Police on June 22 respond to a shooting in Montreal that left a police officer, a civilian and a suspect dead.Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
Maggie MacDonald is a porn platform researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. She has served as a member of the independent advisory board of ECP Canada, which owns Pornhub’s parent company Aylo, from 2023 to 2026.
Montreal was left reeling Monday when a shooting led to the tragic deaths of police officer Mohamed Lamine Benredouane and civilian bystander Michel Mizrahi. The gunman, a 25-year-old from Lethbridge, Alta., was also killed.
The shooter left behind a sprawling 104-page manifesto that has quickly sparked opportunistic and speculative narratives around his motives. Commentators have jumped to paint the gunman as a violent antisemite, a communist, and a far-left ideologue. But these framings overlook the clearest of his motivations: misogyny.
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His manifesto oscillates between various political, cultural and ideological grievances, bringing up Jews eight times and communism 40 times; capitalism receives 176 mentions. However, these complaints are dwarfed by his staggering 578 statements calling for the subordination of “females” throughout his manifesto.
The shooter self-identified as a victim of involuntary celibacy – an incel – and his worldview appears primarily aligned with the misogynistic attitudes of online “manosphere” subcultures. He was preoccupied with “hypergamy” – an incel fixation he named a whopping 222 times, referring to a belief that the majority of women, who should owe him unfettered sexual and romantic access, are drawn to only a small minority of men, and that the natural order had been disrupted as women were granted rights and liberties. Denied a fantasy where “females would be bound legalistically and culturally” to men, incels often direct their resentment, hatred and violence toward women.
Put plainly, the target of the shooter’s ire was first and foremost the sexual liberation and bodily autonomy of women. Disgusted by expressions of feminine love and desire, and angry over the belief he was being denied their “luxurious, pulsating realm of indulgence,” the shooter claimed women are ”able to obtain endless copulation… only because liberal society allows this.” He especially loathed women who “lecherously flaunt their bodies all over the internet.”
It’s no coincidence that the gunman seems to have targeted the pornography industry, which millions of women and queer creators rely on to earn income. His manifesto references porn 32 times, and he rented a hotel room adjacent to the offices of Pornhub’s parent company Aylo, shooting through windows and aiming at terrified employees from across the street.
His misogynistic worldview was reportedly shaped by far-right propaganda and conspiracy theories that he consumed online. But given the circumstances, we must not overlook the specific influence of anti-pornography rhetoric on violent incels.
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The porn industry has long been a scapegoat for societal issues, but today’s “war on porn” is being led by conservative and religious lobby groups, including Exodus Cry (which has called sex work “modern-day slavery”), Collective Shout (an Australian group that lobbied successfully for the censoring of thousands of video games on Steam), and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (or NCOSE, formerly known as Morality in Media, which has declared, without evidence, that pornography constitutes a public health crisis). These organizations have mounted well-funded campaigns to conflate all porn with exploitation and human trafficking, and misleadingly blame “porn addiction” – a condition debunked by research – for an array of harms, including sexual dysfunction, dissatisfaction and alienation among young men.
The manosphere has not just embraced these anti-pornography campaigns, it has amplified concerning anti-porn rhetoric. On anti-masturbation and porn-abstinence forums, which have grown hugely popular among incels in recent years, researchers find that discussion frequently veers into calls for violence targeting pornographers and women. Supporters of Exodus Cry’s Traffickinghub campaign to “Shut Down Pornhub” have called its employees “evil”, posting images of guns alongside Pornhub’s offices, and explicitly calling for violence against its executives on the far-right social-media platform Gab. In her investigation of this issue in 2021, VICE journalist Sam Cole rightly predicted that this “Crusade Against Pornhub Is Going to Get Someone Killed”.
The Montreal shooting follows many violent misogynist precedents, including the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre that claimed the lives of 14 women. More recently, there was the 2014 killing of six in Santa Barbara, Calif., the 2018 Toronto van attack that left 11 dead, and the murder of eight women in Atlanta in 2021. All were perpetrated by men who posted online about a sense of entitlement over women’s sexuality and bodily autonomy before launching into horrifying acts of violence.
The motivations behind this latest tragedy must not miss the forest for the trees. The shooter was undoubtedly subject to many hateful influences, but if we hope to address the systemic patterns that led to this incident, Canadians must recognize the role of misogynist violence, and how these attitudes – perpetuated through harmful rhetoric about women and sex work – power today’s incel movement.