Since beginning research into the incel universe, I'd hoped to find the first online incel: Which corner of the manosphere had he hailed from? How had the concept spread? More than once I thought I'd found the source of it all, but the trail kept going cold—until, after four months of looking, I found her.

"I was trying to create a movement that was open to anybody and everybody," says Alana, now a 43-year-old management consultant and artist from Toronto. In 1993, she was finishing an undergraduate degree in statistics at Carleton University in Ottawa, and she'd never had sex or anything close to a boyfriend. Sometimes she blamed her appearance: short, slightly overweight, eczema splotches. Often she felt like she'd passed through adolescence without learning the unspoken rules of a complex game that everyone else understood intuitively.

At Carleton, she had access to the Internet for the first time. "I was supposed to be doing statistical programming," she says, grinning. "But I was reading about sexuality. Quietly." Moved by powerful accounts of people who realized that they were gay or bi, polyamorous or trans, Alana decided she was bisexual and, at 24, started dating a woman. When the relationship ended six months later, Alana found herself looking back on the prior decade with a fresh perspective and wanting to analyze what she'd been through. First, that required a label—new categories of relationships with new names had helped the queer people she'd met find happiness, after all. She entertained a few options: late bloomer, nonblooming, perpetually single. Then it came to her: involuntary celibate.

Alana built a simple, all-text website— Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project—and while it's long gone, she and a few others shared their memories with me, and Alana sent me a packet of old posts. The site was populated by men and women, but certainly more men, which Alana had mixed feelings about. While the men were prone to antagonistic, repetitive complaining, she truly wanted her project to be a home for all incels; rigid gender norms, she thought, burdened every- one. There were so many ways for people to end up lonely—from awkwardness to mental illness to an overinvestment in the "normal."

"I don't care if your reason is that you always fall in love with horses—and horses aren't legal to fall in love with," she says, trying to capture the level of inclusiveness she'd aspired to.

I figured that sexist ugliness had driven Alana from her site. The moderator of ForeverAloneWomen (an offshoot of a Reddit forum called ForeverAlone) had told me that she spends a couple of hours a day screening out comments from men such as "You could get fucked anytime" or "You're just an attention whore." Whenever she deletes an offensive message or bans a user, she can expect a death or rape threat, she says.

Alana's story is different—and a little heartbreaking. For a few years after founding the project, she says, she was celibate, but she gradually became more socially confident. By then living in Toronto, she started to date men as well as women, read queer liberation theory, and explore polyamory. At this point in the story, Alana hesitates, obviously uncomfortable. "You know, in grade school, the cooties thing?" she ventures. "You don't want to hang out with someone less cool than you are, in case you catch the uncoolness."

Alana knows how ironic this is, not to mention "unjust" and "stupid" of her, but she turned the site over to someone she didn't know and never looked back. Then last February, reading a copy of Mother Jones in a local bookstore, she learned about Elliot Rodger and his identification as an incel. "Holy shit," she remembers thinking. "Look what I started."

That night, she wrote about her discovery on a weblog accessible only to her friends: "Like a scientist who invented something that ended up being a weapon of war, I can't uninvent this word, nor restrict it to the nicer people who need it."

This article originally appears in the March 2016 issue of ELLE.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io