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.
Of course every dating pool is different and it might contain the odd exception where a female prefers to date a short guy, but then she will still prefer the affluent or handsome short guy over the other short guys, which are now out of mates.
> People aren't ranked in some kind of linear way from "more attractive" to "less attractive", lined up, and then can only find partners who agree with their level. There are many reasons...
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.
> All of these combine to make it so that effectively, almost everyone can find a sexual partner.
At this point, I think we should differentiate between finding a a partner and having a sexual encounter at least once in your life.
> And this is not just a theroetical idea either - as I posted in another comment, according to some random studies I just Googled, <0.5% of people have never had a sexual experience by age 40
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.
> Let me just close by saying that if you truly believe you (or some/most people posting on incel forums) are incapable of ever having a sexual relationship, I empathize with you - it must be very unhappy to believe you will never have something that you want and see so many other people enjoying.
To be clear: I'm neither short, nor bad-looking, nor do I lack sexual experience. I'm neither an incel, nor incel-affiliated, nor do I personally know any actual (self-identified) incels. I don't read discussions on incel forums. You may well be right in that a large amount of incel forum dwellers really only look blame personal failures on some immutable characteristic, because that's just what people like to do.
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.