How do you stop being an incel? ?

[Feelsbadman]

I hate being an incel.

i'm sick of the advice "just stop caring about women" "life doesn't revolve around women" .

It’s not all about looks you know​

Every time I discuss incels with any semblance of sympathy, I am met with a chorus of: ‘Boohoo, woe is me, poor men. They’re not entitled to sex or women you know!’.

This is of course true.
I am not and have never at any point suggested that women should be made lower their standards to reduce the plight of the incel.
However, the erosion of societally enforced monogamy coupled with the fact that women are rapidly outpacing men in education, yet still seeking highly educated partners, has significantly exacerbated matters on this front.

However, to have sympathy for incels does not equate to advocating women be ‘given to them’ as their entitlement.
It’s important that mainstream society gives incels a more appealing message than we have been giving. To dismiss them runs the risk of resigning them to the basements of online communities, to fester in resentment and disenfranchisement as potential ticking timebombs.

However, let’s look at some of the messages we send to incels.
Incels are often told that ‘it’s not all about looks’ and that some women go for personality. This is despite the fact that statistics show that men’s looks matter far more to the fairer sex and far more than they’d care to admit.
Feminist writer, Louise Perry, who is currently engaging in an extremely productive letter exchange exploration of the modern dating economy with aforementioned James Bloodworth, had this to say on the looks vs personality dichotomy,

The dating market is highly competitive, hierarchical, and often cruel. This fact is uncomfortable for anyone who values egalitarianism, so a more appealing – albeit dishonest – option is to instead blame Incels for their plight by suggesting that their unpleasant personalities must be the problem.

To make the argument that ‘it’s not all about looks’ is to make the assumption that if you don’t have good looks, you can simply compensate with a sparkling personality. I’m routinely provided with anecdotal evidence for such a phenomenon. However, what constitutes a sparkling personality can be very much dependent on what a man looks like and there is often a minimum level of attractiveness to be reached before personality and other traits are even considered.
Dr Francesca Minerva, a bioethicist at the University of Warwick, explores the fascinating ways in which an underexplored type of discrimination: ‘lookism’, which translates into discrimination in other facets of life. Lookism impacts on areas that we might not intuitively think dependent on physical attractiveness, such as professional success, perception of intelligence, and even morality.

Bloodworth explores more difficulties encountered by incels in regard to ‘it’s not all about looks’.

…in the world of online dating, which is how 40% of couples in the United States meet, looks, height and social status are usually pre-requisites for matching with someone at all. Offline, many Incels lack the basic social skills required to navigate relations with the opposite sex. According to an internal poll carried out on the website Incels.co, 26% of users of the forum said they had some form of autism. Flirting, which requires an innate understanding of nuanced sub-communications and unspoken sexual tension, does not come naturally to these men.

When I bring this up with friends, I receive a volley of potential qualities that incels could and should conjure up so that they may compete in the mating market. It seems that it is difficult for us to imagine a man who is objectively lacking in every aspect that might be important to a woman when considering a mate. We also neglect to acknowledge how many of these are immutable and difficult or impossible to do anything about.