Whenever people are like oh we need to empathize w/ incels, care about their feelings blah blah, I just think about what Lundy Bancroft said about abusers.
They need to learn empathy, and this excessive focus on their feelings is a barrier to them learning empathy.
🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/iHateCogsci/status/1610409758120361984
https://sb-ex6e14yir4.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/109/628/430/505/308/353/original/db370a81de5f1eee.png
But this is step 1 of "offering an alternative": recognizing that it takes different skillsets/social conditions to get them well-adjusted, because for whatever reason they're starting from a different psychological basis.
I agree that to some extent the whole idea of focusing on these guys is counterproductive. But focusing on them is not the same as making sure that our movement is equipped to deal with them effectively, without having to relive this generational moment over and over again.
They feel alienated from society because it feels unlivably complex, and they happen to fit enough heuristics of the power group that they feel entitled to deal with that complexity by violently maximizing their adherence to power.
The right takes advantage of this by a) being in power already, b) being the same kind of people, and c) happy to use these guys to further their own interests. So they offer the easy, accessible, lowest-common-denominator solution of just catering to that entitlement.
Of course "Be a good person" doesn't effectively compete. But that doesn't have to be the only narrative the left offers. We need the next step, a narrative that starts with "Be a good person" and builds it into a competitively epic cognitive reward mechanism.
I would say that those people in your last paragraph are not incels, they are men who hold "redpill"/bigoted beliefs. If you call them an incel they'll laugh in your face, because they are not involuntary celibates, and their entire social circle shares the same bigoted beliefs as them. Using the word incel used to describe these men who hate women in all contexts is a bit misleading. Many men in relationships hold this traditional redpill mindset, saying that it's just incels minimises the issue of how prevelant toxic mindsets are.
That's fair on a technical level, but I think on a practical level they both are so intertwined that to understand one side you have to understand the other. Redpilled guys feed the toxic mindsets of incels and often grift them, and incels create a lot of the online content that redpill guys consume. If you got rid of incels but left the redpills behind, they would create more incels. If you get rid of the redpills, the incels would eventually draw more of them back into 4chan-esque sites. It's kind of in the same vein as the aphorism that under patriarchy, the greatest abusers of men are other men.