"I can't uninvent this word, nor restrict it to the nicer people who need it."
"I was trying to create a movement that was open to anybody and everybody," says Alana, now a 43-year-old management consultant and artist from Toronto. In 1993, she was finishing an undergraduate degree in statistics at Carleton University in Ottawa, and she'd never had sex or anything close to a boyfriend. Sometimes she blamed her appearance: short, slightly overweight, eczema splotches. Often she felt like she'd passed through adolescence without learning the unspoken rules of a complex game that everyone else understood intuitively.
Alana built a simple, all-text website— Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project—and while it's long gone, she and a few others shared their memories with me, and Alana sent me a packet of old posts.
https://www.elle.com/culture/news/a3451 ... -movement/