“To have or not have sex,” writes R. Marie Griffith, “is a vital symbolic and discursive arena for [enacting] the relationship between body and soul.” For incels or involuntary celibate men, who mark their sexlessness as fundamentally different from religious or asexual types of celibacy, not having sex is no such enactment. Neither ideological choice nor moral commitment, their celibacy is involuntary and violent, increasingly so. The list of incel mass murderers makes for a disconcerting array of numbers and places, marking celibacy as a vital arena not just for scholars of religion but for all who contend with the “epidemic” of mass killing.
If the mass killing is a genre of violence, the manifesto is one of its most reliable conventions. Incel perpetrators write of themselves as so frustrated that murder gradually became the most viable path out of the loneliness reticent women impose on longing men. Celibacy, in their writing, is an imposition, a form of social exclusion that makes men boil over into indiscriminate violence.
What can we say about violence and its roots? Scholars of religion should consider the role of social impositions like involuntary celibacy alongside the self-directed moral commitments and meaningful choices that usually capture our attention. The path from frustration to violence is in our domain of expertise, especially in light of the Durkheimian tradition in the field. If, as this tradition posits, religion describes our means for coming to social life, the mass killing comes into our purview as sociality’s total breakdown.
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Isla Vista killer Elliot Rodger rants about his sexual frustration in a 141-page manifesto he entitled My Twisted World. “Knowing that they gleefully show off their desirable forms, yet they would never give me a chance to be their boyfriend,” he writes, “increased my already boiling hatred.” His manifesto toggles between statements of abject hopelessness and detailed plans for a mass murder spree. Rodger believed that his unwanted celibacy meant that he could never be happy or fulfilled, to the point that he eventually saw no path to “peace and serenity” outside of “violent revenge.”
His writing is the tilted mirror image of a much older text, in which sexual frustration becomes a path to peace. In Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, first performed in Athens around 411 BCE, women refuse men’s attentions. Everyone in the play wants to have sex, but men want it so badly that their sexual desire reroutes their desire to continue the slaughter of the Peloponnesian War. Lysistrata is the woman who proposes this strategy of redirection. When her friend asks her how peace will be induced, she responds that “all we have to do is idly sit indoors, […] our bodies burning naked through the folds of shining silk.” The moment women show off their desirable forms, men will “beg our arms to open,” she predicts, gleefully certain that “that’s our time!” Brought to a fever pitch of longing, men “will soon be rabid for a peace.”
Lysistrata and My Twisted World are peculiar twins, one pointing from burning desire and its frustration to the cessation of violence and the other moving from this frustration to mass killing. Both render sexual frustration as a state that begins between specific people but eventually bears an imprint on social life more broadly. The lack of relations between one man and the women he desires reorients the relations between strangers. Frustration churns into furious excitement, a rabidness that can swing in one of two directions once it veers into society at large.
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The rendition of desire as double-edged, capable of driving people to greatness and of tipping them toward horrifying violence, is a staple in what we might call “libidinal” accounts of society. For most of the twentieth century, libidinal explanations for social ills made direct reference to religion.
In a 1916 diatribe against the scourge of spinsters and unmarried men, for example, British eugenicist Walter Gallichan described celibacy as a “disintegrating force in society.” Gallichan attributed rising crime and brutality to birth rates. The wrong kinds of people were procreating. For this he blamed religious valuations of chastity, admonitions to which properly civilized, white, able-bodied people were unfortunately more receptive. Yet he also proposed that religion, currently a troublingly “restraining force,” could be part of the solution. Christians—and Gallichan meant all of them—should stop punishing and shaming sex and instead encourage the “hygienic” unfolding of healthy people’s “massive and often overwhelming” desires. A religion that directs sexual desire properly has the “power to ensure that we shall all be well-born.” For Gallichan, deeply worried about increases in violence, the anchoring of “racial responsibility” through religion offered a path to peace.
The stakes were even higher in what is perhaps the archetypal text elaborating the linkage between sexual frustration and mass violence. Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism attributed the post-World War I popularity of fascist authoritarianism to the intensification of sexual repression in Germany. Children were raised to sublimate their innate longing for sexual pleasure into a longing for the right kind of middle-class “family life.” Religion—Reich, too, wrote in a confidently general key—was central to this repression and redirection. “The core of any religious dogma,” he explained, is “the negation of sexual pleasure.” This negation is never fully successful, however, and so Germans, taught to fear “rebellious forces” within themselves, were primed to approve of the social control authoritarian regimes could provide. If religions instill the sense that repression is necessary, the dictator promises to realize a society in which it is possible. Reich predicted in 1933 that this intensified striving to repress would not end well. “Sadism,” he quipped, “derives from unsatisfied orgastic longing.”
Reich and Gallichan, as well as others writing in a much wider tradition of concern over the havoc wrought by sexual repression, relied on the psychoanalytic assumption that sexual feeling is the structure undergirding interpersonal, social, and even political feelings. Social phenomena can and should be stripped back to the orgastic longing at their root. Sexual desire is dangerously anti-social when misdirected into shame and guilt but can be constitutive of sociality when allowed to unfold properly. This line of argument has found particular resonance in French philosophy, usually via Reich. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, for example, are two texts that do not just present sexual repression as productive of bad sociality, but also propose that the unleashing of sexual desire could be productive of good sociality. In this vision, which gained traction in tandem with the changing social norms of the sexual revolution, the satisfaction of desire becomes an explicit antidote to the social ill that is mass violence. To prevent frustration is to protect society; pleasure secures peace.
Contemporary accounts of violence as rooted, somehow, in men being single, do not usually address themselves to religion, while older libidinal explanations routinely task religious traditions with the proper regulation of sexual desire. Yet something of this older assumption of a linkage lingers in manifestos composed by sexually frustrated killers, which almost always open with their religious disillusionment.
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Incel mass killer George Sodini, who was asked to leave his non-denominational Christian church after he “bothered” a woman, notes that “religion is a waste.” It imposed “that moral standard that always contradicts the natural tendencies and desires of a person”—it taught him repression—and he ended up inhabiting “a closed world with me specifically and totally excluded.” Seeing no pathways into the encounters he wanted, Sodini walked into a women’s aerobics class, pulled out his gun, and opened fire.
Rodger, by contrast, read The Secret and tried his hands at the Law of Attraction. He spent hours in intense meditation, speaking to the universe and telling it he wanted hot blondes. “I wanted to believe,” he writes, “that I had the POWER to do it.” He “almost ripped the book apart” when his wishes did not materialize. This episode marked the beginning of a slow escalation from throwing cups of hot coffee at couples to stabbing his roommates, driving into pedestrians, and shooting women in front of a sorority house.
Ethan Miller, whose online writings alternate between his desire for sex and romance and elaborate fantasies of violence, was certain that he was perhaps the only man who “just can’t have what [he has] always wanted.” Moral considerations about good and evil lose salience against the enormity of his unfulfilled desire. “Fuck your ‘God’ and your ‘Devil,’” he concludes over and over, he is “going to find Peace” by other means. He fired his first shots in the parking lot of a local grocery store.
While the institutions targeted in these manifestos range from non-denominational Christian churches to more metaphysical traditions, religion appears in manifestos wherever these men express the sense that there would have been a way to do things right and reap the rewards. This assumption of a systematic social life, in which good behavior neatly and reliably connects to good outcomes, undergirds incel murderers’ disillusionment with their traditions of choice. Religion ought to have equipped them to navigate social life to their satisfaction, and it did not.
“No fruits for me to enjoy,” laments Miller. Or, in the words of Chris Harper-Mercer, whose manifesto teems with references to demons, there is no “loot” for “good individuals like myself,” while “wicked” men—“vaginal pirates,” even—do get to have sex with the women they desire. Theirs and other manifestos describe an unbearable intersection: the certainty that social life is predictable, systematic, and capable of being organized toward satiation, lives alongside the undeniable lived experience of affection and attention flowing in erratic and even “unfair” ways. It is at this crossroads that the incel killer first grows frustrated, and then rabid for peace.
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“You will pledge good behavior and uprightness,” said Lysistrata to men ready to kill, and “then each man’s wife is his to hustle home.” She is correct, because she lives in a play, where pleasure gained is peace secured. But for incels, as for all humans living in a society rather than according to a script, neither the paths to pleasurable intimacy nor its social consequences are ever so straight or certain. Still, even as he has grown disillusioned with the religious systematizations to which he was once committed, the incel killer cannot imagine a life where there is no system at fault for his frustration. It must be there, but where?
Randomness and arbitrariness are alarming. One French theorist of desire predicted that only “the single flash of terrorism” would eventually still be capable of “checking the system in broad daylight.” The indiscriminate mass violence that incel killers first fantasize about in their manifestos and then realize becomes a revelatory act. The system that assigns some men to sexual fulfillment and others to frustration is a cruel lottery whose workings remain opaque. Incel killers seek peace in its illumination.
Scholars of religion have long produced their own systematizations of social life, and violence often prompts us to consider how some people are assigned to its peripheries. The mass killing, characterized by the killer’s indiscriminate and random distribution of life or death, is a spectacularized refusal of systematicity. It is a refusal born of the hope that systematicity will reveal itself anew once it has been denied so forcefully. “Maybe all this,” writes Sodini in his manifesto’s final lines, “will shed some light on why some people just cannot make things happen in their lives.” He adds: “some people like to study that stuff.”
Yet we should resist the urge to look over killers’ shoulders as they endeavor to pull back the curtain on their own exclusion. Social failure is not about the “stuff” of frustration—the precise racist or misogynist explanations to which mass killers turn—but about the abyss that exposure is meant to keep at bay. What if there was no part to play to satisfaction, no script to live out correctly? If nothing else, mass violence exposes to scholars of religion how peace and pleasure become impossible to imagine once we grow anxious that there is no system holding us together.