I wouldn't really know since I've only ever had "traditional" relationships, but I'm pretty sure they still exist. Most of the people I know (which is now mid twenties at the youngest up to near 40) are in romantic relationships or want to be, it's not just hook-ups out there. Like, don't get me wrong, thinking about how to find a way to get into a romantic relationship again makes me want to CW, but that's partly because it was already really difficult for someone like me and it's getting more difficult as I get older . . . Anyway, of all the things we can blame them for, I think not wanting to fuck men and now wanting to, idk, whip and step on people? is really it. Incidentally, one of the veins of discourse in the incel community is basically doing conversion therapy to become gay because they believe that it's way easier on average for a dude to get laid if he's gay. I've never seen someone report that the converted themselves, though.
The other side of this is that they're so misogynistic how the fuck do they expect to get that romantically close to someone before they realise how awful they are?
Well, they didn't become such sickos until after they already had their negative experiences, at which point they've usually given up and made sexual frustration their religion. There's no contradiction in this specific point, even if there's a lot of short-sightedness, dehumanization, reaction, etc.
Edit:
The level of intimacy they yearn for is created over months, the sex is usually much earlier. So perhaps part of the problem is that they mentally have the cart before the horse, the order of things that are supposed to happen is incorrect in their heads and therefore they fail the whole dating thing because it doesn't match with the material reality and issues occur interacting with others over this.
Not to keep playing reverse "Spot the Contradiction," but you need to remember that these are people who generally have never had a girlfriend. Period. They might get a first date or two and then get ghosted. In the context of a first date, do you think that for a het woman, a man more interested in emotionality than sex is somehow a red flag? Like yeah, if he's trauma dumping to you while you're at the diner and you don't even really know him, that's probably not gonna fly, but if anything I would think emotionality that is somewhat in check and deprioritizing sex would be considered substantial positives for these guys as candidates. Unfortunately for them, most of them never even got that far and the other ones found some other way (probably prioritizing sex in many cases) to fuck it up.
I wasn't weighing in on whether their conversion ideas were legitimate or not, merely saying that some people talked about pursuing it.
I was being facetious, I apologize if I upset you. It might have been insensitive of me. I'll remove that part.
I think the logic goes that lots of dudes want, whether by social conditioning or natural libido or whatever, to fuck anything that walks. Lots of women, for the same reasons, don't. Therefore, if someone wants to have sex, they should have sex with men. It's not about gay men being more libidinal than straight men, it's about men being more libidinal than women. Again, their logic, not mine. Hopefully you don't see this as defensive, since it's not like conversion is a key pillar of their ideology, it's just something that pops up conversationally here and there.
I never excused their actions, I merely want to understand it causally and sometimes to help others make sense of it. The problem with their ideology is that it is reactionary, not that it is extremist; we're extremists, too! I get how you take me for an apologist (though I'm not), but I don't get how you took anything I said to be a "whataboutism".
I'm not particularly aware of the violence it has caused beyond the mass shootings, but I've read some of their violent fantasizing on their board and I won't reprint it even with a CW. I know that this is a dangerous "culture" (network of cults) with a bad ideology, the point isn't to say that it isn't bad. But if you're really serious about acting against them, it's important to understand how they work and where their motivations come from, you can't just make shit up or hastily string faulty inferences together and then have it be unassailable because challenging this negative claim is de facto apologetics. It doesn't make any sense.
Now of course, if you read my dumb rant (which I don't encourage, I think it'll just upset you), I do admit that I personally feel bad for the more sad boy contingent of them, just as I feel bad for a friend of mine who got brought into a more literal cult and now recruits more victims, even though I also condemn their actions and basically everything they do or think at this point. However, my feelings might motivate my attention to this issue, but I do not justify anything with those feelings as that would be absurd and no one here would even understand it, much less agree. It would also be poor reasoning. Ultimately, what I want is the best outcome for the most people, which statistically means mainly that people should be protected from incels, but it also means that -- insofar as logistics allow it -- the incels should be put in re-education camps rather than on death row, and they don't need to repent first, they just need to be put somewhere where they can't hurt anyone and then learn why they should repent.
I understood before, but the particularly offensive content has been removed
By the way, you don't need to apologize for voicing concerns, it is a good thing to do.