“A strong terrorist potential”: these are the terms in which a French domestic intelligence note, revealed last week, describes the “incel” movement – from the English “involuntary celibate”, these “involuntary celibate” men united in their sexual and emotional frustration, and the resentment they feel towards women.
The General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI) warns of younger and more numerous profiles, capable of becoming radicalized in a few months on social networks, until taking action.
That the danger is real, and the problem serious, no serious person disputes, and certainly not the author of these lines. But this is precisely why we must take the time to think about the best way to respond, which first requires properly qualifying the phenomenon.
A counterproductive qualification
As a researcher in “gender studies”, I welcome the call launched by the High Council for Equality, in its January 2026 report, to promote the study of masculinities: better understanding their construction means giving ourselves the means to combat their criminal abuse. But, so that this necessary work can be carried out, I fear, as a researcher on terrorism, the other recommendation of the same report: “integrate misogynistic terrorism into the security doctrines” of the State.
Already on April 3, by refusing to take up the Cédric Prizzon case – this man accused of having killed his ex-partner and then his partner – the national anti-terrorism prosecutor Olivier Christen had aroused understandable indignation. But in these matters, the sirens of emergency are bad advisors. Too often, this word “terrorism” is the product of this. Conceived as the superlative of crime, it seems alone to measure the horror.
But a superlative is not a concept, and indignation, however legitimate it may be, does not make a policy of prevention. Particularly with regard to the “incel” movement, and more broadly this “masculinist” nebula to which it is linked, there is even a fear that the “terrorist” qualification may be counterproductive.
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Certainly, since the violence of the double murder was added to that of the misogynistic hate speech on which Cédric Prizzon had fed and which he propagated, the main criterion for a minimum definition of terrorism was well met: violence which, beyond its immediate victims, aims to terrorize an entire group – here, women – in the name of an ideology. However, there are more than a hundred definitions of terrorism, without any having ever achieved consensus. Knowing whether a crime meets this or that criterion is then less important than the effects of the use of this vague category in the public space.
However, following the American anthropologist William Douglass, a figure in “Critical Studies on Terrorism”, we can fear here, according to the title of his 2009 book, a “self-fulfilling prophecy”: by designating an absolute enemy, the terrorist qualification contributes to producing it; by establishing a climate of exception, it calls for measures which in turn create the conditions for new violence.
The Bush administration’s “war on terror” offered the most striking demonstration of this: we know today that this crusade, far from reducing the jihadist threat, aggravated it, by fueling among those it targeted the resentment from which was born the violence it claimed to extinguish.
Irrefutable threat
This vicious circle is even more formidable when it comes to masculinity, because of the way in which it is constructed. Because this is not a block: as the Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell, a pioneer in studies on masculinity, established in the 1990s, masculinities are constructed in a play of positions between men, as much if not more than between men and women.
More profoundly, other works suggest that at the heart of this construction there is a complex dynamic between norm and transgression – two poles that masculinist imaginations tend to confuse, where defying the forbidden is equivalent to obedience to a higher law, that of “real men”.
However, the surest effect of the terrorist qualification is to lock this dynamic around an irrefutable threat which admits only two positions: whoever is not against it, is for it. Indeed, opposing it with other forms of masculinity, or designating it otherwise, runs the risk of weakening the security response, and therefore reinforcing the threat.
Bonus for transgression
We are already seeing this on social networks: that justice is hesitant to qualify Cédric Prizzon’s crime as terrorist, that researchers are questioning the relevance of the security response to the masculinist threat, and here they are suspected of patriarchal collusion. The idea is even expressed that men cannot deal with this subject by themselves without reproducing the male domination at the root of the violence: they would have to either remain silent, or echo the feminist speeches made by women.
The issue here is not so much freedom of speech as the effectiveness of our collective response to “masculinism”. By legally sealing a link between masculinity and terrorism, without being able to precisely define either of these two terms, the qualification of “masculinist terrorism” makes the domain of the forbidden indefinitely extensible; However, for the new apostles of male domination, and for the men breaking the ban from whom they trade, each new prohibition, far from being dissuasive, increases the premium for transgression.
The vicious circle of terrorism comes into full play here: if any masculine speech tends to arouse suspicion thanks to the link between “masculinity” and terrorism, only transgressive and violent masculinities will dare to assert themselves, which will further fuel the initial suspicion, and so on. Masculinists rush into this void that the security discourse contributes to hollowing out.
This forum is not a plea against the High Council for Equality, whose work is precious, and even less against those who fight against masculinist violence, whose commitment is necessary. She expresses a concern: that we are sacrificing, to the security emergency, the patient work of understanding contemporary masculinities, so important to dry up this violence at the source.
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