Love-shy.com

Love-shy.com was founded in 2003 by 'loveshcom' and was the largest incelospherian community for almost 12 years. Love-shy.com was deleted circa April 2020, and essentially moved to the new domain of love-shy.net, under the guidance of the new admin, ieatboogers. Love-shy.com is probably the closest an incel forum ever got to a community. It has always served as a place for men and women perpetually rejected or extremely shy of potential partners to swap stories and causes of their situation.https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/10/07/incels-4chan-and-the-beta-uprising-making-sense-of-one-of-the-internets-most-reviled-subcultures/ A passage from the site's now inaccessible FAQ read, "It is possible for a person to be both incel and love-shy, and most are both, and most are both to some degree or another. For instance, a person could originally be incel, then suffer large numbers of turn downs, and eventually become love-shy and unable to approach.”https://heavy.com/news/2018/04/incel-movement-alek-minassian-elliot-rodger/|title=What Is the Incel Movement? 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know
==History==
According to Sara Gardephe, the director of Shy Boys IRL, the forum was founded after men from the discussion section of the IMDB page 'The 40 Year Old Virgin' wanted to expand their discussion to an entire forum (not kidding).https://podtail.com/en/podcast/the-last-podcast-on-the-left/side-stories-earons-incels/. They identified with the plight of the character Steve Carell played. Although as the forum was founded in 2003https://web.archive.org/web/*/love-shy.com and the movie was released in 2005, this is unlikely.
===Loveshcoms adminship===
The forum was founded by an anonymous British [source about him being british?, were you involved back then?] man called Loveshcom 
Loveshcom, the founder, founded the site as an older male virgin in 2003. He defeated his shyness, lost his virginity at age 43, found a girlfriend, and got married, losing interest in maintaining the site. EIther him or Mr. C did a video interview with a news agency in 2018 but under a black silhouette fearmongering about adult virgins and appealing to the (basically dead) "co-alpha" forums as reason for a source of fear
When loveshcom stopped being interested in the forum, the only way to post was to post as guest (anonymously), because of that, at the beginning of 2009 the forum was flooded by trolls that were flaming everybody and a group of posters (among them Rammspieler) asked loveshcom to take control of the forum. He agreed and the new admins banned many trolls and suppressed the guest account (that guy WALKER was posting as guest and stopped posting when the guest account was suppressed). Everybody thought that things would improve but it's the opposite that happened : a whole bunch of guys that have much more serious mental problems than love-shyness started posting in the forum and they basically killed it. Many of these guys were banned from other forums because of their ideas - fschmidt was banned from at least three other forums and he was welcomed in love-shy.com. One of the moderator (empty_caldera) was encouraging the misogyny and whenever a poster that had experiences with women had good ideas,he was ridiculed by other posters and the admins by being called a mangina or a bootlicker.
===Rammspielers adminship===
Love-Shy.com was the forum in competition to IncelSupport until 2013 and love-shy.com was, during Rammspieler's couple years of adminship, not feminist.
The forum for a couple years was adminned by an admin named Rammspieler who fostered an anti-feminist tone on the board during his stay, that left an impression on sites that track misogyny.https://www.timsquirrell.com/blog/2018/6/4/a-definitive-guide-to-incels-part-three-the-history-of-incelTHE INCEL MOVEMENT: A history from the perspective of ReformedIncel, p. 7 Later, Rammspieler suffered a personal misfortune and adminship was handed over to Mr. C., or Michael, the current admin,https://www.elle.com/life-love/sex-relationships/a33782/involuntary-celibacy/https://www.reddit.com/r/exredpill/comments/2hebzq/ask_a_former_loveshycom_admin_anything/ who is featured as Michael in the documentary called Shy Boys IRL.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ8EAwRauoM Rammspieler after he left, did an AMA on Reddit, apparently with a change of heart about the site's more extreme posts.https://www.reddit.com/r/exredpill/comments/2hebzq/ask_a_former_loveshycom_admin_anything/
===Michaels adminship===
Unlike Rammspieler, Mr. C has a much stricter moderation style. In an interview with Michael, Elle Magazine stated that Michael claims to disown any misogyny left on the board, which he describes as still a cesspit but with some more moderate members to act as a buffer. The interview also contains the following sentence, "While Michael says the vitriol and indignation are misguided at best—'By becoming resentful, you're not going to endear yourself to many women. I may have some of the same feelings, but I deal with them' [says Michael]https://www.elle.com/life-love/sex-relationships/a33782/involuntary-celibacy/".
The website used to direct link a downloadable PDF copy of Shyness and Love, a book published in 1987 by social psychologist Brian Gilmartin. The book included interviews with 300 men he considered to be love-shy. Today the website hosts a forum for people, mostly men, who identify as love-shy or involuntarily celibate.
Now as the site has distanced itself from both Gilmartin's work and inceldom in general through laziness, the site is more or less dead, but hasn't closed down as of late 2018 for some reason.
==Love-shyness as a mental condition==
Love-shyness was a term coined during the 1980s by deceased https://www.havredailynews.com/story/2016/10/21/obituaries/obituary-brian-g-gilmartin/510750.html professor of psychology at Humboldt State University and Montana State University, Brian G. Gilmartin, who published two books about what he coined as, "love-shyness", and acted as a consultant for Japans population problem during the 1990s, including free trips to Japanhttp://interpersonalscience.com/2011/01/03/interview-with-brian-g-gilmartin-ph-d/. in 1987 he argued for love-shyness to be treated as a medical condition and for society to take it more seriously. He based his book on a series of interviews and questionnaires, as well as previous studies on the topic, for example, Dr. Philip Zimbardos research, which he considered faulty data collection.
===Definition of Love-Shy===
Dr. Gilmartin defined love-shyness as the following:
*(1)He is a virgin; in other words, he has never had sexual intercourse.
*(2) He is a person who very rarely goes out socially with women, dating no more than 4 times.
*(3) He is a person without a past history of any emotionally close, meaningful relationships of a romantic and/or sexual nature with any member of the opposite sex.
*(4) He is a person who has suffered and is continuing to suffer emotionally because of a lack of meaningful female companionship. In short, he is a person who desperately wishes to have a relationship with a woman, but does not have one because of shyness.
*(5) He is a man who becomes extremely anxiety-ridden over so much as the mere thought of asserting himself vis-a-vis a woman in a casual, friendly way. This is the essence of "love-shyness".
*(6) He is a man who is strictly heterosexual in his romantic and erotic orientations. (Gilmartin did this as he thought including homosexuals would lend credence to a stigma of love-shy men being gay-in-hiding)
*(7) He is male. No female love-shys were studied.
==Documentary==
In 2011, an up-close documentary of the personal lives and opinions of multiple members from the love-shy.com forum was made called, "Shy Boys IRL". This documentary and it's director, Sara Gardephe, was later used by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to help explain the romantic and sexual frustration in certain incel communities in it's reporting of the April 2018 Toronto van attack. In a report to the CBC's The National, Sara Gardephe described the various incel community attitudes toward society as, "I think they just want to see the world burn a little bit [...] punishing us for not seeing their pain".http://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/incels-and-extremism-how-an-involuntary-celibate-s-frustrations-can-evolve-1.4636020
link to Shy Boys IRL documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ8EAwRauoM
==Other Notable Events==
A current mod named loveablenerd eventually became a couple with user ukshygirl. This wasn't the first romantic pairing on the forum, but they were the best known couple and are still active users as of 2018.
==Fschmidt and Caamib/Dante Alighieri/Alexius==
Two anti-feminist posters named fschmidt and a user by the names of caamib/Dante Alighieri/Alexius originated in the love-shy.com forums and still post there as of 2018, albeit extremely rarely. Their influence has reached beyond love-shy.com as their philosophy became so extremely anti-feminist they felt the need to create outside forums which had a big influence on the increasing trend of anti-feminism in the incelosphere. caamib/Dante Alighieri/Alexius is best known for his now defunct 'governmentgetsgirlfriends' site. He helping to shape, mod, and mold the original incel presence on Reddit (/r/truecels and /r/incels), which later moved onto incels.co (a site that Caamib hates and is now banned from). Fschmidt was caamib/Dante Alighieri/Alexius' 'mentor' and was well know for his extreme anti-feminism and rape praising posts during Rammspieler's adminship. Fschmidt and caamib/Dante Alighieri/Alexius moved onto extremely small sites of fschmidt's creation such as: Co-alpha Reactionary Forum and Mikraite.org.
==References==
== External links ==
* Love-shy wiki
Category:Incelosphere