These are excerpts from a story I came across that is coming out in April's McLean's Magazine. I blotted out the names, but you can dig up the article and read it for yourself. Here are the important passages from the article entitled The Incel Terrorist.
I post for 2 main reasons:
1. So that we reach out to any young men who we observe to be isolated and alone and therefore susceptible to online subversion. This is an epidemic affecting young men today. Know the meaning of Incel.
2. It portrays MP's as they really are, which is refreshing.
The author writes:
My interest was not only journalistic, but personal. The streets around that part of North York are very familiar to me because, in the early and mid-2010s, I spent five years working in Toronto’s massage parlours. I did it during a hiatus from university—rent was expensive, writing was economically precarious and, as I sometimes joked to clients, working a parlour job was more interesting than folding T-shirts at the Gap. For about a year, I worked at a parlour located in an office building near Highway 401, only 10 minutes from Crown Spa. I thought of all the late nights and sleepy weekday mornings I spent with fellow attendants as we laundered towels and answered endless prank calls, as we applied each other’s eyeliner before sessions and skittered around suburban strip malls on coffee or Red Bull runs.
And I thought of YYYY, picking up a shift to make ends meet. I had never met her, but I knew plenty of young women much like her. The massage parlour economy operates on cash payments, unpredictable hours and, often, loose adherence to regulations. As a result, it attracts workers in transitional phases of life: students, single parents, women between jobs and aspiring entrepreneurs. Violence is a risk, and a lack of trust in law enforcement makes staff more likely to handle the burden privately.
When I worked at parlours, we would occasionally get a client walking in visibly drunk or high, who wouldn’t take kindly to being turned away. Sometimes, in the dimness of a session room, tensions would rise during negotiations about services, and my heart would race until I felt the smooth handle of the doorknob under my palm. Once, somebody even robbed the front desk of a parlour I worked in at gunpoint.
But most days, it was simply a job. Contrary to stereotype—that the men who pay for sexual services are deviants, that the women who provide them are reckless or desperate—those moments were by far the exception. And the idea that anyone would walk into a massage parlour and commit an atrocity like the one at Crown Spa was unimaginable......
A few blocks away, a 17-year-old boy named XXXX was getting ready for his own day, in the house he shared with his father and stepmother. He dressed in sunglasses, a hat and a long dark coat. He tucked his driver’s licence into his coat pocket, along with a sharpening stone and a note scrawled on lined paper: “Long Live The Incel Rebellion.” Into a black sheath attached to his belt he slid a short sword, 17 inches long, etched with the words “THOT SLAYER” (THOT is an acronym for That Ho Over There, a slur sometimes used for women, especially sex workers). Then he left home.
His parents divorced when he was young, which devastated him. By all accounts, he was a lonely and depressed teen, bullied relentlessly in school. In Grade 9 he told his parents he no longer wanted to attend classes. He left school, effectively ending his education. At some point, XXXX’s mother looked for professional help for her son, and mental health practitioners suggested medication. That never came to pass. Instead, XXX moved to his father’s house, where he spent his days alone in his basement bedroom, spiralling deeper into a network of fringe websites and YouTube channels promoting alt-right and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories—and the incel subculture.
XXXX sought out incel-themed videos on YouTube and discussed incel themes on social media and on Steam, a gaming platform. Without in-person social contact and the structure of secondary school education, XXXX found his feelings of abandonment reinforced online. He began describing himself as a “proud incel,” and a “Seeker of Martyrdom” on Steam, declaring in his profile that he hated feminists.
(Conclusion: He committed murder that day and although only 17, he was convicted as a terrorist, and sentenced to Life in Prison.)
XXXX’s case expands not only the definition of a terrorist, but that of a victim. The perception that sex work is intrinsically seedy or undesirable often lends itself to the idea that the people who do the work perhaps deserve that violence. Or at least that it’s inevitable. The XXXX case blows up those assumptions, demanding that both perpetrators and victims receive more attention and effort from law enforcement and courts. For now, his conviction looks like the beginning of a change.
I post for 2 main reasons:
1. So that we reach out to any young men who we observe to be isolated and alone and therefore susceptible to online subversion. This is an epidemic affecting young men today. Know the meaning of Incel.
2. It portrays MP's as they really are, which is refreshing.
The author writes:
My interest was not only journalistic, but personal. The streets around that part of North York are very familiar to me because, in the early and mid-2010s, I spent five years working in Toronto’s massage parlours. I did it during a hiatus from university—rent was expensive, writing was economically precarious and, as I sometimes joked to clients, working a parlour job was more interesting than folding T-shirts at the Gap. For about a year, I worked at a parlour located in an office building near Highway 401, only 10 minutes from Crown Spa. I thought of all the late nights and sleepy weekday mornings I spent with fellow attendants as we laundered towels and answered endless prank calls, as we applied each other’s eyeliner before sessions and skittered around suburban strip malls on coffee or Red Bull runs.
And I thought of YYYY, picking up a shift to make ends meet. I had never met her, but I knew plenty of young women much like her. The massage parlour economy operates on cash payments, unpredictable hours and, often, loose adherence to regulations. As a result, it attracts workers in transitional phases of life: students, single parents, women between jobs and aspiring entrepreneurs. Violence is a risk, and a lack of trust in law enforcement makes staff more likely to handle the burden privately.
When I worked at parlours, we would occasionally get a client walking in visibly drunk or high, who wouldn’t take kindly to being turned away. Sometimes, in the dimness of a session room, tensions would rise during negotiations about services, and my heart would race until I felt the smooth handle of the doorknob under my palm. Once, somebody even robbed the front desk of a parlour I worked in at gunpoint.
But most days, it was simply a job. Contrary to stereotype—that the men who pay for sexual services are deviants, that the women who provide them are reckless or desperate—those moments were by far the exception. And the idea that anyone would walk into a massage parlour and commit an atrocity like the one at Crown Spa was unimaginable......
A few blocks away, a 17-year-old boy named XXXX was getting ready for his own day, in the house he shared with his father and stepmother. He dressed in sunglasses, a hat and a long dark coat. He tucked his driver’s licence into his coat pocket, along with a sharpening stone and a note scrawled on lined paper: “Long Live The Incel Rebellion.” Into a black sheath attached to his belt he slid a short sword, 17 inches long, etched with the words “THOT SLAYER” (THOT is an acronym for That Ho Over There, a slur sometimes used for women, especially sex workers). Then he left home.
His parents divorced when he was young, which devastated him. By all accounts, he was a lonely and depressed teen, bullied relentlessly in school. In Grade 9 he told his parents he no longer wanted to attend classes. He left school, effectively ending his education. At some point, XXXX’s mother looked for professional help for her son, and mental health practitioners suggested medication. That never came to pass. Instead, XXX moved to his father’s house, where he spent his days alone in his basement bedroom, spiralling deeper into a network of fringe websites and YouTube channels promoting alt-right and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories—and the incel subculture.
XXXX sought out incel-themed videos on YouTube and discussed incel themes on social media and on Steam, a gaming platform. Without in-person social contact and the structure of secondary school education, XXXX found his feelings of abandonment reinforced online. He began describing himself as a “proud incel,” and a “Seeker of Martyrdom” on Steam, declaring in his profile that he hated feminists.
(Conclusion: He committed murder that day and although only 17, he was convicted as a terrorist, and sentenced to Life in Prison.)
XXXX’s case expands not only the definition of a terrorist, but that of a victim. The perception that sex work is intrinsically seedy or undesirable often lends itself to the idea that the people who do the work perhaps deserve that violence. Or at least that it’s inevitable. The XXXX case blows up those assumptions, demanding that both perpetrators and victims receive more attention and effort from law enforcement and courts. For now, his conviction looks like the beginning of a change.
