Researcher warns of ‘extremely frightening’ exchanges on incel forum

Hands type on a computer keyboard in Toronto, in this file photo taken on Sunday, Oct. 9. (The Canadian Press/Graeme Roy)

A doctoral student at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) is raising the alarm over the demonization of women on incel discussion threads, after analysing exchanges on a men’s rights online forum.

Violence against women has increasingly moved online over the years, where the roots of some crimes against them sometimes take shape. That digital hatred is also the focus of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, which takes place Tuesday.

Océane Corbin, a PhD student in communications at UQAM, has firsthand knowledge. She spent nearly three years immersed in the main incel forum — “involuntary celibates” — which is freely accessible online.

Incels are “almost exclusively heterosexual men who want to be in a relationship with women but cannot for multiple reasons,” she told The Canadian Press.

“They identify women, and more specifically women’s emancipation, as being responsible for their single status,” she said.

Often made up of men aged 13 to 30, the men’s rights movement sometimes goes so far as to advocate “committing violence and punishing women because they are emancipated.”

Corbin said she witnessed “extremely frightening” content on the international forum, ranging from lists of drugs that could be used to weaken victims before assault to confessions of sexual assault.

She also noted that confessions of a desire to commit rape are frequent on these threads.

“About every 30 minutes, you’ll see a post confessing a desire to commit a sexual assault,” she said.

Quebec is not immune to this trend, which emerged in the 2010s.

“There are other Quebec forums where you’ll find men’s rights rhetoric and discourse that can be linked to the incel movement,” Corbin said.

Regulating these forums is extremely difficult, she added, since many are based in the United States and hard to control.

“There is a significant legislative gap right now in Quebec and worldwide regarding this type of platform,” said the researcher, who sometimes had nowhere to turn when she wanted to report comments on the forum.

She noted, however, that a bill on online sexual assault threats is currently underway in Quebec.

According to Corbin, education remains key to curbing the incel movement, which often recruits boys in early adolescence, when they experience their first romantic rejections.

She said young men need to be taught to pre-emptively deconstruct arguments used by members of this community.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Nov. 23, 2025.