been a specific target. He was hard to pin down, but at one point he said he wanted it to be, quote, the couple crowd, like people holding hands.

That really struck a nerve with my partner, Evan Mead. I've been angry at couples before. I've been angry that, you know, girls I've liked have gotten with other guys that aren't me. But I'm not Alec and I'm not an incel. So I remember a girl I had a big crush on for the last two years I was at Thornley. for the last two years I was at Thornley, I heard through the rumor mill that she had hooked up with a dude in my art class. And I remember being so angry and so jealous

that I wound up hating the guy myself. But it never occurred to me to physically harm him. Evan wants the things, to quote Frail, that normal people should enjoy. He wants to meet someone, get married, have kids. Evan's autism makes these dreams harder to realize. Do you feel like all of these things are possible for you? There's a deep fear in my core being that it's not. There really is.

Being on the outside can be hard and lonely. The reality is that life can be that much harder and that much more lonely for people with autism. What we do see with the incel community is, I think, a higher number of ASD individuals that you would see in other extremist groups. Incel ideology focuses on sort of social interaction, the ability to access sex, the ability to access romantic relationships. And a lot of these things are behaviors that are difficult for people with autism spectrum disorder. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder are sort of present in these extremism types because they offer a very black

and white view of the world, which again sort of is a seductive way of viewing the world for people who do have ASD. There's a complicated relationship between autism and inceldom that researchers are just starting to explore. What little we do know is that a lot of incels identify as autistic. And in a lot of these cases, they're diagnosing this themselves. It's not just ASD that incels self-diagnose with. They self-diagnose themselves with being an incel. They self-diagnose themselves with a range of other sort of mental health disorders,

social anxiety, depression. As a community, they have a huge amount of distrust for mental health professionals and doctors and sort of the medical field more generally. professionals and doctors and sort of the medical field more generally. So part of their ideology is this belief that society is actively working against sharing information about the state of these incels. So it sort of feeds into that narrative that medical professionals would also be actively working against them. This is one of the weird things, everyone always says, oh, just go and see a

therapist. I can't even tell you how many of my friends in this community are either seeing a therapist or have seen a therapist. Like, yes, it's tried. It's done. It obviously doesn't work. It's not going to solve the underlying issue, really, is it? They're still going to be lonely. Frail's not autistic. He feels isolated because of how he looks. Yeah, I've had about three therapists in my life, and they give good generic advice,

but they can't fix an issue that's, like, society-born, if that makes sense. They would have to be able to cast a spell on society and dictate how other people feel and how the media talks about people and glorifies sex constantly. sex constantly. So you've got like this huge excess of males who exist and they've really got nothing to look forward to.

I think this is why this issue is going to get worse. They're not wanted. They're not needed. They're not required. They are drones. Their feelings mean fucking nothing to anyone. And well they've pretty much got two choices.

They can either drop out or kill themselves. Have you ever thought about suicide? Twice. I've thought about suicide twice before in my life. Are you okay talking about it? You don't have to. The first time I wanted to kill myself was in winter of 2010, right after I turned 18,

because... It's so stupid, it's not my crush's fault, but I was sad that my crush didn't want to go out with me, so I thought, okay, there's no point in living if I can't live without her, you know, I can look back on that and think, wow, that was a dumb thing to feel. The last time I did it, which was last summer during the pandemic. Evan, you're in charge here. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Yeah, it's whatever you want to share. There was a friend that I was getting really close with who had teased the prospect of a casual, you know, sexual relationship. That wouldn't lead to anything serious, but, you know, she was a gorgeous woman. She had amazing features quite a few years. So I thought it would be great to get that experience. So then I asked her if she still was interested. And then she just said, No, I'm not. And then the conversation kind of ended a little abruptly and i felt awkward for even asking because she put uh that kind of a sexual casual relationship on the table months ago but then it occurred to me that yes it is her body it's her choice she can withdraw consent anytime she wants she doesn't owe me anything but because i felt like I didn't have the magical power that guys have to seduce girls, that I had no purpose, and was therefore useless. I biked down to the shore of Lake Ontario, and I sat there for an hour thinking, you know,

I could just walk into the water and not come out and just let the lake have me. And then when I realized how serious I was, I texted two of my friends. One was, I texted roommate, and I also texted this other friend of mine who had been suicidal before, and I knew they were the best people to talk to about this. Then once I sent those text messages, I knew that, you know, just go back home, talk it out with them, and everything will be fine. And I felt somewhat better at the end of the night.

So when you were in that dark place, what were you feeling? Did it feel out of control? How would you describe? It felt out of control. It felt like no matter how much I would try to accomplish things, they wouldn't work out for me. That's the easiest way I can sum it up.

Were you feeling like you could never find a relationship? Yeah, I did. I did feel like I felt like love wasn't going to work out for me the sadness feels like it's never going to end but it does end right eventually it does yes young people on the spectrum are about three times more likely to attempt suicide than neurotypical youth. That means that they're more likely to need access to crisis intervention, counselling and other kinds of support. And those aren't always easy to access.

Evan had a solid group of friends who were there for him when he needed help. But say you don't have that kind of real-world support. Some autistic folk, including Alec Manassian, look online. And this can be dangerous, because ASD often means seeing the world in black and white. It can make it hard to understand irony, satire, and nuance. And what ASD kids see on these forums can be pretty harsh. Suicide isn't just normalized on these sites. It's romanticized, and in some cases, it's encouraged.

I think it's fucking stupid to encourage people. I don't agree with that at all. Because suicide is hard. It's hard to... It is hard. It's hard to... It is hard. I've only tried it once, and I ended up in a coma for a few days. It's very hard to get to that point

where you actually feel like you should just fucking do it. Do you see what Elliot Rodger did and what Alec Manassian did as killing themselves and wanting to take a whole bunch of people with him? Yeah I know that they were thinking that but I just don't see the merit in that. If you're going to die, you're going to die anyway, so who cares? At the end of the day, why bother? It's just making it overcomplicated.

You shouldn't do that. Other people have their lives to live. It's just fucking stupid. Like, if you are that sad, just kill yourself, which is what most incels do.

We kill ourselves. just kill yourself which is what most incels do we kill ourselves let me uh shave it okay it's not a video don't worry frail showed me a forum that archives farewell messages from incels who have apparently killed themselves there There's no way to confirm that all of these deaths really happened, but Frail knows for sure that some did. He watched them being live-streamed. Look at this list. Just scroll through them. And bear in mind, this is a small list,

because these are only people that are well known on reddit it doesn't account for people that weren't so well known it doesn't account for other discord servers or forums or anything that's the smallest of the people that have killed themselves in the past like three years it just goes on it just goes on yeah like i have a hard time imagining that all of the guys on this list you know that there was no hope for them right i mean a lot of these guys are young they obviously felt that there was no hope um i i know god many more people that aren't even on that list

that are dead right now so it's fucking brutal yeah I mean some people that I thankfully managed to talk out of fucking doing it but I mean that well, actually,

it's probably about maybe six or seven, but it's not a big number. But, say, if I have an opportunity to call someone, which is very hard sometimes, but if people are on Discord or something, or I manage to find their phone number and I can call them, if they pick up I can always talk them out

of it. All you've got to do is give them a bit of humour, keep them talking for about half an hour and they'll change their mind. This is the part of the incel community that's important to Frail.

To him, it's a support network for guys who feel cast out of society. There's always one thing most people get wrong. They're always focusing on a vocal minority, in my opinion. That site, when I was on there, had 11,000 members. And probably only about maybe 100 to 200 even spoke on there and probably maybe 50 or 50 to 100 of that actually posted all the edgy content. They were constantly the same people making outrageous statements, all this kind of stuff. And to be honest, i did used to find that

funny at the time like it was just funny whether i agreed with it or not it was just funny i think that's the whole thing of the internet you've got this entire dynamic of you can be who you want to be but it might not necessarily represent who you are in real life i mean to be honest everyone's been fucking stupid online like everyone talks shit online everyone's an edgy piece of shit that's just the internet so i actually i take issue with that characterization actually of the insult community these conversations are real the violent misogyny that they're talking about is real i think it's really dangerous to talk about it in terms of it being shitposting or dark humor and not taking those threats seriously. We made that mistake

with the violent far-right and we saw the consequences of that at the Capitol building. These things need to be taken seriously. The isolation and frustration that frail feels is real. And on some level, it's valid. We really do judge people based on their looks. And the effect that has on people, it's real. We label people neurodivergent and we treat them differently. We can be incredibly cruel to one another.

People need community, a sense of belonging, a place to find support and comfort. But that's not what these sites provide. So which posts here are getting the most traction? So here's a video of, yeah, a video from YouTube of a woman, you know, treating an unattractive man badly. In this video, you're going to see me get rejected 15 times. You're gonna see 15 different women reject me, turn me down, you know, just say, ugh, get out of here, get out of here, you're disgusting.

You know, these sort of videos are very popular in this community. So essentially men approaching women in public, trying to ask her out on a date and her rejecting them. And these videos really very much being seen as these women are terrible, awful people that women deserve to be punished. Sort of no consideration or discussion about the fact that these women are being approached by random men in public while these women are just trying to go about their day but it's very much this idea that these women somehow owe these men sex and that these women are bad people deserve punishment for not sort of putting up with that sort of that sort of treatment in public. I'm seeing a lot of racism here.

Yeah there's a lot of racism so here's a good example here. There's sort of a lot of anger and resentment towards Asian women specifically because of this belief that they seek out sex with white men, that they refuse to have sex with white men. Jen shows me several posts that refer to Asian women in ways that are incredibly degrading. Not everyone in the community is racist, but white supremacy seems to get a free pass. Rape is also a big point of discussion. There's always violence. There's always violence on here. You're always going to see. I'm always aware when I log on to look at it that I will come across something really horrible. There's never a day that I've ever I've ever not seen something horrible. You know, I've been doing this for a while now. I kind of feel like, you know, I know the depths that it can go. But it's always a shock when you come on here, just how horrible it is.

I imagine this is difficult stuff to read and to internalize. Like, do you, is it too much some days? If I spend all day on one of these forums, it puts me in a really horrible mood. I'm really upset um it's really it's really horrible when you read this stuff they don't even refer to i mean you can see for yourself here as we're looking at it you know the females is as about as good as it gets um we're holes we're toilets we're whores um it's just it's incredibly dehumanizing um it's just, it's incredibly dehumanizing. It's very upsetting when you see pictures

and images of real women that they posted on here. So there was a woman about a year ago, she was a Twitch streamer who was murdered by one of her followers who slit her throat, took pictures of it and posted it on Instagram. And those pictures were all over this forum. Like I logged in in the morning and it was just, the first thing I saw was just this image of this, you know, murdered woman.

Jen's talking about Bianca Devins, a 17-year-old from upstate New York who was killed by a young man she met online. Her killer posted graphic photos of her murdered body on multiple social media platforms, including Discord and 4chan. And the way that they were celebrating, the way they were sort of celebrating, laughing, discussing it, was horrible. It's horrible to see that. And it was actually sort of some discussion as well from some users who took part in sort

of a wider, not just incel only, but a wider campaign of harassment of the victim's mother, where they were actually sending her these images of her murdered daughter. We have seen an escalation in incel violence since the first sort of key attack, which was Marklepine in Canada in 1989. December 6th, 1989 started off like any other day, but ended in horror, forever being labeled in Canadian history

as the Montreal Massacre. A young man, identified later as Marc Lepine, entered Le Côte-Polytechnique in Montreal, opening fire, killing 14 female engineering students before turning the.22 caliber gun on himself. This was the first school shooting of its kind in Canada. The murder of these 14 women became known as the Montreal Massacre. Even though it happened years before the term incel was coined, incels have since since adopted Lapine as one of their own.

Since then we've seen an attack that can be attributed to the Incel community every few years. So we hit 2014 and then there was one every year and then we hit 2018 and there were multiple attacks every year till now. So we are seeing an escalation in violence that is associated with this. We are seeing an increase in membership, according to our research, of different incel communities. So this community is growing. It is becoming more mainstream.

People are aware of incels. It's not as niche as it was before. That also means that it's being exposed to more people. There's sort of this assumption, it's not as niche as it was before, that also means that it's being exposed to more people. There's sort of this assumption that it's boys will be boys, they're just making jokes, they're just ranting on the internet. The type of violent misogynistic content that they're saying, the amount of that violent misogynistic content, this is not just one post on one forum one time this is an endless stream of the same sort of ideas that are linked to this this unifying ideology that that accepts violence as a solution to their position that accepts violence against women that encourages and

celebrates violence against women that celebrates incel, that refers to them as saints, as martyrs, that's not shitposting. And I think that it's really important that we push back on that narrative and sort of dismiss this idea that this is just dark humor or boys being boys. Frail wanted me to see the incel community as a kind of support network, like Alana's original incel project, forums that allow these men to be seen and heard. I take Frail at his word, and there is that side to these sites. I have a lot of sympathy for the way he feels,

and I believe we need to be empathetic to young men in his position. The rates of suicide and self-harm among incels represents a public health crisis. But the support system that incels have built for themselves exists in a larger ecosystem of misogyny, racism, entitlement, and hatred. Instead of providing alternatives, it reinforces the hopelessness and nihilism that these young men feel. It's a community that normalizes or even encourages suicide. These are sites that promote white supremacy and violence against women while playing everything off as a joke.

So where Frail sees a support group, Jen sees something dangerous. And I share Jen's concern. Most of the guys on these sites aren't ever going to go ER. But once in a while, one of them does. It's time we start asking why. Next time on Boys Like Me. I guess maybe I thought that if I hooked up with my crush after

being turned down, other guys would look at me as, you know, the guy who turned a no into a yes. We were shocked to see that people that supported Alec Manassian and Elliot Rodgers was higher than we thought and that does suggest that the community could facilitate violence against the public at a level that is shocking. Boys Like Me was created by me, Ellen Chloe Bateman. The series is produced by me, Chris McEnroe, Scott Dobson, and Michael Catano.

Michael Catano is our head writer. Additional production by Evan Mead. Eunice Kim is our associate producer. Emily Connell is our digital producer. Sound design by Michael Catano. Chris Oak is our story editor. Damon Fairless is our senior producer. And the executive

producer of CBC Podcasts is Arif Noorani. Additional audio from KRON, KPIX, and 100 Huntley Street. You can find the full interview with Alana at noncompete.com. If you like the series, we'd really appreciate it if you'd take the time to rate it and review it. It really helps others find it. Thank you.