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Accepting these as the choices is still accepting the incel-yellers frame. There is a possibility that the complaints the men have do in fact have validity and are not merely some sort of injured pride.
Well, yes. "Couldn't get laid when I was 16, now I'm 30 and I still can't get laid" could be down to "all women are bitches" or it could be "there are reasons why this is down to me" (and that needn't be "I don't make any effort", it's "unfortunately due to nature I'm odd/weird/ugly/otherwise unattractive").
But "couldn't get laid when I was 16, now I'm 30 and I can" has little reason to still resent the 16 year old girls back then. You're older now, improved, grew up (we hope), are better value, know now what to do and how to act when you want to attract someone. Still being resentful over "Lisa wouldn't date me when I was a spotty, gangly, awkward 16 year old, that bitch, I hope she's fat and single and poor today" is just being mean.
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All three can be true. This is what you absolute conflict theorists ignore: the people you hate may be making bad faith accusations, but their accusations may also have more than a little truth to them. Of course you won't acknowledge the latter because admitting your enemies have a point would be conceding ground to them, which conflict theorists (who do not care about the truth, only about winning) can never acknowledge. But your enemies still might have a point.
There are actual incels, and incel-adjacent misogynists, and some of them have been legitimately injured by feminists and have reason to be resentful, and some of them are just shitty people who can't get laid for good reason, and some are just plain old misogynists resentful that they can't get laid as much and as easily as they would like.
Your enemies are never going to concede that calling Elon Musk (with 10 kids by 3 attractive women) an incel is at all wrong. By conceding that any of their accusations have truth to them, you validate such bogus accusations as well. It is not a matter of conflict theorists not caring about the truth; it is a matter of conceding true things assists in establishing lies.
No, they aren't, because they are also bad-faith conflict theorists.
Calling Elon Musk an incel is obviously ridiculous, but it has nothing to do with whether incels and incel culture does in fact exist. And if you take your position, which is that you can never admit your opponents might even accidentally be right about something because that would be giving them a "win," then you are no longer able to actually distinguish between what's true and what's not, only between what helps your cause and what doesn't.
I know what's true and what's not; I know men with unjustified anger at women exist. But I see no reason to accept the "incel" framing of that phenomenon when it brings in all the stuff that isn't true also, and by accepting that framing I implicitly validate that too. That brings no one closer to truth.
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The term "incel" is generally hurled at three categories of men:
I know because I fit into the third category (certainly not the first, and I would like to think not the second), and have had the "incel" epithet hurled at me dozens of times.
Now, obviously it's ridiculous to assume that any man who departs from woke/progressive orthodoxy is either sexually frustrated or harbours a lingering resentment towards women as a group. I don't think I hold the opinions that I do because of resentment towards women. But I'm also not going to deny the existence of men who fit in category 2: they exist, I've interacted with them, I've spoken to them in person.
And what's more, even if these men only arrived at their opinions because of their lingering resentment towards women as a group, that doesn't in and of itself mean that their opinions are wrong, or their grievances lacking in merit - that would be a textbook example of Bulverism. Bob's underlying psychological motivation for believing in X has no bearing on whether or not X is true. I'm not required to deny the existence of resentful misogynistic men in order to make the case for why e.g. female underrepresentation in STEM is not the moral outrage many feminists seem to think it is.
Spin it back the other way around: it could be literally 100% true that Alice is only a socialist because she feels resentful of how unsuccessful she is, and that in and of itself wouldn't tell us anything about whether or not socialism is a preferable economic system to capitalism.
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