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Comment by TrackerFF | Hacker News Reader

I'm gonna be honest, some years ago morbid curiosity lead me to visit the most prominent incel forum - this was before "incel" simply became the alias for "angry misogynistic males".

The forum regulars were mostly self-proclaimed incels. They'd analyze "chads" to the most microscopic detail, and draw conclusions - to them, if there was a correlation, then that implied causation, because in the end, they were desperately looking for answers which they had no control over.

Things they could change, such as social skills, attire, and what not were usually the laughing stock. No way were women interested in any of those aspects - women were, in their eyes, attracted to some male because his inherent facial features - again, often to the microscopic details.

These guys were obsessed with the immutable (or near immutable), and would daydream about spending hundreds of thousands to alter their faces and bodies, to meet their own perceived beauty standards - which was always a beauty typical to masculine male models.

But, yes, it became too much. These guys would practically do nothing but post sob stories, detailed analysis of male faces, and rants on women. It became one nasty echo-chamber where top posters were just feeding each others misery.

If you were an incel, you were so simply because of your genes. There was nothing that could be done, other than very expensive and extensive surgeries.

And then you had the extremists. Those that would idolize mass murderers, perceived or self-confessed incels. They'd start catfishing girls on dating apps, stalk people, all that. It was extremely toxic.

Truly a bizarre, but sad community. I can def. see some normal kids joining just for the laughs, then slowly get normalized and radicalized, starting to both doubt themselves, and believing the propaganda.

View on HN

Like that paradox for self-help groups: anyone in the forum who was actually successful in self-help wouldn't be on the forum anymore. The people who never got out would be the ones who looked at the wrong things.

I have spent time on incel forums too, and I disagree with this assessment. There were lots of instances of guys who "got out" of inceldom, found partners and entered successful relationships.

They would come to the forum and share their success stories and advice (and in most cases it was the common sense generic advice you would expect) and in every case the poster would be ridiculed in one of two ways. Either they were never an incel to begin with, just a Chad who had a prolonged dry spell and who had been an imposter or interlocutor (regardless of their tenure on the forum, often of several years) or they were just a flat out liar and imposter who had just come to give the same trite, cookie-cutter advice that they hear from every Chad and Stacey every day.

The success stories only reinforced their toxic ideology.

> The success stories only reinforced their toxic ideology

This is a bit of a blanket statement. I am pretty certain there were also a lot of guys who learned something useful from those stories.

You're not contradicting the GP. If the bringers of the success stories are outgrouped, that is what determines the evolution of the culture.

> Like that paradox for self-help groups: anyone in the forum who was actually successful in self-help wouldn't be on the forum anymore.

This is exactly the view of Canadian woman "Alana" who initially coined the respectful, non-perjorative term "incel" as part of a self help group for people who had reached college+ age but, for one reason or another, not entered the dating world. They were not "losers" or "virgins"; they were "involuntarily celibate".

The term started off as "invcel" (for Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project) but was shortened to "incel" for aesthetic reasons. She was a closted, queer, academic, socially-awkward woman who eventually made the transition from "awkwardly not dating, to awkwardly dating", and having made that transition, identified with others who had not, and wanted to help others still in that situation. It wasn't until later that the whole thing got taken over by weird misogynist extremists.

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’ve been there to give them hope they’d moved on. Even, eventually, Alana.

I highly recommend the following podcast interview with Alana: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/76h59o

I was a member of a small self-help group that practically disappeared in two years, because everyone was too busy doing their awesome projects, and didn't have time to post. That was when I realized that self-help groups that persist for too long are suspicious.

Okay, in theory, the members that solve their problems and leave could be gradually replaced by new members, so the group could exist for a long time. But in practice, it would be unlikely to have the members sufficiently balanced, so the evaporation of the most successful ones would increase the fraction of the ones who are unusuccessful for all kinds of reasons. Also, trying to grow a group is in tension with vetting the potential members.

Pickup artists are toxic and awful, but one thing you could say for the pickup community (at least back when I was researching it) is that one of its core ideas was that attractiveness is a skill that can be learned and doesn't depend on genes, wealth or anything else that is difficult/impossible to change. Self-improvement or "inner game" was part of the program.

Unfortunately the pickup artist scene seems to have ended up overlapping with / feeding into even more toxic communities like incels and gamergate, and I don't fully understand why. I guess because at its core pickup artistry was also founded on misogyny, using women as objects and conquests to be won.

EDIT: I guess reminiscing about pickup artists is a little like being nostalgic for Dubya in the era of Trump. The horrifying awfulness of today doesn't excuse the people who sucked in the past, and their past awfulness laid the groundwork for the even more awful people to come.

For me, instructive was reading Elliot Roger manifesto. There you could see from his own words why he has no girlfriend and no chance to have one. And you could also see how he is interpreting events he just described in completely twisted way.

And then he makes up rules of female attraction. Fullfills them, nothing and the conclusion is not "maybe my rules are bad". The conclusion is "it is unfair cause I did everything". And it almost does not matter even, because if he tried to tweak on rules, he would still had no success.

But he ended up building ideology in his head that lead to him killing multiple people which was basically failed plan to kill even more.

I watched the videos of Elliot Roger, and I had a strong feeling that he didn't even want to have a girlfriend. It was just that he wanted to be admired, noticed that having an attractive girlfriend is considered a success, and resented that he didn't have this specific mark of success.

His entire strategy was whining: "Hey, I am so awesome, why don't the attractive girls approach me?!" I don't remember hearing about any specific step he made to approach girls, not even saying "hello". He was just a guy addressing other guys, expecting that he should somehow magically obtain a girlfriend without even trying, insisting that he deserves it.

I strongly suspect he was a gay in denial. Before anyone gets performatively offended, no, this isn't a statement about gays in general, this is a statement about Elliot Roger specifically. Watch the videos to understand what I mean. His only reason to get a girlfriend was to impress other guys. Incels are bitter about not being attractive and not having sex. Elliot Roger was bitter about being so awesome and yet not having any girlfriend; there was never a hint of any sexual desire towards the hypothetical girlfriend or women in general, no hint of any specific activity he would want to do with the hypothetical girlfriend.

I don't think there is anything to suggest he was gay.

It is not just that he had no way to approach women. He had no friends either, neither males nor females. He did not talked to anyone except parents and 1-2 friends his mom found him when he was preschooler. (Third refused to associate with him anymore.) And the two treated it as chore. He was profoundly alone, except like minded people on Internet where he had a lot of contact.

And it was like that for years, because he refused to go to school after one day and was learning from home - visiting once in a while for contact with teachers. He socialized on Internet and world of warcraft. Literally.

It is just that. His inability to have girlfriend was extension of him being profoundly alone and profoundly incapable of any relationship.

But, he was not gay. Homosexuals have nothing to do with any of this.

Fair enough, but the problem is that a lot of what an incel may believe appears to be true. You're ignoring all the research that supports them.

It's not that mutable attributes do not matter, but sexual selection is more a like a sales funnel than a breakdown of pros and cons. If you are very short, your attire can not make up for it. If you have an ugly face, muscle mass isn't going to revert that. Very high earning potential can make up for these shortcomings, but at that point you might question the motivation of the potential partner. See Table 5.4 (looks) and 5.5 (height):

http://home.uchicago.edu/~hortacsu/onlinedating.pdf

We'd all like to live in a world where we can tell everyone "If only you work hard enough, you will find success in the end". We like to believe in cosmic justice.

Unfortunately, that's not how nature works. Evolution works by discarding the weakest contenders from the gene pool. That ungrateful job is performed by the females, and it's unsurprising that those rejected males would harbor resentment, power fantasies and other moral delusions.

In societies where most women eventually settle on one life partner, sexual success is much easier than career success. Your remarks on nature reflect incel fantasies, not the dominant reality.

You might know an answer to a question I have. Does the "involuntary" part mean that an incel would settle for a woman he would consider very physically unattractive, but isn't able to find a partner even this way?

What would "this way" constitute? I can't claim to speak for the incel community but my guess would be that in general they are probably not seeking out hideous women, but they're probably not turning down offers either.

Anecdotally, as a virginal twentysomething, long before incels were a thing, I had the idea that I might be better off targeting the lower end of the beauty spectrum. I don't think it makes much difference to your chances of success. Women don't generally think "well seeing as I'm physically hideous, I'd better accept this unappealing romantic offer". I eventually ended up having some totally hot partners, as well as rejections from less conventionally beautiful people.

There's also the issue that you probably wouldn't have a very active or joyous sex life, which your partner will probably have a problem with even if you don't.

My understanding is that very short men are handicapped by not wanting to face the stigma associated with being shorter than their partner, and that tall women face a comparable difficulty finding partners.

The issue here is not so much that men do not find women taller than themselves attractive, but the second-order concern about drawing attention to their own height.

I have the impression that it is typical that men usually become less distressed by such stigma when they get older.

A far simpler explanation is that females want the best for their offspring, being fairly tall is generally an advantage in every aspect of life and it's hereditary.

Generally, the preferences and concerns of disadvantaged males do not matter. Females choose the males, and they almost universally choose taller males.

Your explanation ignores the difficulty tall women face finding partners in wealthy countries and so addresses only part of the data. E.g.,

"In western postindustrial cultures, taller women tend to have less reproductive success (RS) defined as number of children surviving to reproductive age, than women 0.7–1.7 standard deviations below average height"

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2008.06.003

Fair enough, here's the missing part:

Tall women have trouble finding partners because women not just want a tall man, they almost universally want a man who is taller than them. It's the same for high-earning women, they almost universally want a man that earns more than them. The same is true for education or job status and many other factors, and they compound.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy

Women who are exceptional in one or more of these traits face a commensurately smaller pool of men that are acceptable to her, whereas every man in that pool is attractive to a commensurately larger pool of other women. However, men are not hypergamous, they do not care about earnings or education and they prefer shorter mates. Therefore, the males in that pool are more likely to end up with another female than the exceptional one.

Unable to find an acceptable partner and absent societal pressure in western societies, those exceptional females may defer or give up on reproduction.

That was also part of their problem.

A lot of them would, or couldn't even imagine, settling with anyone under some arbitrary "score".

I do recall that many posters would post about "hunting" girls that they deemed ugly, on dating sites, just to get laid. Then they'd come back lamenting over the fact that even these "ugly" chicks seemed to have standards, and continued to bemoan that regular guys were inflating these girls egos, due to matching with them on Tinder, etc.

I'd say that some of these guys, absolutely showed signs of narcissism, along with extreme victim mentality.

You are wrong. You are demonstrably wrong, in that you can just observe that almost every "disadvantage" that incels talk about (as I understand it), also exists in 40-50 year olds who are happily married.

E.g. being short is certainly a disadvantage when dating, that's obviously true - but it's just as obviously true that being short does not mean you will be an incel for life - how can you possibly think that it does, given the myriad short people who are doing just fine. Can they date literally any partner they want? No, no one can. But can they date someone, can they be non-celibate? Yes, demonstrably so.

It's certainly true that everyone is a mix of more desirable attributes and of less desirable attributes, and some people get a bigger mix than others. Some are mutable, some are immutable.

The big problem with the incel worldview (as I understand it) is that it's completely binary - you are either capable of finding a sexual partner, or not, and some traits (that they believe they have) mean that they are on the wrong side. But that's just utterly unfounded, again, because take any trait that is supposedly disqualifying, and you'll find someone (plenty of someones) with those traits that are in sexual relationships.

That refutes "a single bad card in your hand means you will inevitably lose". It doesn't refute "At some point your hand is so bad you're basically [not] fucked from the start". Which I think might be a fairer statement of incel beliefs.

>It doesn't refute "At some point your hand is so bad you're basically [not] fucked from the start". Which I think might be a fairer statement of incel beliefs.

Serial killers get marriage proposals from behind bars. Ugly men, including men with physical deformities, find partners. Men without working penises still have sexual relationships. Even if there were such a thing as "basically [not] fucked from the start," the vast majority of incels would be nowhere near that extreme.

I mean, look at the patron saint of incels (canonized as such by the incel community itself) Elliot Rodger. Did life deal him such a terrible hand that dating was impossible, or was the only thing standing in his way himself and his own twisted, hateful and false view of women and the world around him?

The fact serial killers get marriage proposals does not mean that people who are not serial killers necessarily get marriage proposals.

I suspect if somebody is hideously deformed and does not have a working penis, they're going to have a lot of difficulty finding a romantic partner. Presumably there are large numbers of people who have those and similar issues. I think they should be allowed to talk about that, and not have people respond by comparing them to Elliot Rodger.

That these things didn't (Ok I don't know about the penis thing) apply to Elliot Rodger doesn't mean they don't apply to anybody.

> The fact serial killers get marriage proposals does not mean that people who are not serial killers necessarily get marriage proposals.

Yes, you are correct that the fact serial killers get marriage proposals does not mean that people who are not serial killers necessarily get marriage proposals, however that was not the argument that I was making. Serial killers have extremely undesirable personality traits which, typically, one would assume should exclude them from the dating pool. Despite these traits, however serial killers manage to be attractive to people. The conclusion to be reached here is that there is a wide range of personality traits, including negative and antisocial traits, which women can find attractive.

>I suspect if somebody is hideously deformed and does not have a working penis, they're going to have a lot of difficulty finding a romantic partner.

Again, yes, you are correct. But I was not arguing that it was common, rather, I was arguing that there is a wide range of physical attributes which women find attractive, and including deformity implicitly includes the entire range range of attributes one would consider non-traditionally attractive as well, and again (refer to the previous argument) most incels likely do not fall outside of this range in terms of their physical appearance.

Therefore, the argument that every incel is somehow undateable due to immutable and innate characteristics is demonstrated to be false when the variety of physical, psychological and social traits of the entire population which is dating is considered. Edanm's comment above is correct - there are very few, if any, incels for whom a person with practically the same physical and psychological circumstances couldn't be found, but with a partner.

>Presumably there are large numbers of people who have those and similar issues. I think they should be allowed to talk about that, and not have people respond by comparing them to Elliot Rodger.

If they don't want to be associated with people like him, they shouldn't self-identify with a community that considers him a hero and a martyr for their beliefs.

I think that's all broadly untrue or nonsensical, but I'm not going to argue it point by point.

Basically, I think people should try to have some empathy for people who are having a bad time. I don't really get why so many people are so adamant that that should not happen. But I get that I'm not likely to change your mind about anything at this point.

> Basically, I think people should try to have some empathy for people who are having a bad time.

I completely agree, and I have a lot of empathy for people who are unable to find a partner. I was a very geeky "late bloomer" myself, and went through a luckily small period where everyone around me was able to find relationships, and I wasn't.

So when I say I think incels are wrong in their view of the world, it's not out of a lack of empathy - it's because I think the most important thing to tell incels is that they are wrong. I have no idea how to make this a message that will actually resonate with them, but I wish I could. The cure to believing you will never be able to get something that you desperately want, and that you actually can get with >99% certainty, is to learn that your belief is wrong.

I'm not that aware of incel beliefs, I've only visited the forum a few times out of curiosity (partially borne of my own history with relationships).

But to be clear, I agree that there is a point at which you're basically unable to find sexual relationships - clearly there is such a point. But I'm willing to bet that no one, not one person on the incel Reddit, is unable to find a sexual relationship, at least not because of the so-called "immutable characteristics". There is no one there who is so physically unattractive (or who has whatever other traits are talked about) that they can't find a relationship.

I say this with having known many people who in their late teeanager/adult years, were unattractive, "undateable", etc, who believed that they wouldn't ever find a relationship, and who grew up to be in great relationships.

It's like those old commercials for closeted homosexual teenagers - "it gets better". That's a message that is really the same - it does get better, and it's super easy to confirm, because so many older people in happy relationships were once young incels.

So, you accept that there must be a set of individuals that are unable to find sexual partners, but at the same time you are willing to bet that somehow none of these individuals are also active on some incel subreddit.

Can I take the other side of that bet?

I was being somewhat metaphorical, as I can't imagine how we could possibly test such a hypothesis.

But were we able to test it (and feel free to suggest something), I would take that bet, yes. My position being roughly that anyone capable of posting to an incel forum, is capable enough to make the kinds of changes in their life that would "overcome" whatever other physical characteristics they have, and therefore be able to find a sexual partner. Although not necessarily quickly - it might only be later in their adulthood.

(And ok, to be more realistic, I'd only bet on 99.5% of people on incel forums - not 100%. Though I'd probably take the bet at 100% anyway.)

> [...] you are willing to bet that somehow none of these individuals are also active on some incel subreddit.

Yes. I believe the base rate of people who never find a sexual relationship in their entire lives (assuming they want it) is miniscule. Some quick searching puts it at around 0.5% by age 40. I believe that those are mostly unfortunate extreme cases. I believe that even some of these people could conceivably still make changes that would lead to them having a sexual relationship.

The odds of someone on an incel forum being one of the probably-less-than-0.5% of people who by age 40 have not had a sexual relationship is pretty small.

>I believe the base rate of people who never find a sexual relationship in their entire lives (assuming they want it) is miniscule. Some quick searching puts it at around 0.5% by age 40.

[1] puts it at 1.2%, which would be about two million American men.

[1] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/mar/3/government-s...

Edit: Arguably fairer to just divide by the number of over-40s in America, which would make it only about half a million.

I'm actually not so much interested in the incel identity, but in the biological reality of sexual reproduction and mate choice including (but not limited to) Homo Sapiens - as opposed to the fantasies that a given Homo Sapiens might harbor in favor of that reality.

To that end, I would count an incel not as "someone who can't have sex" but someone fertile who involuntarily fails to sexually reproduce.

Research suggests that historically, the ratio of females to males that reproduced is 1.1 (Asia) to 1.4 (West Africa)[1]. Of course that doesn't prove all of these male individuals were incels, but we're not a naturally monogamous species, so you would have to explain why a female would not choose only the best males for reproduction and ignore the rest.

Many (if not most) societies have historically suppressed female mate choice, likely as a measure for maintaining social order. This would suggest that as females are able to be more picky, the number of incels should rise.

I believe that's exactly what we can observe right now in affluent western societies: Women have been financially independent from males for decades, and now that online dating shows women the abundance of mate choices they never knew they had, less attractive males suddenly appear much less desirable. Consequently, the threshold for successful reproduction rises.

[1] https://www.cell.com/ajhg/pdf/S0002-9297(10)00033-9.pdf

It's poor reasoning to conclude that because some (for example) short men find a mate than all short men can find a mate if only they lower their standards.

If there are more short men than women that are willing to date short men, some short men will still be able to find partners, but not all of them.

More generally speaking, some men have so many unfavorable traits that no female would accept them, because females almost always have more and better options. Those unfortunate individuals are discarded from the gene pool.

I'm not saying that every self-described incel is actually in that set of unfortunate individuals, but this is how sexual selection works in lots of species, including our own.

> It's poor reasoning to conclude that because some (for example) short men find a mate than all short men can find a mate if only they lower their standards.

Firstly, I didn't say they have to lower their standards.

> It's poor reasoning to conclude that because some (for example) short men find a mate than all short men can find a mate [...]

I agree that that would be faulty reasoning. I was combatting the opposite reasoning, which is that some traits or combinations of traits (like being short) are disqualifying. E.g. your parent comment in which you wrote: "If you are very short, your attire can not make up for it."

I could totally be misunderstanding your meaning or the incel worldview, but as I said, it comes off to me as very binary - there is some "threshold" of attractiveness/traits, which if you are under, you are therefore unable to find a sexual partner. My contention is that almost every one of these traits or combinatios-of-traits can be found in someone who is in a sexual relationship, and therefore that can't be true.

> More generally speaking, some men have so many unfavorable traits that no female would accept them, because females almost always have more and better options. Those unfortunate individuals are discarded from the gene pool.

This is in incorrect view of the world (barring extreme examples like severe physical deformities or mental issues).

People aren't ranked in some kind of linear way from "more attractive" to "less attractive", lined up, and then can only find partners who agree with their level. There are many reasons:

- People are varied and have different preferences - some women like short men, etc.

- The same person has different preferences at different times.

- Most people will have more than one sexual partner.

All of these combine to make it so that effectively, almost everyone can find a sexual partner.

And this is not just a theroetical idea either - as I posted in another comment, according to some random studies I just Googled, <0.5% of people have never had a sexual experience by age 40.

Moreover, I can tell you that almost everyone I know, including some fairly odd, nerdy, shy, introverted people who had had no dates by the time they were 25, still ended up in happy relationships. (And I say almost mostly because I lost touch with some people and don't know how their story turned out).

Let me just close by saying that if you truly believe you (or some/most people posting on incel forums) are incapable of ever having a sexual relationship, I empathize with you - it must be very unhappy to believe you will never have something that you want and see so many other people enjoying.

But based on my own life experience, and where the people around me are at at age 35, I can tell you that I absolutely believe that almost everyone (>99.5% of people) posting on HN is able to find a sexual partner.

For what it's worth I can think of people in their forties and fifties who are still perennially single, despite apparent efforts to make it otherwise.

I mean, they could maybe hit the gym, or get rich, or read The Game, or become ardent feminists, or buy Thai brides online (after getting rich). I'm sure the options have not been exhausted. But I think at some point you have to admit that these people were just dealt a shit hand and there's probably not much they can do about it.

Or, if you think they should just work to fix the problem, you have to understand that it's not at all obvious how to do that. I mean honestly, I don't understand why serial killers can find partners and the people I'm thinking about can't. I've no idea what they ought to do about it.

> I agree that that would be faulty reasoning. I was combatting the opposite reasoning, which is that some traits or combinations of traits (like being short) are disqualifying. E.g. your parent comment in which you wrote: "If you are very short, your attire can not make up for it."

Being short is in fact a huge disadvantage for dating, this is well established, for example in the study I gave you. Most females will indeed disqualify a short male from consideration.

Of course every dating pool is different and it might contain the odd exception where a female prefers to date a short guy, but then she will still prefer the affluent or handsome short guy over the other short guys, which are now out of mates.

> People aren't ranked in some kind of linear way from "more attractive" to "less attractive", lined up, and then can only find partners who agree with their level. There are many reasons...

I'll call this the "cosmic justice fantasy". In reality, attractiveness is fairly objective and measurable, with fairly low variance across individuals. There are of course always exceptions at the tail ends, but it doesn't make much of a difference.

> All of these combine to make it so that effectively, almost everyone can find a sexual partner.

At this point, I think we should differentiate between finding a a partner and having a sexual encounter at least once in your life.

> And this is not just a theroetical idea either - as I posted in another comment, according to some random studies I just Googled, <0.5% of people have never had a sexual experience by age 40

What this actually says is that less than 0.5% of people admit to never having had a sexual experience, which also would include an encounter with a prostitute.

Even at that low-ball rate, we'd be talking about millions of people in the US.

> Let me just close by saying that if you truly believe you (or some/most people posting on incel forums) are incapable of ever having a sexual relationship, I empathize with you - it must be very unhappy to believe you will never have something that you want and see so many other people enjoying.

To be clear: I'm neither short, nor bad-looking, nor do I lack sexual experience. I'm neither an incel, nor incel-affiliated, nor do I personally know any actual (self-identified) incels. I don't read discussions on incel forums. You may well be right in that a large amount of incel forum dwellers really only look blame personal failures on some immutable characteristic, because that's just what people like to do.

I happen to be interested in the some of the science that an incel might be interested in, because I prefer to know what's real, as opposed to what people would like to be real.

> I happen to be interested in the some of the science that an incel might be interested in, because I prefer to know what's real, as opposed to what people would like to be real.

To be clear myself, I agree with this attitude and goal completely.

> Being short is in fact a huge disadvantage for dating, this is well established, for example in the study I gave you. Most females will indeed disqualify a short male from consideration.

The study you linked is about online dating. While that is clearly important, it's also an arena in which you are basically forced to quantify and pick thresholds for various attributes (and in which it is much easier to just "disqualify" people based on attributes).

This is important, and arguably will get more important as reliance on online dating becomes ever more prevalent. But it is still not everything, there are still some places in which potential partners will have a chance to get to know each other without the initial choice to disqualify someone based on height, and through which other attributes might win out.

> I'll call this the "cosmic justice fantasy". In reality, attractiveness is fairly objective and measurable, with fairly low variance across individuals. There are of course always exceptions at the tail ends, but it doesn't make much of a difference.

I don't know, on reading this I was inclined to agree. But on further reflection, speaking as a man, I know there are plenty of other men who have differences of opinion with me about what they care about in a woman - height, body type, etc. There are the endless discussions of "are you a chest man or a butt man". And the answers really do vary! A woman who is objectively very pretty (and who I can objectively say is very pretty), might still not be the best match for me, because she is e.g. too thin or too tall. Whereas other men might want a thin, tall woman.

That said, you're also making another mistake in your reasoning IMO - you're assuming attractiveness is the only thing that matters in finding a mate. That is simply not true - both in what people say they care about, and by simple observation of actual people.

Put another way, let's do this experiment: someone takes a hundred couples (let's assume straight couples), takes a picture of the man and the woman separately, then mixes up the pictures. Do you think you'll be able to match the couples based on attractiveness alone? I'm sure there's some correlations here, and you'll be able to do it to some extent, but certainly nowhere near 100%.

> What this actually says is that less than 0.5% of people admit to never having had a sexual experience, which also would include an encounter with a prostitute.

Even at that low-ball rate, we'd be talking about millions of people in the US.

By age 40, and that also includes people who are not actively looking for sex. But yes, that is a lot of people, probably around a million (assuming an over-40 population of around 110 million in the US, which I'm kind of guessing at).

I'm not sure what our point of disagreement is at this point. I'm not saying that there are literally no people who are able to find a sexual partner despite wanting one. I'm saying:

1. It's very rare to be unable to find a sexual partner.

2. Physical attractiveness and other physical (immutable) attributes, while certainly mattering a lot, will almost certainly not preclude anyone from being able to find a sexual partner.

3. If you're an around-20-year-old incel, the chance that you will never be able to find a sexual partner, assuming you make some steps to change things you can change for the better, is incredibly tiny. Most people posting in incel forums are not in that situation, and if they think they are, they are mistaken.

> The study you linked is about online dating. While that is clearly important, it's also an arena in which you are basically forced to quantify and pick thresholds for various attributes (and in which it is much easier to just "disqualify" people based on attributes).

Of course in reality women aren't going to reject males on arbitrary and exact thresholds, but on what they consider "too short", which is also related to their own height.

I would agree that online dating is a very tough dating pool and that many other pools exist and that those thresholds are always relative to who is in the pool.

> I don't know, on reading this I was inclined to agree. But on further reflection, speaking as a man, I know there are plenty of other men who have differences of opinion with me about what they care about in a woman - height, body type, etc. There are the endless discussions of "are you a chest man or a butt man".

That's another point I keep making: Men's preferences generally don't matter to the outcome. Average men have far lower standards and are willing so settle for less, because the pool is far smaller. Beggars can't be choosers.

Women have higher standards not only because it's their biological imperative, but because they generally can afford to, at least in a free sexual marketplace.

> That said, you're also making another mistake in your reasoning IMO - you're assuming attractiveness is the only thing that matters in finding a mate. That is simply not true - both in what people say they care about, and by simple observation of actual people.

I'm not exactly saying that. The evidence shows that - absent any societal or economical pressures - attractiveness is the overwhelmingly important factor in mate choice. What people say is irrelevant, studies show that people are not honest about this. People don't want to be seen as "shallow" or "superficial", they also want to believe in a just world.

> Put another way, let's do this experiment: someone takes a hundred couples (let's assume straight couples), takes a picture of the man and the woman separately, then mixes up the pictures. Do you think you'll be able to match the couples based on attractiveness alone? I'm sure there's some correlations here, and you'll be able to do it to some extent, but certainly nowhere near 100%.

Looking at couples is "survivorship bias". You would have to be taking into account the population that fails to find a mate.

Again, just because you can find a short guy with a mate doesn't mean there's mate for every short guy.

> I'm not sure what our point of disagreement is at this point.

I guess you're being "too optimistic".

> 1. It's very rare to be unable to find a sexual partner.

Finding sex - if we were to include prostitution - is very easy. Finding a sexual partner with which to produce offspring is another matter. I would suggest that the number of males that fail at this, particularly in a free sexual marketplace, would be relatively high, perhaps in the double-digits percentages.

> 2. Physical attractiveness and other physical (immutable) attributes, while certainly mattering a lot, will almost certainly not preclude anyone from being able to find a sexual partner.

I disagree with this, at least if we exclude prostitution.

> 3. If you're an around-20-year-old incel, the chance that you will never be able to find a sexual partner, assuming you make some steps to change things you can change for the better, is incredibly tiny. Most people posting in incel forums are not in that situation, and if they think they are, they are mistaken.

I'm not interested in the question of "how many self-described incels on the forums are real incels?", because it's just not measurable. Like I said, people are dishonest in what they say, people like to harbor victim identities, and so on.

At the very least, I doubt only a "incredibly tiny" amount these people couldn't be turned into a reproductive success, because I already ballparked the amount of reproductive failures at over 10% and it makes sense that these would be overrepresented in an incel community.

And yet, short ugly poor people have partners. Being without a partner permanently (in western societies) is rather unusual, and if you were looking to draw correlations between the people in that category, you’re probably looking at a combo of psychological issues and lack of interest, not so much what they look like.

> And yet, short ugly poor people have partners.

That might actually be an odd but perfectly rational dating strategy for females that want to make absolutely sure they are not being cheated on, to be in a relationship where they have all the power, because they damn well know how hard it would be for that guy to find another partner.

Of course you have exceptions like this, for all kinds of reasons. There are people who fetishize morbid obesity or amputation. That doesn't mean that for every morbidly obese amputee there's a matching partner.

Let me guess: sky-high on OCD, paranoia, and narcissism quotients; rock-bottom on empathy and personal grooming?

Ugh. Hope you picked up a gallon of eye bleach on your way out.

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