A lot of people like to hate on the so called "incel community" and lookism theory as a whole, but I've yet to hear a compelling disproval of these ideas.
I mean, generally, there is little to disprove. Humans are animals, and animals have sexual selection. The selective sex is the one that puts the most "effort" into reproduction, and in the modern world where both men and women have to work full-time, the agony, effort, physical risk, and childrearing-obligation of motherhood is more taxing than siring a child. As a result, women are going to be more selective than men to at least some degree. (It's uncomfortable, but you can argue that women going to work made this situation far more extreme. Personally I think more women should be stay at home moms, but the option of not being one should never be taken away. But for that, we need a fairer distribution of wealth, better economy, what have you.)
Most people are pretty uninteresting and have extremely generic taste in men and women, but women have more of an ability to actually select for these preferences, with more men settling. So the incel "theory" of a bunch of women trying to go after a small group of conventionally highly attractive people is right to an extent.
The information age has obviously made this much, much, much worse by giving people far more "choices" than humans ever evolved to have. Stuff like Tinder has basically broken the sex economy in that way. I talked about this a couple pages ago and won't go into it here.
Now, I'm going to differ from incel doctrine with this particular advice. All the above applies to maybe 66-95% of men and women-- the kinds of people who are relatively generic. People within a standard deviation or two of the "mean" of humanity, mentally. When you get to people a standard deviation or two
away from the mean, you get to the people who select for unexpected and highly individualistic things.
For example, take my brother and his wife. Both of them waited until their 30s to date even a single other person because they were only interested in dating someone else in their field of mathematics, despite being conventionally attractive. Then after years and years, they finally met each other and basically instantly paired for life. Or take one of my friends, who basically selects boyfriends based on how good at Smash Ultimate they are. She's an incredibly beautiful opera singer, and her current boyfriend had never dated anyone else, is overweight, has a recessed chin, and never goes outside. I know personally more women who are like this than not, just because I tend to be in very niche communities, but every time I see an incel thread I think about these kinds of women. This is personally how I meet 100% of the men I date, and I can assure you that the competition is not as strong as you'd think.
Basically my most earnest practical advice is that if you're not supremely handsome, you should try to be highly interesting in some niche way that will appeal to a woman in that niche. And then, you have to physically go to locations where this niche gathers. This could be a hobby, grad school, etc. If you are that and clean-kept, respectful, and not addicted to porn or drugs you will be leagues and leagues ahead of the other men you'd be "competing with" in these niches.
I sperged a while ago about how the internet is fucking over men, but here is some actually practical advice for someone who's struggling to date from my (admittedly specific) point of view. People find "incel theory" uncomfortable because it shows aspects of dating/sex that are true but reflect poorly on the majority of the population. It's a theory that (in its less schizo form) does model a big part of the sex economy well, but it's not the whole picture. My advice is that you can ignore this population and can get out this system entirely if you have the acumen.
