> 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.