The first website to use the term "incel" was "Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project", founded in by a Canadian university student known only by her first name, Alana, to discuss her sexual inactivity with others; [ 9 ] [ 8 ] however, some media has incorrectly dated it to , the date of a personal interaction that later inspired her to design the page. That's a pretty sad version of this phenomenon that's happening today. Things have changed in the last 20 years". The message board love-shy.
While IncelSupport welcomed men and women and banned misogynistic posts, love-shy. Over the next decade, the membership of love-shy. It was known as a place where men blamed women for their inceldom, sometimes advocated for rape or other forms of violence, and were misogynistic and often racist.
Since around , some self-identified incels have attempted to redefine their views to appear more mainstream by writing blog posts and articles on subject-specific wikis and forums rejecting the more open expressions of misogyny within other segments of the subculture, highlighting the heterogeneity of incel communities, and reframing incels not as an online subculture but as those experiencing a life circumstance that applies even to individuals who are not members of the subculture.
Kelly wrote for the Political Research Associates think tank in that these attempts to redefine themselves contradicted the communities' self-identifications and moderation strategies, where members regularly challenge other users' "legitimacy" as incels, but have accepted as members individuals with sexual experience who nonetheless shared similar political ideologies. The incel subculture's attitudes can be characterized by extremist resentment, hostility, sexual objectification , misogyny , misanthropy , self-pity and self-loathing , racism , sense of entitlement to sex, blaming of women and the sexually successful for their situation which is often seen as predetermined due to biological determinism , evolutionary genetics or a rigged game , nihilism , rape culture , and the endorsement of sexual and non-sexual violence against women and the sexually active.
The Southern Poverty Law Center SPLC described the subculture as "part of the online male supremacist ecosystem" that is included in their list of hate groups. Beginning in and into the s, the incel ideology has been described by North American governments and researchers as a terrorism threat, and law enforcement have issued warnings about the subculture.
