Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project

Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project (AICP) was founded in either 1993^{[citation needed]} or 1997 and as such was the second-oldest incel website after Alt.support.shyness. It was the first incel website to abbreviate the term "involuntary celibacy" whose usage reaches back at least to the 18th century. It, along with Parsimonyforum 3708, and the usenet groups Alt.support.shyness and Alt.seduction.fast formed the initial and primary websites of the incelosphere in the 1990s. In the 2000's, AICP became the IncelSupport and You're Not Alone forum.

History

1993

???

1997

Alana created the the site as a research project at her college for involuntary celibates at least before 1997, shortening the involuntary celibacy term coined by Antoine Banier (originally calling it "invcel"), but never seemed to assist any published research from the early 90s to now except maybe for the Donnelly Study. Sometime before May of 1997 she described herself publicly on her website as a 'lesbian' with dating experience who had been reading a lot of feminist writings. Alana started the first incel 'forum' as a mailing list (forum) later on in 1997. So Alana started the mailing list (the forum) as a lesbian, contrary to some accounts suggesting she stopped considering herself as straight or started dating *after* the forum was created. In 1997, her site won an award from an LGBT organization. In 1998, users from Alt.support.shyness were invited to participate in Alana's mailing list. Alana stopped maintaining the site in 2003 and the community was handed off to someone else who created IncelSite.com after it started becoming too negative in tone for Alana.

INVCEL to Incel

Incel was originally, "invcel", and Alana’s personal story has the url of "invcel.html", but the community decided "Incel" would be easier to pronounce and not sound like "imbecile" (In-v-cel sorta sounded like Im-be-cile).

Who Qualified as Incel?

• Someone who has never dated, or not dated in a long time, but would like to, is involuntarily celibate
• Someone going through long periods of not dating anyone
• Those who, for one reason or another, have difficulty meeting someone for a sexual relationship
• Those with no or very little experience with sex and dating
• Someone with experience of dating and sex, but not for many years
• Those who are in a relationship, but for one reason or another their partner desires sex very infrequently or not at all
• Those who are sexually inactive while wishing to be otherwise
• Those with an inability to form relationships
• Those married, but the "spark" is gone: little or no sex, little or no love.
• Those who have intense difficulty dating, searching for a mate
• Those who just want to get laid, and can't for some reason
• Your Geek Code contains r--, r---, !r, r*, z, z--, !z, or !z+
• Not being able to express oneself sexually due to circumstances that are difficult to control (this would include those who are socially phobic, shy, disfigured, homosexual, sexually disfunctional, marcels, the handicapped, prisoners, mentally ill, pedophiles or whatever else...the list is infinite)

Forum Discussion

There were always problems with what exactly there was to talk about, but it’s safe to say they we were all unhappy with the consistent lack of sexual and/or romantic lives. Whatever the discussions of terms and definitions, the term, "Incel", was adopted and they seemed to have an intuitive understanding of what it meant. Additionally, in the early years, one didn’t have to be a virgin to be Incel. They based this off of another early researcher, Dr. Donnelly, who stated this: "we define the involuntary celibate as one who desires to have sex, but has been unable to find a willing partner for at least 6 months prior to being surveyed."

Negativity Arising on the Board

Compared to today’s Incel boards, the overall tone of the conversation was different: Incel was not a permanent thing, and women were part of the Incel community. Because of this, fatalistic and defeatist attitudes as well as misogyny and anti-feminism weren’t as pervasive as they are now. But there still was negativity and Alana left. At this point in time, self-describing as incel wasn’t a negative thing even though the state of being incel was negative. It remained that way for over a decade, which ranged from the end of the 90s to the end of the 2000s.