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Notes -
Be more specific about what you take from the comment you're replying to?
Because if I take your comment literally... "a commenter on TheMotte used the word "incel" in relation to a character played by Brad Pitt [note - not Brad Pitt himself], and from this we see that the word "incel" is meaningless" seems difficult to justify.
Tyler Durden is played by Brad Pitt, an infamously sexually attractive man. He is the alter-ego of another man who, while less overwhelmingly sexy than Brad Pitt, is still a pretty good-looking dude. Both in-universe and out-of-universe, the men involved are not struggling sexually, nor suffering the world's disdain, nor would they even if they hit a rough patch.
That either one of them would be representative of "incel" culture, even in its early days, is ridiculous. Incel has become a catch-all term for "distressed and male", and that's really not a useful description. The concerns of the narrator are not the concerns of incels, as /u/FiveHourMarathon attempts to suggest. The narrator is influential, has status, has sexual success, and relative economic comfort. He's unhappy, but "incel" is not the same thing at all -- at least, it didn't used to be.
At this point, "incel" has become a new, fairly general insult. A socially acceptable replacement of calling someone "gay" in the old times. The literal meaning is different of course, but the underlying sting of the insult has a very similar source, namely that the person cannot fulfill the masculine role of seducing women and "obtaining" sex from them. When calling others "gay" (in the schoolyard sense) was not as taboo as today, it also referred to this: being passive, non-agentic, not being a go-getter.
Lame, loser etc. It doesn't mean "literally lives a zero-sex life involuntarily".
It's just part of the standard woke narrative. "Society's problems are caused by a group of men, and it just happens to be a group we despise."
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