When I came up with an idea for a novel back in 2018 about a troubled mother and son, I needed to find an angle. I needed to find something to bring conflict and drama into the lives of these two poor souls. I tried a few different angles; I had them, first of all, trying to navigate the aftermath of a nuclear strike on Scotland but it was terrible – like a fanfiction version of The Road.

Next, I had the boy, Jamie, being found dead in his room and his mother trying to piece the story of his dodgy online life together to try and find out why. I knew right away with that one that killing off a main character in the first couple of pages wasn’t the way forward. While reading an article about a new online community known as incels, as I tore my hair out over the book, I knew I’d found my hook.

Incel is short for Involuntary Celibate. Generally, it means a person, almost always a man, who regards themselves as being involuntarily celibate because they are unable to attract a romantic or sexual partner. For some incels, they say this is because of how they look; because they aren’t tall enough, because they have a weak chin or because their eyes aren’t positioned in what they believe is the most desirable position on their face.

For others, they say it’s because women aren’t attracted to them because they are of low status – because they aren’t high-status, alpha ‘Chads’ (think of the opposite of an incel, a successful, tall, handsome, promiscuous man.)

I dove headfirst into researching the world of incels. I watched documentaries, read articles, books and papers on the subject and scoured their forums to pick up their terminology.

Having been on the internet for a long time, I consider myself pretty much unshockable and desensitised but even I felt harrowed and uneasy, disgusted even, by what I read in their online spaces.

Their hatred towards women was so visceral and frightening. They detailed their deranged and violent fantasies, involving women they knew, sometimes even family members. They lauded mass shooters, even hailing one of them as a sort of quasi-deity. They spoke to each other as if they hated each other, almost as much as they hated themselves.

It was hard to feel sorry for them. I thought to myself that these guys were beyond help. But something kept me coming back to reading through their forums. After a while I began to think, ‘How have they ended up like this?’

I began to delve deeper and began reading lengthy posts where young guys opened up about their home lives, childhoods and mental health. Time and time again, these boys would write of their upbringings which were littered with abuse, poverty, bullying, loneliness and often learning difficulties. To me, it painted a bleak picture of lost boys searching in the wrong places for a bit of human interaction.

And ready to prey on these boys were far more sinister men. These men encouraged the boys to blame their problems on women and to seek retribution for it. They detailed ways in which to make the women they may encounter in their day to day lives uncomfortable.

They were egging on these obviously very vulnerable boys, luring them deeper into their toxic worldview until they had them, essentially, brainwashed; fully malleable and compliant, ready to do whatever the men wanted out of fear of being ostracised from the only community they had or of being blackmailed. If this was what I was seeing being written on public forums, it’s hard to even comprehend what might be going on in their private messages to one another or what was happening in other, less accessible parts of the internet.

While their troubled childhoods and desire to be part of a community might go some way towards explaining their online behaviour, it can’t excuse it. These boys need to help themselves if they really do want to break away from these toxic online environments. I suppose this is easier said than done and in an ideal world it would be as simple as that.

But in the world we live in, where misogyny isn’t just confined to dark corners of the internet but is instead rampant and ever present, I believe it’s down to men to help tackle the problem.

Good male role models are in short supply. The ones that are out there struggle to cut through the noise made by the likes of Andrew Tate who present a cartoonish, ridiculous version of masculinity which, to a thirteen year old boy, looks like the coolest and most aspirational thing ever. But role models don’t have to be celebrities or influencers.

As men, we should be doing our best to set good examples for the boys and other men in our lives, to show them a positive version of masculinity. We all have friends, brothers, cousins, colleagues and classmates who maybe look to us for guidance. While we’ll all have acted in ways we’re not proud of and we’ll all have said things which make us feel a sharp pang of guilt when we are reminded of them, we’re all more than capable of trying to be better than that.

As I wrote my novel, I grew more and more interested in men in general. I pondered over what a makes a good man and still can’t quite come up with an answer.

Is being a good man just not doing bad things?

Is the bar for us that low?

Is it just as simple as being a good person?

I began to ask myself if I could say, hand on heart, that I am a good man. The answer to that is – I don’t know. But I do know I want to be a better man. I implore you to ask yourself the same.

Hermit by Chris McQueer (Wildfire, £18.99) is out now.