I have an ounce of sympathy for the incels, because I am in kind of an inverse position. I met my wife when we were sixteen. The longest I ever went without sex in that time was about a year when her sex drive cratered during her pregnancy. Sex has never been something I have to seek, aside from cooking a nice dinner once in a while. Because of this, huge swathes of typical American culture are basically opaque to me. The whole teenage/20-something dating scene, sowing your wild oats, making a terrible mistake at a party one night, wild sexcapades with strangers, seeking companionship with new partners, wondering if you've finally found "the one," and fretting that you'll end up alone experience was just a weird story to me. A very large number of movies and TV shows are devoted to experiences that are supposedly common but that I just will never have. My wife and I would go to parties with our 20-something friends and listen to stories about who's banging who, and which couple is mismatched, and which of our various friends are secretly cheating on their current flings, and then we would go home and just shrug in bewilderment.
So I can sort of imagine how weird it must be from the other side. If sex is something mysterious and powerful that you are told that you should want, that our culture bombards you with propaganda about how you should make it a central aspect of your life, about how everybody is doin' it, but you have no way into that culture. I can very much understand how you would start to feel like an outsider because that is how I felt for about a decade or more, and I can understand how you might start to feel very bitter and develop some really warped ideas about sexuality and sex partners as a result.
Somewhat ironically, the feminism that incels like to blame for their problems is probably the long term cure for their delusions. As gender norms break down further, men should feel less pressure to define themselves based on their sexual conquests, and sexual experience will become less of a defining trait. But that will be a slow process and most of today's incels will likely be dead before we achieve such a utopian society.
So I feel an ounce of sympathy for them. I might even pity them if they weren't so intent on being such total fucking douchebags all the time.
