Earlier this spring, it was reported that the online community of involuntary celibates (“incels”) were celebrating the dawn of COVID-19 lockdown, rejoicing on message boards like Reddit and 4chan as a large chunk of society became, for a brief glimmer in time, housebound, lonely, and sexless.

The subculture — which has existed online since the early ’90s — is a loose amalgamation of online groups and (mainly angry) sensibilities drawn together by rejection and sexual frustration. In recent years, a number of mass shootings committed by incels, as well as the subculture’s tendency toward a particularly resentful form of misogyny, have drawn headlines.

Those celebrating lockdown took an ironic glee in the fact that single women in particular would be stopped from having casual sex. But as a number of high-profile arrests seemed to suggest, this was not a zero-sum game: the fact that we’d all temporarily become incels didn’t mean the subculture was ready to dissolve itself. Plans for a neo-Nazi “incel hit squad” were unearthed by police, and then later an alleged plan to attack “hot cheerleaders” before a homemade bomb that a guy was making blew off one of his hands. For these incels, the spite that drives the movement froths and shudders just as it had before we were all forced inside.