But soon, a picture of Davison’s life started to emerge. It was quickly revealed that he was immersed in so-called incel culture — an internet community of misogynistic and angry men, most of them young and disaffected. Davison’s online footprint clearly showed that he had a hatred of women.

The incel movement has been responsible for other acts of mass violence, yet it remains a sub-culture that is largely unknown among the wider population.

One of Ireland’s foremost experts in the area is Dr Debbie Ging, associate professor of media studies at the DCU Institute of Future Media, Democracy and Society.

“Incel is short for involuntary celibate and describes men who are sexually unsuccessful with women,” she says. “While it started out as a more neutral term, it now refers specifically to an online community of men immersed in the anti-feminist ideology of the broader ‘manosphere’. Incels believe in a biologically preordained sexual hierarchy, and see themselves as losers in the ‘genetic lottery’.”

She says that incels can be broadly divided into two key categories: those who are still invested in the possibility of sexual success and those who have given up.

“The latter are characterised by a strong sense of defeatism, hopelessness and fatalism. These incels identify as ‘black pillers’, distinguishing them from the manosphere’s core philosophy of the ‘red pill’.”

Incel culture has its own vernacular and the notion of black and red pills is critical.

Originally derived from a scene in the 1998 film, The Matrix, in the men’s rights movement “taking the red pill” means holding the belief that certain gender roles they are expected to conform to, such as marriage and monogamy, are intended to solely benefit women.

The “black pill” takes this idea much further — it is masculinity at its most toxic and rooted in the idea that their lives are futile, and their suppression is at the hands of women.

Davison uploaded a video of himself in the weeks leading up to the shooting in which he bragged about “consuming the black pill overdose” and ranting that “women are arrogant”.

Incels are united by what they consider to be involuntary celibacy and feelings of rejection, injustice and frustration in their own inability to convince people to have sex or form romantic relationships with them. Davison was no different and he used social media to discuss how he was still a virgin who had never kissed a girl.

‘Stacies or Chads’

“The most dominant rhetorical tropes on incel forums,” Debbie Ging says, “are bio-essentialist ideas about gender, extreme misogyny, self-loathing, negative body image, a preoccupation with sex robots, a belief in great replacement theory, antipathy toward sexually active people — referred to as Stacies and Chads, or normies — and a strong sense of what [veteran American sociologist] Michael Kimmel refers to as ‘aggrieved entitlement’.”

Bio-essentialism is the belief that an individual’s personality is something they are born with, rather than the product of circumstances or upbringing.

While misogyny is as old as humankind, Ging believes the internet has exacerbated a sense of toxic masculinity. “The key difference is that incels and men’s rights activists are now digitally connected but their use of misogyny has the same objective as it always did — to assert male supremacy and serve as a warning to women who try to challenge it.

“Misogyny,” she adds, “is not some genetically inherited trait or the behaviour of a few bad apples — it is a strategic weapon used by a political project, whether you call that patriarchy or male supremacy or whatever, intended to keep women ‘in their place’.”

Debbie Ging says Davison’s acts, shocking as they are, are at the extreme end of the subculture and, in fact, most incels are not violent. “While incel culture is misogynistic and toxic, I would not describe it as inherently aggressive or violent,” she says.

She adds that most incels have little or no contact with women and, while incel forums contain extreme misogyny and sometimes violent ideation, most incels do not actually condone violence and many condemn the attacks perpetrated by Alek Minassian, who killed 10 people in Toronto in 2018 and others.

“Indeed, incels are frequently at pains to point out that it is the chads or alpha males who are violent and abusive towards women, while incels remain undesirable precisely because they are not aggressive.”

The writer and media studies lecturer Mary McGill has been widely acclaimed for her recent book, The Visibility Trap: Sexism, Surveillance and Social Media. She has looked deeply into incel culture.

“The first word that I think of when it comes to incels is entitlement,” she says. “This sense of entitlement towards women, access to women, access to sex. At the most extreme end of the incel movement, we get the sense of entitlement blown up to such an extent that it manifests itself in the offline world as extreme violence, leading to mayhem and death in the worst instances.”

McGill says that misogyny is not new, but what is notable about the incel as a phenomenon is its place in online culture and how it seems to have really festered and found community within internet subcultures.

She says internet subcultures are an excellent breeding ground for radicalisation of all kinds.

“You create these closed communities where people reinforce one another’s belief and that reinforcement becomes a gateway into extremism when you have people reinforcing support for deeply antisocial and misogynistic philosophies.”

What drives men — often young men — into this unhappy, destructive world?

“There seems to be a real sense that they as men have been disenfranchised and this relates back to the changes in gender roles that have taken place over the last, say, 40 to 50 years.”

She says women have gained independence with regard to reproduction thanks to the contraceptive pill, and also have greater economic independence and can delay marriage.

“Incel communities see those gains as having an impact on them, and their ability to get a girlfriend or get married,” McGill adds.

“But what’s often missing from that sort of analysis is the economic changes that have taken place over the last 40 or 50 years. The breadwinner model that is still held up as what a man should aspire to has been seriously undermined when it comes to the economy, the ability to buy a home or pay rent or secure decent employment.

“That kind of analysis leads into questions about hopelessness, being able to financially provide for yourself and provide financial security in order to build a family and build a home.”

These problems are rooted in society and have been brewing for decades, culminating in these horrific acts of violence, she says.

The question of what attracts young men to the incel subculture has long fascinated Debbie Ging. “Incels,” she says, “lack the attributes of manliness that society values — physical prowess, sporting ability and conventional good looks.

“Linked to this, histories of bullying are common, and of a retreat into the mediated worlds of gaming and other online communities. From there, the transition to NEET [not in education employment or training] is often relatively seamless. In a neoliberal economy where job security and the social safety net are fast disappearing, the hallmarks of traditional masculinity and marriageability — property ownership and career for life — are no longer available to most of these men.”

Ging says it is important to note that we are now living in a highly sexualised culture, one in which extrovert personalities are rewarded. “Incels, by contrast, are introverted, with low self-esteem and high levels of inhibition. They are socially isolated, and many self-identify as having neuroatypical diagnoses, such as autism.

“On top of this, we have had a dominant narrative in popular culture for the past 20 years telling us that feminism has achieved its aims, that men are in crisis and that women have it all. So, if your experience of the world is largely mediated through your computer screen, you might have a somewhat distorted picture of how gender relations in the real world actually work.”

Laura Bates, the British feminist writer and founder of the Everyday Sexism project, spent two years undercover in incel communities as research for her new book, Men Who Hate Women. She believes the incel movement is a form of extremism and at its most violent should be considered misogynistic terrorism.

“Online incel forums are steeped in extremist misogyny, with members regularly suggesting women should be raped and murdered,” she wrote in the Sunday Telegraph this week. “They encourage each other to rise up in a ‘day of retribution’ or ‘incel rebellion’, when they will punish society, and women in particular, for their suffering, by murdering as many ‘normies’ (non-incels) as possible.”

Her interest in the movement began when she became disturbed by what young school-age boys were telling her and realised some of the boys she worked with on gender inequality and sexual consent in UK schools were parroting extremist beliefs and fake statistics. One pupil told her 87pc of women lie about rape. “I soon realised that these teenagers had been radicalised online,” she writes. “But it wasn’t a kind of radicalisation anyone was talking about.”

Posing as an incel named Alex, Bates got a glimpse into a world of deeply unhappy young men. “Racism and sexism overlap in their ideology, with particular vitriol reserved for women who sleep with non-white men,” she writes. “The movement is transnational… One day, they were discussing a massacre at a US school. There were rumours the shooter had been rejected by a female classmate. The forum members hoped that he had been able to rape her before she died. I switched off my computer and cried.”

Online abuse

Some experts who have gone public about incels have incurred their wrath and have been targeted online. When Review reached out to one such figure, she responded by email to decline an interview. “I don’t touch the incel issue anymore at all. Too much online insanity follows. So I’ll have to stay away from this one.”

Debbie Ging has had a different experience. She says she been ridiculed in certain men’s rights online forums but not directly targeted or threatened, but feels this would be different if she had a larger social media presence that put her on the their radar.

“I am much more likely to be targeted by other types of men’s rights activists, as incels rarely make direct contact with women. And, despite the scale and severity of online abuse, I am as likely to confront misogyny and harassment on the street or in a bar.”

Mary McGill’s book looks at how women often receive much more online abuse than their male counterparts. She is no exception.

“A couple of years ago I did a TedX talk about my research area which is how young women use the selfie phenomenon,” she says. “I got some very strange comments and emails that could be considered intimidating.

“I’ve never read the comments under the YouTube video but I’ve been told that they’re not pleasant. Unfortunately, that’s the reality when you discuss issues such as this.

“If we don’t talk about these things and we don’t talk about what’s gone wrong or how we might make the situation better, we won’t learn anything and nothing will change but by simply talking about it, it’s interpreted as hostility, as a provocation.”