In April 2018, about 20 years after the early incel community coalesced, a college student in Toronto named Sohe Chung decided to walk to the library. It was, he told me, “kind of an SJW community.” It was a welcoming place, one where men who didn’t know how to talk to women could ask the community’s female members for advice (and vice versa). The teenager, now a man who uses the handle “ReformedIncel” to keep his internet history out of his offline life, recalls the online incel world of the 1990s and 2000s fondly. The group eventually became a community, one that began using a phrase to describe their romantic troubles - “involuntary celibacy.” Later the term would get shortened: “incel.” There he found friends: other people who were awkward in real life, particularly when it came to sex and dating. He was a shy kid, too introverted to feel fully comfortable in the real world, and he logged on to the early internet’s bare-bones web forums for a sense of connection. In the late 1990s, a lonely teenager on the West Coast fired up his dial-up modem to find someone to talk to.
