The history of incel communities

In previous posts, I've introduced the incel community as it stands today and given a glossary of the many and varied terms they've come up with in order to describe the world as they see it. Here I want to go on a deep dive into the history of the various communities that have constituted incel culture since the 1990s. I am deeply indebted to ReformedIncel, who got in contact with me after I posted my A-Z of Incel to send me two lengthy documents detailing his experience and understanding of incel communities since their mailing list beginnings. This post is also informed by a number of other sources, including web archives of old incel communities (though they didn't necessarily call themselves that at the time), the documentary Shy Boys IRL by Sara Gardephe, Sara's interview with the folks at Last Podcast on the Left, and the Reply All episode INVCEL. Each of these sources is highly interesting and I recommend listening to and watching them separately if this is something you'd like to learn more about.

As well as providing an overview of the evolution of the incel movement, the central thesis I want to put forward here is one that reflects upon the dynamics of internet communities more generally construed, and particularly those which have a tendency towards extreme opinions. In particular, I'm going to highlight the tensions between the comparatively feminist IncelSupport and the virulently misogynistic Love-Shy.com in the mid 2000s and early 2010s, bringing that into dialogue with contemporary conversations happening within the incel community and showing the tendency towards radicalisation on unregulated forums like incels.me (and the now-defunct Incelocalypse).

The central themes you're likely to notice are an ever-dwindling emphasis on support and rehabilitation, and an increasing pressure to take the blackpill (that is, to accept that the world is fundamentally stacked against incels and that nothing will ever change for them). The "victory" of the camp that argued for the primacy of looks over those who argued that personality is the most important thing in terms of sexual and romantic success is also a point of inflection in this history, contributing to the concretisation of a culture for which the tagline is "it's over". Whilst misogyny and advocacy of really extreme positions (e.g. pro-rape, pro-paedophilia) were always present, they weren't dominant in the same way that they are on contemporary sites like incels.me.

As well as sketching out a history of the communities, I'll try to draw some comparisons and contrasts between them and the contemporary incel sites as we go.

INVCEL, Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project, and Alt.Support.Shyness

Whilst people have always been involuntarily celibate - that is, they have gone for significant periods wanting to have sex but unable to have it - the formation of a community around this identity is a relatively new phenomenon. Reply All did an interview with Alana, who created a website and mailing list for people who identified as "invcel", which quickly became "incel" for ease of pronunciation. The website was created in 1998.

The incel forums of today are obsessed with purity, gatekeeping, and paranoia. There are constant fears that they are being infiltrated by outsiders who wish to undermine them and paint them in a bad light. Moreover, they engage in periodic disputes over who is and is not a truecel, and who is a fakecel or actually volcel (voluntarily celibate). There is a general consensus that not only do you have to be a virgin, you also have to be ugly enough or disadvantaged enough in some other way that you could not find sex, despite wanting to. Some incels will even say that someone has to have "approached" women a significant number of times and been rejected every time in order to be truly incel. Women are strictly forbidden from the community, as all women are capable of having sex if they truly want to.

This lies in stark contrast to the early incel communities. They began as mixed-gender projects, and there was little gatekeeping as to who could and could not post to the group. They initially went off of a definition given by an academic study of involuntarily celibate people which defined them as those who had not had sex for 6 months or more, despite wanting to or actively trying to.

Moreover, there was a strong emphasis on support and overcoming one's incel status. Incel was a temporary state and not an identity that you defined yourself by. Alana's Involuntary Celibacy project had resources for trying to overcome. Eventually, Alana left because she felt the community was becoming too toxic. At the same time, the usenet group Alt.Support.Shyness had a number of regular contributors. In contrast with the fast-paced, low-quality content emblematic of sites like 4chan's /r9k/ and incels.me, posts were lengthy and thought-out.

It's worth noting, however, that these groups did still play host to some misogyny. For Alt.Support.Shyness in particular, because it focussed on people for whom introversion and shyness were the primary issue, men often became bitter about sharing a space with women who wanted help with confidence in job interviews when they were decades older and had never been kissed.

That kind of misogyny can be seen in this post from 2003:

“The disadvantage of being male is hard to quantify, Men have a more intense role to play. This takes 8 yrs off their life. For million of men who can’t find a mate, take off another 8 yrs. Women are accepted into society no matter what. Guys have to earn a place in society by getting a job in an economy where most jobs are more suited to females. Females are not shy and have much less social anxiety. They basically are given a free pass. This was fine in the days when women did not have jobs. Nature gave them a bunch of social and sexual advantage to compensate for their lack of resources. Now that they have resource and sex power, things are out of balance. We needs laws that prevent females from going to university or taking family supporting jobs from men. Our prisons are full of men who could not feed their families. The rape laws should be repealed. Females are artificially restricting the supply of available females in their reproductive years. Rape is the answer. Societies go to war over lack of females and jobs. Females have become a threat to society and must be put back in their place. Marc Lepine, you were ahead of your time.”

Marc Lepine was a Canadian mass murderer who killed 14 women at the École Polytechnique in 1989, claiming that he was doing so to fight feminism.

The quote above demonstrates an attitude that would be seen as mainstream in a lot of the manosphere today. Even given its advocacy for rape, by comparison to the kinds of beliefs expressed by incels on a daily basis it's tame. But the key difference between this expression of misogyny in 2003, and the daily conversation on incels.me today in 2018, is that this was an exception rather than the rule. This user didn't have 6000 other men egging them on, applauding their extremism and adding their own, more extreme statements. They didn't have the manifestos of George Sodini and Elliot Rodger to draw upon for his ideology. He didn't have the vast, toxic literature of the manosphere to back him up, or the felt need to differentiate himself from his peers by saying more and more extreme things.

The argument I'm making here is that chan culture and incel culture have intersected to create something that can only end badly. Chan culture (most prominently displayed on 4chan) promotes saying more and more extreme things just for the lols. It abhors expressions of emotional vulnerability, and instead emphasises mockery and the externalisation of blame as the means by which one should cope with negative emotions. Posters can always claim that the things they're saying are ironic, or jokes, or meant just to provoke a reaction, but with enough posts and posters it becomes impossible to differentiate between those who mean it and those who don't. Those who genuinely mean the things they say have the imagined (and expressed) support of those who don't, whom they think are on the same page as them.

Incel culture, on the other hand, is not intrinsically toxic. The original incel communities weren't perfect, but they functioned as peer support groups in much the same way as AA, or NA, or anorexia recovery groups might. In the same way that the existence of pro-ana communities doesn't mean that those afflicted with eating disorders cannot support each other through recovery, the existence of toxic incel communities doesn't mean that lonely people can't help each other through the process of self-acceptance and self-love. And there are groups of people who do this, even today: the r/ForeverAlone subreddit, for example, is a relatively supportive zone for people who might be considered incels. The problem is that all of the communities that identify as incel (with the potential exception of the relatively inactive r/incelwithouthate) are by definition toxic buckets of crabs, because the label has been warped and policed and turned into something synonymous with hatred, misogyny, and the acceptance of a nihilistic ideology which leaves them no choice but violence or misery.

When incel culture is crossed with chan culture, the result is a community that emphasises saying the most extreme things as a means of coping with their sadness. And because they've never learned how to process their emotions rationally (because that is a skill, and it's one that has to be taught or learned) they externalise blame on to everyone but themselves. Moreover, they end up defining themselves by their incel status, meaning that to transcend incel would be losing the only community they feel offers them support. They say things that are so extreme that they're difficult to take back or to move away from. They are, for all intents and purposes, a cult rather than a community.

Incelsite, IncelSupport, and Love-Shy.com

Here I'm going to bring in one of the key clashes that defines the incel community today. Incelsite, founded in 2004, was succeeded by IncelSupport in 2008. These were, as the titles would suggest, support communities. They were open to most people who self-identified as incel, including women, non-virgins, and people who had children but were now in sexless marriages. At the same time, we'll be looking at Love-shy.com, which was created in 2003. The original owner of this forum left after getting into a relationship, and the forum was taken over by a user named Rammspieler, who was deeply toxic. Under his leadership, the forum became a place that even 4chan users though of as extreme.

IncelSupport had a poll demonstrating the range of reasons members gave for their incel status.It included geographical isolation, social isolation, work-related stress, depression and "primacy incels", who had an otherwise fulfilling life but whose main issue was just the fact that they were incel. Whilst incels.me and other contemporary sites encourage their members to blame society and women for their problems, IncelSupport and similar sites always defined incel status as something that could be remedied by fixing the underlying issue. There was even debate over whether "primacy incel" was something they should accept, as a lot of members felt like there was always an underlying issue which was causing someone to be incel. The contrast, again, is striking.