Robert

So even then, there were some signs that like some of these guys seem to be surprised that like women have feelings.

Yeah.

And she's noticing this.

Right.

And that's kind of weird.

But a couple one couple who meets on the site gets married and people get better there, including Alana.

And in fact, she over time stops being involuntarily celibate.

She finds people.

She starts dating.

She moves on with her life.

And to be entirely fair to her, she is not the origin of the term incel.

She comes up with the term involuntary celibate, but her preferred abbreviation was inv-cel, I-N-V-cel, which was never going to go viral the way incel has.

No, it's harder to say.

It's harder to say.

And an unnamed member of the community suggested incel might flow better off the tongue.

The term originally referred to people of any gender, right?

Like it was not specifically just for angry young men.

So again, after a couple years of this, Alana's life changes.

She starts meeting people and dating, and she leaves the community she'd started around the turn of the millennium.

The website she'd built and the community on it wound down, but the term incel stayed in use, and it kept on being adopted by people who, well, they wanted to have sex, but they weren't having sex, right?