I have so many friends who would 100% be labeled as an incel if they were men. They hold men to impossibly high standards while meeting none of those standards themselves.
For example, women living with parents while expecting men to have their own place, women who are obese but are only interested in fit men, working part time while expecting a man who has a career, refusing to drive and expecting men to chauffeur them around, expecting men to have a variety of friends and interests while doing nothing but watching TV all day, etc.
The worst part is, calling out this inequality will 100% get any man labeled as an incel. We’re expected to either deal with it or be alone forever.
This is NOT to undermine the very real issues women have to deal with, for example the loss of bodily autonomy in the US. But this is still an issue worth discussing and nobody is talking about it.
That isn’t the defining characteristic, though [ETA: under the conventional understanding of the word, at least - apologies for appearing to ask you for clarification only to then argue with you about it]. There is already a word for that and it’s called entitlement. What distinguishes an incel is the added belief that there is something wrong with people who have romantic or sexual preferences that the incel disagrees with (as long as the preference is limited to consenting adults).
Personally my main gripe is with the implication that a person, who simply wants someone with traits that the person doesn’t have him/herself, is therefore entitled in a way that puts them in the wrong. To hopefully illustrate why that’s weird: I tend to be romantically interested in those bleeding-heart optimist types even though my own philosophy is relatively pragmatic. I admire that characteristic in others but have no intention of adopting it myself. It isn’t obvious that this fact, on its own, makes me an incel, even if optimism is more rare, desirable, or difficult to maintain.