I’m not sure what incels want from women

well, they don't understand that either.

the issue here is a bit more complex than lack of experience with women, though.

To start off, friendlyness is heavily gendered in our society. Many cis people aren't aware of that, but it's a huge part of how we're trained to behave. If you get socialized in a male gender role, friendlyness is driven out of you from a very young age, you are trained to become more callous, competitive, guarded, emotionally shut off and dominant. If you are socialized in a female gender role, you are instead raised to be agreeable, submissive, collaborative, approachable and vulnerable. My biggest step in socially transitioning so far has been to reject that part of my upbringing as a boy to the point were i can now almost cry on command. Few things have been as liberating as letting go of these stereotypically male behaviors were i fake being tough and abrasive. I'm saying this as somebody who, even pre-transition, would've been referred to by your typical incel as a soyboy beta cuck numale mangina or however they call people who aren't bristly hypermasculine psychopaths - i never felt comfortable with male gender roles and always thought of myself as some kind of feminist, i've spent a long time trying to find ways to be more open and honest with people, searching out social circles where i could act more friendly than expected of me, yet i had to reject being a man completely to truly free myself from this emotional impoverishment and that process is still ongoing after one and a half years of knowing i'm not a cissie. This goes deep, it fucks with people's heads royally and incels are definitely no exception.

Now there's things like politeness, joviality and so on, codified and "safe" ways in which men are allowed to open up and interact on friendly terms. not everybody raised as a boy is a brash, rude dickhead. The thing is, a typical incel socialization also involves a ton of bullying, or other things that destroy their ability to love themselves and be loved by others. This makes it harder to trust people, particularly when it comes to accepting signs of friendlyness and affection as genuine. They cannot imagine that somebody is honestly kind to them. It has to be a trick to set them up for greater humiliation or otherwise manipulate them. When you view yourself as absolutely unlovable (and incels are more or less defined by exactly that, adherents of the "manosphere" ideology who think they are doomed to a life as an "omega"), somebody who is nice to you must be faking. Otherwise, you couldn't be a blackpilled omega permavirgin - and incels are very adament in defending that they are just that and will be nothing but that for their entire life.

Lastly, there's the problem of projecting too much into friendlyness from women, combined with only valueing women as possible romantic partners. Back in the day, /r9k/ incels used to have this "she wants to fuck" meme, where they'd ironically list normal, polite behavior such as "hands me my order at McDonalds, smiles tells me to have a nice day" in a greentext format, finishing with "she wants to fuck". That was all tongue in cheek, but they are so starved for affection and their idealized version of true love that they fall into thinking too much of friendlyness very quickly. See also their obsession with "ending up in the friendzone". All interaction with women is shoehorned into either being the first meeting with their later tradwife or being worthless.