Julia Ebner is slim, pale, brown-eyed, bookish and softly spoken, with a formidable intelligence and a gentle handshake – precisely not the sort of person you expect to find hanging out with male supremacists venting their hatred of women and fantasies of misogynist violence.
Yet this is where Ebner spends her days (and, I suspect, many late nights): lurking in unpleasant corners of the internet pretending to be Alex Williamson, an “unhappily single”, unemployed, white American male in his late twenties who is “fed up with feminism”.
Williamson is her incel – involuntary celibate – avatar and his online world is “a really toxic space”, Ebner says. A place where, on average, someone shares a rape fantasy every 29 minutes. “More than many of the groups I infiltrate, incels talk a lot about wanting to use violence. It’s a very violence-condoning atmosphere.”
The incel movement was started by a woman in the ’90s with the “very innocent purpose of wanting to connect people who felt lonely, who couldn’t find a romantic or sexual partner”.
Today it has tens of thousands of followers in easy-to-access online groups and forums, but has morphed into a community
