Claire Kim / Daily Nexus
12 years ago on May 23, 2014, Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old Santa Barbara City College student, drove through the streets of Isla Vista with a plan. Having written and distributed his manifesto alongside a series of videos he uploaded to YouTube, Elliot enacted his “Day of Retribution”: a premeditated act of revenge against the women who he felt had rejected him and the men who had the relationships and social status he felt entitled to.
Being in I.V., surrounded by the abundance of parties, couples and general social life that Rodger felt was unattainable pushed him over the edge. He stated that: “The Day of Retribution will take place in Isla Vista. On weekend nights, the streets of Isla Vista are always flooded with young couples and good-looking popular kids walking to their parties. What better place is there to exact my Retribution on my enemies?” His killings were meant to be a punishment, a statement against the culture of I.V. that he believed refused to allow him to participate. He deemed those who were able to participate in this culture “enemies,” deserving of his planned attacks.
Rodger planned to begin his “Day of Retribution” by killing his roommates and their colleagues, who were coming back to their Capri Apartments on Seville Road after class. He then planned to attack the Alpha Phi sorority house on Embarcadero del Norte to seek revenge against women who he felt rejected him. Finally, he planned to attack the streets of I.V. during the night, killing as many groups of popular young people as he could before the cops stopped him. On the day of the attack, nobody answered the door to the sorority house, so he skipped that part of his plan and focused his attention on the people of I.V. He began terrorizing the streets, and by the end of the night, seven people were killed (including Rodger himself) and 14 were injured.
It would be easy to file that night away as something distant and unrepeatable, an act of a deranged stranger. But the story refuses to stay in the past. Today, Rodger’s attack on I.V. feels increasingly relevant; the worldview that Rodger articulated hasn’t disappeared, but has instead evolved into a digital language and online culture that is now resurfacing in plain sight, slipping into mainstream media, your feed and your vocabulary. His worldview has only become more popular, showing itself passively in a large part of contemporary internet culture.
Rodger was a self-proclaimed “incel,” or involuntary celibate. Incel communities believe their inability to find a sexual partner is no fault of their own, instead attributing their celibacy to the will of society and women, in turn circulating hostile and violent views of women in their online spaces. These spaces act as isolated cesspools of misogyny, racism and other bigotry, founded from the deep masculine insecurity of its users. Rodger himself mentions the important part that these communities played in the formation of his ideology, as he stated: “The Spring of 2013 was also the time when I came across the website PUAHate.com. It is a forum full of men who are starved of sex, just like me. Many of them have their own theories of what women are attracted to, and many of them share my hatred of women.”
The killings in I.V. sparked a bridge between these different incel communities, as he became a martyr for their ideologies. He heralded as the “Supreme Gentleman,” the man who followed through on his extremist hatred and committed violence against attractive men and women. His face and likeness became popular references among incels, and he was referenced directly in other misogynistic killings. This “incel movement” began to coalesce and eventually manifested itself into a more common subgenre of misogynistic pseudo-science, encapsulated in common memes and words that uninformed audiences frequently use.
Social media algorithms have evolved to promote “algorithmic radicalization,” a process by which these platforms encourage its users to consume content that aligns with specific, often problematic narratives. These algorithms use feedback loops that promote emotional and controversial content by focusing on engagement such as likes, shares and comments. The consistent consumption of controversial content can lead to polarized narratives for the consumer, making them increasingly vulnerable to extremist views. In a more practical sense, social media algorithms work to find controversial, engaging content to keep its users hooked.
Through this system, incel ideology has repackaged itself into memes and buzzwords, finding its way to a large demographic of people who are not a part of these communities. Many of us already speak and understand its language and references. Words like “looksmaxxing,” and “mog” stem from incel communities that believe in certain methods to maximize attractiveness. Other words like “chad” and “foid” originate in manosphere incel communities. It matters less to regular audiences as to where their words come from, so long as it signifies they have the screentime to understand.
These dangerous ideas survive not because the majority of people believe them, but because enough people are willing to recognize them, repeat them and treat them as harmless. Calling people “subhuman,” women “animals,” “foids,” “beasts” and even “females” is part of a larger psychological process that allows people to overcome inhibitions and makes it possible to commit and justify acts of extreme violence, like Rodger’s killings.
Dehumanization is the first step in this psychological process. It functions by stripping a group of its perceived humanity, excluding them from what psychologists call the moral community, or the group of individuals to whom moral consideration is owed. Once a group is framed as less than human, the moral inhibitions that normally prevent violence are weakened, allowing harm to be committed and justified more easily.
This mechanism is exemplified in the rhetoric of Rodger, who wrote: “On the Day of Retribution, the tables will indeed turn, I mused to myself. I will be a god, and they will all be animals that I can slaughter. They are animals … They behave like animals, and I will slaughter them like the animals they are.” The language he uses contributes to his worldview in which his violence feels justified. By repeatedly framing his targets as animals rather than people, Rodger removes them from moral consideration entirely.
We understand that language doesn’t only describe reality, it also creates it. The way that an issue is framed directly affects how audiences interpret it and what solutions feel reasonable. When dehumanizing language is normalized, it desensitizes people and gradually makes unthinkable ideas feel acceptable. Treating this language as causal leads us to lose the ability to see where the line is and when exactly it has been crossed.
In incel communities, this process is evident in the use of terms like “foid”: a combination of the words “female” and “humanoid,” implying that women are not fully human. The term is used to demean, degrade and dehumanize women, particularly those deemed unattractive. Its intent is disguised through slang and irony, which is how dogwhistles operate: they feed on plausible deniability. A dog whistle refers to language that carries a specific ideological meaning for those who are familiar with it, while remaining ambiguous or deniable to outsiders. Even when used jokingly or sarcastically, the language still reinforces an underlying dehumanizing structure. Even if you may not consciously endorse the ideology, by repeating the terms, you participate in its normalization, a process that many scholars call a “visual turn.”
We cannot scoff at the absurdity of incel ideologies and send our thoughts and prayers to the victims while simultaneously circulating the thoughts and language that sustain them. Even if you use these words under the guise of satire or irony, you are still blowing that “dogwhistle,” even when you yourself cannot hear it.
Believing you’re exempt from incel radicalization underestimates its effectiveness. Effective radicalization often begins with an appeal to logic and presents you with premises that are difficult to deny. For example, physical attractiveness indeed influences how people are perceived and the opportunities they receive, whether that be socially, through dating or in terms of career. Studies on symmetry, grooming and health all come to the same conclusion: looks matter. This can be useful in explaining why incel culture and ideology in the form of “looksmaxxing” (an online movement based on maximizing one’s physical appearance) has taken a chokehold on the mainstream.
Looksmaxxing presents itself as realism before extremism. That logic is paired with an appeal to emotion. For people who feel rejected and overlooked, the core idea behind “looksmaxxing” gives them hope: optimizing your looks serves as a clear and measurable path toward improvement in every aspect of life.
Looksmaxxing also happens to play into our psychological need for belonging, as explained through Polish social psychologist Henri Tajfel’s social identity theory. Humans have a fundamental need to belong to a group, and with that comes the creation of in-groups and out-groups. We categorize both ourselves and others into groups that are often purely cognitive and based on arbitrary traits. In the case of looksmaxxing, this categorization is determined by where one falls on the PUAhate, Sluthate and Lookism (PSL) scale, which rates facial attractiveness. The process of social categorization encourages individuals to favor their in-group over the out-group. Ranking high on the scale or your in-group having status and success produces positive distinctiveness, in which one’s group is perceived as superior, feeding directly into self-esteem.
However, ranking lower on the scale may lead to different coping strategies. One such strategy is individual mobility, where a person purposely tries to distance themselves from a low-status group. Translated to looksmaxxing, this means changing or altering one’s physical appearance in order to climb up on the scale. However, when boundaries do not seem permeable, and individual mobility is not seen as an effective option, individuals may turn to a different strategy known as social competition.
In Rodger’s case, he began with trying to gain status and popularity through individual mobility; going to the mall and picking out a new wardrobe complete with Gucci sunglasses, a Versace shirt and working out in his home. He found no luck with this, stating: “I’ve been trying to join and be accepted among the beautiful, popular people all my life, but it was to no avail.”
Instead, Rodger turned to social competition, a different coping strategy in which groups seek to improve their status by directly competing or attempting to dominate an out-group with higher status. Rodger wrote: “Every single time I’ve seen a guy walk around with his beautiful girlfriend, I’ve always wanted to kill them both in the most painful way possible. They deserve it. They must be punished. The males deserve to be punished for living a better and more pleasurable life than me, and the females deserve to be punished for giving that pleasurable life to those males instead of me.” Rodger sought to redefine the hierarchy by asserting power through violence against those he blamed for his sexual and social rejection. His attacks were an attempt to win status through domination, punishing the out-group he believed had wronged him and overturning the social order he felt he had been excluded from.
The core idea throughout both Rodger’s ideology and the looksmaxxing community is the same: that attractive people get love, respect, status and power. Looksmaxxing often begins in the same place Rodger did, with individual mobility. The promise is that by changing one’s appearance, whether that be through grooming, fashion, fitness or cosmetic optimization, it is possible to cross the boundary, or “ascend,” into a higher-status group. And just as Rodger’s views paved the way for external violence, looksmaxxing has already led to internal violence. Within its communities, there are extreme and self-destructive practices that are often normalized in the pursuit of climbing the hierarchy. Prominent figures within the community, specifically Clavicular, encourage extremely harmful behavior. He publicly engages and endorses illicit drug use on stream (including ketamine and methamphetamine), causing him to overdose and seize in front of his audience. He also practices physical self-harm in a process called bonesmashing, or smashing hard objects repeatedly onto one’s face to “build bone mass.” Additionally, he encourages the use of non-regulated peptides, hormones and fat dissolvers (Aqualyx, Retatrutide, GHK-CU, Melanotan II, HGH testosterone) found through gray markets on the internet.
Looksmaxxing and certain parts of incel ideology have this strange universal appeal because even if you reject incel ideology, parts of it still feel true. You’re not radicalized because you’re doing skincare, going to the gym or wanting to improve your looks. You are not radicalized because you acknowledge that attractiveness plays a role in how people are treated.
You begin to become radicalized, however, when self-improvement becomes a matter of quantifying attraction, sorting people into rigid categories and reducing people deemed unattractive as biological categories and rankings: subhuman, low tier, mid tier and high tier. These labels act as an easily understandable and objective framework for navigating the nuanced and subjective concept of attraction. And it becomes easy to see the world through this lens.
Although looksmaxxing claims to pursue objective truth, it collapses under the same logic. Although it starts with truth, it’s illogical to believe that attraction can be reduced to a scale, and that maximizing the potential of your looks is the answer to everything that you are lacking. Even within looksmaxxing spaces, ratings are inherently subjective, shaped by personal insecurity, individual preferences and biases. People frequently disagree on where someone falls on the PSL scale, with some ranking others lower as a way of coping with their own perceived status. And beyond looksmaxxing spaces, most people would reject such rankings altogether. At that point, self-improvement becomes about who deserves respect and dignity and who does not.
The shift here marks where a personal desire to improve becomes tangled with a worldview that sorts people into hierarchies and treats those at the bottom as subhuman.
Incel slang and culture are not harmless internet humor. Incel slang is a communication system that builds identity through in-groups and out-groups, normalizes dehumanization, violence and self-harm; it, in turn, makes extremist worldviews easier to adopt and violence easier to justify. This pattern relies on people who repeat and excuse it without recognizing that they are active participants in its circulation.
Pushing back against this requires resisting anti-intellectualism and the fear of being “that one friend that’s too woke.” It requires being critical of the media we choose to consume and repeat. And it also requires understanding that our language matters because it influences what we see as acceptable and what we see as worth caring about. The easiest way to stop radicalization is to refuse to give it a language that offers it laughter and a place to hide.
Claire Kim and Dylan Hunter will stop calling each other chuds now.
