Robert

That doesn't seem like someone who should have any relation to the incel community based on, like, what incels are famous for, which is not hanging out in clubs surrounded by sorority girls, right?

So how did this happen?

Like, how do we go from a bunch of online weirdos who are like so upset at the fact that like women don't behave the way they want them to, that they're doing mass killings, to this guy who's like famous for being handsome and hitting himself in the face with a hammer, like going to frat parties and having impenetrable internet dialogue spread about whatever happened there.

Here we are, Sophie.

So how and why that all happened is the story we're going to tell this week.

And to tell that story, we got to go back to 1997 and the place where all great evil begins, Canada.

That's actually very unfair.

It's unfair to the very first incels, because the phrase involuntary celibate originates from a Canadian student named Alana, and she seems to prefer, based on the stuff I've read, not giving a last name.

My understanding is that she's a very young person, obviously.

I think she was somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum, and because she's a young person kind of living...

out in a not huge, heavily inhabited part of Canada, she's having a lot of trouble like finding people, right?

Like a fairly, especially in 1997, a fairly normal experience for a ton of people.

And so as a result, she finds herself like involuntarily celibate.

And in other words, she can't like find any people that she has this, like she feels like in common with, that she feels she can be open with about who she is.

She doesn't know how to start those conversations.

She's a self-described late bloomer.

And she starts thinking like, well, maybe other people are going through this and maybe the internet can be a way for us to kind of bridge some of the gaps between us.

I found an article on her with the BBC and quote, I thought maybe there are other late bloomers out there.

I noticed people would talk about the lonely virgin and make silly jokes about people who didn't start dating in their teens.

She rightly felt like this was messed up and wanted to create a place where she and other people struggling with sex and relationships could commiserate.