Reply All - #120 INVCEL

Episode Date: May 10, 2018

How a shy, queer Canadian woman accidentally invented one of the internet’s most toxic male communities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Reply-All. I'm PJ Vote. Before Atlanta tried to change the world, before she realized exactly how catastrophically trying to change the world could go, she was just a college kid in Ottawa. Back then, she could still use her last name in public. She was a stats major. I had a little office cubicle where I could do my math assignments until late at night. And so I was doing that one night and working really hard on some difficult math problem. and it was a lonely floor, you know, no one else was around, but that was okay, I was used to that, it's late at night in the math department. And then some stranger, a man I've never seen, walks up to the door of my office and knocks, and he doesn't introduce himself with a name.

He says, I'm 27 and I've never been on a date. Whoa. What did you do? Well, because I didn't understand much about, you know, stalking and creepy behavior, I thought, well, that's unusual. But he clearly needs to talk to somebody. So I kind of talked to him for a while. And it was uncomfortable and a little scary in ways I didn't understand. But he was looking for support. And so Alana listened to him.

She listened as he told her about his friend. who had committed suicide, as he told her how sad and out of place he felt at school. The main thing seemed to just be that he was lonely, that he was afraid he'd be alone forever. They talked for a while that night. Eventually the guy left. But the conversation stuck in Ana's mind for a long time. Because she and this guy, they actually had something in common. Of all the students in all the math departments in Ottawa, he'd happened to walk up to the one with the exact same problem as him. She'd never been on a date either.

I was able to live without dating for a long time, and I was willing to forego it. Because, you know, I had some friends and I had some other interests, and the idea of asking was just too scary. I found my academic skills came faster than other people, and my social skills came later. So getting rejected for anything was a reminder that maybe I asked in the wrong way. Maybe I said something rude when I was, you know, asking someone for a favor or asking them to hang out and do something on a, you know, being friends. So asking someone in a date would be even more scary. And would you, would you talk to friends about it? Did it feel like something you could talk about?

Not a lot, actually, because, because of that, like, that embarrassment problem. Like, my friends would know that I wasn't dating. but I didn't want to discuss it much because then they would be alerted to the fact that I wasn't dating and we'd have to discuss something that's embarrassing. It's like this great silence. There's actually this other great silence, which is that Oana was queer, but she wasn't out.

But there were actually more resources available to her for dealing with that secret. She started researching her sexuality on the internet. She found queer dance parties to go to. And when she was 24, she met a woman. and they started dating. She was out. You know, I learned that in lesbian dating, everybody pulls out their wallet and both people

split the bill. That is normal in lesbian dating. But, you know, where do you learn that? You just kind of do it once and figure it out, maybe by making a rude mistake, expecting the other girl to pay because she's more butch. No, that's not the way to do it. So in other words, she had finally made the transition that a lot of people make, from awkwardly not dating to awkwardly dating.

When that transition first started happening in my high school, what I remember is that it felt like a rapture, like a sex rapture. Like one day you had friends in Farside T-shirts talking about Star Wars, and then the next day they were just gone. They were in this other place that smelled like hair gel, where you had to talk to girls on the phone all the time,

and it was really hard to figure out how to get there. The one thing that was obvious, the one rule everybody seemed to agree on, was that once you finally crossed over, you did not look back. You didn't want to be associated with the thing that you were leaving. Alana, though, Atlanta did something really unusual, which is that when she finally started dating somebody at 24, she immediately looked back.

She decided that the decade where she'd been alone, she wanted to do something about that. She wanted to help people who were stuck the way she had been. I came up with the idea to create the support group online because I recognized that, you know, there are other people who have this kind of situation. And if I can get out of it, if I can start dating after a long period of being single, then maybe other people can too.

And the reason I knew about going through that process of reducing shame was that I'd come out of the closet. And that's the exact process you go through when you discover that there are other queer people in the world. And maybe you're queer too. and then you talk to the other queer people, and you get used to the idea that you have that identity, and then you are more able to tell other straight people about it. So that was a really wonderful and empowering process for me in my early 20s. So I think the group was the same idea that meeting real people,

even just on the internet, helps you understand, hey, this is a thing that's happening to me. and maybe there's some hope. Maybe I can get some support. She had a vision for the website. It was going to be simple, just a place with a bunch of resources where people could talk.

Black text, white background. But the first thing she needed, she realized, was just to give all these people a name. Because the name is for people like her were pretty awful. You know, phrases like the lonely virgin in his mother's basement was kind of dominant in the culture.

And was worthy of attack as well. So I wanted something neutral. and kind of precise. I didn't want to use virginity in the name because it's quite possible for someone to have sex and then stop having sex again for a long time. So I don't remember exactly, coming up with names is a mysterious creative process. But I do remember noticing that celibacy was a useful, you know, accurate descriptor, but it was mostly a religious term. that priests and nuns are celibate. And in fact, if I researched for books and articles on celibacy,

they would all be about religious, voluntary vows of celibacy. So putting involuntary in front of it, solve that problem, and then we were off to the races. She called her site, Alana's involuntary celibacy project. It felt right to her. And it felt right to the community that showed up. They embraced the term. They weren't virgins.

they weren't losers, they were involuntarily celibate. It felt more respectful. And so I did that. And, you know, it became fairly well known. Who was showing up? Oh, let's see, demographically, there were few women and a lot of men. You know, there was a guy who was always kind of depressed and sad, but he was talking to us. and there was a man who was in a marriage,

but it sounds like the marriage was kind of loveless or sexless, and he wanted to stay married and not get divorced for some reason. There were teenagers, middle-aged people, there were gay people, they were straight people, there was an astrophysicist. The poets wrote haikus. The little black dress shows more than I wanted and less than I desired. The musicians wrote songs, Cup without a saucer. They were this international group of very,

very shy people meeting online to compare notes on all the ways in which they felt trapped. Some of them were kind of stuck not going out, but I think there were others who were in that state of, well, I have this female friend and I have a crush on her, but I can't really figure out if she's interested or not, but I don't dare ask. I think that situation is common for lonely people. You know, the, how do I approach somebody? How do I approach somebody? How do I ask them out? It's so scary. And what would people say in response? I think there was a lot of empathy, but nobody really had any answers. One of the challenges of having a peer support group is that you got a bunch of people who don't really, like they all have the same problem and they don't have a solution.

Right. And nobody in the group has a solution. What was your role in the project? Like, how did people look to you? You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. That's the good point. Yeah. So on this mailing list, because I had started it, the mailing list, and because I had already started dating, people kind of looked up to me. How'd that feel? You know, I was in my mid-20s and not really comfortable with that role, and I didn't have any mental health training either, so I was definitely not suited to be a counselor or advisor to celibate folks.

For Lana, being put in that position, it was just scary and awkward. What she'd hoped was that if she brought everybody to get, They could compare notes and they could start to make progress together. But that never happened. It never felt like they made progress as a group. It felt like what she had was a bunch of individuals who wanted her to solve their problems. Like, she was back in the library talking to that 27-year-old guy, except for whenever he left, there was another one just like him.

You know, it was kind of an endless litany of people needing support and people telling long stories about their difficult lives. it's an important thing but not a fun thing. So I was really disappointed that my project had become just a small mailing list and had not yet made a huge difference in the actual problem of people being lonely for love. So yet another project that I put effort into and it didn't go anywhere. I've had a lot of those in life. She figured the group would be fine without her.

somebody else could take over. At this point, they'd mostly stopped calling themselves the involuntarily sell a bit, a bit shortened. First, they were Inva cells, and then, because it sounded like imbecells, shortened again. In cells. In 1997, Alana walked away.

Sure that no matter what else happened, she would never hear about in cells again. She could not have been more wrong. When Alana walked away from her 100-person mailing list, she fully expected that the movement that had started there would peter out. It didn't. This was three weeks ago.

This is CNN breaking news. Breaking story out of Toronto where we now know that police have been questioning the driver behind the wheel of this white van who basically mowed people down for as long as a mile. This morning we're learning more about the suspect, including a cryptic Facebook message that was posted on the account right before the massacre. 25-year-old Alec Manassian called himself an in-cell, involuntarily celibate. It's believed he carried out the attack

to exact revenge on women for rejecting him. Incredibly, there are an estimated 40,000 other in cells out there. For Malana's original 100 incels, there were now 40,000. And one of them had just murdered 10 innocent people. I wanted to know what had happened. How had it gotten here?

I emailed a guy who'd been on Atlanta's board, stuck around for decades after she left, and he said he'd seen the changes. He said they didn't happen overnight. After Atlanta left, the community tried to police itself as if she were still there, which meant that if new members showed up who were blaming women for their problems or espousing misogynistic ideas, the community would try and respond. They developed this thing they called the seven deadly sins of in-cell,

apathy, excuses or justification, over-analysis, naivete, fear, rage, shame. The idea was you couldn't blame other people. You had to work on yourself. And if people weren't willing to do that, they were kicked out. The problem was, as the internet grew, these toxic people increasingly just began to form their own communities. And then those communities would grow and splinter off. Now they weren't just in-cells. Some of them decided they were vol-cell, voluntarily-celled, or gym cell, in-cells who were really into exercise.

Posers were fake cells, authentic in-cells were true cells. And at the same time as all these splinter groups were forming, the manosphere was flourishing. men's rights activists, red pillars, all these different groups of men who promised answers to InSELS, who said, if you want a way out of your situation, follow me. Are you interested in connecting deeply with other people,

including women? Well, if so, I've got a little event where we work on this stuff. It's called The Infinite Man Summit, and there's one coming up soon. Like, there's the pickup artist who will tell InSELs, the answer to loneliness is just to learn how to pick up chicks. This city is sex, my friends.

And what they'll tell you is, you know, women are actually easy. all you need to know is how to manipulate them. And if you pay me, I can teach you. And in today's video, I'm bringing you my number one life philosophy for success with women, success in dating. If that doesn't work for you, you can join a backlash group like Pua hate. People who will tell you that women are just too shallow and vapid to go for you, that you've already lost a genetic lottery that happened when you were born,

that the world is just a bunch of blonde stacies pursuing buff alpha chads, and beta guys like you don't have a chance. Good morning. This is John, host of MIGTOW is freedom. These guys believe you should just avoid women anyway because relationships with women will weaken you. So I drew this up for everybody. All right. This Migtow guy has a big whiteboard where he's explaining his theories. He's got men written on one side. Women are written on the other side. And then underneath it says, companions?

I got a question mark over here. Why? Are women companions? Obviously, the answer is no. Would they like to use that phrase? I want a companion forever. By 2013, this is what the Internet had to offer the involuntarily celibate young man. The veterans of Alana's original group were still out there. They still existed, but they were nearly impossible to find underneath all the noise. At the end of the year, their site crashed, and as they were trying to get it back online, something else happened.

In May 2014, one of the toxic incells from the Pua hate forums, posted a video online. Hi, Elliot Roger here. Well, this is my last video. It all has to come to this. Tomorrow is the day of retribution. The day in which I will have my revenge against humanity, against all of you.

For the last eight years of my life, ever since I've hit puberty, I've been forced to endure an existence endure an existence of loneliness, rejection, and unfulfilled desires. All because girls have never been attracted to me. Girls gave their affection and sex and love to other men, but never to me. I'm 22 years old and I'm still a virgin. I've never even kissed a girl. But in those years I've had to rot in loneliness. I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me,

but I will punish all of you for it. After uploading the video, Elliot Roger murdered six people and then killed himself. To the most violent fringe of the incels, Elliot Roger became a hero, the leader of the rebellion. To people like the guy from Atlanta's board, this was the end. He wrote, after the 2014 killings, only the toxic incels could gain momentum.

In 2014, we began losing. losing interests in our temporary board, and efforts in fixing in-cell support were eventually abandoned. Both forums are gone now, and everything positive and supportive from the intel community from the last 15 years has gone, too. Despite still being in-cell, this is when I stopped associating myself with the in-cell community. Alana didn't know about any of this. She found out one day at a bookstore, paging through a magazine, when she saw an article about a murderer from California named Elliot Roger. The article mentioned that he identified with this new group that everybody was talking about in cell.

I immediately recognized, oh, my God, this is what happened to that thing I created. And, you know, it was pretty disturbing. I felt that flash of guilt, you know, the one that makes your face flush red, as if I have done something, you know, deeply wrong. It wasn't that she felt responsible for Elliot Roger. It was more like 20 years ago she'd seen this problem. and she tried to solve it, and she'd failed. And the feeling she's been having lately is that maybe it was a mistake to stop working on it.

I feel responsible for basically creating a safer place, maybe on the internet, maybe elsewhere, for people who are having difficulty with dating. And it's not just a safer place. It's the research and the understanding of why this is happening. And why is it your problem? How come you have to fix it? I don't think I'm going to be able to fix it. But I think, yeah.

Why do I care? Why am I still? Why am I working on this again? Yeah. Well, because I have, I guess because not enough other people are, because I recognize the problem and have spoken to many people who identified as involuntary celibate 20 years ago. And so I still care about about them in the abstract.

It feels like one of the things, one of the many things that is bad about all this is that because the people who are angry and violent take up so much space, it feels like it's now hard for somebody like you to talk about the problem of loneliness. Because what I think some people hear is, oh, you're asking me to feel bad for a bunch of violent misogynist. Exactly. be very careful what I say because of that. So yes, I'm, as you say, there's not enough space on the internet to create forums that are safe and friendly and nonviolent, because they tend to get taken over apparently by the violent rhetoric. You know, no one has a right to sex, but everybody deserves respect and everybody deserves love. So how can we help people find the love they want in a respectful way.

Alana says the big mistake she made, back when she started a movement in her 20s, was that she overlooked what she now calls the student government problem. You can't build a movement of people whose whole reason for joining the movement is to leave it. It's not just that the people who find love then go disappear. It's that you don't get to have what every other movement takes for granted, the old guard. Instead, the people who stayed in Incel were the ones who got stuck, the people who felt the most bitter, the most abandoned. When young people showed up with questions, the people who should have been there to give them hope had moved on. Even eventually, Alana. In the last few weeks,

she's decided to come back. She has this new research project called love, not anger, dedicated to answering the question she first started with. How might lonely people find love? One thing she knows she still has to do, come up with a name to describe the people she's trying to help. Incel isn't her word anymore. Reply Al is hosted by me, PJ Vote, and Alex Goldman. Our show is produced by Shruti Permanani, Fia Bennon, Damiano Marquetti, Kaelin Roberts, and Elizabeth Kulas. Our editor is Tim Howard.

He is now in Berlin. Please tweet Guten Togs at him. And while he's moving, Reply Al's super fan Alex Bloomberg stepped in to help. Our intern is Devin Gwynn. Special thanks to Adi T. Natasha Keeney. Matt Lieber is food that is the appropriate amount of spicy. We're mixed by Rick Kwan. our theme music is by the mysterious breakmaster cylinder.

You can find more episodes of the show on iTunes, Spotify, or on CDs, maybe. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.