The Big Haunt: Bianca Devin and the spectre of Elliot Rodgers in the War on Women within Social Media Platforms and Male-on-Female Violence.
CW: Racism, Misogyny, Violence, Sexual Violence, Suicide, Rape
As an outsider to so many social platforms, the news that self styled ‘gamer girl’ Belle Delphine selling her bath water for $42 a jar (which flooded my slowly decaying Facebook newsfeed) was met with an internal shriek of affirmation at a comical act of late capitalist entrepreneurship. Belle had seemingly carried out a victimless heist against a market of undoubtedly male followers that felt like an act of retribution- albeit a financial one- against a toxic, lowly educated and socially lonesome and abusive substrata of male fandom. From a critical perspective, one could argue a genealogical heritage from Piero Manzoni’s 1961 piece Artist’s Shit, as opposed to the more directly libidinal market for worn, used and in some cases soiled underwear. The hours spent posing as a masthead for the male gaze upon platforms that reward the more Lolita-esque and infantilised aesthetic were coming home to roost, that if one were inclined could view the enterprise as a subversive and political act of selling their waste as the modern day equivalent of a offering a saintly relic. The patrons of the jars of water were purchasing a liquid that was proposed to have encountered Belle Delphine’s flesh; and therefore holding it within the individual’s possession afforded them a proximity they could only hope to attain. But holy water is only holy if you believe it is. So there was laughter. We were laughing at men. And then Bianca Devin died and we were reminded that men do not like being humiliated.
As of beginning to write this approximately 8 days out from Bianca’s death, facts have not been easy to crystallise as to the exact motive, timeline and evisceration of her body by the man that killed her, who will not be named in this article. Outlets speculated that Devin was or was almost decapitated, with this being clarified somewhat with the statement of her receiving ‘significant wounds’ to her neck. Whilst the perpetrator’s relationship to her was unclear in terms of whether or not they were in a relationship, had ever been in a relationship or if this was what is described as an ‘orbiter’ (a male that circles around a female’s social media in the hopes of garnering romantic or sexual attention) enacting upon a primal urge to kill. What we can factually state is the subjective and polarising nature of the murder; with the chat forums, instagram and reddit posts currently embroiled in a gender war between rational minds and incel apologists, incels and a wide spectrum of misogynist victim blaming, shaming and attacks on Devin’s mental health. Because mentally compromised women are seemingly fodder for predators.
Factually we know that Bianca Devin was a 17 year old female, living in Utica, New York who was killed by a man who posted pictures of her corpse onto the social media platforms Instagram and Discord before he attempted to take his own life. Factually we know that a spray painted slogan believed to be by the killer reading ‘MAY YOU NEVER FORGET ME’ was found at the scene of the crime. Factually we know that the killer wrote, as a comment below the picture of Bianca Devin’s corpse ‘Subscribe to PewDiePie’, this was the same utterance from a gunman involved in the Christchurch massacre that ended the lives of fifty people and was broadcast over a livestream on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Instagram. Sometimes memes get out of control.
To add to the speculation would be unethical, and therefore this article seeks to speak around the linguistic toxicity of incel-speak and its permissions that allows a zoned physical and virtual attack on women with deadly consequences. The killer of Bianca Devin may or may not have denoted themselves as in incel, or indeed ever visited a forum or interacted with members of the incel community. He did however clearly demonstrate a vocabulary (and ultimately a physical manifestation of these linguistic traits) that meant it would be too much of a coincidence to suggest that he wasn’t familiar with the ideology and behaviours of incel subculture. What is telling, and speaks to perhaps how the internet has shaped these attacks on women, is the use of proximities and distances within colloquialisms and rhetoric. Women, or indeed any kind of human contact (and by proxy humane thought) appears to be something that lurks forever in the distance; it is unattainable and cannot be travelled to or worked towards. It is the lack of agency that incels feel they have in closing these distances and proximities that grows beyond and above initial doubts and insecurities, such is how deep the micro-cultures self sustaining, echoing and haunting narrative plays out. It is a culture of violent rhetoric that whirls in and of itself that utilises space, distance and gravitational pull that brings forth the most horrifying of conclusions; a death spiral, akin to a satellite or asteroid smashing into Venus. The Earth’s second mass extinction was caused by a useless piece of rock that was 1/10,000th of its size. The community of women that operate on social media have every right to be concerned about orbiters.
As Natalie Wynn points out in her video on incels, linguistic tricks trap and add volume to this sense of isolation, othering and dehumanising through the use of portmanteau, slang and acronyms; comparing Soviet-era propaganda terms such as agitprop (agitiational propaganda) alongside the terms incel (involutary celibate), blackcel (an involuntary celibate that is a Person of Colour) and ricecel (an incel that is of Asian origin). These terms show an encompassing aspect of dehumanisation that deals absolutely with the exterior appearance of an individual that sit across from a collective of Nouns to denote non-incel social status. The most commonly used are Becky (an average looking female), Stacie (The optimally attractive female in line with what incel’s characterise as beautiful) and Chad (The archetypal, physically attractive male). The conflict between the portmanteau and the noun -in this case the umbrella group of incel being pitched against Chads, Beckys and Stacies- creates a conflicting dichotomy of a self styled underclass of men adopting titles in line with political sloganeering and therefore an organised movement that sits in (at their least physically aggressive state) a frustrated commentary on a civilian class of peoples that they study through a skewed sociological and genealogical lens. Whilst some of the linguistic traits can be seen as acronyms for the sake of abbreviating repeated sentences in one with common internet tropes such as ROFL (Roll On The Floor Laughing), the general tone is one of hate speech; with acronyms AWALT (All Women Are Like That) and JBW (Just Be White) being two of a litany of quick fire phrases that permeat chat forums that are slowly being de-platformed and quarantined. The liguistic disease did not start in the incel forums, but it has been cultivated and mutated.
But this is not a wholly incel issue, rather it is a trope that appears to have been adopted from mainstream culture. Around Bianca Devin’s murder the most prevalent of these acronyms that were assigned her was the term thot or ethot. Origins of the terms are unclear although Know Your Meme lists it as potentially stemming from the Chicago Drill scene. The acronym stands interchangeably for That Hoe Over There or Thirsty Hoe Over There. In both cases we see the spectre of misogynistic distancing; dualistically in the reduction of the female to an aggressive description of her sexuality, in tandem with the proximity to the speaker’s or writer’s immediate physical space. The use of thot or ethot (electronic thot) in terms of describing Bianca Devin post- death can only be seen as, at best an act of victim shaming, at its worst incel-allyship. He got too close and so she had to die, because in a broken, heterosexual male mind its only ever someone else’s fault.
And of course, male-on-female violence was not brain stormed as an act of violent insurrection on r/braincel, but it has made the act of physical violence against strangers a more innate and permissible act, when attempting to cope with a mind that is filled with self loathing — albeit a performed one — that only fractionally masks ideation towards the most hateful end point of the misogynistic spectrum. But let’s stick to the facts. Factually we know that worldwide sexual violence has remained at a depressingly high statistic and in the United States the report and conviction rate is even more depressingly low. Factually we know that the killer of Bianca Devin’s Father was a domestically violent individual that served time for threatening to slit his wife’s throat; with the paternal legacy playing out nine years later. We are seeing a remodelling of old behaviours mapping onto new media. In both cases of the Father/Son crimes, it is speculated that jealousy played a key part in their motive. If jealousy and/or sexual jealousy is the main drive of male-on-female violence, then we need to talk about the perceived intimacies and ownerships that a follower of someone on social media feels entitled to have. The binaries of a heterosexual and monogamous marriage offer much clearer borders than whatever nebulous and speculative boundaries Bianca and the accused had. I do not believe that in the current climate of social media where the lines of follower and followed, where a person’s social media presence is the craft that elevates them — and thus relies upon an explicit intimacy and engagement, even more so given the increasingly hard to work with algorithms — that an intoxicated and entitled mind would begin to feel that ownership of the individual they follow as a tangible possibility. Bianca Devin’s killer was an individual that aside from simply following was also an active participant on social media. The killing was borne out in the cultural white hot heat of approval, likes, shares and views Essentially the killer had another father, and he was only one year older than he was.
The murder of Bianca Devins is intrinsically linked to the massacre committed by Elliot Rodgers in 2014, who in a failed attempt to kill every single member of a sorority house, killed six people; four men and two women in what became dubbed as the Isla Vista Massacre. Elliot Rodger’s took his own life that day, bringing the death toll to seven. Elliot carried out the attempted attack on the sorority house after posting a video (which is intentionally not linked here) to Youtube, setting out his manifesto of retribution. Seeing himself as a ‘gentleman’ rejected and seeing virginity at the age of 22 as a fatal flaw of character, he exhibits all the linguistic tools and traits of the incel movement; with the pre-massacre upload only being trumped in its menace by the live streaming of the Christ Church Massacre and, in a case that lands much closer to home, the broadcasting of Bianca Devin’s murder. In both cases there was an escalation of both the paternal traits he inherited. He killed where his biological father did not and he documented in a way that Elliot Rodger’s could have conceivably only hoped to achieve. The haunting shadow of his father figures is a daunting one, and if following their own rhetoric has to be seen as a figure to be both in their thrall and to despise; as his son they are biological proof of a man’s success in getting laid, and by proxy a constant reminder of your own perceived failures.
Elliot Rodger’s killing spree and manifesto are the largest haunt that killings of this nature will have, and set an infinitely dangerous precedent. Rodger’s can be seen as the first, but definitely not the last, as Bianca Devin’s murder demonstrates. Her murder sets further watersheds to reach and break, both in its primal brutality (Rodger’s used guns, Bianca Devins was mutilated with a blade), graphic documentation and staging. The shadow reaches from Rodgers to Devin’s killer, who casts another shadow to stand beneath. The shadow casts dims us all and creates shelter for other predators. Unless we begin to dismantle the mechanics that permit incels to evaluate, craft and perfect the hateful, misogynist dominant paradigm of the mainstream, our cultural and social future will have a long ribbon of black running through it.
#ripbianca