I’m sitting in a clammy hotel room in mid-state America waiting to meet a man called Darkcel. Darkcel is a content creator who has said he hates women. Every video he makes depicts women as the enemy and celebrates the manosphere. He will only talk to me anonymously, while wearing a skeleton mask. I watch the clock wondering if he’ll turn up. There’s a knock on the hotel room door and I hold my breath as I answer to a man in a black suit with a pale white mask and sullen black eyes. 

‘Nice to meet you,” I say. My politeness pisses me off. It’s not nice to meet him. 

I’ve had some restless nights recently – not because I have a young child or the nights are uncomfortably warm, though they don’t help. The release of my new project, Investigates, which I’ve been working on for over a year, has left me apprehensive. Don’t get me wrong, I feel so proud to have made these films, but their controversial subjects have perhaps put me in the line of fire. Some of our contributors and members of our production team wanted to remain anonymous. Despite the danger, we were so desperate to make these shows.

Investigates is a docuseries made up of three standalone one-hour episodes on the following topics: rough sex, cyberstalking and incels. Words that have peppered the media recently, but that few of us fully understand. Before working on this show, I didn’t fully comprehend the complexities of these issues. Even now, I’m still getting my head around it all. 

Documentary making is a journey of discovery, and like going to the airport with no ticket, you don’t always know where you’ll end up. That spontaneous unplanned trip sounds dreamy until you end up in a dodgy hostel in Oklahoma with no air-con talking to a self-confessed woman-hater wearing a mask.

I’ve spent the best part of last year trying to get people to talk to me who I wouldn’t usually ever be in a situation to talk to, or even want to. But we need more discussion, more questioning of the issues we’re scared of or don’t understand. We need to have conversations with people we don’t agree with if we are going to deal with tough subjects. Because what can start online as banter can become a very real physical threat.

So, what are incels? Incels by definition are not threatening – they are involuntarily celibate (usually) men who blame circumstance – be it physical, financial or other – for their lack of sexual relationships with women. Sometimes these incels are (relatively) harmless, but sometimes the extreme toxicity of their masculinity can have a violent impact.  

There have been high-profile cases. I first started working on the incel film shortly after the Plymouth attack in August 2021. Jake Davison was a 22-year-old man who had expressed misogynistic views in videos (since removed) he shared on his YouTube channel, ranting about his mother, other single mothers and his failure to find a girlfriend. In one video he said: “I’m still in the same house, same situation, same position … I’m still a virgin, fat, ugly, whatever you want to call it.” He also used incel forums to express hatred towards women. Two weeks after making one of these videos he went on a gun rampage, killing his own mum in their home, before shooting dead four other people in the space of eight minutes and then turning the gun on himself. His victims included a three-year-old girl, Sophie Martyn, who was walking a teddy in her pram while holding her dad’s hand. 

Watching his videos is heartbreaking. Were there signs of what was to come? Could this tragedy have been prevented? Why couldn’t authorities have stepped in before it was too late? Learning about his story and watching his videos, I felt sickened.

In Canada in 2018, Alek Minassian, then 25, was found guilty of 10 counts of first-degree murder and 16 counts of attempted murder after he ploughed a white van into pedestrians. In interviews at the police station, he declared in a remarkably calm tone that his killing spree was all in the name of ‘The Incel Rebellion’.

Elliot Rodger, 22, was one of the first incels to commit mass murder, killing six people in a horrifying attack in California in 2014. He left behind a 137-page manifesto blaming women for not loving him. Shockingly, I’ve seen in these incel forums that Rodger has since become a revered figure to extremists in the online community with some even praising him as ‘Saint ER’.

Today, over 100 people around the world are said to have been murdered or injured from incel-related attacks. Could those lives have been saved? I wanted to get a deeper understanding of this growing community to try to answer that question.

The evolution of incels and the radicalisation of lonely men has also resulted in thousands of blog posts celebrating the demise of women and a world where physical attacks towards females are glorified. Scrolling through these blogs can be scary, with their own colloquialisms and derogatory language. The incel lexicon takes a while to digest. Chads are how incels describe typically attractive males. Then there are Stacys, your typically attractive women, and Beckys who, in their opinion, are less attractive. Incels believe that 20% of men (the Chads) will attract 80% of the women. 

There are two main incel ‘ideologies’: ‘black pill’ and ‘red pill’, inspired by The Matrix. Incels who are black-pilled believe they see the world for what it truly is, and so have no hope of relationships with women. Red-pilled incels persist in doing extreme things to make themselves appeal to the opposite sex – including drastic cosmetic surgeries and learning pick-up artist techniques. I explore both in the show.

A lot of vulnerable men go looking for a space of inclusion. When I talked to other self-proclaimed incels like Sam and Vanta in the documentary, I was left confused, because I liked them more than I thought I would. It’s hard to draw a line between incels who pose a threat and those who are just sad, lonely, isolated men.      

I was asked by an audience member at the Sheffield film festival how I convinced someone like Darkcel to talk to me. I didn’t have to do a lot, if I’m honest, which I found surprising at the time. I flew to his hometown in mid-state USA and gave him time. A lot of men feel unseen and really are looking for community. It’s just the intensity of the community that usually captivates these men that can lead them down a dangerous path. After giving him space to talk for almost two hours, I learned he had been badly abused by his mother’s boyfriend. This doesn’t condone the videos he makes or some of the horrific ideologies he shared with me, but a part of me understood that this was a traumatised man who had fallen through the cracks of society. My crew were all women, and I did question how he felt about us filming him – he was quite dismissive, saying that it didn’t matter. A lot of things emerged during the interview that contradicted his extreme views. By the time I finished the interview, I felt more sad for him than scared of him.

The headlines around incel culture are shocking but there are people, pain and suffering behind it all on both sides. We need to be talking to young men from a young age in schools – something my friend and activist Laura Bates does – but alongside that, it is everyone’s responsibility to be aware of this behaviour. 

It seems to me, so far, that there are extremists lurking within all communities, but it’s important to talk to the men in these groups in order to understand them. But why would they want to talk to me? I am what they hate, after all: a woman. 

Making this film now feels important, not just because the Davison attack was so close to home, but also because of the continued popularity of Andrew Tate, the extreme self-proclaimed misogynistic influencer who was charged in Romania with rape, human trafficking and forming an organised crime group to sexually exploit women. He denies all charges. 

Hope Not Hate, a group campaigning against far-right extremism in the UK, has warned that Tate continues to attract a huge following among young men and teenage boys who are drawn to his “misogynist, homophobic and racist content” by the luxurious lifestyle the influencer projects online.

This proves to me that toxic masculinity needs to be talked about and exposed for what it is. It’s everywhere. Over the years I have witnessed misogyny – not to the extreme levels I deal with in this documentary, but in subtle ways that still need to be called out. Misogyny seeps through the cracks in all our lives. I hope that my documentary will shine a light on just how far it has spread, and push forward a conversation about how we tackle it.

Laura Whitmore Investigates is available to watch on ITVX.

Images: George Gottlieb; Getty; ITV