When Elliot Rodger killed six people in a shooting spree in 2014, he became a hero to the online ‘incel’ community of men who seek revenge on women for rejecting them. While the term is heavily associated with men it was actually a woman who invented it – ‘Alana,’ who prefers to remain anonymous, founded an internet portal in 1997 which she named ‘The Involuntary Celibacy Project’. Aged 25 at the time, she was hoping to find more people like her: “the word incel was intended to describe anyone, regardless of gender, who was lonely,” as she said in an interview with the BBC in 2018.
With the Elliot Rodger murders communities of incels on the internet became more visible, showing the extent of online hate speech towards women and toward attractive men who could get sex. They were closed, masculine communities, toxic to any woman who might attempt to wade in. However, the concept of involuntary celibacy as coined by Alana was not masculine, but universal, and just as there are incels, there are femcels.
Femcels or involuntary celibate women have reached their peak of popularity in the last two years, after several media such as The Guardian or Elle magazine ran features on them.
Incels deny the existence of femcels, since one of their founding arguments is that women can get sex whenever they want it, even if it is by lowering their standards.
But femcels do exist and they also move in different digital communities, as was pointed out in a recent article in The Atlantic. The origin of it all was TruFemcels, a subforum that was originally located within the Reddit forum. When it closed in 2020, it had more than 25,000 users who identified with the incels as they felt the same social rejection due to their physical appearance, but were not welcome in their spaces. Another of its spaces is Vindicta, a Reddit sub-forum dedicated exclusively to talking about aesthetic treatments, surgeries and physical improvements exclusively for women. And also the new TruFemcels, hosted within an online community called ThePinkPill where broad and diverse topics of interest to women are discussed.
According to the description provided by TruFemcels, “a femcel is an adult woman whose physical appearance is below average (<4/10) or suffers a significant impediment that prevents her from securing a romantic relationship – NOT sex.”
“Sex,” it continues, “is available to most (not all) women as long as it is done IN SERVICE of men.”
“This does not end loneliness and often serves as a pretext for abusive relationships. In a culture where lookism means many men feel comfortable mistreating women they [have sex with] but are not attracted to, many femcels rely on celibacy to protect them from the worst of casual sex culture.”
Located somewhere between Alana’s original idea and the subsequent misogynist movement, TruFemcels is a space for conversations such as ‘Why does beauty cost so much money?’ where a user complains about the unfairness of not being able to afford cosmetic surgery treatments to improve her face. Participants in the forum agree that impossible beauty standards in society prevent them from having the romantic or sexual relationships they long to have.
A second entry asks, ‘How often do you usually cry?’, and emphasizes another popular topic among femcels: loneliness. “Of all the horrible feelings that make up a femcel’s life for which there is never a remedy, longing – for a friendship, for a man, for anything – is one of the worst,” writes another user.
A pinned post on the TruFemcels forum homepage explains that “femcels are objectively ugly women.”
" ‘Ugly’ is often used as an insult towards women” says the post, “but here [we use it to refer to] an objective truth.”
“Femcel women will have extreme difficulty getting a serious boyfriend/girlfriend, and the vast majority will never get one because of their looks. If you’ve ever had a partner and men asked you out, you’re not a true femcel, you’re most likely a normie. The only time a guy asked me out was in high school, and he did it as a joke...he couldn’t even finish asking me because he was laughing so hard.”
As this user explains, all problems faced by femcels stem from their ugliness: these include loneliness, bullying, social rejection, discrimination in certain jobs because of their physique, or mental illnesses such as depression.
According to the femcels, the superficiality of men puts them at a disadvantage compared to beautiful and normal women, causing them problems on a sentimental, social and economic level. Just as the incels talk about having taken the red pill, in reference to the scene in the science fiction movie Matrix in which Neo chooses the pill of the same color to discover the real world and get out of the simulated reality in which he lives, the femcels make constant reference to the pink pill, which at times rides on feminist discourse (they talk about terms such as lookism, the form of oppression based on appearances, as well as toxic masculinity or male privilege) and at other times on misogynist discourse (they not only have animosity towards beautiful women but also towards ‘normal’ women (the ‘normies’ referred to above), and who are discriminated against within the forum itself for having the possibility of having sex, despite having the same feelings as the “real femcels”).
Health psychologist and expert in psychological wellbeing Elena Daprá tells EL PAÍS that “these women have very low self-esteem.”
“They confuse a very negative opinion about themselves (‘I am very ugly’) with a fact, and then turn this fact into the main cause of all their problems.”
Daprá adds that the forums provide reinforcement for that idea.
“These women are stuck in complaint and victimhood,” anticipating that bad things will happen to them if they go out into the world and having no desire to really change the situation.
“They suffer from cognitive inflexibility: this is clearly seen when what they define as ‘a normie’ appears and they reject it, instead of learning from it or trying to understand how they have gone from ‘incels’ to ‘normies’, which shows they are a closed group,” uninterested in trying to improve their conditions for themselves.
The psychologist suggests that US society contains some aspects that support the development of the femcel culture.
“US culture is less sociable,” she says. “In Spain, this phenomenon [femcels] would have completely different characteristics…. I don’t think it would have the same number of followers, to begin with, because in Spain we are more encouraging of interpersonal relationships, and the development of social skills.”
In contrast to the incel movement, which tends to use outward violence, Daprá believes that these women may be prone to violence against themselves because they do not accept themselves.
“True femcels,” the Atlantic article explains, “see two main options for themselves.”
“They either renounce love and society altogether to simply “lie down and rot,” or they begin a path to ascension through rigorous self-improvement and, at times, modifications to their own bodies.”
There is also, the article notes, a third group. Smaller and less vocal, these femcels are betting on a more radical change: finding joy and intimacy through other paths, focusing on areas of life other than romance or sex. It may be these spaces that are realizing what Alana initially aspired to achieve: places to find other people like themselves.
Femcels:
The ‘involuntarily celibate’ women who say they are barred from sex and romance.
By Beatriz Serrano. El País, May 17, 2022.
“We were all ugly,” Amanda, a 22-year-old student from Florida told me, recalling the online community she found when she was 18. “Men didn’t like us, guys didn’t want to be with us, and it was fine to acknowledge it.”
When a woman named Alana coined the term “incel” in the late 90s, she couldn’t have predicted the outcome. What started as a harmless website to connect lonely, “involuntary celibate” men and women has morphed into an underground online movement associated with male violence and extreme misogyny.
In 2014, Elliot Rodger stabbed and shot dead six people in California, blaming the “girls” who had spurned him and condemned him to “an existence of loneliness, rejection and unfulfilled desires”. There have since been numerous attacks by people who identify with incel culture, including Jack Davison, who killed five people in Plymouth this summer, before turning the gun on himself. In the darkest corners of the internet, incel groups have become a breeding ground for toxic male entitlement, putting them on hate crime watchlists across the UK.
But it is not just incel men who struggle to find sexual connections in the modern world. Some young women are turning to online “femcel” spaces to discuss the challenges they face as involuntary celibates.
Theirs is a non-violent resistance. Rather than blaming the opposite sex for their unhappiness, as some of their male counterparts do, femcels tend to believe their own “ugliness” is the root cause of their loneliness. Posting anonymously on platforms they have designed for themselves, they argue that they are invisible due to their abnormal appearance, and that our beauty-centric, misogynistic culture prevents them from being accepted. There is anger and open grappling with self-esteem, but no extreme hatred and no sense of entitlement within the community.
Meanwhile, a far greater number of women would not describe themselves as femcels, but live unintentionally celibate lives. They share many of the femcels’ concerns.
Caitlin, 39, doesn’t call herself a femcel, but she hasn’t had sex for almost eight years and doesn’t think she will find another sexual partner. “I’m not conventionally attractive and I never get approached by men,” she says. “They don’t look at me. I’ve had therapy to try to address these issues, but dating feels like a barren wasteland. It’s worse as I get older, because I’ve missed that short window to marry and have a family.”
She never tells people that she is celibate, because it makes her feel “abnormal” and inadequate. “I feel a lot of anger and hurt that my life has ended up this way. I struggle to cope with the fact I may never find a partner. Society makes it harder because, after a certain age, people tend to pair off and form their own insular units and life gets lonely for single people.”
Although Caitlin is not morally opposed to casual sex, it is not an experience that feels right for her. She has had two short-term relationships, which ended in heartbreak. There is a popular notion among incel communities – and even in wider society – that women are privileged because they can get sex at any time. Not only is that untrue, as many women will testify, but also, as Caitlin points out, not all sex is enjoyable. “Generally, men who aren’t in a relationship with you don’t make it a pleasurable experience,” she says. “The risk of rejection afterwards is high, which makes the sex even less enjoyable. As a woman, you want to be desired, not treated like a piece of meat.”
Caitlin is aware that men also struggle with self-esteem issues linked to appearance, but believes the pressure is greater for women. “I’m not especially drawn to someone’s looks or height. I prefer to get to know someone and develop an attraction. But I feel that a man who didn’t find me attractive straight away would never learn to become attracted to me. I see lots of beautiful women dating men who aren’t good-looking, but rarely the other way around. Men have more ways to attract a partner than looks.”
Appearance-based discrimination, termed “lookism” by femcel communities, is not the only reason that some women struggle to find a sexual partner. The risk of male violence has always been a concern, but the semi-anonymous nature of app-based dating has increased these fears for many women.
Jane, 49, has been single for eight years and celibate for five. Although she would love to have a sex life, she is not prepared to compromise her principles by seeking a casual relationship with someone she has just met online. “I don’t want to invite someone I don’t know into my home, as you never know the risks.” She was once followed home by a man after their date. “I saw his car behind me and he said he was curious about where I lived. It made me extremely uncomfortable.”
In addition to safety concerns, Jane says apps make it hard to find the type of connection she is looking for. While this is also true for men, she believes they tend to be more comfortable with the “fast-food”, casual-sex nature of online dating. Dishonesty is a common theme; she says it is impossible to build trust with a man who lies online. “Pictures will be 10 years old, or not an accurate representation of the person,” she says. “I look for men who take care of themselves physically, who are emotionally available, open and honest. You can’t see that on a profile.”
Since giving up on apps, Jane has stayed active through a walking group and has tried many other activities in the past few years. “I meet a lot of great women, but I never meet single men at classes or events. It’s hard to meet men who share your interests.”
This is also Mary’s experience. She is 53 and has been celibate for five years. “A lot of us feel that we’re not expressing ourselves sensually. It’s important to use the word ‘sensual’, not ‘sexual’. For women like me, it’s not about the act of sex. It’s about having the intimacy of emotions, as well as physical experiences.”
Like Jane, Mary has little interest in casual flings, but misses physical intimacy. She has even considered using escorts. It is a far cry from the close relationship she desires, but she would feel more comfortable with the idea of a no-strings sexual encounter if she knew exactly what it entailed. “I’m not really sure that safe, secure sex-worker services exist, but in a way it would be preferable to one-night stands. At least it would be a safe, secure transaction for which you and the man involved knew exactly what you were signing up, with no risk of violence, STIs or emotional hurt and confusion.”
Mary also refuses to use dating apps, due to the number of married men seeking affairs and the difficulties she has in building connections. “The #MeToo movement was extremely important, but, at the same time, it created polarisation in society,” she says. She believes that, as men attempt to “relearn” the best ways to approach women so that they feel safe and comfortable, it can discourage some from making a connection at all. “It’s like nobody knows how to date any more and the fast-paced culture of apps means nobody has the patience to get to know someone.” She says the men she encounters are almost always looking for someone younger than themselves.
According to Silva Neves, a sex and relationship psychotherapist with the UK Council of Psychotherapy, it is not uncommon for women to struggle to find a partner they find physically attractive, especially as they get older. “Society places a higher importance on women’s beauty,” he says. “We absorb and internalise this misogyny on every level and even women are more likely to criticise another woman’s body than a man’s. You often see women putting more effort into their appearance as they age because they have been taught it’s important in a way that men haven’t. But a lot of women complain that they struggle to be attracted to men, because they have let themselves go.”
While many men still prioritise beauty, Neves says women’s other successes, such as education, wealth or a good career, may be deemed threatening. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Richard Vedder, an economist and senior fellow at the Independent Institute, a libertarian US thinktank, said that men make up only 40% of the university student population in the US. Women are outperforming their male peers academically and delaying having families in pursuit of financial independence and a career. While this might be considered a positive step forward for society, it has left some men feeling adrift.
Elaine, 37, who has been celibate for five years, feels her successful career has played a role in her dating difficulties. “Men don’t like the fact I don’t cook or clean, even though I pay for someone to do both jobs,” she says. “The stereotype of male hunter-gatherer remains quite prevalent and at times I think they feel they don’t have a role.” Like other women, she is seeking an intellectual equal and is not interested in finding someone who will take care of her. “If you don’t fit in a Barbie box and do all the domestic duties, it can be quite upsetting for some men.”
Yvonne, 28, recognises the same traditional values in men her age. Despite numerous attempts at dating on and offline, she has never had a relationship and doesn’t engage in casual sex. “I don’t necessarily need to be with a man who has a degree, but I want to meet someone who is intellectually curious, with the same values,” she says. “I think men can be intimidated by education and career success. In online dating especially, it always seems to come down to appearance only. I even know people who get professional pictures done as they know looks will be the first thing men see. As a Black woman, this can be especially hard, as even Black men seem to prioritise light-skinned women.”
Although she experiences loneliness, Yvonne is determined to stay positive. She has an active social life, enjoys a wide range of activities and subscribes to Nicola Slawson’s Single Supplement, a weekly newsletter that celebrates the joys of single life and supports people through the more challenging aspects. She also reads the work of the US author Shani Silver, who writes candidly about single life. “There are lots of women who are joining communities of other single women and sharing their experiences,” she says. “It’s certainly a much healthier approach than some of the toxic, woman-hating platforms that some men inhabit.”
Femcels and women who struggle to find relationships are sometimes accused of misandry, especially by male incels. Yvonne counters that any resentment women feel is more likely to be turned inwards. “The biggest difference between men and women seems to be that men feel entitled to sex and relationships, so it’s the fault of women when they can’t get it,” says Yvonne. “Women seem to internalise the issues and be more likely to blame themselves.”
Neves argues that while misogyny and misandry are both unacceptable, they have very different roots. “Misogyny is an ideology which dictates that women should be seen as objects, without the same rights as men. Misandry is mostly a reaction to misogyny and informed by evidence. We shouldn’t put all men in the same bag, but at the same time it’s hard to criticise women who have had negative experiences.”
Like Yvonne, he believes that women are more likely to devalue themselves, rather than others. It is one of the reasons he would like to move away from the term “femcel”: “When women label themselves as defective, it becomes part of who they are and how men define them, rather than something that can be overcome.” Although he doesn’t underestimate the trauma that some women experience due to bullying or poor self-esteem, he is hopeful that there will be healthier ways for women to fight back in future.
On Instagram, for example, which is known for perpetuating unrealistic beauty standards, a growing number of women are resisting these norms. Campaigners such as Lizzie Velasquez, who was bullied due to a congenital condition, and Katie Piper, who survived an acid attack, are building online communities for people who don’t fit beauty stereotypes, while others are raising positive awareness about skin conditions and different body types. “I appreciate it can be incredibly difficult, but I would encourage women to surround themselves with these accounts,” he says. “You can have surgery or change your looks, but ultimately it shouldn’t be linked to your value as a person.”
It is something that Caitlin is exploring. “I’m trying to become more positive about finding alternatives to a sexual relationship,” she says. As well as channelling energy into building her self-esteem, she is trying new activities and communicating with other women. “Of course, not all male incels are involved in extremist online forums, but those that do are feeding off their hatred of women, viewing us as possessions or something to conquer,” she says. “Involuntary celibate women seem to be handling their anger and hurt in a more evolved way, throwing themselves into work, life and healthy communities where single life is celebrated. I hope it can inspire me to feel more confident in my own situation.”
Some names have been changed.
‘I feel hurt that my life has ended up here’: The women who are involuntary celibates. By Lizzie Cernik. The Guardian, October 18, 2021.
A femcel
is a woman who is unable to find romantic, sexual relationships with men, though
she desires them. She is related to the incel, the involuntary celibate man, as
he also wants sex and romance with women though he complains of being rejected
by them.
The comparisons between femcels and incels stop there though. Femcels and incels don’t like each other. Incels don’t even believe femcels even exist. They call femcels “volcels” — or voluntary celibates, which, ironically, is a slur in the incel community.
The existence of the femcel doesn’t just smack as impossible to incels. So often we assume in our culture that all women have it easy in terms of finding sex. Men think women can find sex no matter what they look like. But that’s the thing — femcels often don’t want just sex with men.
They want to be loved, adored, and respected. However, they feel men pass them over for conventionally “pretty” women.
Some say femcels are just being picky — they could find a man if they just lowered their standards. Femcels say they don’t want men to just use them.
Because they can’t find healthy, successful relationships with men, femcels swear off men altogether. They seek solace in online femcel communities.
Femcels used to thrive on Reddit. Their communities were banned from the platform, though, in January 2021 for spreading hate. The femcel community has since created its own website, The Pink Pill.
Though this may sound like the “red pill” counterpart to the incel movement, there’s never been a case of a femcel going on a violent rampage. As women are known to do, femcels chose instead to turn their self-hatred in on themselves.
What femcels believe.
Femcels possess a deep sense that they are not “normal.” Writer Isabelle Kohn discusses the issues of self-hatred and social awkwardness that femcels grapple with in her piece for Mel Magazine.
Kohn notes: “…femcels believe the physical, mental and cognitive inadequacies they have are unique and extreme” and that these inadequacies “make their sexual situation entirely out of their control.”
Femcels feel blocked from loving relationships with men because they believe men are only interested in a woman’s looks. If men do take any interest in femcels, they view them as “low-value” women.
The loneliness and frustration that femcels feel as a result is deeper than just a need just for sex. Femcels feel ignored by society in general. They feel like they’re treated as if they don’t exist. They resent the high value our culture puts not just on being attractive, but on being sexy.
According to Kohn, femcels believe “conventional ‘hotness’ is everything: it’s what finds you partners, helps you make friends, lands you a job and allows you to function normally in society.”
The problem is, there is truth in this belief.
Pretty privilege is real.
I believe our society is looks-obsessed. Pretty privilege is real. Beautiful women have been shown to get hired more easily, land better jobs, earn higher grades, and are treated better in our society as a rule.
If looks weren’t so important, we wouldn’t have a booming plastic surgery industry. Filters wouldn’t exist on social media and whistleblower Frances Haugen would not have come forward to testify that Facebook knew that viewing perfect bodies constantly on its platforms was harming the mental health of young women.
Women are brought up to believe our worth is tied up with our beauty. Beauty is seen as young and thin. Women are judged harshly for our bodies. One in two hundred women suffer from anorexia. It’s not surprising at all.
That, and our culture is misogynistic. Hookup culture is the norm these days and it often benefits men over women. Too often women agree to have sex with men without a commitment because they don’t think they can get anything else.
So I don’t think it’s crazy that femcels exist, or that they’d want to find a place where they can connect with other women like them. But there are nefarious elements to the femcel movement, or they wouldn’t have been kicked off Reddit.
And besides, I think there are healthier ways to go about finding help for one’s loneliness or to tackle one’s low sense of self-worth. Going to therapy is an excellent way to improve your self-esteem and to get to the bottom of your issues.
As women, society may tell us that our worth is connected to our looks, but there are other ways to feel good about ourselves. Giving back to our communities, helping others, spending time developing our talents — these are all ways to feel worth that has nothing to do with your outside appearance.
It’s every woman’s job to find her value beyond her looks. But she needs to be willing to do the hard work to get there. It takes looking deep inside oneself and healing from trauma. It takes retraining our minds to see what’s good about us beyond our appearance.
I hope that femcels can find a way to finally understand this.
Meet the Femcel, the “Pink Pill” Popping Sister of the Incel. By Emme Witt. Medium, October 10, 2021.
The comparisons between femcels and incels stop there though. Femcels and incels don’t like each other. Incels don’t even believe femcels even exist. They call femcels “volcels” — or voluntary celibates, which, ironically, is a slur in the incel community.
The existence of the femcel doesn’t just smack as impossible to incels. So often we assume in our culture that all women have it easy in terms of finding sex. Men think women can find sex no matter what they look like. But that’s the thing — femcels often don’t want just sex with men.
They want to be loved, adored, and respected. However, they feel men pass them over for conventionally “pretty” women.
Some say femcels are just being picky — they could find a man if they just lowered their standards. Femcels say they don’t want men to just use them.
Because they can’t find healthy, successful relationships with men, femcels swear off men altogether. They seek solace in online femcel communities.
Femcels used to thrive on Reddit. Their communities were banned from the platform, though, in January 2021 for spreading hate. The femcel community has since created its own website, The Pink Pill.
Though this may sound like the “red pill” counterpart to the incel movement, there’s never been a case of a femcel going on a violent rampage. As women are known to do, femcels chose instead to turn their self-hatred in on themselves.
What femcels believe.
Femcels possess a deep sense that they are not “normal.” Writer Isabelle Kohn discusses the issues of self-hatred and social awkwardness that femcels grapple with in her piece for Mel Magazine.
Kohn notes: “…femcels believe the physical, mental and cognitive inadequacies they have are unique and extreme” and that these inadequacies “make their sexual situation entirely out of their control.”
Femcels feel blocked from loving relationships with men because they believe men are only interested in a woman’s looks. If men do take any interest in femcels, they view them as “low-value” women.
The loneliness and frustration that femcels feel as a result is deeper than just a need just for sex. Femcels feel ignored by society in general. They feel like they’re treated as if they don’t exist. They resent the high value our culture puts not just on being attractive, but on being sexy.
According to Kohn, femcels believe “conventional ‘hotness’ is everything: it’s what finds you partners, helps you make friends, lands you a job and allows you to function normally in society.”
The problem is, there is truth in this belief.
Pretty privilege is real.
I believe our society is looks-obsessed. Pretty privilege is real. Beautiful women have been shown to get hired more easily, land better jobs, earn higher grades, and are treated better in our society as a rule.
If looks weren’t so important, we wouldn’t have a booming plastic surgery industry. Filters wouldn’t exist on social media and whistleblower Frances Haugen would not have come forward to testify that Facebook knew that viewing perfect bodies constantly on its platforms was harming the mental health of young women.
Women are brought up to believe our worth is tied up with our beauty. Beauty is seen as young and thin. Women are judged harshly for our bodies. One in two hundred women suffer from anorexia. It’s not surprising at all.
That, and our culture is misogynistic. Hookup culture is the norm these days and it often benefits men over women. Too often women agree to have sex with men without a commitment because they don’t think they can get anything else.
So I don’t think it’s crazy that femcels exist, or that they’d want to find a place where they can connect with other women like them. But there are nefarious elements to the femcel movement, or they wouldn’t have been kicked off Reddit.
And besides, I think there are healthier ways to go about finding help for one’s loneliness or to tackle one’s low sense of self-worth. Going to therapy is an excellent way to improve your self-esteem and to get to the bottom of your issues.
As women, society may tell us that our worth is connected to our looks, but there are other ways to feel good about ourselves. Giving back to our communities, helping others, spending time developing our talents — these are all ways to feel worth that has nothing to do with your outside appearance.
It’s every woman’s job to find her value beyond her looks. But she needs to be willing to do the hard work to get there. It takes looking deep inside oneself and healing from trauma. It takes retraining our minds to see what’s good about us beyond our appearance.
I hope that femcels can find a way to finally understand this.
Meet the Femcel, the “Pink Pill” Popping Sister of the Incel. By Emme Witt. Medium, October 10, 2021.
Doreen* had been bullied since middle school because of her looks. People called her fat and ugly, at what felt like a ceaseless pace. She didn’t feel sexually or romantically desired. Boys didn’t treat her the way they did her more attractive friends. Having a sex-positive attitude was even tougher growing up in a religious West African immigrant family, where she was taught that sex was a sin outside of marriage. Neither her sister—the “pretty one”—nor her mom understood what she was going through. “I didn’t have any type of self-esteem or confidence,” she recalls. The world “taught me that my worth and my value as a female, as a young lady, was connected directly to what I looked like.”
Nona Willis Aronowitz. Elle, September 1, 2021.
After being kicked off Reddit, femcels are the latest banned community to build their own platform. They claim to just want somewhere to speak free from harassment – but some experts question whether the site will descend into toxicity.
Growing up, Kim*, an 18-year-old from Eastern Europe, says she was mercilessly teased at school over her looks. The romantic rejection she suffered and the bullying she endured left her feeling alone and suicidal. At age 13, she started spending time browsing 4chan and similar forums, where she came across the incel (a portmanteau for involuntary celibate) community.
While initially, she empathised with what incels were going through, from reading more of their posts, Kim grew disturbed at their violent and misogynistic language. It wasn’t until Kim was 15 years old that she discovered r/Trufemcels – a subreddit dedicated to ‘female incels’. Like incels, femcels define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one. It wasn’t long before Kim began engaging regularly with posts about the pains of loneliness and the dangers of men.
“The subreddit made me feel less alone, like someone understood how I felt,” she tells Huck. “It was a huge emotional support.” Kim would spend a large part of her week on the subreddit – right up until it was banned in January of this year for violating Reddit’s rule against promoting hate. (The incel equivalent, r/incel, had been banned four-years prior as part of a crackdown on subs that glorify or incite violence).
Among the suspected reasons for the ban are other Redditors reporting the forum, with some users accusing members of r/Trufemcels of spreading everything from alt-right conspiracies, to self-harm encouragement and transphobia.
When r/Trufemcels was banned without warning, it sent the community into disarray. “There was a lot of confusion, sadness, hurt, and anger,” says Giga, a femcel from the US in her mid-20s, and former member of the subreddit. “I shared in those emotions, and felt loss for the community I would visit almost every day.” She claims that the language used on the sub did not constitute hate speech, beyond criticising men who engage in hurtful behaviour.
While Giga was shocked, she was not totally surprised. Last summer, Reddit introduced an overhauled content policy that contained specific rules about hate speech in response to pressure from users amid Black Lives Matter protests. This led to the automatic ban of about 2,000 other subreddits – among them was the notorious pro-Trump forum, r/The_Donald.
After seeing the waves of bans over summer, Giga had toyed with the possibility of creating a dedicated site for r/Trufemcels. But it wasn’t until the sub was deleted that she felt compelled to take matters into her own hands, establishing ThePinkPill.co in February earlier this year as a new online destination for the femcel community.
“After all the tip-toeing we did in reverence to site rules, while men are free to do whatever they want with impunity, including targeting and harassing us, that made me feel like I had to do this,” Giga says.
The site, which resembles Reddit, is divided into subs, or threads, which include everything from memes, to music, to cooking, and gaming. The ‘Trufemcels’ sub is the most active, and some of its posts include: “How can men complain when they have so much privilege?”, “Rejected For 30 Years”, “I hate being alive”, “I could cry when I see TikToks of women generally interacting with their guy friends” and “Femceldom = Misunderstanding”. Just under two months since its establishment, the site boasts “a few hundred members,” says Giga.
Femcels certainly aren’t the only community who’ve taken matters into their own hands after being exiled from Reddit and other social media platforms. Alternative forums have long been springing up across various corners of the internet, and following the subreddit ban, a handful of new sites emerged. Among them is Donald.win, built to house members of the former r/The_Donald sub, and Ovarit, a platform for the now-banned r/GenderCritical, or ‘TERF’, forum.
While conversations are usually focused on pressuring social-media behemoths such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to take responsibility for the content on their platforms, these alternative spaces raise pertinent questions about moderation outside of these spaces. Parler and Gab have similarly provided an alternative for ‘free speech’ conservatives, but starting a new platform offers “more long-term security”, explains Luc Cousineau a PhD student at the University of Waterloo specialising in online spaces for men’s rights. As Cousineau explains, spaces like Parler and Gab may be forced to pivot and tighten their moderation policies in the same way as Reddit – a platform once upheld as a bastion of free speech – as they become more popular.
What concerns some experts is whether hateful rhetoric is likely to escalate among banned communities that have founded their own platforms. “The risk is that those people are the only ones that they’re talking to, and moderation policies are weaker, so things can get more extreme, and they become more radicalised,” says Jeremy Blackburn, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Binghamton University. When r/The_Donald moved to the site Donald.win, for example, Blackburn says that research “showed increasing signs of radicalisation” among the community.
With incels, their migration to anonymised spaces like 4chan and 8chan has been linked to the killings committed by Alek Minassian and Elliot Rodger. “[Incels] could push, push each other to escalate, because there was no way to really moderate them, nor are the people that run those spaces inclined to do so,” explains Cousineau.
But can this same thinking be applied to femcels, whose online behaviours have not yet been linked to real-life violence? Most femcels are adamantly opposed to being conflated with incels, and claim to just want a safe space to speak free from the harassment they face, primarily from incels and other men.
Cousineau suspects that femcels’ tendency to engage in the same terminology as incels would likely have contributed to the group’s ban from Reddit – most obviously, in the adoption of the ‘cel’ term, and the references to ‘Stacys’, ‘Beckys’, (slang for different types of women) and ‘Chads’ (used to refer to an ‘alpha male’). “They’re closely enough associated, that if you didn’t know anything about these communities, it would be really easy to go, ‘Oh, well, this is exactly the same.’”
Even some femcels question why the community would choose to keep the ‘cel’ term. Sara*, an 18-year-old from Canada and member of ThePinkPill.co, admits that: “If femcels went by a different name, people would be more interested in actually listening to what we have to say before judging us.”
However, the similarities between these groups runs deeper than just overlaps in language, most significantly, in the shared preoccupation with ‘lookism’ (discrimination based on the physical appearance of a person), which they both blame for their plight. The disconnect between the communities, however, is that incels blame women for their loneliness and that, as Giga puts it: “Incels like to say that femcels are invalid because any woman can be used for sex.” It’s an argument that has been made even outside of incel circles, and goes some way to explaining the lack of research and understanding around femcels.
While it is certainly simplistic to conflate the two communities, in both femcel and incel spaces, lookism is similarly allowed to flourish unchecked. As Julia Marr wrote in a Medium post, “Within femcel communication, the moderators often use their power unjustly to censor those presenting credible information that disproves or counteracts aspects of femcel ideology.” This, Marr claims, compounds the echo chambers effect and makes it harder for femcels to escape their unhealthy obsession with lookism.
It’s a suggestion that Giga adamantly rejects: she says that on ThePinkPill.co, “women will intervene and point out when we get overly focused on despair and depressive emotion”. She adds that the purpose is never about trying to convert, or ‘radicalise’ anyone into becoming a femcel: “If anything,” she says, “we celebrate when femcels ascend – that is, not need the community anymore due to romantic success or peaceful self-actualisation.” Being a femcel, she stresses, is not an ideology.
For many femcels, though, the answer to ascending the community does not reside in femcel spaces. Speaking to Huck one month after joining ThePinkPill.co, Kim says she has severed most of her ties with the community, after witnessing femcels on Reddit using lookist language to make racist and transphobic remarks.
Most members of ThePinkPill.co that Huck spoke to deny that racism and transphobia is allowed to proliferate in femcel spaces. When asked whether trans women are welcome on ThePinkPill.co, Giga responds: “The site is open to all women, as our community has always been, and it specifically caters to women’s issues.”
While Kim says she hasn’t seen this type of language on ThePinkPill.co, she recently made the decision to delete her account from the site, fearing things would end up the same way. “I hope it doesn’t,” she says, “but many femcels spaces eventually turn toxic.” Even before deleting her account, Kim admits that she has in the past had to take a break from the community for the sake of her mental health.
Sara agrees to some extent, saying that: “Sometimes, [femcel spaces] get overwhelming, and I feel like I need to take a step back.” But ultimately, she says that distancing herself from platforms like ThePinkPill.co does nothing to change a society that she believes to be revolved around lookism. To deny this “only does more damage [to myself] in the long term,” she says.
Given that ThePinkPill.co has already had to deal with trolling from incels, it’s questionable how effective this platform is in providing a safe space without harassment. Whether the site can guide femcels towards self-acceptance is yet to be seen – but it will likely do very little to solve the misunderstanding which surrounds this community.
*Names have been changed to protect identities
Inside the online ‘safe space’ for female incels : Enter the pink pill. By Daisy Schofield. Huck, March 29, 2021.
While it would seem that the manosphere is exclusively the domain of miserable white men, there’s a surprising number of women among it, too. And so, throughout this week, we will present you with six features that explore the lives and beliefs of these women, from femcels to Honey Badgers: Who are they? What have they experienced in life to end up cavorting with men who — to varying degrees — deny their humanity? And why do we know so little about them?
On April 23, 2018, 25-year-old Alek Minassian plowed his van into a crowded sidewalk in one of Toronto’s busiest neighborhoods, killing 10 people and injuring 16. It was one of the deadliest acts of domestic terrorism in the city’s history, and the latest in a string of mass murders committed by men whose rage was born out of celibacy.
After the attack, Minassian told investigators he was an incel, a person who cannot find a sexual or romantic partner despite trying to. He’d never had sex or a girlfriend — in fact, all his encounters with women had made him “embarrassed and angry,” and his murders were his attempt at revenge. They were, as he told Canadian police, retribution for “not getting laid.”
A few days later, Mary — a 43-year-old Black woman in Philadelphia whose hypothyroidism and polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) has saddled her with a similarly rocky relationship to sex and dating — heard about what Minassian had done and thought, “Yeah, I can relate to that.”
It wasn’t the violence she connected with — she found that part revolting. It was what caused it. Like Minassian, Mary was involuntarily celibate, and though she made a “damn good” effort not to be, she knew firsthand how devastating a life of sexual isolation could be. “We had a lot in common, him and I,” she says over the phone on a break from her administrative medical assistant job. “I’m not up here about to kill nobody about it — that boy is crazy — but let’s just say there were parts of his story that felt like mine.”
There was the constant romantic rejection, for one. Then there was the frustration of seeing other, supposedly better-looking people get what they wanted. Mostly, though, they shared a sense of exclusion from the so-called “sexual marketplace.” Minassian felt like he was ineligible to date, and Mary did, too. As an obese middle-aged woman whose chronic diseases made it next to impossible to keep the pounds off, she got what it was like to be shut out of a dating pool that seemed to value everything she wasn’t. “Judging by society’s standards — which we all know are bullshit — I’m everything a dateable woman shouldn’t be,” she says. “That’s a horrible, lonely feeling. A person can only take so much.”
She didn’t condone what Minassian did, she says, but empathy for a sexless, cold-blooded killer? That part came easy.
Curious to know whether other celibate women felt the same way, she typed the words “female incel” into Google. She wasn’t expecting much — inceldom as we know it has always been framed as the exclusive bane of men — so when she discovered a series of online communities for involuntarily celibate women like herself, she was floored. Not only were there tens of thousands of them filling fora with stories that sounded conspicuously similar to hers, they had an official name, too: femcels.
In one sense, femcels are similar to male incels in that they claim to have trouble finding someone to have sex with or date because of their looks or personality. But while everyone feels that way from time to time, femcels believe the physical, mental and cognitive inadequacies they have are unique and extreme. According to femcel canon, their “defects” — which are arbitrary and entirely self-defined — must “exceed those of normal” women and exist in a much more “severe form.” These could be related to their looks, age, disabilities, medical conditions, mental illnesses, the repressive cultures some live in or some combination thereof, but whatever the case, femcels believe they make their sexual situation entirely out of their control. They were dealt a shitty hand, the sentiment goes, and the only way out of the lonely hellscapes they live in is to “ascend” (femcel-speak for “get hotter”).
If there’s anything femcels and incels can agree on, it’s that conventional “hotness” is everything: it’s what finds you partners, helps you make friends, lands you a job and allows you to function normally in society. In their worlds, it exists on a 1–10 scale, with each numeric level being personified into archetypal characters they compare themselves to or spew jealousy or hatred at. By self-definition, involuntarily celibate people occupy the lowest rungs — 4 or below — and are exceeded by “normies” who clock in at 5 or 6. “Beckys” are basic, not unattractive 6s or 7s, and “Stacys” are elite and untouchable 8s. “Chad” is Stacy’s conventionally attractive fuckboy counterpart; the Channing Tatum character in 21 Jump Street whose heart-circled name fills pages of femcel diaries but who’ll forget theirs the moment they meet.
Together, Becky, Stacy and Chad make up an unholy totem of power and privilege at which both femcels and incels direct their obsession and despair, reflecting every insecurity and fear back at them tenfold like a taunting funhouse mirror.
That’s about all femcels have in common with incels, though. The two are are distinct groups with their own cultures, values and norms, and though it’s tempting to see them as gender-swapped versions of the same sexless basement-dweller, they’re better thought of as a pair of phobic, incompatible fraternal twins: birthed from the same belly but raised in completely different homes, in completely different states, in completely different worlds.
Funny thing is, you only hear about the brother. There are incel websites, incel meet-up groups, and at one point, there was even a twisted incel dating site (it’s since been shut down, possibly because incels have recently been classified as a hate group). Nearly every major publication, from the New Yorker to the Washington Post, has covered the rise of incel culture in all its hideous angles, and mountains of academic research published by dedicated and well-funded incel scientists line the annals of Google Scholar. Incels also have a number of murderous micro-“celebrities” like Minassian and his “mentor” Elliot Rodger, and there are even incel T-shirts, if “cesspool of proto-males but make it fashion” is your look.
The fact that they appear to be killing people and themselves over their celibacy at alarming rates is the obvious cause of their ubiquity, but there’s another, more telling reason why polite society hears about Minassian but never Mary: Few people other than femcels themselves believe it’s even possible for women to be involuntarily celibate in the first place.
“The logic for this is that there are supposedly men out there who will sleep with any woman, so all a woman has to do to get sex is make herself available to literally anyone,” says Nick Chester, a journalist and femcel expert who spent months researching and interviewing women navigating incel spaces for Huck Magazine. “Incels frequently call women ‘volcels,’ which means ‘voluntarily celibate’ and is a slur within the incel community. They’re always challenging the validity of each other’s ‘incel’ status and accusing one another of being less of an incel in a bizarre hierarchy based on who is the least fuckable. Women seem to be at the bottom of the pecking order with regards to this.”
According to Deborah Tolman, a feminist psychologist and professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Hunter College, that idea comes from the myth that male sexuality is always monstrous and out-of-control. “Somewhere along the line, we got the idea that the male desire is so strong that it cannot be overcome,” she says. “That’s a false and damaging stereotype that makes us think that men ‘must’ have their needs met or they’re somehow, fundamentally not being men.” By that logic, she explains, women “can’t” be involuntarily celibate because somewhere, at some point in time, some man will need to bone so utterly badly that anything will do.
Female sexuality, on the other hand, is assumed to be controllable (optional, even). And because women are supposedly so “pious” and “pure,” the stereotype says they should never succumb to their urges toward these “monstrous,” hypersexual men. In the upside-down world of incel dialectics, then, female incels just don’t make sense.
Perhaps that’s why, despite the fact that there are tens of thousands of involuntarily celibate women on sites like Reddit and Lipstick Alley — and that the accidental founder and official “patient zero” of the incel movement was a woman herself — femcels and the worlds they live in are virtually unknown. As of now, not a single academic study on femcels has been published online; there are no femcel-specific researchers to speak of; and, if all your fingers are intact, you can count the number of news articles about them on one hand. Social media is similarly devoid: The #femcel hashtag on Twitter is sparsely populated at best, Instagram is no better and YouTube, which has become a seething hotbed for incels armed with Final Cut, has just a handful of videos from women, the majority of which borderline on parody and are torn to shreds in the comments.
With such poor visibility, it’s no wonder that people like Greg, a 29-year-old incel living in Denver, likes to compare the elusive femcel to Santa Claus. “They’re not real,” he says, echoing the same sentiment splattered over every incel forum and YouTube entry. “They’re a myth made up by entitled women who play the victim to get sympathy and attention from men but refuse to lower their standards. Everyone knows that if something has a pussy, some man will fuck it.”
Rapiness and heteronormativity aside, Greg does bring up an interesting point: In a digital universe where using the word “female” and “celibacy” seems about as believable to people as “Bigfoot,” femcels like Mary must struggle not only with the very real pain of being forever alone, but also the assumption that they don’t even exist.
That’s the thing, though — in the most paradoxical of ways, many femcels like Mary actually agree. “Some people in the femcel and incel communities are like, ‘Oh, I’m so hideous, no one will ever touch me,’” she says. “Well, anybody with a brain knows that’s bullshit. If you’re a woman and you have a vagina, there’s a man somewhere willing to have sex with you. Now, whether his hygiene is up to par, whether he treats you like a person, whether he shames you and abuses you and calls you a ‘disgusting cow’ afterwards and whether you’ll feel worse about yourself than you did before, well, that’s all negotiable. I’m sure any one of us could set up shop behind a dumpster and let the first drugged-out creep cop a feel, and any incel could, too. But who wants that? Who wants to stoop that low?”
What femcels are saying, she explains, isn’t that sex and dating are categorical impossibilities. They just don’t have the same options for either as someone who conforms to conventional beauty standards, or even as men, who set and enforce them. And if you think there’s any “choice” in that other than protracted celibacy, Mary has some choice words for you: “You’re just wrong.”
It’s all a bit complicated and hard to process, but, as APieceofFemShit writes in a Reddit post explaining what femcels are, “The complexity of the femcel condition or the personal inability to understand does not disprove or nullify it.”
So, then, who are these women who say they can’t have sex and relationships, and why do we insist on wiping them off the map?
Getting pelted in the face with an egg wasn’t as bad as Zoe thought it would be. Nor were the mocking taunts of “Hey, sexy” from the men in the car that had slowed down to harass her on her walk home. Neither registered, actually: As a femcel whose abusive and neglectful upbringing left her with severe social anxiety and a persistently “sickly appearance” until her early 20s, the 25-year-old Brit was used to being tormented for how she looked.
“I grew up in such a stressful environment that I never really learned how to take care of myself,” she writes over Reddit DM. “My face would leak blood and pus in public, I had a noticeable missing tooth and I couldn’t even properly close my mouth because my overbite was so bad. My hair was falling out, my clothes had holes in them and I had such extreme IBS that there were times when I couldn’t even go outside. I was bullied every time I left my house.”
It wasn’t just by strangers, either. In grade school, one of her only friends dumped her because he said her looks were ruining his reputation. “We can be friends again once you get plastic surgery!” he said, as if that were some kind of consolation. A few years later when she managed to secure her first boyfriend, he admitted he was “settling” for her. “Our entire relationship was based around my appearance,” she says. “They would make fun of me constantly. It was pretty much just him and his family telling me to wash my face, brush my hair or see a dentist.”
Home was no better. Her mom drank heavily and abused her father, and the stress of being with them was so bad that she started sleeping on the street. Though all she wanted was to be loved, she knew in her heart — and from years of experience — that until she “ascended” (femcel for “got hotter”), that was never going to happen. “I was basically a leper at that point in my life,” she says. “The rejection and the social isolation was so intense that my life became unlivable. I thought about suicide all the time.”
Though what makes someone a femcel differs from person to person, Holly Richmond, a sex therapist who frequently works with late-in-life virgins, trauma survivors and other people who can’t access the kind of sex and relationships they want, says Zoe’s reaction is common from people who are denied sexual or romantic connection. “It’s hugely damaging to a person’s mental wellbeing and physical health when they feel sexually ignored or romantically undesirable,” she explains. “Most humans are social, sexual creatures. But when we feel isolated, alone and unable to connect with others on an intimate level, it’s a pretty straight line to frustration, anger, depression and anxiety.” In some cases like Minassian, she says, it can even lead to violence and hate.
For some femcels, the only respite from this so-called “fate” is to take shelter in commiserating online communities like Reddit’s r/TruFemcels, the current beating heart of the femcel community and the most concentrated locus of its culture. Zoe first came across it after becoming fascinated with the lives of ugly women and searching for stories that reflected her own. She wanted to understand them, but more so, she wanted to understand herself — if she read enough posts and made enough comments, maybe she could come to terms with what was happening to her.
So, she dove in, instantly discovering that she wasn’t just an ugly face and a lonely heart; she was one of 22,400, a drop in an ocean of other women who, despite their extremely diverse backgrounds, knew the type of rejection she’d experienced firsthand. There were fat femcels, disabled femcels, mentally ill femcels, queer femcels, ethnic femcels, femcels who’d had sex, femcels who’d never been kissed — all women who fascinated and comforted her at the same time. “Unattractive people are really the only people who can be both attacked and invisible at the same time,” she says. “I was drawn to the community because of their stories.”
So long as she met the forum’s membership criteria — be a 4 out of 10 or below and unable to get a partner because of it — she was free to co-mingle and condole with them as she pleased. “Vent, dear sister,” the sub’s description reads.
And vent they do. Users post everything from mild memes to elaborate, voyeuristic essays about the perfection of other women to full-blown suicidal ideations with every shade of grey in between. One woman confesses she’s been putting off college so she could get cosmetic procedures to make herself more attractive, another talks about how the hardest rejections are from friends, not men, and there are almost too many posts about the utter heartbreak of watching “normal” men and women flirt with each other to count. “One of the saddest things about being a femcel is that you see other people get what you want,” says Zoe. “You might like a guy because he is one of the few people who isn’t mean to you and then watch him pursue and eventually date someone more attractive than you. This happened multiple times, and it didn’t get easier. It reminded me, at the time, that I wasn’t enough. In essence, I suppose I felt inferior, lost, doomed and inadequate.”
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of women blame their celibacy on their physical appearance and the injustice of the lookism they feel is perpetuated by meathead Chads who go gaga for Stacy’s bodacious bod. Femcels spend a great deal of time comparing themselves to other women — often over things like “skull type,” that seem to take on a life-or-death significance — and pouring over their features with an excruciating level of detail with the not-uncommon comparison to Becky and Stacy.
“I stand and look more closely at pretty girls than any man ever could and measure her beautiful extremities, all that smooth skin, the line of her back, her smile, her hair, her nose, her beautiful eyes,” writes redditor vcardthrow1 in one of TruFemcel’s most popular posts:
“Each feature is like a counting of all the ugliness contained in my own fucking disgusting person. Fuck — I get it. I get what she does. I am in awe of her — I understand why they seem like dreams come into drab real life, to men. And it makes me hate myself so much, feel so fucking hopeless, I wonder what fucking deity I pissed off that I couldn’t just be ‘average’ … I’m so fucking disgusting. Not a single body part — not one — was left unravaged. Acne scarred, hairier arms than most men, hair on my disgusting saggy tits, yellow worn away teeth, a mud flap nose bigger than any I’ve ever seen on another woman in real life, on a small, wide, shapeless, recedent pigskull face. Could these people ever imagine someone like me, or someone like you, Femcel?”
Reading posts like these, it becomes clear why so many believe women like vcardthrow1 don’t exist: because it’s painful to think about. It’s inconvenient to imagine their anguish, impossible to relate to it if you’ve never been that low and cognitively grating if it contradicts what you think you know — that “any” woman could get fucked or wifed up if she’d only lower her standards. Men could too, of course, but a vile and raging inceldom is much more in line with what we’d expect from a group of people who, according to stereotype, will spontaneously combust if denied access to sex.
Plus, explains Mary, lowering your standards and “taking what you can get” doesn’t get you much. While few femcels have ideations of Chad and Stacy and would be happy to settle for their “looksmatch” — or at least someone who’d notice them — r/TruFemcels is full of stories of women who say they fall into relationships with people who treat them with same sort of disdain the rest of the world seems to. And while plenty of them have perfectly functioning sex drives (TruFemcels is actually a pretty horny place), it’s hard to feel wanted when the majority of your sexual or romantic experiences have been defined by partners who treat you like Zoe’s did — by making it clear you’re just a stepping stone on the path to someone hotter.
The feelings of sexual inadequacy and insecurity that come from that can complicate femcel’s options for intimacy, too. “Middle schoolers have more sexual experience than some of us here,” writes vcardthrow1. “I’m horrified of the prospect of a man seeing my disgusting fucking body, my repulsive man feet, the hair, smelling me, the ingrowns on my crotch after hair removal, my hairy lower back — and touching me. I grow weary and horrified at the prospect of sex. In real life I picture someone… hurting me. Laughing at me. Giving me a fucking disease after ghosting me.”
Of course, haters will say getting a disease after being ghosted doesn’t count as involuntary celibacy. Vitriolic incels might even call that “pickiness.” They’ll argue that the fact that a femcel could even get an STD in the first place means she doesn’t exist. But what most femcels want isn’t the kind of casual sex they could theoretically get were they willing to stoop that low. They want love, or at the very least, some sort of meaningful, mutually respectful connection with a person who treats them like, well, a person.
“When you’re ugly like we are, casual sex just for the sake of getting laid is not that,” says Phoebe, a 19-year-old femcel in Australia who first started identifying with the label after a long string of rejections from crushes. “It’s degrading for us. Men will sleep with us just for the fun of it and that feels worse than being alone.”
“It’s frustrating as hell,” echoes Mary. “I’d like a partner and I’d like to be having an active sex life, but there are trade-offs to that. I’m not going to trade my self-respect for validation through a one-night stand. I’m not going to put my sexual and emotional health at risk sleeping with some rando that I don’t even know. If that’s what I have to do to be sexually validated at this point, then I guess I’m not going to be validated. And that’s just the bottom line.”
But unlike incels, femcels don’t seem to be particularly angry at the people whose rejection puts them in such a miserable place. Quite the opposite, actually: They’re angry at themselves. This reaction isn’t unique to femcels, but a stereotypically “feminine” quality that Tolman confirms most women share. As my former colleague Tracy Moore discovered in her investigation of Nice Girls (the female equivalent of the toxic Nice Guy), most women who blame their bad luck with sex and dating on their appearance feel embarrassed and sorry for inconveniencing the people they find attractive with their attraction to them, not entitled to their attention.
“Then, there’s the woman who explains that, because she’s ‘extremely unattractive,’ she doesn’t have great luck with men,” writes Moore. “But she tries to flirt anyway, and feels awful. ‘I’ve realized that I actually valued my faint hope of maybe receiving a spark of interest in return over those men’s comfort, and I’m ashamed to even think about it.’ Again, the result is soul-searching and quiet shame.”
Similarly, when Phoebe was ghosted by her high school crush two years ago and then repeatedly taunted by a series of men on Reddit who either catfished or feigned interest in her only to disappear, she wasn’t upset with any of them. She empathized with them, actually. “I can’t blame them for rejecting me,” she says. “I wouldn’t want to date me either. I was clingy, awkward, ugly and mentally ill. I don’t know why I thought I even had a chance in the first place.” At one point, she was so convinced that she’d be alone forever because of how she looked that the very way she saw herself began to change. The features of her face started morphing into unrecognizable elements, melting into what she calls a “series of weird features and flaws all thrown together.” Eventually, she just stopped looking.
Reactions like hers are one of the most telling reasons why we think femcels don’t exist — men rage outward; woman rage inward. “Women will almost always take the blame for their shortcomings,” says Tolman. “We’re socialized to do that. We’re taught that good women silence aggression, anger and rage and swallow it up, because if we don’t, you know what we get called.” (Everyone say it together now: “Bitch.”)
That’s why it’s hard for femcels like Phoebe to buy into the argument that they’re just entitled women who need to lower their standards. “We don’t feel like we’re owed anything,” she says. “If anything, most of us believe we deserve nothing at all.”
In her Nice Girls piece, Moore noticed a similar, almost pathologically unentitled attitude among the dating-challenged women she spoke with: “A woman stepped up to the Reddit confessional booth to unburden herself with the admission that she got very upset when people she liked didn’t like her back: ‘I wouldn’t take it out on anyone and just kind of wallow in my own misery, but I still had to have that moment of realization that no one owed me anything…’”
It’s for that same reason that you’re unlikely to see a femcel Minassian anytime soon (and why femcels haven’t received nearly the same level of attention as male incels). While Mary “wouldn’t put it past some of them” and there are some genuinely disturbing posts on TruFemcels, it seems, for the most part, that the only “revenge” involuntarily celibate women want for their suffering is a new nose, better face and different life.
Mary, however, is one of the few femcels who doesn’t feel that way. She actually likes herself just fine. She’s cute enough, makes good money and has a life outside of Reddit where she gives dating the old college try. “Look,” she says. “I’ve been in this fat, Black body for 43 years and I’m good with it. I’m not on Reddit to tear myself down like most of these girls are. I joined the community hoping to find like-minded women who I could talk to about what I’m going through, but all I found was these sad, young, mostly white girls who want nothing to do with me and spend so much time online that they actually think all the shit they see on social media and Reddit is real.”
What’s real to her, she says, is logging off Reddit, putting herself out there and working with what she’s got.
This coming weekend, in fact, Mary has an out-of-town date with a man she met on WooPlus, a BBW dating site. Few men she matches with treat her like a legitimate option — most of them are “pump and dumpers” that fetishize her weight or encourage her to be unhealthy so she gains more of it. Still, she’s hoping this guy will be different. “I’d rather put myself out there in what ways I can than sit around on Reddit and insist no one will ever love me,” she says.
Maybe they’ll hook up. Maybe they won’t. Either way, she has to try.
Inside the world of ‘Femcels’. By Isabelle Kohn. Mel Magazine, February 10, 2020.
The
‘involuntarily celibate’ community is typically seen as being male-dominated,
with female members – otherwise known as ‘femcels’ – often being overlooked.
Writer Nick Chester meets the women who are being left behind.
Incels
have been in the news long enough now that you know what they are. But a quick
refresher: “incels” is a portmanteau of “involuntary celibates”, an online
community of men who believe they are inherently unable to engage in romantic
or sexual relationships, despite wanting to do so. This subculture has existed
in dark corners of the internet for years, but on Monday April 23rd, 2018, it
became three-dimensional.
That
day, 25-year-old Alek Minassian reportedly drove a van into a group of
pedestrians in central Toronto. He has since been charged with 10 counts of
first-degree murder and 13 counts of attempted murder. Hours before the attack,
Minassian posted a Facebook status referencing the incel community and praising
Elliot Rodger, the University of California spree killer who had a history of
posting women-hating screeds on incel forums.
Incels
posting misogynistic rants are not uncommon: these are men who are incredibly
frustrated that they are not to not be having sex with women, and that
frustration often boils up into outright anger. Since the attacks in California
and Toronto, the media has done well to slice the incel movement open and gaze
upon its beating heart.
Journalists
have come up with a wide variety of theories on why this subculture has
attracted so many angry young men, ranging from fear of recent advancements
towards gender equality to a male backlash against the #MeToo movement. They’ve linked it to various different
elements of the “manosphere” – a network of forums, vlogs and blogs focussing
on issues related to masculinity – including supposed men’s rights activists,
pick-up artists and Men Going Their Own Way (an ideology involving men opposing
serious romantic relationships), claiming that these online subcultures helped
to foster the extreme misogyny that has enabled it to thrive. It’s been
discussed in the context of prominent figures within this network, most notably
Jordan Peterson, who was accused of seeking to legitimise incels’ grievances
after claiming the solution to their extreme views is “enforced monogamy.”
However,
with all the focus on the factors causing men to identify as incels, we’ve
largely overlooked one aspect of involuntary celibacy: female incels, or
“femcels.”
The term
“incel” was coined by a woman – known only as Alana – in the 1990s, when she
created a website to discuss her sexual inactivity. She hoped that Alana’s
Involuntary Celibate Project would become a resource for others like her –
supposedly involuntarily celibate people who needed guidance and support. Of
course, the incel scene has moved on radically since then, and Alana has
distanced herself from its current incarnation – one that is dominated by men
who feel entitled to sex, and resent women for not giving it to them.
Though
very much in the minority, you do find femcels in small numbers on most incel
forums – but, unsurprisingly, they struggle to have their motivations and
problems heard in these spaces. In the rules section of the now-banned subreddit
r/Incels, an admin had laid out the opinion of femcels held by the
40,000-person community: “Those who continuously claim there are as many female
incels in the same situation as male incels will receive a warning and then a
ban.” So what motivates women to join a movement that produced the likes of
Rodger and Minassian? Are they self-hating, or is the incel community more
inclusive than first thought?
*
Rachel,
a 19-year-old from the US, was 15 when she first came across the term “incel”
online, and was struck by how precisely it described her situation. “I’ve never
had sex or had a relationship due to a hormonal condition that has caused me to
develop a very atypical appearance,” she says. “The term ‘incel’ fits me
perfectly.”
Despite
ticking the same boxes as male incels, the community she is now part of doesn’t
offer her the support she wants. “Most males don’t acknowledge the fact that
females can be incel, and that makes it extremely hard for me to cope,” Rachel
tells me in a private message on one of the more popular incel forums. “I’m
being rejected by both society and people who share the same struggles as me.”
In a
space where men can refuse to acknowledge that incel women exist, her
membership of the community ends up compounding her sense of isolation. “I end
up feeling alone,” she adds.
The idea
that any woman can get laid if she wants to is common on incel sites. The
theory behind this is that even supposedly unattractive girls can find sexual
partners if they make themselves available to anyone who’s willing to sleep
with them, no matter how those men look or behave – a particularly toxic male
view of the dynamics of heterosexual interaction. And yet Rachel continues to
interact with male incels. Why? She gets the feeling few women would relate to
her experience as a female incel, leaving her no one to relate to outside of
this community.
“It
takes great measures for a female to become incel,” she tells me. “A female
incel has to be extremely ugly or demented to be rejected by all males. I
mostly interact with male incels because of the lack of women in the same
situation, and also in the slight hope that I’ll be able to find a partner, as
normal Chads would never even consider being with me.”
A
“Chad,” for the uninitiated, is incel slang for a confident, attractive man who
has plenty of sex. A “Stacey” is the female equivalent. Male incels have
another piece of jargon they often use to put down self-identifying femcels:
“volcels”, or “voluntarily celibate” women, who – they claim – could have sex
if they wanted it, if only they shifted their impossibly lofty standards down
low enough to do so.
Although
Rachel had clearly experienced rejection from some sections of the incel
community, she takes care to clarify that she doesn’t consider all incels to be
woman-haters. “I don’t think the movement as a whole is misogynistic,” she
tells me. “There are some misogynistic incels, just as some Muslims are
extremists, but Islam isn’t an extremist religion – and the entire incel
movement isn’t misogynistic.”
Fiona, a
femcel I speak to on Reddit, has a similar outlook on misogyny within the incel
community. Her femcel origin story is similar to Rachel’s: she saw the word
incel used online and realised that she roughly fit the bill, as she had never
had sex or a romantic relationship. Like Rachel, she’s found that male incels
often accused her of being a volcel, and refuse to accept her into their group.
“I argue
with them that they should be inclusive all the time, but they always end up
saying that I could use Tinder or a dating website to find sex,” she says.
“This would be fine for women who want to have no-strings-attached sex, but a
lot of us want sex in a relationship with people we love.”
Fiona
adds that she wishes incel forums were simply platforms for discussing the
trials and tribulations of being involuntarily celibate, without all the gender
politics clouding the discourse. “I’d prefer if they were just about sharing
stories instead of being rude to women,” she tells me. “To be fair, a lot of
male incels want this as well.”
There
are some platforms for women who have never had relationships. Fiona mentions
the r/Foreveralone subreddit, which is for people who have spent the majority
of their lives not in a relationship. But being single for long periods of time
and being incel aren’t the same thing. “Most women there have had sex and
relationships, so I really can’t relate to them,” she says.
There
are even more complexities to navigate for lesbian incels, or “lesbcels.” Clare, a 30-year-old former incel
from the US, who has since got a girlfriend, tells me a paranoid fear and
sharpened hatred of lesbians marked her time in the incel community. Lesbians
were seen as competition, vying for the same pool of sexually-viable women as
incel men. “I’ve seen posts where incels speak very negatively about lesbians,”
she tells me via a Reddit DM. “One I can recall was where an incel discussed
how females were so entitled and selfish that they chose to date masculine
women in place of men in order to oppress them and satisfy their superiority
complexes.”
Clare
says she felt she needed to pretend to be a man online to interact with the
other incels without encountering hostility. “From my experience in the
community, it’s incredibly hard to get support when you’re the enemy gender,”
she says. “It was easy enough to act like I was a guy to fit in, and I even
managed to convince myself that I was feeling gender dysphoria, but my stay in
the community was always highlighted by a sense of fakery and deception.”
Still,
says Clare, she kept going back to the incel community because they were the
only people she felt she could fully relate to. “The issue with such a spiteful
community is that your acceptance and integration only goes so far as sharing
their experience, and empathising with them,” she says. “They’re incredibly
intolerant to varying ideas and situations and interests – especially females.”
Clare,
Fiona and Rachel all believe that incels aren’t a misogynist movement; they’re
just a movement with an awful lot of misogynists in it. Therein lies the nub:
as the dark, underground community of incels is pushed ever more into the
spotlight and asked to atone for the sins of its actively violent members,
broad-stroke characterisation may well push more centrist members to extreme
ends of the movement.
The
women of the incel movement are the hardest hit by this, branded members of a
hate group from those outside, and told they don’t belong by the community they
feel a part of. Life without sex is clearly difficult for everyone affected,
but at least men have a supportive community to turn to. Femcels don’t
even have that.
Meet the
women of the incel movement : The truth
about femcels. By Nick Chester. Huck, December 5, 2018.
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