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So What IS a Femcel? The Atlantic Attempts to Answer But Misses Key Points
32 Plays3 years ago
FDS gets named dropped in a new article from The Atlantic titled "What Do Female Incels Really Want"? for distancing ourselves from femcels. Through discussion of the article, we detail what a femcel is, how their issues manifest into feminism (tradfemcels, libfemcels, and radfemcels), and why ultimately they couldn't stay on FDS. Important conversations on the racial and political intersectionality of incels & femcels. Article: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/05/femcel-meaning-female-incel-reddit/629836/
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
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This episode was brought to you by The Donut.
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00:00:06
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Uh, is it money?
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No, Lilith, it's your time.
00:00:09
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Time is precious, so why would you use it on a biased and a stressful news source?
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I don't know, you must be really dumb.
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It's boring, it's dry and negative.
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It's near impossible to read and not think humanity's doomed.
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I agree.
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Most of the time when I read the news, I feel doomed.
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But that's where the donut comes in.
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So you don't need to pay for a subscription?
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How does that work?
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Well, you just go to www.thedonut.co forward slash FDS.
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So if you subscribe to The Donut within the month of June using our link, they'll be giving away a hand-dipped Tumblr to three people.
00:01:02
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That's T-H-E-D-O-N-U-T dot C-O forward slash FDS.
00:01:08
Speaker
Or check the link in the show notes.
Introduction to Female Dating Strategy Podcast
00:01:15
Speaker
What's up, queens?
00:01:16
Speaker
Welcome to the Female Dating Strategy, the meanest female-only podcast on the internet.
00:01:20
Speaker
I'm Rope.
00:01:21
Speaker
And I'm Lilith.
00:01:22
Speaker
And unfortunately, Savannah, I don't know how much I want to say, but like, due to a medical emergency, she's still not with us, but she's okay.
00:01:28
Speaker
She's okay.
00:01:29
Speaker
She's going to be out for a little bit.
00:01:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:32
Speaker
So...
00:01:34
Speaker
Sorry, we know she's a fan favorite.
00:01:36
Speaker
And we miss her a lot.
00:01:37
Speaker
But, you know, she does need to... To recover.
Exploration of Femcel Experience
00:01:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:40
Speaker
She's currently in recovery, so it's just, once again, Lilith and I. So today we're going to revisit a subject... That's near and dear to our heart.
00:01:47
Speaker
We shouldn't say that.
00:01:48
Speaker
The subject of female incels.
00:01:50
Speaker
And it was sparked by us being name dropped an article written by The Atlantic where they were talking about fem cells and the difficulties that fem cells face.
00:01:59
Speaker
And they're painting this as the rise of a new movement that's a counter to the incel movement.
00:02:04
Speaker
We thought it had a lot of good insight on how fem cells think and what is going on with them.
00:02:08
Speaker
And we thought this would also be a good way to insert some strategies to help the dating lives of fem cells, if they are indeed fem cells,
00:02:16
Speaker
which we'll talk about because some of the women that are saying they're femcells are probably not actually femcells.
00:02:21
Speaker
Some of them don't even want to date.
00:02:22
Speaker
I mean, there's self-identified femcells and then there's women who are the female version of femcells or the female version of just male incels, but they don't call themselves femcells.
00:02:33
Speaker
Female insults, as is described in this actual article, are women who feel that they are not as attractive as the average person and therefore their dating options are limited and they feel that they're being socially excluded or socially punished for that.
00:02:46
Speaker
Because that does happen.
00:02:47
Speaker
People get bullied for the way they look, etc.
00:02:49
Speaker
So, you know, what I like about this is that it is kind of drawing attention to the fact that there's a segment of women that have grown up being bullied about their looks and maybe being antagonized for that.
00:02:58
Speaker
And, you know, let's talk about why that is, what's happening, and then what they can do to help them.
00:03:03
Speaker
Okay, so articles titled, What Do Female Incels Really Want?
00:03:07
Speaker
Online, groups of women have started using the rhetoric of the incel movement, but to what end?
00:03:11
Speaker
Author is Caitlin Tiffany.
00:03:13
Speaker
So let's read it.
00:03:15
Speaker
We were all ugly, Amanda, a 22-year-old student from Florida, told me, recalling the online community she found when she was 18.
00:03:22
Speaker
Men didn't like us, guys didn't want to be with us, and it was fine to acknowledge it.
00:03:26
Speaker
This Reddit forum was called rtruefemcels, and she commented there under the username strangeanduglygirl.
00:03:32
Speaker
Amanda didn't post very often, but she checked in every day on the community of self-identified femcels or involuntarily celibate women.
00:03:38
Speaker
I agreed to refer to her by her first name only to separate her current life from her former internet identity.
00:03:44
Speaker
They came to complain about the superficiality of men and the privilege of pretty women and to share their experiences moving through the world in an unattractive body, which therefore disadvantaged them romantically, socially, and economically.
00:03:55
Speaker
They were finding the modern dating landscape, the image-based apps, the commodified dating market, the illusory freedom to be found in hookup culture to be unnavigable.
Contrasting Femcels and Incels
00:04:04
Speaker
And they talked about taking a pink pill and opening their eyes to the reality that society was misogynistic and, quote, lookist.
00:04:11
Speaker
There's a lot going on there so far.
00:04:14
Speaker
I mean, that's pretty consistent with what True Femme Cells was before it was booted by Reddit, which I actually think True Femme Cells was booted unfairly.
00:04:21
Speaker
I think that was another one of those like Reddit misogyny things.
00:04:24
Speaker
Yeah, like where they're trying to be fair because they booted the incels for being violent terrorists.
00:04:29
Speaker
Yeah, but the true femcels, they just like complained about men.
00:04:32
Speaker
Honestly, like I kind of liked when they were around.
00:04:34
Speaker
This is a both side scene by Reddit because they banned incels.
00:04:37
Speaker
They felt like they had to ban femcels or the incels like probably flooded true femcels and just started reporting it like crazy until it got banned.
00:04:45
Speaker
This is what we're talking about, why it's unsustainable to be on Reddit.
00:04:48
Speaker
Because what happens is men who felt like they were being pushed off for being incels just got extremely retaliatory towards any female space, including true femcels, which most of it was just them being sad.
00:04:58
Speaker
They thought that it was women's or feminist fault that their subreddits got banned rather than their own fucking fault for being violent fucking terrorists.
00:05:05
Speaker
Like these men, you know, MGTOW, Red Pill, Incels, Art Incels, or what is it, Brain Cells?
00:05:10
Speaker
They had a bunch of different incel subreddits, right?
00:05:12
Speaker
And they kept getting banned.
00:05:13
Speaker
They kept making new ones.
00:05:15
Speaker
And then when they got those new ones got banned, they kept attacking women and so on.
00:05:18
Speaker
Right.
00:05:18
Speaker
So, yeah, that's why Reddit as a platform is not sustainable because it's got this large, angry male user base that hates women.
00:05:25
Speaker
Right.
00:05:25
Speaker
And so I actually kind of miss when true fem cells were around because those sorts of women like hung out on true fem cells or on the pink pill.
00:05:32
Speaker
They stayed away from FDS.
00:05:33
Speaker
Right.
00:05:33
Speaker
After they got banned, it was very inconvenient to us that they all started coming to
Challenges in Online Spaces
00:05:38
Speaker
FDS and expecting us to like talk about lookism and the pink pill and how, you know, it's so horrible and unfair that men are attracted
00:05:45
Speaker
to attractive women and it's like, I don't know what to say to you.
00:05:47
Speaker
It's like, that's just life.
00:05:49
Speaker
I don't know what to say.
00:05:51
Speaker
Well, okay.
00:05:52
Speaker
So we can talk about it because some of it, honestly, based on some of the pictures that were revealed to some of the fem cells, some of it is entirely in their head.
00:06:00
Speaker
They weren't even that ugly.
00:06:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:02
Speaker
Some of it seemed like it was more, they were socially awkward and perhaps, you know, low self-esteem and then like non-white women who internalized like white beauty standards so much that they felt unattractive.
00:06:12
Speaker
So it
00:06:12
Speaker
We can dive into that a little bit more when we talk about strategies for fem cells and we start to outline what most of their actual problem is rather than just truly, truly being ugly.
00:06:21
Speaker
There's no nice way to put it, but they are so far away from the average that they are noticeably unattractive to people, right?
00:06:27
Speaker
So if you're average, you're probably fine and you have more than enough dating options.
00:06:30
Speaker
But if you're just like really outside the average through physical deformity or something like that, then it's yes, I think it's fair to talk about the difficulties with that.
00:06:38
Speaker
Yeah, I want to say actually, first of all, like this episode, we're going to try to be like fair, but we're not going to sugarcoat things.
00:06:44
Speaker
Okay.
00:06:45
Speaker
Like one thing that bothers me a little bit with like the everybody is beautiful, like everyone is beautiful.
00:06:50
Speaker
It feels so fake.
00:06:51
Speaker
First of all, it's not true.
00:06:52
Speaker
Secondly, like a lot of unattractive people, like being unattractive actually does really affect their life.
00:06:57
Speaker
I've read, you know, a lot of comments from unattractive people saying like, oh, you know, being unattractive really affects my life.
00:07:02
Speaker
And so the whole everybody's beautiful, everyone's beautiful bothers me because it's just words.
00:07:06
Speaker
It doesn't actually make my life.
00:07:08
Speaker
better.
00:07:08
Speaker
And they make that point actually later in this article.
00:07:11
Speaker
So let's keep reading because I think we can discuss that more in depth when they talk about that.
00:07:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:15
Speaker
We need to be honest.
00:07:16
Speaker
We need to be honest to the fem cells.
00:07:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:18
Speaker
We need to be honest.
00:07:19
Speaker
Let's cut the crap like real talk, right?
00:07:21
Speaker
I'm not going to be deliberately cruel, but you know, please understand that I might make some comments that some people might take personally.
00:07:27
Speaker
Sometimes...
00:07:28
Speaker
Give it to him straight.
00:07:30
Speaker
Here's the thing.
00:07:31
Speaker
Like some people talk about how horrible I am, such a mean girl or whatever.
00:07:34
Speaker
And it's like, sometimes you just need to speak.
00:07:36
Speaker
Like, honestly, I have to say the thing.
00:07:38
Speaker
Okay.
00:07:39
Speaker
Like don't take my words personally.
00:07:40
Speaker
Okay.
00:07:41
Speaker
That's what I'm saying.
00:07:41
Speaker
Anyways.
00:07:42
Speaker
Okay.
00:07:42
Speaker
So continuing.
00:07:43
Speaker
They could be funny.
00:07:45
Speaker
In 2019, a commenter repeated a pretty friend's suggestion that nobody really needs to wear makeup, adding five heart emoji and a link to the joke subreddit r forward slash thanks I'm cured.
00:07:54
Speaker
Okay.
00:07:56
Speaker
They could be kind of mean like male incels.
00:07:58
Speaker
They mocked lucky, beautiful women whom they called Stacey's.
00:08:01
Speaker
Mostly they wrote about being sad.
00:08:03
Speaker
Normies can't comprehend real loneliness.
00:08:05
Speaker
And early post begins, guys don't treat ugly girls like people, reads another.
00:08:09
Speaker
So yeah, that's, I mean, they're a constant bullying of women they found to be more attractive as part of why they couldn't sit on female dating strategy after a while because they just got a little bit
00:08:18
Speaker
They got so pissed off at us for like not letting them sit with us kind of thing.
00:08:21
Speaker
Like, oh, they're mean girls, Regina George.
00:08:23
Speaker
But it's like, we can only handle so much of your shit before we start to set boundaries.
00:08:28
Speaker
You know, people think we're horrible people for excluding themselves or whatever, right?
00:08:31
Speaker
But like, it was for a reason.
00:08:33
Speaker
Every time there was a TikTok of an attractive woman putting on makeup or whatever, they'd all be like...
00:08:37
Speaker
she's performing for the male gaze.
00:08:39
Speaker
She's such a slut or whatever, like calling her Stacy and shit.
00:08:42
Speaker
Like a lot of people that might not have seen those because as moderators, we removed those, but it's just constant negativity.
00:08:48
Speaker
Or posting like long rants about lookism and then like weird racialized dating advice that felt like very similar to some of the male counterparts on Reddit that were like, it's basically like guys who are non-white that would just complain about like, oh, I wish I was white.
00:09:03
Speaker
all of the time.
00:09:04
Speaker
And so like, we don't want to read like post after post of you complaining about not being white.
00:09:08
Speaker
Like that's just weeks of low self-esteem.
00:09:10
Speaker
And it's like, I get secondhand cringe as a woman of color myself.
00:09:13
Speaker
Like, girl, you have to stop focusing on this because it just makes you less likely to focus on your own unique skills and abilities and attractiveness and that kind of stuff app, just reading it, reading it, reading it.
00:09:25
Speaker
Not only is it depressing, also it's not true.
00:09:27
Speaker
And also like the self-flagellation doesn't help them, right?
00:09:30
Speaker
If we just keep posting it,
00:09:31
Speaker
It doesn't help other people.
00:09:32
Speaker
That's the thing.
00:09:33
Speaker
Like most of the time actually can be really good to have a community of people where you can like, you know, commiserate about your problems and find common ground and, you know, come up with solutions.
00:09:42
Speaker
All that normally is a very, very good thing.
00:09:44
Speaker
But this is one of those things where having a community to talk about how unattractive you feel and bullying women who are more attractive than you and...
00:09:51
Speaker
in their head, they think they're justified because they're like, you know, and I get this a lot on Twitter, too, where it's like, oh, you're higher than me in the social
Political Beliefs and Beauty Standards
00:09:56
Speaker
hierarchy.
00:09:57
Speaker
Therefore, by attacking you, I'm actually fighting the power kind of thing, right?
00:10:00
Speaker
It's kind of like, you know, in their mind, it's like a system of oppression.
00:10:03
Speaker
But instead of being based on sex or being based on wealth or something like that, like a normal person, they base it on attractiveness.
00:10:10
Speaker
And so they see it as like attractive people are oppressing less attractive people by being hostile to attractive people.
00:10:15
Speaker
They're like, it's they're like rising up and, you know, fighting the
00:10:18
Speaker
power.
00:10:18
Speaker
They think of it as like a social justice type of thing, right?
00:10:21
Speaker
It's just a lot.
00:10:22
Speaker
I don't know how to say it.
00:10:24
Speaker
It's just a lot.
00:10:25
Speaker
Okay.
00:10:25
Speaker
So continuing, I was the kind of girl in school where it was like, people would say, oh, he has a crush on you to make fun of the guy.
00:10:32
Speaker
Amanda told me she was anxious and unhappy, but she didn't want to talk about any of it with her friends.
00:10:37
Speaker
When she first heard the term fem cell, it offered some clarity in a very literal way.
00:10:41
Speaker
I was involuntarily celibate and female.
00:10:43
Speaker
So I was like, okay, that applies.
00:10:45
Speaker
Okay.
00:10:45
Speaker
So yeah.
00:10:46
Speaker
So a lot of these women were bullied.
00:10:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:48
Speaker
So online, she found thousands of other women who were trying to figure out how to live without the kind of romantic love that our society has deemed a pillar, maybe the pillar of happiness.
00:10:57
Speaker
Even though the women in the subreddit were pretty depressed and sad, it did give me reassurance.
00:11:02
Speaker
She said, at least there are other people out there who are like me and they weren't completely weird.
00:11:06
Speaker
They were pretty normal.
00:11:07
Speaker
Oh, that's another thing actually that distinguishes femcels and incels is that most femcels are actually like relatively normal people.
00:11:13
Speaker
Like they might have low self-esteem.
00:11:15
Speaker
They might be, you know, slightly less attractive or even just like average in appearance.
00:11:19
Speaker
But incels, male incels are like insane.
00:11:21
Speaker
Like they're all fucking weebs.
00:11:23
Speaker
They're all coomers.
00:11:24
Speaker
They like look gross.
00:11:25
Speaker
They act gross.
00:11:27
Speaker
And they externalize all their problems, right?
00:11:29
Speaker
Part of the reason they got banned is because they were trying to plot like a government coup to redistribute women.
00:11:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:36
Speaker
And the femcels don't do that shit.
00:11:38
Speaker
The femcels don't do that shit.
00:11:39
Speaker
They're more or less like this article says, just very sad.
00:11:42
Speaker
And sometimes they do come up with some of these cockamamie theories about attractiveness.
00:11:45
Speaker
But it doesn't come up.
00:11:46
Speaker
It doesn't result in violent political action.
00:11:49
Speaker
So it's like a huge line.
00:11:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:51
Speaker
It's not even really political.
00:11:52
Speaker
It's more or less like them trying to analyze, like they're trying to figure out why they aren't attractive, right?
00:11:57
Speaker
It's more of a self-flagellation trying to figure out like to some extent, especially when you get into different parts of different ideas about race and then proximity, then where you grew up.
00:12:05
Speaker
Some of it is like culturally induced social hierarchies due to like things like racism, et cetera.
00:12:10
Speaker
And then some other things are just like, even if it was within their own culture and their majority feeling like they're still unattractive in accordance to the beauty standards of their own culture, they're
00:12:17
Speaker
And then I'm trying to dissect that kind of thing.
00:12:19
Speaker
And in some ways, it's just a discussion about intersectionality, etc.
00:12:22
Speaker
But yeah, it's nothing like incels.
00:12:24
Speaker
But again, that's the line.
00:12:25
Speaker
It's like the femcels will have a discussion about intersectionality and the incels will like do a bomb threat or some shit, you know?
00:12:32
Speaker
Incels are mall shooters.
00:12:33
Speaker
Yeah, incels are mall shooters.
00:12:35
Speaker
They're school shooters, right?
00:12:36
Speaker
Like they do crazy shit.
00:12:38
Speaker
I just want to be very 100% clear and avoid this sort of false equivalency that I see going on all the time.
00:12:45
Speaker
Incels are filming themselves harassing and abusing women in public.
00:12:48
Speaker
Yeah, so as much as I like to dunk on femcels, I actually am low-key kind of defending them right now just because, like, they are nowhere near as bad as male incels.
00:12:56
Speaker
I just want to be perfectly clear.
00:12:58
Speaker
There's so many people who try to draw false equivalency and be like, well, like, female incels are using the same rhetoric as male incels and it could become dangerous in the future.
00:13:06
Speaker
Well, it's not.
00:13:06
Speaker
Stop speculating on whether it could become worse in the future or whether the rhetoric is dangerous or whatever.
00:13:11
Speaker
Focus on what you actually see in front of you and they are not the fucking same.
00:13:15
Speaker
So here's a paragraph reiterates that.
00:13:18
Speaker
Around the same time that Amanda was getting involved in the femcel community, mass media attention was focused on its far better known male counterpart.
00:13:24
Speaker
Because of course, the lonely and angry young men of the internet became a subject of fascination because their language was disgusting and the threats of violence against women were real.
00:13:32
Speaker
Incels deified the murderer Elliot Roger, who killed six people and himself in Isla Vista, California in 2014, and left behind a YouTube video in which he outlined his plans to punish women for rejecting him.
00:13:43
Speaker
Right.
00:13:43
Speaker
So male audacity here.
00:13:44
Speaker
So coverage also eliminated the broader manosphere, the sprawling online network of disaffected young men that overlapped with the so-called alt-right and with President Donald Trump's rabid army of MAGA trolls.
00:13:55
Speaker
Okay, so this is a side note.
00:13:56
Speaker
I don't like when the mainstream media automatically makes all of the manosphere alt-right because it's actually pretty politically diverse.
00:14:03
Speaker
Yeah, that's actually so true.
00:14:05
Speaker
There are left wing manosphere people.
00:14:08
Speaker
There are left wing incels, violent incels.
00:14:11
Speaker
Yeah, actually, there are some of it who literally take like a communist approach and they see themselves again as like a sort of proletariat of ugly people and that they need to rise up and like redistribute.
00:14:24
Speaker
They have this idea of like redistributing sex as though it's the same as like resources or whatever, right?
00:14:28
Speaker
It's just too convenient that whenever we have these like male incel movements that they always try to assign it to a political party rather than maleness.
00:14:35
Speaker
And I'm like, it's just fucking maleness.
00:14:37
Speaker
Like, I'm not saying there's not these maggot like right wing trolls.
00:14:40
Speaker
I'm just saying it's not exclusively that by any means.
00:14:42
Speaker
And the fact that they've chosen to like pigeonhole it there is actually in some respects dangerous because like we said, it's not that left winger men are not devoid of misogyny, right?
00:14:50
Speaker
Like these guys are the like the pro porn, poor sissy porn, pro BDSM, kink.
00:14:55
Speaker
you know, pro prostitution, pro pedophilia narratives, pro pedophilia guys.
00:14:59
Speaker
And like those guys are, that's a large percentage of the insults, just as much as these like super patriarchal race hierarchy, right-wing trolls.
00:15:07
Speaker
Exactly.
00:15:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:08
Speaker
So it's both of them.
00:15:09
Speaker
Before you continue, I do want to say actually in the article, it says of disaffected young men that overlapped with the so-called alt-right.
00:15:15
Speaker
So it does say they overlapped and yes, there is some overlap, but I just feel that there needs to be more recognition on the left-wing incels.
00:15:22
Speaker
Hell yeah.
00:15:22
Speaker
Like they're actually in some respects, I feel like people understand the alt-right is all like fringe.
00:15:27
Speaker
Sometimes the left-wing parts because left-wing media is so mainstream and like self-reinforcing that they ignore the fact that they're creating incels and violent misogynist movements on the left side.
00:15:39
Speaker
Like the whole narrative around like not fucking me is discrimination.
00:15:43
Speaker
Exactly.
00:15:43
Speaker
Right.
00:15:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:46
Speaker
Right?
00:15:47
Speaker
Like that whole narrative.
00:15:49
Speaker
Yeah, that's left-wing incels.
00:15:51
Speaker
That is a left-wing incel movement, right?
00:15:54
Speaker
The whole thing that lesbians have to take dick, that kind of shit, right?
00:15:57
Speaker
Like that's what we're talking about of like rabid male entitlement, regardless of political stripes.
00:16:03
Speaker
Exactly.
00:16:04
Speaker
In a 2018 report on the intersection of misogyny and white supremacy, the Anti-Defamation League outlined how incels' sense of entitlement to sex was leading them toward other extremist spaces and beliefs.
00:16:13
Speaker
This is a scary and dizzyingly complicated story.
00:16:16
Speaker
And femcels, whose rage was quieter and whose presence was smaller, didn't really factor in.
00:16:21
Speaker
Because they're not these guys.
00:16:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:23
Speaker
Yeah, because they're not as scary.
00:16:26
Speaker
That's why.
00:16:26
Speaker
They're just sad.
00:16:27
Speaker
They're just sad, mostly.
00:16:28
Speaker
Five years later, incels are a known quantity and femcels are the new mystery.
00:16:33
Speaker
In recent months, headlines have named 2022 the year of the femcel and heralded a coming, quote, femcel revolution, wherein women are reclaiming involuntary celibacy and asserting their right to give a name to their loneliness and alienation.
00:16:45
Speaker
You see how that's like not threatening in comparison to the incel revolution?
00:16:48
Speaker
The incel revolution, wasn't that guy who drove his van into a crowd of people who cited the incel revolution in Canada?
00:16:55
Speaker
No, the incel revolution is where all the ugly men rise up and take over the government and forcibly redistribute women sexually like The Handmaid's Tale.
00:17:03
Speaker
Okay, so literally like dystopian crazy shit.
00:17:06
Speaker
Femcel revolution is where they reclaim involuntary celibacy.
00:17:10
Speaker
and assert their right to give a name to their loneliness and alienation.
00:17:14
Speaker
So really all it is is like, we demand the right to talk about our problems.
00:17:18
Speaker
But there's no government taking over stuff at all happening there.
Critique of Societal Beauty Norms
00:17:22
Speaker
The attack I'm referencing is by Alec Manassian, and he killed 10 people in Toronto in 2018 as part of the quote, incel rebellion.
00:17:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:30
Speaker
I mean, just compare and contrast what the femcels are trying to do versus what the incels are trying to do.
00:17:35
Speaker
Like what their actual goals and tactics are completely different.
00:17:39
Speaker
Yeah, let's be fair to the femcels that they are nowhere near and they're not the same as incels and everybody trying to both sides is really disingenuous.
00:17:46
Speaker
So this new recognition of femcels has tended to stop there.
00:17:49
Speaker
But incel had political meaning.
00:17:51
Speaker
People who identified with the term were read as reactionaries, the young, mostly white men who felt left behind as society progressed beyond its historical focus on their specific needs.
00:18:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:01
Speaker
Suck it up.
00:18:02
Speaker
Well, again, this feels like it's probably mostly white because the United States is mostly white.
00:18:07
Speaker
But if you actually read the incel, this incel forms, they have names for it's multiracial.
00:18:13
Speaker
It's multiracial.
00:18:14
Speaker
That's how they came up with stuff like rice cell and curry cell.
00:18:16
Speaker
They call themselves that, by the way.
00:18:20
Speaker
Yes.
00:18:21
Speaker
For non-white N-cells.
00:18:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:24
Speaker
There's another one that Black men use to refer to themselves that I won't repeat, but it's like... Just take the first half of a slur and then add sell.
00:18:31
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:18:32
Speaker
And so that's what they call themselves.
00:18:34
Speaker
It's like...
00:18:35
Speaker
The incel movement is very diverse.
00:18:37
Speaker
Again, like they're saying it's mostly young white men.
00:18:40
Speaker
I mean, it is because just probably numbers wise because of the United States being mostly white.
00:18:45
Speaker
This is a male problem.
00:18:46
Speaker
Again, this is not a political problem.
00:18:48
Speaker
It's not a racial problem.
00:18:49
Speaker
It is a male problem.
00:18:50
Speaker
Like name the problem, you know?
00:18:52
Speaker
Okay.
00:18:52
Speaker
And each of these has their own sub-incel movements.
00:18:56
Speaker
There's like Asian masculinity and South Asian masculinity and a few others, the ones that worship Kevin Samuels.
00:19:01
Speaker
Exactly.
00:19:02
Speaker
There's the generalized incel movement and then there's sub-racialized incel movements for each of these specific racial groups, which is just all sorts of problematic.
00:19:10
Speaker
It's intersectional.
00:19:12
Speaker
It's intersectional.
00:19:13
Speaker
Look at this beautiful harmony between your face.
00:19:17
Speaker
Look at this beautiful harmony between the races bonding over male entitlement.
00:19:21
Speaker
Yes.
00:19:23
Speaker
From the fires of this.
00:19:24
Speaker
I want to say, actually, the thing that all the men have in common is that they were raised to think that they were entitled to have a woman without having to actually offer any value to the woman.
00:19:33
Speaker
Not only are incels ugly, but they actually just don't want to have to do boyfriend shit.
00:19:37
Speaker
They're like, oh, girls want you to take them out to dinner and treat them really well.
00:19:41
Speaker
But I hate women.
00:19:42
Speaker
I want to treat them like shit.
00:19:43
Speaker
Why won't they date me?
00:19:44
Speaker
They were raised to think they were entitled to love a woman and treat women badly.
00:19:48
Speaker
And the fact that that's not panning out for them, they are very retaliatory and abusive over that, right?
00:19:53
Speaker
The abusiveness is a way of trying to reclaim power, right?
00:19:56
Speaker
Women were not raised like men to think that they were entitled to a partner.
00:20:00
Speaker
to a slave women were raised to think like oh if you don't have a man you know you're worthless kind of thing right and it's much more internalizing it's like the expectations that men and women are raised with have had very different impacts on the fem cell versus the incel movement but that's just me
00:20:15
Speaker
The term FemCell is now in widespread use, not just in Reddit forums, but on every major social platform, including the Gen Z-favored TikTok.
00:20:23
Speaker
But we still don't know what it's for.
00:20:24
Speaker
If a FemCell revolution is coming, what new world are FemCells dreaming about?
00:20:28
Speaker
When Amanda talks about the FemCell community, she specifically contrasts it with one other option, contemporary liberal feminism or maybe, quote, girlboss feminism, as popularized by millennials and the brands that cater to them.
00:20:41
Speaker
Which we've also dragged because it's easy to drag.
00:20:43
Speaker
Understandable that you criticize liberal feminism.
00:20:46
Speaker
They're finding the same holes in liberal feminism and girl boss feminism that a lot of us found.
00:20:50
Speaker
Their solutions and their discussion of it is more or less what the issue is, which is why I think they like female dating strategy, because we were one of the places that were calling out the complete nonsense of liberal feminism.
00:21:01
Speaker
Yeah, they liked us because we hated the same things, but we didn't stand for the same things.
00:21:06
Speaker
Exactly.
00:21:06
Speaker
So the liberal feminist notion of like supporting all women, feeling positive all the time, it's disingenuous, she told me.
00:21:12
Speaker
When she started identifying with the term femcel, it was partly because she felt a resentment toward a style of feminism that challenged traditional beauty standards, mostly by asking those who fell short of them to feel beautiful anyway, regardless of their lived experiences.
00:21:24
Speaker
I'd rather be able to talk about being ugly than just to try to convince myself that I'm pretty, she said.
00:21:29
Speaker
Yeah, I agree.
00:21:30
Speaker
I think it's important to be honest and not delude yourself.
00:21:33
Speaker
And that's the point I made in the female political strategy episode of like fem cell feminism, right, where a lot of the push was by women who feel like they're traditionally locked out of like what society deems sexually attractive.
00:21:46
Speaker
And then the push was to like make these women feel sexually attractive.
00:21:50
Speaker
And I'm like, if you're chasing the male gaze, that's kind of a self-defeating process.
00:21:54
Speaker
I guess, because ultimately male attention is fickle.
00:21:57
Speaker
It's not that I don't think you should have more wider representation of women of different body types and et cetera.
00:22:02
Speaker
But the issue is just more or less like if you stake all of your feminism in sexualizing women's bodies and forcing them to feel beautiful, then when men don't respond that way and then women learn and they're not going to respond that way, then first of all, the fem cells get upset because they feel like they've been lied to.
00:22:16
Speaker
Your feminist movement ends up being diluted because there's an over focus on physical attractiveness as a feminist movement.
00:22:22
Speaker
Mm hmm.
00:22:22
Speaker
What people find sexually attractive is so unique to that person, more or less, that trying to use feminism to force like a sexual politic.
00:22:32
Speaker
Like a morality around who you're sexually attracted to.
00:22:35
Speaker
Yeah, is pretty futile, more or less.
00:22:38
Speaker
And the femcels have discovered it's futile, right?
00:22:41
Speaker
At least this group of femcels.
00:22:42
Speaker
Like there's another group of femcels who are still somewhat in denial about it.
00:22:46
Speaker
Liberal femcels?
00:22:47
Speaker
Yeah, liberal femcels.
00:22:48
Speaker
I want to be clear.
00:22:49
Speaker
There's different types of femcels.
00:22:50
Speaker
There's the trad femcels.
00:22:51
Speaker
There's the one who are like, why are men always chasing the bad girls instead of good girls like me?
00:22:55
Speaker
There's the lib femcels.
00:22:57
Speaker
They're the ones who are like, lesbians don't take dick.
00:22:59
Speaker
They are bigots.
00:23:00
Speaker
Or, you know, oh, if you don't, I'm 500 pounds.
00:23:03
Speaker
You know, men who don't find me attractive are fat phobic.
00:23:05
Speaker
That's another lib femcel ideology.
00:23:08
Speaker
And then there's the rad femcels.
00:23:09
Speaker
They're the ones who take the radical feminist angle of like, they're the ones who tend to be more into like pink pill or, you know, black pill type of stuff.
00:23:17
Speaker
If you do anything that could be remotely considered sexually attractive by anyone, you're a sellout and you're ball palming.
00:23:24
Speaker
You're performing for the male gaze, that crowd.
00:23:26
Speaker
So there's different types of fem cells, right?
00:23:28
Speaker
And so obviously the fem cells who are more rad fem cells got really mad that we called the lib fem cells.
00:23:33
Speaker
They're mad that we conflated the two.
00:23:34
Speaker
I just want to be clear that all of y'all are fem cells.
00:23:38
Speaker
I mean, fact.
00:23:39
Speaker
And honestly, liberal femcellism is how we get people like, hate to keep saying her name, but Tracy Clark Flory, right?
00:23:44
Speaker
I mean, her entire feminist dick was like, I want to be as sexually attractive as like the porn stars to men, right?
00:23:50
Speaker
And like her entire feminist sexual ethos and her entire focus on the sexual revolution was about that rather than actual strategies to make women's sex life considerably better.
00:24:01
Speaker
It just becomes about like, how come I'm not the person that people find sexually attractive?
00:24:05
Speaker
It must be oppression.
00:24:06
Speaker
It must be patriarchy that's making me
00:24:08
Speaker
not sexually attractive.
00:24:09
Speaker
Right?
00:24:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:10
Speaker
And I'm like, sorry, you just have bad genetics.
00:24:12
Speaker
I hate.
00:24:13
Speaker
Right.
00:24:13
Speaker
Like how do you tell someone like it's not patriarchy, like that people don't find you sexually attractive.
00:24:17
Speaker
It's the same thing as we talked about in this episode about tall men with short people arms.
00:24:21
Speaker
People were saying that, oh, because of patriarchy, that's why shorter men aren't as considered as sexually attractive.
00:24:26
Speaker
And I'm like, is it patriarchy?
00:24:27
Speaker
Or is it just like millions of years of evolution?
00:24:30
Speaker
Right.
00:24:30
Speaker
Like females preferring taller men.
00:24:33
Speaker
Like deer, for example, the females usually want to mate with the larger bucks with the larger antlers and shit.
00:24:39
Speaker
Right.
00:24:39
Speaker
If you're a buck that has smaller antlers or is just physically smaller and weaker and the does don't want to mate with you.
00:24:45
Speaker
Tough luck.
00:24:45
Speaker
I'm sorry.
00:24:46
Speaker
That's just luck of the draw.
00:24:47
Speaker
You just lost the genetic lottery.
00:24:49
Speaker
Sorry, but it's life.
00:24:51
Speaker
Right.
00:24:51
Speaker
And there's some things that are culturally induced, but like the liberal fem cells making all of their feminism about like, how can people don't sexually objectify me as much as they do skinny blonde white women?
00:25:00
Speaker
Yeah, this other woman.
00:25:01
Speaker
And then making that like a reflection of patriarchy rather than like talking about specifically representation and focusing on that.
00:25:09
Speaker
And that's where the disconnect has been coming between all of the different fem cell groups and then liberal feminism and secondarily radical feminism.
00:25:15
Speaker
feminism.
00:25:16
Speaker
It's like the lip fem cells and the rad fem cells are just duking it out.
00:25:19
Speaker
Honestly.
00:25:20
Speaker
And we're over here like, could y'all quit?
00:25:21
Speaker
Like, like all this is stupid.
00:25:24
Speaker
None of you are going to win this argument because like, listen, rad fem cells, you cannot control what makes a man's dick hard.
00:25:29
Speaker
I'm sorry, but you know, it is what it is.
00:25:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:31
Speaker
Lip fem cells, you can't control what men find sexually attractive.
00:25:34
Speaker
Rad fem cells, you can't control what women don't have sex with.
00:25:38
Speaker
Right.
00:25:38
Speaker
You can't tell us like, Oh, be politically lesbian or whatever they're trying to push.
00:25:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:43
Speaker
We're not doing it.
00:25:44
Speaker
We're like, can you guys have to figure out a way to get over it?
00:25:47
Speaker
We're going to live over here in reality.
00:25:49
Speaker
Yeah, where some people are ugly.
00:25:52
Speaker
Reality is that some people in any given population, some people are faster than others.
00:25:56
Speaker
Some people are taller.
00:25:57
Speaker
Some people can draw better.
00:25:58
Speaker
Some people are more physically attractive.
00:26:01
Speaker
And what's generally considered physically attractive is pretty consistent culturally, even with all the weird racialized stuff is generally like things like facial symmetry.
00:26:10
Speaker
A lot of it is biological.
00:26:11
Speaker
Yeah, like
00:26:12
Speaker
facial symmetry.
00:26:13
Speaker
People generally like, you know, people who are like taller, who are fit, maybe some muscles, that kind of stuff, not morbidly obese, you know, whether thinness or more curviness that can change through time, that sort of stuff.
00:26:23
Speaker
But like, yeah, there are certain standards of beauty that are actually just pretty universal regardless of culture, but yeah, maybe cut out some of that.
00:26:30
Speaker
But anyways, this feels mean.
00:26:31
Speaker
Overall markers of health are generally universally attractive, clear skin, et cetera.
00:26:37
Speaker
So,
00:26:37
Speaker
In some ways, this logic.
00:26:39
Speaker
OK, so this is continuing on after the femcels that I'd rather be able to talk about being ugly than just to try to convince myself that I'm pretty.
00:26:45
Speaker
She said feeling on that.
00:26:46
Speaker
So next paragraph.
00:26:48
Speaker
In some ways, this logic is even more uncomfortable than the original incel logic.
00:26:51
Speaker
In a 2021 essay, the feminist theorist Jilly Voice K argued that it's not just incels who assume that any woman can get sex from men.
00:26:59
Speaker
This is a widespread cultural assumption.
00:27:01
Speaker
Women have long been understood to hold sexual capital.
00:27:04
Speaker
In modern dating culture, they're expected to wield it.
00:27:06
Speaker
Femcels complicate that story.
00:27:08
Speaker
They feel the same sense of humiliation and exclusion that incels do, but they react to those feelings differently.
00:27:13
Speaker
Incel discourse tends to project anger outward onto society in a hatred of women.
00:27:17
Speaker
Kay told me when we spoke recently.
00:27:19
Speaker
Facts.
00:27:19
Speaker
The anger is expressed radically through threats of violence or through bizarre, though arguably imaginative, calls for the government to redistribute sex.
00:27:26
Speaker
Facts.
00:27:27
Speaker
Uh-huh.
00:27:28
Speaker
Uh-huh.
00:27:28
Speaker
Sounding familiar.
00:27:30
Speaker
In femcelle discourse, it does tend to be much more turned inward on the self, she said.
00:27:34
Speaker
Though society is discussed as inherently lookist and unfair, femcels are not out to change it because they don't see it as changeable.
00:27:40
Speaker
Yeah, they don't see it as changeable.
00:27:42
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this goes back to the mountains of research about how men versus women deal with problems.
00:27:47
Speaker
And one of them is women tend to internalize it and men tend to externalize it as a problem with everybody else because male audacity.
00:27:53
Speaker
Another point I want to make about this article is that incels and femcels want different things.
00:27:58
Speaker
Incels tend to want just sex.
00:28:01
Speaker
And so the whole incel argument like, oh, any woman can get sex for men.
00:28:04
Speaker
The male incels don't seem to realize or care that female incels, they don't just want sex.
00:28:09
Speaker
They want a relationship.
00:28:10
Speaker
They want to be treated like a human being.
00:28:12
Speaker
Yeah, it's like male incels want to be able to treat women as sexual objects and femcels want to be treated as people.
00:28:18
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:28:19
Speaker
And you can see the difference in this and how the, quote, fantasies of what life would be like if they were attractive play out between the femcels and the incels.
00:28:28
Speaker
When you look at the incels, a lot of their like male power fantasies is being able to like treat women like sexual objects.
00:28:35
Speaker
And have sex with lots of women and treat them like shit.
00:28:37
Speaker
Yeah, no, and exactly.
00:28:39
Speaker
They've literally drawn these cartoons of the so-called quote unquote chads, like doing all sorts of sexually degrading things to women, like slapping their penis in their face.
00:28:47
Speaker
Or like getting them pregnant and then leaving them, you know, a single mom.
00:28:51
Speaker
Like slapping them around, etc.
00:28:52
Speaker
This is the incel power fight.
00:28:54
Speaker
This is the incel sexual felonies.
00:28:55
Speaker
They're crying inside because they'll never be able to sexually abuse and objectify a woman in the same manner as much as they think attractive men do, which is bizarre.
00:29:03
Speaker
Well, not bizarre when you understand male behavior, but they see this as like the ultimate privilege is to be able to treat women as disposable, degraded objects.
00:29:11
Speaker
That's their goal.
00:29:12
Speaker
Yeah, and the femcells want the opposite of that.
00:29:15
Speaker
A lot of them read like fan fiction stuff or draw like fan fiction, like their fanfic cartoons are like a man sees them and sees their beauty on the inside and falls in love with them and treats them really well and treats them like a princess and that kind of stuff.
00:29:27
Speaker
Like the femcell fantasies, their fandom stuff is very different, paints a very different picture.
00:29:32
Speaker
They want a man who loves and cherishes them or the male incels want to be the sort of man who can like abuse women.
00:29:38
Speaker
It's a very different power fantasy.
00:29:40
Speaker
Continuing, this inward facing posture contributes to the difficulty in estimating the group's size and summarizing its positions.
00:29:47
Speaker
When the most well-known Reddit forum specifically for femcels, R2FemCels, was banned from the platform in June 2020, it had just over 25,000 members.
00:29:55
Speaker
The subreddit was one of 2,000 forums banned for, quote, promoting hate after a major change to Reddit's content policies.
00:30:01
Speaker
A Reddit spokesperson declined to provide more detail on the decision because it was probably bullshit, to speak like that.
00:30:06
Speaker
They're not going to give any detail because it was probably like, well, they're probably both sides.
00:30:11
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:30:12
Speaker
The male in cells, the female in cells, they're both equally as bad.
00:30:15
Speaker
Get rid of them.
00:30:15
Speaker
The larger Vindicta subreddit was created as a space for fem cells to discuss looks maxing or improving their physical appearance with a combination of soft makeup and hard plastic surgery.
00:30:25
Speaker
I guess the soft looks maxing is makeup.
00:30:27
Speaker
Hard looks maxing is plastic surgery.
00:30:30
Speaker
but has recently seen a diluting influx of non-fem cells looking for beauty advice and sometimes offering words of encouragement.
00:30:38
Speaker
Read the next paragraph.
00:30:38
Speaker
This is so funny.
00:30:39
Speaker
This has caused problems.
00:30:41
Speaker
Reminder to fem cells, people who lie to you and tell you that you look fine the way you are are not on your side, a moderator wrote last year.
00:30:49
Speaker
They benefit from you remaining ugly and not fixing your looks because it makes them more attractive relative to you.
00:30:55
Speaker
This is why the fem cells had to go.
00:30:56
Speaker
It's that sort of attitude, which is why we didn't let them hang out with us on FDS is because like, first of all, like, yeah, there were some women who would wander into the true fem cells of the vindictus subreddit and be like, and say the same things that we thought, which is like, you guys aren't that ugly.
00:31:09
Speaker
Like, no, they're not.
00:31:11
Speaker
That's the thing.
00:31:13
Speaker
You just look average, right?
00:31:15
Speaker
And so we look at these women and we're like, you look fine.
00:31:17
Speaker
There's nothing wrong with you.
00:31:18
Speaker
And they actually get mad at us for saying that kind of stuff.
00:31:21
Speaker
They're like, no, I am ugly.
00:31:23
Speaker
I am a one out of ten.
00:31:24
Speaker
I am a two out of ten.
00:31:26
Speaker
I'm a horrible monstrous gargoyle.
00:31:28
Speaker
A man hasn't looked at me in ten years kind of thing, right?
00:31:30
Speaker
So they get really fucking hostile to women who say anything like positive towards them.
00:31:35
Speaker
You know, FDS is about leveling up, maximizing female benefit and stuff.
00:31:38
Speaker
We're not into the whole like self-flagellating and like being at the bottom of the hierarchy and crying about it and staying there, right?
00:31:44
Speaker
We want to increase our position in the hierarchy.
00:31:47
Speaker
We want to increase our power, increase the quality of our life and so on.
00:31:50
Speaker
And they don't.
00:31:52
Speaker
Yeah, I don't understand it because even on the incel subreddits and I used to lurk some of the incel subreddits and there was a really funny subreddit called incel selfie where it would be,
00:32:00
Speaker
There were to be guys who would take selfies of themselves and be like, is it over for me based on how they look?
00:32:05
Speaker
And like most of them were like overwhelmingly young guys hadn't really grown into like their bodies or their looks yet.
00:32:11
Speaker
The vast majority are pretty
Impact of Past Trauma
00:32:13
Speaker
average.
00:32:13
Speaker
There was like a handful of them where I was like, yeah, bro, it's gonna be real tough for you because they were really short and they were just facially fucked up and there was nothing that could be done about that.
00:32:21
Speaker
But actually, even among the incels, at least the ones that were brave enough to take selfies, they actually looked fairly average, right?
00:32:27
Speaker
And I'm like, 100% of your problem is your personality.
00:32:32
Speaker
Which is actually not comforting to them because the incels actually get mad when you say that too.
00:32:36
Speaker
The incels get really mad when you say, oh, you're not that ugly.
00:32:39
Speaker
It's just your personality.
00:32:40
Speaker
Because like, at least like looks, they can at least blame someone else.
00:32:43
Speaker
If it's their personality, they have no one to blame with themselves, right?
00:32:47
Speaker
And that's just a really uncomfortable thought for them.
00:32:49
Speaker
Or lack of grooming.
00:32:50
Speaker
That's also the problem is them just not having figured out how to groom themselves.
00:32:54
Speaker
in a way that's attractive or consistent.
00:32:56
Speaker
Like I saw a lot of struggle braids, struggle beards, et cetera.
00:33:00
Speaker
I'm like, you could take care of that and vastly improve your chances of a woman finding you attractive.
00:33:04
Speaker
You just choose not to.
00:33:05
Speaker
I want to say like to the incels and the femcels, like what you call looks maxing is just what normal people do normally.
00:33:16
Speaker
Like showering, putting on makeup, like grooming yourself.
00:33:21
Speaker
Right.
00:33:21
Speaker
Like I just want to say it's not that hard.
00:33:24
Speaker
The one thing that I feel like a lot of them don't understand, and I feel actually really bad for Gen Z because of the fact that they've only known the social media age.
00:33:33
Speaker
Instagram age is that they don't understand that how much attractiveness is actually a learned skill.
00:33:39
Speaker
And it actually took me a while to really like catch on that some of the women who look seem like they look really effortless at school every day in high school.
00:33:45
Speaker
A lot of them, they would spend hours perfecting their makeup, right?
00:33:49
Speaker
They would spend
00:33:49
Speaker
hours of perfecting their makeup.
00:33:51
Speaker
I was one of those girls.
00:33:52
Speaker
I got up at five in the morning every day in high school to do my hair and put in hair extensions and my makeup.
00:33:57
Speaker
They spent a ton of money on products like trial and error, trying to figure out what worked with their hair, what worked, what didn't.
00:34:03
Speaker
Obviously, that takes money.
00:34:04
Speaker
So sometimes I got a job at 15 and spent most of my paycheck on cigarettes, actually in grooming products.
00:34:10
Speaker
I quit smoking.
00:34:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:12
Speaker
So I spent it mostly on cigarettes, drugs and grooming products.
00:34:15
Speaker
I feel like a lot of them didn't quite understand that that was the case.
00:34:19
Speaker
A lot of them didn't realize that that was the case, that a lot of women were doing that.
00:34:21
Speaker
So they think a lot of this stuff just happens.
00:34:23
Speaker
You know, they obsessively search through magazines to look for the new like fashion trends, etc.
00:34:27
Speaker
Like these women study fashion, style, etc.
00:34:30
Speaker
Like a part-time job, basically.
00:34:32
Speaker
And also they have the money to sustain their habits.
00:34:34
Speaker
So it's not so that you're ugly.
00:34:36
Speaker
It's that you either haven't dedicated the time and effort to putting into your looks like they have, or you don't have the money to sustain it.
00:34:42
Speaker
And I think there's a famous quote.
00:34:43
Speaker
It's like, you're not ugly, you're just poor.
00:34:45
Speaker
Yeah, that's a meme.
00:34:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:47
Speaker
So I just think, I feel like a lot of femsoles aren't aware of that.
00:34:50
Speaker
So when they look at themselves and like, I'm hideously ugly, like, no, you look like an average person who hasn't done, who hasn't put in hours of work on their appearance, like the women that you think are so much more attractive than you have.
00:35:00
Speaker
Because if they didn't put in the amount of work that they put on their appearance every day, they would look just like, right.
00:35:04
Speaker
Now, there's definitely room for a conversation around like how, you know, starting when I was like 14, 15, I put way too much emphasis on beauty standards.
00:35:14
Speaker
I had kind of an eating disorder, actually, when I was in my teen years, just stay thin.
00:35:18
Speaker
And there's definitely room to be had about how that's harmful to women.
00:35:22
Speaker
And like the pressure that women feel to meet these kinds of beauty standards comes at an enormous cost to not just financially, but also to your mental health, your physical health and so on.
00:35:31
Speaker
Right.
00:35:31
Speaker
So, you know, I'd be more open to having those kinds of conversations
00:35:34
Speaker
and how like tragic actually it is in my opinion that a lot of young girls feel whether they meet the beauty standards or not they all feel that pain and that trauma around beauty standards right but at the same time it's like it's really hard to have those kinds of conversations with fem cells because whenever I try to open up about that
00:35:50
Speaker
kind of experience they're all very hostile to me like i've talked about some of the stuff on twitter and they're all like oh you know you whore you like you know spend all that like they call me a stacy they like call me stupid for spending all that time and money trying to be beautiful and stuff and like they see me as part of the problem oh you're perpetuating toxic patriarchal beauty standards and stuff like that so it's really hard to have those kinds of conversations with some fem cells because they're not really willing to try to see the perspective of the woman on the you know
00:36:16
Speaker
The grass is always greener on the other side, right?
00:36:18
Speaker
But they don't really seem to be that interested in, you know, trying to understand things from another woman's perspective.
00:36:23
Speaker
Yeah, it seems again that they're more or less trying to blame.
00:36:26
Speaker
They don't want to admit that maybe it's not that they're hideously ugly.
00:36:29
Speaker
Maybe it's their personality.
00:36:32
Speaker
Or perhaps they've just internalized some really, really bad messaging because of like people being shitty in high school.
00:36:36
Speaker
I mean, high school, it doesn't matter, but I feel like so many people just have so much unresolved high school trauma, you know, like so many adults going through life with like trauma that they got in high school that they just have internalized that worldview and not really challenged it, you know, and it's sad a little bit because I feel like I've at least I hope I've like matured and grown since then.
00:36:56
Speaker
Sometimes I meet people and it's like very obvious to me that they're still in that kind of high school mentality.
00:37:01
Speaker
I stopped giving a shit the day after my graduation.
00:37:04
Speaker
I'm never going to see these clowns again.
00:37:06
Speaker
And I just, yeah, I like graduated from my small town high school.
00:37:13
Speaker
Like I'm never going to see you fucking townies ever again.
00:37:15
Speaker
Peace out, bitch.
00:37:16
Speaker
I'm off to the big city.
00:37:17
Speaker
Basically.
00:37:20
Speaker
Healthy selfless too.
00:37:21
Speaker
Okay, so next paragraph.
00:37:22
Speaker
Now femcels are scattered across what Kay tentatively calls the femisphere.
00:37:26
Speaker
Some left Reddit altogether, moving instead to small femcels-specific boards on the Reddit lookalike site, The Pink Pill, which has only 580 members.
00:37:35
Speaker
Another reason the femcels subculture is difficult to visualize and comprehend, they're unwanted even in many women-only spaces, so they sometimes hide or are hidden.
00:37:43
Speaker
They were tolerated in the notorious female dating strategy subreddit for a while, but we're later kicked out.
00:37:49
Speaker
This is...
00:37:50
Speaker
I'm trying to see these two links here.
00:37:52
Speaker
So there's one link to the Jezebel article and the second link is to, oh, this is to jam.
00:37:57
Speaker
So the word notorious is highlighted and then it goes to the Jezebel article, which again, it annoys me that like that is now that piece of shit that they call journalism is now seen as like, oh, that's the defining article of like, if you want to understand FDS, go read that kind of thing.
00:38:12
Speaker
Right.
00:38:12
Speaker
It's so dishonest.
00:38:13
Speaker
Right.
00:38:13
Speaker
But then it says, but we're later kicked out.
00:38:15
Speaker
Let's click on that.
00:38:16
Speaker
Where does that go?
00:38:17
Speaker
And that was clicked.
00:38:18
Speaker
And that goes to a rant by the OG Jammies.
00:38:21
Speaker
Oh, isn't it closed because the subreddit's private?
00:38:23
Speaker
Well, no, they have an archive link here.
00:38:25
Speaker
That was the OG Jammies ranting.
00:38:27
Speaker
Reminder, FDS is not wig-tow over Femsel.
00:38:29
Speaker
We're a dating strategy.
00:38:30
Speaker
So you should date.
00:38:31
Speaker
Oh, yeah, I remember that one.
00:38:32
Speaker
That was a really good day, actually.
00:38:34
Speaker
I really enjoyed that.
00:38:35
Speaker
Public dragging of everyone.
00:38:36
Speaker
I really enjoyed that day as a moderator.
00:38:41
Speaker
the first in a long series of mods versus the user base yeah of like disagreements between the fds mods and the fds user base being like you know you should level up and stop being as sad fucking losers like and then the user base who are still sad non-leveled up being like how dare you i
00:38:58
Speaker
If I remember correctly, because this is after the true fem cells was banned.
00:39:01
Speaker
And this is when we started seeing that massive uptick of fem cell activity.
00:39:05
Speaker
And it started pissing everybody off on the mod team.
00:39:07
Speaker
Like, y'all, could y'all like stop posting?
00:39:09
Speaker
Because every other post would be about lookism and then like racist facial standards.
00:39:14
Speaker
There was one fem cell who went off like, yeah, she posted a article.
00:39:19
Speaker
It was about...
00:39:20
Speaker
a certain like race space.
00:39:22
Speaker
It was a racially themed article, which we removed because we thought it could be like construed as like racist.
00:39:27
Speaker
And she went off on us like accusing FDS mods of being racist for like not letting her speak her truth and stuff.
00:39:35
Speaker
And she just like went on like a one year like harassment campaign against FDS mods because we removed her post and banned her.
00:39:42
Speaker
Was that the one that showed up to our lecture that we did with Gail Dines?
00:39:46
Speaker
I think that was the same one.
00:39:47
Speaker
Yes, I think that was the same one.
00:39:50
Speaker
Yeah, this woman is mental.
00:39:51
Speaker
She went around to all of the FDS dissent subs, like saying like FDS mods are racist and like not having any receipts or proof, like just saying like they removed my post, which was racist.
00:40:02
Speaker
And therefore that makes them racist.
00:40:03
Speaker
She got up at like the crack of dawn, paid $30 to come harass us at a lecture we gave with Dr. Gail Dines.
00:40:10
Speaker
It was pretty, pretty mental.
00:40:12
Speaker
So I was like, yeah, I'm
00:40:14
Speaker
This is why they can't sit with us.
00:40:15
Speaker
This is why they can't sit with us, right?
00:40:17
Speaker
This is why we're allowed to draw boundaries with these types of women.
00:40:19
Speaker
Like, I've actually met a few women like this in real life where it's hard to describe it.
00:40:23
Speaker
They just get a sort of strange obsession with me.
00:40:26
Speaker
Like, I have to destroy her.
00:40:27
Speaker
I call them ankle biters because I touched on this idea, you know, overcoming conflicts with women, the catfight episode.
00:40:33
Speaker
There's a specific type of woman where like she is of a lower status than me in her mind.
00:40:39
Speaker
Even if I treat her as my equal, like in her mind, she sees herself as beneath me.
00:40:43
Speaker
And then she's like, has this sort of like, I have to fight the power.
00:40:46
Speaker
I need to take down Lilith.
00:40:47
Speaker
Like bitch thinks she's so hot.
00:40:48
Speaker
Well, I'm going to like, or that bitch thinks she's hot shit.
00:40:51
Speaker
Like she thinks she's so good at her career.
00:40:53
Speaker
She thinks she's got this and she's got the man and...
00:40:55
Speaker
whatever like they'll just decide that they hate me and become just obsessed with like just ankle biting it's just so kind of weird and pathetic because they're coming at it from like beneath me right so it's kind of like a little yappy chihuahua just like like you know so it's not effective that's the other thing is like dedicate years of their lives to trying to like destroy me but it's mostly not effective and just makes them look crazy
00:41:18
Speaker
Like I said, if they were there to just ask about strategies to date, if you're not quote unquote traditionally attractive, then that'd be one thing.
00:41:26
Speaker
But all of this other stuff that they're doing is a problem.
00:41:29
Speaker
So that's kind of why we had to tell the themselves to get lost.
00:41:34
Speaker
Okay, so the forever alone subreddit welcomes them but forbids the use of any incel or femcel lingo.
00:41:39
Speaker
A woman-only 4chan-like image board called lolcow.farm has a reputation as another site that femcels have drifted to and is covered with femcel lingo, but verently denied their presence there when I posted on the site about the story.
00:41:52
Speaker
They're a fringe group that is mostly a meme, one commenter wrote.
00:41:55
Speaker
Femcels aren't real, another added.
00:41:57
Speaker
I do think that femcels are real, but they are a
Societal Roles and Adaptation
00:42:00
Speaker
fringe group, yeah.
00:42:00
Speaker
Femcels are real and their existence has meaning, but thinking of them as a unified group with specific political goals is less useful than thinking of them as overlooked individuals who are now being swept around the web, sometimes letting their insecurities and resentments lead them into unproductive conversations.
00:42:15
Speaker
The architecture of many of the forums they've ended up in encourages defensiveness, border, patrolling, exclusion, even aggression.
00:42:23
Speaker
For instance, while femcel culture is not inherently transphobic, there is an overlap or amenability to transphobia, Kay told me.
00:42:29
Speaker
Fem cells, especially now, tend to find themselves on identity-based forums that are fixated on biological essentialist ideas of gender.
00:42:37
Speaker
Women are like this, men are like that, as Kay put it, more stagnant than revolutionary.
00:42:41
Speaker
These spaces do just kind of become inward-looking, very defensive, rather than about imagining radical new futures, she said.
00:42:47
Speaker
So the problem is, is that once again, I feel like they're shoehorning transphobia into everything.
00:42:52
Speaker
Oh, they're all right.
00:42:53
Speaker
Oh, they're white.
00:42:53
Speaker
Oh, they're transphobic.
00:42:54
Speaker
Like they're trying to shoehorn a lot of other like femcells are politically diverse, just like incels are.
00:42:59
Speaker
OK, as I just said, there's trad femcells, there's rad femcells, there's lib femcells.
00:43:04
Speaker
Trad femcells go on TikTok in their little house in the prairie dress and talk about how submissive they are and why aren't men picking them like.
00:43:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:12
Speaker
And then there's the rad fem cells.
00:43:14
Speaker
Those are the ones who tend to be more, quote unquote, transphobic.
00:43:16
Speaker
They're the ones who, you know, I call them black pillars.
00:43:19
Speaker
Generally, they just like make fun of women they don't like and make fun of men in dresses.
00:43:22
Speaker
That's the extent and limitation of their political activism.
00:43:26
Speaker
And then there's the lib fem cells who are generally more like the, you know, if lesbians don't take dick, they're a bigot.
00:43:31
Speaker
The lip fem cells will say things like policing trans women's gender expression is contributing to lookism, right?
00:43:37
Speaker
They're the ones that will say things like black women don't fit mainstream beauty standards, just like trans women don't fit mainstream beauty standards.
00:43:44
Speaker
Therefore, policing gender expression in trans women is racist and contributing to lookism and contributing to their fems of them.
00:43:52
Speaker
Right.
00:43:53
Speaker
So like this is just not true.
00:43:54
Speaker
Right.
00:43:54
Speaker
This is where I kind of feel like they cherry pick what they want to see to push certain narratives.
00:43:58
Speaker
But like I said, there are liberal fem cells who are pro trans ideology and they justify it under the lens of like, oh, if trans women aren't considered women, even if they look very, very masculine, then I'm going to get policed in my beauty expression, too.
00:44:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:10
Speaker
They equate being a fem cell and being unattractive woman to being saying that same experience is the experience of being trans.
00:44:16
Speaker
So again, politically diverse, them cherry picking the narrative that they want to see here in the Atlantic is just false.
00:44:23
Speaker
So once again, trying to shoehorn the conversation a certain way.
00:44:25
Speaker
And again, I don't understand what they mean by imagining radical new futures.
00:44:28
Speaker
And this is how they always do a cop out here.
00:44:31
Speaker
What radical new futures?
00:44:32
Speaker
People have been having sex for millions upon millions of years, and there are some things about that are fairly consistent.
00:44:38
Speaker
So when they say imagining radical new futures, I would love to see their outline of that.
00:44:41
Speaker
But again, this is how they kind of hide them not having actual solutions, right?
00:44:45
Speaker
Okay, so in the past year, the term femcel has taken a surprising turn.
00:44:49
Speaker
It has been adopted by mainstream internet.
00:44:51
Speaker
On Twitter, it's an easy synonym for depressed or not dating right now.
00:44:54
Speaker
On Instagram, it's a sort of funny word to pair with a baffling meme or a picture in which you actually look really hot and disaffected.
00:45:01
Speaker
It's newly popular on TikTok, which has seen an odd trend towards semi-ironic sex negativity.
00:45:06
Speaker
And on Tumblr, it's the latest word for describing your basic Tumblr user, a romantic loner who likes the blog.
00:45:11
Speaker
The era of the incel is over.
00:45:12
Speaker
The era of the fence cell has begun, reads a tweet that has been circulating as a meme.
00:45:16
Speaker
The text appears above a graph that shows an increase in the number of women under 35 who say they have not had sex in the past year.
00:45:22
Speaker
The graph was created by a right-wing think tank with the creepy task of promoting the natural family.
00:45:27
Speaker
I think it's pretty normal that a lot of women who haven't had sex in the past year because of the pandemic, right?
00:45:32
Speaker
I wasn't like seriously looking for a boyfriend for like the first three quarters of the pandemic.
00:45:37
Speaker
So does that make me a fence cell?
00:45:39
Speaker
Like, no.
00:45:40
Speaker
You know, it's pretty normal, I guess.
00:45:42
Speaker
Yeah, it went down in 2021.
00:45:44
Speaker
Oh, so they didn't have sex during the pandemic?
00:45:46
Speaker
Duh.
00:45:47
Speaker
There was like a massive spike in 2019, 2020, 2021.
00:45:50
Speaker
So I'm like, yeah, 2020 is when the pandemic took off.
00:45:54
Speaker
And we've been talking about this in
00:45:55
Speaker
In general, a lot of women are losing their appetite for dating because a lot of men are just like, you know, they just live within their mom's basement playing video games, jerking off to porn.
00:46:02
Speaker
Like the overall quality of men is generally decreased.
00:46:04
Speaker
And I guess men are unhappy with women because we're not the submissive servants that they've been raised to think that they're entitled to.
00:46:10
Speaker
So, you know, men will be like, well, women aren't the sort of women that men want to date anymore either because they're not submissive and hot anymore.
00:46:15
Speaker
Okay, bye.
00:46:17
Speaker
We're good.
00:46:18
Speaker
We'd rather not date that.
00:46:19
Speaker
If men are unhappy with us for not being submissive and we're unhappy with them for being shitty, then it's probably best if we don't date.
00:46:25
Speaker
This is a war of attrition.
00:46:26
Speaker
We're just not going to fuck.
00:46:28
Speaker
So moving on.
00:46:28
Speaker
So it's like an appropriation of ugly girl culture, Amanda said, when I asked her about the diffusion of the term.
00:46:34
Speaker
I did kind of get that old feeling of like, you guys are not part of the group.
00:46:37
Speaker
You're too pretty to be part of this group.
00:46:39
Speaker
So basically the femcells are gatekeeping, femcelldom.
00:46:42
Speaker
The same thing with a lot of the women on the subreddit Vendicta who weren't that ugly either.
00:46:46
Speaker
We kept telling like there's literally nothing wrong with you.
00:46:48
Speaker
And in fact, you might even be considered pretty.
00:46:50
Speaker
So on Tumblr in particular, the word is totally divorced from its original meaning and is following the natural goofy path of any internet word that is perceived to confer edginess and intrigue.
00:47:00
Speaker
Lila, a 21-year-old Tumblr user, recently used the FemCell tag in a post that reads, in curling cursive script, asking myself if I can cook my instant noodles with vodka instead of water.
00:47:09
Speaker
The tropes of the toxic loner are not just for boys, she talks.
00:47:12
Speaker
Right.
00:47:18
Speaker
That's what happens with women.
00:47:19
Speaker
Tumblr users are adding hashtag femcel to images of antisocial icons like the super skinny and delusional Natalie Portman in Black Swan, the Lisbon sisters of the Virgin Suicides, and of course, Lana Del Rey, from whom they learned of the joys of cigarettes and cherry schnapps.
00:47:34
Speaker
I just thought that a word was funny and maybe even a little shocking.
00:47:37
Speaker
Hannah, a 19-year-old Tumblr user who also tagged some of her posts with FemCell, told me I knew it would get people's attention.
00:47:43
Speaker
Most of my posts are ironic.
00:47:44
Speaker
I've been in a relationship with my boyfriend for two years.
00:47:49
Speaker
that's you know what the funniest fucking thing is like i get so much hate on twitter for like oh you date men oh you know you're a traitor to women if you date men you know they think fds that we're traitors because we center men and so on but i was told recently by one of my contacts within the fem cell community who i'm mutuals with on twitter she was saying like no actually in all of our discord chats and all of our
00:48:13
Speaker
group chats and stuff, like most of these women who dunk on women for dating men are themselves in relationships with low value men.
00:48:20
Speaker
She said basically like the women who hate FDS the most are all women in relationships with shitty men.
00:48:26
Speaker
That makes the most sense, to be honest.
00:48:28
Speaker
Like nobody wants to reexamine their situation and whether or not it's benefiting them.
00:48:32
Speaker
So...
00:48:32
Speaker
I mean, no one's going to drag you up to get into the life where you belong.
00:48:35
Speaker
All right.
00:48:38
Speaker
Exactly.
00:48:39
Speaker
So here's the thing, like the reason why they're in relationships with these low value men, though, and they clearly unhappy in multi-year, like two, three, four, 10 year relationships with shitty men.
00:48:48
Speaker
And they feel like, oh, well, since I'm ugly, I'm not going to do any better.
00:48:51
Speaker
They'd rather stay in a relationship with a man that they hate because they think they can't do any better and they don't want to be single.
00:48:57
Speaker
Right.
00:48:57
Speaker
Sad as fuck.
00:48:58
Speaker
Like, I'm like, I can't relate.
00:48:59
Speaker
But no one's going to force them to change, right?
00:49:02
Speaker
That's why I kind of feel like, okay, if you don't want to be part of FDS, then don't.
00:49:05
Speaker
That's weird behavior to me.
00:49:07
Speaker
That's the category of women who become ankle biters.
00:49:09
Speaker
It's like they see women, they think that they're inferior.
00:49:11
Speaker
They see women they think are doing better than them and they just decide, I have to take you down.
00:49:15
Speaker
I have to destroy you.
00:49:16
Speaker
Next, as silly or maybe even annoying as that may be, using the word femcel more lightly could hold some promise.
00:49:22
Speaker
Its literal use has been nearly tapped out.
00:49:24
Speaker
At the personal level, true femcels see two main options for themselves.
00:49:27
Speaker
They either give up on love and society altogether to, quote, lie here and rot.
00:49:32
Speaker
Again, another reason why we didn't include them.
00:49:34
Speaker
FDS number one is like, if you want a high value man, you have to be a high value woman.
00:49:38
Speaker
You have to level up.
00:49:39
Speaker
The strategy.
00:49:40
Speaker
You have to have strategy.
00:49:41
Speaker
The whole lie here and rot attitude is fundamentally not compatible with FDS.
00:49:46
Speaker
Or they devote themselves to ascending through rigorous self-improvement and sometimes dangerous body modification.
00:49:51
Speaker
Broadly speaking, they're finding their way to extremes, but not toward anything revolutionary.
00:49:56
Speaker
A smaller number have recognized a more politically hopeful third option, Kay told me, which is to give up on men, but not on the world.
00:50:02
Speaker
In abandoning heterosexuality, they work on finding joy and intimacy in other ways, or focusing on other areas of life which are not to do with romance and sex.
00:50:11
Speaker
So the political lesbian black pillar crowd, the wig towels.
00:50:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:15
Speaker
And the wig towels, which again, we're not wig towels.
00:50:18
Speaker
I mean, there's some women that say they take breaks and they're not necessarily, you know, dating at the moment, but like as a lifestyle choice of singleness, as a lifestyle choice, that wasn't supposed to be what female dating strategy was about.
00:50:29
Speaker
It's about like engaging the world as it is.
00:50:32
Speaker
If you want to opt out, that's your choice, but it's just not the direction that we want it to go.
00:50:36
Speaker
Exactly.
00:50:36
Speaker
It's like, so again, I'm not against women taking breaks from dating.
00:50:39
Speaker
What bothers me is when the women who are not dating attack the women who are dating.
00:50:43
Speaker
That's a problem.
00:50:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:45
Speaker
But definitely finding joy and intimacy in ways in other areas of your life other than romance and sex is also really important for leveling up, even for women who are dating, in my opinion.
00:50:54
Speaker
Yeah, everyone should do that.
00:50:55
Speaker
We're not saying that you shouldn't do that.
00:50:57
Speaker
We're just saying that that's not just a fem cell thing.
00:50:59
Speaker
That's a being a normal person thing.
00:51:01
Speaker
If you've dedicated yourself to, quote, avoiding relationships of any kind, and that's a lifestyle choice that you've made, that's not conducive with the strategy of dating, right?
00:51:10
Speaker
So it's fine if you do that.
00:51:12
Speaker
It's just not... Female dating strategy was not the place for it.
00:51:14
Speaker
And so people keep trying to put that on there rather than going to, quote, forever alone or going to wig towel where that was their strategy that would have been more appropriate.
00:51:23
Speaker
That's how the mods ended up raging against the user base that appeared on female dating strategy after Wigtow, True Fem Cells, and a bunch of other female subreddits got banned.
00:51:31
Speaker
I don't think Wigtow got... Did Wigtow get banned?
00:51:33
Speaker
Did it?
00:51:34
Speaker
Again, if it got banned, I'm not a Wigtow, but I would be so mad if they... Okay, no, it didn't get banned.
00:51:38
Speaker
Okay, good.
00:51:39
Speaker
Because I don't think Wigtow is the male one.
00:51:41
Speaker
I don't think that one's been banned yet, but it's quarantined.
00:51:44
Speaker
MGTOW got banned because they were linked to another terrorist attack.
00:51:46
Speaker
So MGTOW is definitely banned now, but it was, it's fairly recent.
00:51:49
Speaker
Oh, right, right.
00:51:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:50
Speaker
But the women going their own way are so innocent.
00:51:53
Speaker
Like they just like post like pictures of their cats and like gardens and like aesthetic pictures of like tea and stuff like that, or their car.
00:51:59
Speaker
And it's like way more chill.
00:52:00
Speaker
And overall, like, you know, yeah, they complain about men, but I say it's like less bad than way, way, way less bad than MGTOW.
00:52:07
Speaker
Yeah, MGTOW, their users were actually linked to terrorist attacks, meaning like straight up people found the posts that several people made before they committed out terrorist attacks.
00:52:16
Speaker
So that's why Reddit shut them down finally.
00:52:18
Speaker
Okay, so use more airily.
00:52:19
Speaker
The term femcel still highlights certain contradictions in contemporary life.
00:52:22
Speaker
There are many people who are experiencing similar, less articulated anxiety about their place in the gender order and about the pressure to locate happiness through sex and romance, which they must find through success in a marketplace.
00:52:33
Speaker
The 21st century was supposed to bring a wider range of options than this, but to many, it doesn't appear to have.
00:52:38
Speaker
There are still winners and losers, Kay argues.
00:52:40
Speaker
She also cites the feminist philosopher Amiya Srinivasan's 2018 essay on incels.
00:52:44
Speaker
Does anyone have the right to sex?
00:52:46
Speaker
Absolutely the fuck not.
00:52:47
Speaker
In it, Srinivasan wonders how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn't is a political question.
00:53:01
Speaker
I mean, it's partially is.
00:53:02
Speaker
It partially is in the sense of like, yes, there are some things about like attractiveness that can be sort of culturally influenced.
00:53:10
Speaker
And a lot of that has to do with perceptions of wealth, right?
00:53:13
Speaker
That's how like, yeah, the whole BBL thing became big.
00:53:16
Speaker
And then back in the day when women who had more weight were considered more attractive because the wealthy could afford more food.
00:53:21
Speaker
A lot of
00:53:22
Speaker
what we consider attractive is set by wealthy.
00:53:24
Speaker
So in some respects, it can be politicized in the sense of, yeah, women's aspiration to attractiveness is set by the wealthy.
00:53:31
Speaker
But the thing is, it's like for men in general, there's such a wide, actual diverse amount of things they find sexually attractive that more or less the beauty standards exist as a way to sell women products.
00:53:43
Speaker
Because you could be a woman who looks like a supermodel and be working class.
00:53:46
Speaker
And it's not going to put you up on the social hierarchy just because you see another model who is from like, you know, who's like a nepotism baby model, someone like Kendall Jenner or Hailey Bieber.
00:53:56
Speaker
And you could look just like them, but be working class and your life is going to be completely different.
00:54:00
Speaker
So in a lot of ways, like the beauty standard exists just for rich people sell poor women products.
00:54:06
Speaker
But it doesn't change that men, you know, I mean, like, there's a lot of men that still like thick women that still like women who don't look like models who don't look like that, right?
00:54:14
Speaker
First of all, I actually just want to say, like, we do get criticism sometimes on FDS where we say, like, yeah, even if you're not a supermodel, men will still want to fuck you.
00:54:22
Speaker
And like, I almost feel like, who cares?
00:54:24
Speaker
Like, it doesn't matter if men will want to fuck you.
00:54:26
Speaker
Men will fuck an apple pie.
00:54:27
Speaker
They will fuck a hole in the ground.
00:54:29
Speaker
Okay.
00:54:30
Speaker
Men will stick their dick in anything.
00:54:31
Speaker
They don't care.
00:54:32
Speaker
Right.
00:54:32
Speaker
So just because men will fuck you, I feel like your attractiveness or your value as a person shouldn't really like be based on that.
00:54:38
Speaker
But, you know, we've talked about that with the fem self feminism episode.
00:54:41
Speaker
It doesn't have that much as much currency as people try to make it seem like we keep trying to express that to people that like there's a lot of very beautiful women that get treated like absolute shit in their relationships.
00:54:52
Speaker
Just think of how many celebrities are constantly cheated on or deal with skirts.
00:54:56
Speaker
Some men will be deliberately mentally abusive to attractive women to try to make her have lower self-esteem so that she'll be more available to him, right?
00:55:04
Speaker
In fact, like in the pickup artist community, they say, oh, if she's ugly, you should compliment her.
00:55:08
Speaker
That'll make her feel special.
00:55:09
Speaker
If she's attractive, you should neg her and insult her.
00:55:12
Speaker
That'll take her ego down or whatever, right?
00:55:14
Speaker
So...
00:55:15
Speaker
Every woman gets misogyny, but pretty privilege is, I feel, actually just female oppression.
00:55:19
Speaker
But like this idea that like, oh, you only deserve to be treated well if you're beautiful or that, you know, attractive women get it better.
00:55:26
Speaker
That's how it is.
00:55:26
Speaker
A sign of female oppression, that's not pretty privilege.
00:55:29
Speaker
And you can never be beautiful enough to outrun female oppression.
00:55:33
Speaker
Ask like literally any beautiful, ask Halle Berry, ask any of the Kardashians, right?
00:55:38
Speaker
Like they, all of their husbands have treated them like shit or boyfriends have treated them like shit.
00:55:41
Speaker
That's part of why they still have a show all these years later.
00:55:44
Speaker
So, I mean, Kardashians slash Jenners, the idea that you can like get pretty enough to outrun cultural misogyny is false.
Conclusion and Future Discussions
00:55:51
Speaker
And so I think sometimes fem cells overemphasize looks when what they're experiencing is just garden variety misogyny that would happen even if they were attractive.
00:55:59
Speaker
It just would take maybe a slightly different form.
00:56:02
Speaker
Who is desired and who isn't is a political question.
00:56:04
Speaker
Femsels dwell in that ambivalent space all the time.
00:56:06
Speaker
Some may risk, as they say, rotting there, but others may emerge having thought more deeply than most about alternative ways of ordering their lives, of finding happiness and dignity on their own terms.
00:56:15
Speaker
Amanda no longer thinks of herself as a femsel, and she looks back on the time when she did as an experience.
00:56:20
Speaker
Her era of, quote, femseldom, as she calls it.
00:56:22
Speaker
Today, she's sympathetic toward the young women who have adopted the word, even if somewhat insincerely or inaccurately.
00:56:28
Speaker
On the internet, young women see more images of beautiful people every day than they have at any other time in history, she pointed out.
00:56:34
Speaker
A TikTok feed is basically the popular girl in high school times 10 million.
00:56:37
Speaker
It's easy to feel like an outsider, and it's also easy to feel like you've been lied to.
00:56:41
Speaker
If traditional beauty standards don't matter, then why are they still celebrated all the time?
00:56:44
Speaker
What are we, stupid?
00:56:46
Speaker
I think for girls, it just feels kind of infantilizing, she said.
00:56:49
Speaker
Like, we're not allowed to think of ourselves as how we really see ourselves.
00:56:52
Speaker
It was illuminating for a time to have a word for that.
00:56:55
Speaker
You know what?
00:56:55
Speaker
I think mostly like this article, other than like the weird political shoehorning that we talked about, I did mostly like this article.
00:57:01
Speaker
I thought it was somewhat fair to, you know, relatively fair to the femcels.
00:57:05
Speaker
And I do think it is important to have these kinds of conversations.
00:57:08
Speaker
Yeah, I want to do a part two of this episode where we actually do some fem cell dating strategies because we didn't really get into the meat of the strategy that we wanted to in this episode.
00:57:16
Speaker
But meaning like, what do you do if you are truly just a fem cell?
00:57:20
Speaker
Meaning there's something with you that's so far outside the norm.
00:57:24
Speaker
How do you then navigate the dating space?
00:57:26
Speaker
So I think
00:57:26
Speaker
there's room for discussion on that.
00:57:28
Speaker
And we can talk about the pressures that are against you as a fem cell.
00:57:30
Speaker
But I think this article was really illuminating because I think it's going to actually describe what we were talking about as far as like, first of all, interactions with fem cells, but also give more color to what the movement is and what's happening.
00:57:41
Speaker
And then from there, we can take what's actually happening to these women and then create some applicable strategies, which we'll do in part two, I think, of this episode.
00:57:49
Speaker
So thanks for listening, queens.
00:57:51
Speaker
Check out our Patreon, patreon.com forward slash the female dating strategy for weekly bonus content and our Twitter at femdatstrat as well as our Instagram at underscore the female dating strategy and our website, www.thefemaledatingstrategy.com if you want to talk about this episode.
00:58:06
Speaker
And also we're starting to ramp up.
00:58:07
Speaker
There's a lot of people posting on there now.
00:58:09
Speaker
So check out the forum.
00:58:10
Speaker
Thanks for listening, queens.
00:58:11
Speaker
And for all you insoles out there, it's over for you, bro.
00:58:14
Speaker
Die mad.