On a street in Montreal, a city in a country with stricter gun control than most of the world, a man opened fire near the headquarters of one of the most visited websites on the internet. The attack left three people dead, and the shooter left behind a 100+ page manifesto blaming capitalism, porn, and, of course, women for his loneliness and unhappiness. He identified with the incel movement, and he decided that his suffering was someone else’s fault. So he responded with violence.
OnlyFans creator Kit Barrus read the news and felt something she’s been feeling more frequently: not surprise, but a grim recognition.
“He basically went on a shooting spree and then claimed it was the fault of capitalism and porn,” Barrus said, “that they made him unhappy, lonely, targeted him, and made his life worse.”
Barrus has been watching the radicalization pipeline that runs from loneliness to resentment to manosphere ideology to violence for years. She’s seen it in her comment sections, in her DMs, and in the way certain corners of the internet have built entire communities around the idea that women are responsible for male suffering. And more specifically, women like here: sexually visible and professionally unavailable. The incel movement is the most visible expression of that ideology, but it sits inside a broader ecosystem that includes pickup artist culture, men’s rights activism, and the general online infrastructure of what gets called the manosphere. Basically, it’s all a loose network of communities united by the conviction that feminism has broken something that men are owed.
What Barrus wants people to understand is the specific paradox at the center of this violence. “I’ve seen men prioritize and put other men on a pedestal while trivializing women,” she said, “and then become upset when women don’t want any sort of sexual intimacy with them.” The men most drawn to incel ideology are frequently also the men most obsessed with women like Barrus, not as people, but as symbols of an availability they feel denied. “When men think, ‘There are no women who want to have a sexual relationship with me,’ and then scroll on Instagram and see OnlyFans models, we wind up becoming the target of their madness.”
It’s a catch-22 with a body count. The same women these men fetishize become the objects of their rage when the fantasy of access doesn’t materialize into reality. “These men often don’t want a normal, everyday woman,” Barrus said. “They want an OnlyFans creator who is overly sexually available to satisfy their needs, because they lack a way to view women as human. They want our sexual availability, but they don’t want to know us intimately.”
This is the core of what incel ideology gets catastrophically wrong about human connection. Intimacy is not a product. It cannot be purchased, demanded, or taken. It is built slowly, mutually, through the kind of vulnerability and reciprocity that requires seeing another person as fully human. “Intimacy is about connection,” Barrus said, “and if you’re unwilling to connect with women, you won’t be able to have intimacy with them. Nobody is owed sex or a relationship. It is something you continuously try to earn every day.”
The Montreal shooting is particularly striking because Canada has much stricter gun laws than the United States, along with lower rates of gun violence and a cultural identity built in deliberate contrast to American gun politics. That a man animated by incel ideology carried out a mass shooting there, near the offices of a porn company, with a manifesto explicitly blaming the adult entertainment industry signals something important about the reach of this radicalization. It isn’t just an American problem exported. It’s a global ideological infrastructure with local casualties.
“It’s stunning that something like this has happened in Canada,” Barrus said. “I think it’s very telling that this ideology is reaching so far.”
The women most likely to be targeted by this ideology are the same women facing full-scale structural hostility. They’re already facing legislative pressure at the state level in the US, UK regulatory overreach, payment processor threats, shadowbanning on social media, and the quiet cultural consensus that their work is either a joke or a menace. Now they have to add the danger of being visible to men who have been conditioned to believe that female sexual autonomy is the source of their pain.
“I think we’ve been seeing more and more of this violence over the last 10 years or so,” Barrus said, “and unfortunately, I think it will continue.”
At the end of the day, nobody is owed sex or a relationship. And no woman – not an OnlyFans creator, not a PornHub employee, not anyone whose proximity to the adult industry made her a symbol to a man with a manifesto – deserves to be the target for someone else’s failure to deal with their own loneliness.
Three people in Montreal are dead because one man didn’t understand that. And unless something changes, this tragic event will likely happen again.