I have been an outsider looking into incel spaces for the best part of a decade. I have loved them, I love reading rants about bone-structure, proclamations about the virtues of leg-lengthening surgery, and I am rarely more excited than when I see a fresh sincere post by a lonely gentleman about how miserable his prospects are. They are of course uniformly wrong about the state of the world, and I have never been able to see the world from their narrow and socially stunted perspective. The golden years were pre-2016, before the word incel entered the popular lexicon and the most hateful forums existed in the far corners of the internet. At this time, incels were genuinely bizarre. Few people new of their existence and never would I have imagined that (suffix)-cel or (suffix)-maxxing would find their way into the mouths of ordinary folk.
As with almost all things, being an incel connoisseur got much worse after 2016, suddenly everyone who was once a garden variety misogynist was now an incel in the eyes of most liberals in the wake of the Trump election. The small Facebook group I once frequented ballooned into a continuous stream of the same 5 famous posts recycled daily. I propose that this was due to two compounding factors. First, the rise of incel subreddits (as opposed to dedicated forums) made content briefly more accessible, exposing people to heinous content, while the rapid demise of said subreddits led to a sudden drought of content almost immediately. The people loved incel content but were not willing to crawl through the mud to get it.
In the mean time, half a million content cycles past, and the discourse devoured incel culture, incorporating it into mainstream culture in its wake. In 2020, we even got an incel documentary, TFW No GF, which personally I liked but of course as with all media written about online communities was met with ambivalence by the community itself. In the meantime I eventually ‘deleted’ my twitter account, and in a moment of weakness started rebrowsing reddit. Though the days r/braincels and r/trucels were long gone, the remnants of these communities could still be felt. In particular, ‘post-left’ communities, comprised mostly of bernie bros, 4Chan refugees, and the contemporary fans of many of the largest podcasts (I want to die writing this), and incels found their way to growing subreddits. Most of these groups were really familiar to me, but a new clique emerged and I was instantly infatuated - the femcels.
A vocal community of women united by their disdain for men and in particular their romantic relationships with men. Many great power users from across the globe, posting a 24 hour chorus on topics ranging from their disappointing dates, hatred of sex work, perfected skin care routines, screaming into the void, the works of Sylvia Plath, coquette waif fairy-core, Lana Del Rey, and traditional Catholicism (or famously, Islam). Many of them also discussed their Tumblr accounts, longing for their days of fashion reblogging, their extensive educations, and high paying corporate jobs. The ‘bitterness’ was a sliding scale, with some lamenting their predicament, while others proudly boasted that they would proudly be alone until they could secure a high value male. Generally, I really enjoyed sharing an online space with them, they were infinitely more diverse posters then the tireless hate pedaling of the traditional incel. Though naturally they did not want anything to do with me, I was always curious and supportive (once I asked for advice on the Femcel canon and was met with a simple ‘they aren’t for you’, which you know fair enough),
Over time it became clear that Femcel was clearly a misnomer. Many of these women were not simply regularly dating men but in some cases they were even married. And after discussion with my friend, a fellow Femcel scholar, it became clear that there was almost no relation between the incel and the Femcel. Someone could argue, that many Femcels are in fact volcels, and while that may be true in name, true volcels were often far more hateful miserable creatures. With the aid of google scholar I embarked on a journey to try and catch up the early history of the Femcel. I believe Post45’s collection of essays on Heteropessimism is the best analysis of the movement more generally. In summary, the Femcel is merely the latest instantiation of the belief that heterosexual relationships are unrewarding, and in some sense so oppressive that they should be ignored all together. This analysis of course ignores the not insignificant group of queer Femcels but nevertheless this feels compelling to me.
While now I have left these communities behind for the most part, my tolerance for incels has been entirely surpassed by my fascination with Femcels. Though ultimately I have always been a romantic idealist, I do understand their plight, something I could never grasp for the male variant. In 2023, even the term Femcel is being rapidly diluted by Tiktok and other cannibalistic media platforms hungry for new content templates, it is stolen valour to post a Femcel outfit if you weren’t in the trenches denigrating random men in the comments at 3 am. Upon reflection, I have probably been thinking about them too much, indulging too much gender content (though this is far more fulfilling than culture war content), alternatively the othering that comes through thinking about them in this way makes me miss them even more, it makes me want to post screenshots from Possession (1981) on reddit one last time.
