7mo ago

Welcome to the femosphere, the latest dark, toxic corner of the internet… for women

www.theguardian.com

Summary

The “femosphere,” a growing online space for women, mirrors the misogynistic “manosphere” with toxic ideologies, including anti-gender equality views and strategies to “conquer” men.

The term describes communities like Female Dating Strategy and “dark feminine” influencers who reject liberal feminism, advocating traditional gender roles as empowering.

“Femcel” influencers urge their followers to give up on gender equality and use men for financial gain – in the name of feminism.

Critics warn these spaces mix conservative and feminist ideas, creating “anti-feminist feminism” that appeals to those disillusioned with mainstream feminism.

While less linked to violence than the manosphere, researchers caution against its potential for radicalization and harm.

121 comments

In the femosphere, as in the manosphere, there’s an overarching belief that life is about survival of the fittest, that men will always hurt women and that will never change, so strategies are needed to conquer the opposite gender.
I'm not a massive fan of the guy they nailed to a tree 2000 years ago for saying maybe people should be nice to each other once in a while, but the violent reaction to that suggestion no longer surprises me.
- Look we just need to move around small bits of green paper and everything will be fine.
  
  And then the Vogons show up...
- To be fair, he also suggested if they worshipped other gods, they'd be punished in hell for it. That's why I'm not a massive fan. But I like the 'be nice to people' part.
- That guy is a made up story. No more, no less.
  Edit: oh my, so much salt. Just keep downvoting me if it makes you cope better with the facts. It's OK.
  
  That's not really my point.
  
  What an insufferable way to be. No one honestly cares either way
  
  Lol til "cope" = "being bored by a boring and irrelevant topic"
Wait, femcels are a legit thing? I thought that Lemmy meme group was just a joke.
- That's not what happened in this situation, but it is how we got those flat earther idiots. Femcel was a term used for years, even back on reddit, long before the API controversy and the exodus to Lemmy.
- "Female Dating Strategy", at least, has been around on Reddit for years and years.
- I think that the femcel meme group here on Lemmy seem much happier to just post about being horny and I think pretty clearly don't subscribe to this ideology at all.
- Pretty sure it's mostly a trans group on here.
Sounds like a snazzy new bunch of nonsense that's just describing the age old concepts of prostitution and being a gold digger.
In a way they're acting as feminists by proving that girls can indeed do everything boys do, including being assholes on the Internet for fame and fortune.
- Yeah nothing new here. Just regression.
- Feminism is about equality. This is not feminism
  
  Idk, "equally shitty" does have equality in it. 🤔
I feel bad for all the dumb guys who get robbed blind by all these con artist grifters. Whether it's someone like Andrew Tate or some OF model, they're getting taken for a ride.
If there's some young man reading this who has or is considering giving money to a manosphere grifter or some cam model, just know they don't know you, they don't care about you, they only want your money. You're nothing but a mark to them. Get off the Internet, go to church, or go to school, or to the library, or do some volunteer work in your community. Meet a nice girl, in real life, treat her right, and cultivate a real, lasting relationship.
- Yeah, don't give your money to people give it to the church.
  
  Ah, the original grifters for thousands of years.
- Irrelevant to this post.
  
  I think it's relevant, but I admit I failed to acknowledge a critical part of this situation: the ways in which women are harmed by these circumstances. Obviously, there are the direct effects of the kinds of misogyny peddled by men like Tate, but there are also the less direct and mostly unintentional effects of the broader movement that helped create the conditions that made the manosphere possible.
  Liberal feminism tried to liberate women, but unintentionally ended up confining them to a different kind of prison, one in which they would remain the person primarily responsible for keeping house and caring for children, but in which they would also be the sole financial provider, as well. Liberal feminism convinced women that it would be liberating for them to take on both traditional, household gender roles, but all it did was saddle women with an even greater burden.
  Meanwhile, the movement to make women independent left a lot of men lonely, bitter, and resentful, ideal for manosphere grifters and parasocial cam models to exploit. It really was a scenario that ended up making essentially everyone worse off. It also absolved men of any of their previous responsibilities.
  I think people need to abandon the idea that freedom comes from independence. Independence can be liberating, but it can also be isolating, and burdensome. A person who lives totally self sufficiently, alone in a cabin in the woods is independent, but also lonely and saddled with the entire burden of survival. Many hands make the burden light, fewer hands make it heavy.
  Where liberalism fails time and time again is in its antisocial tendencies. Liberalism's focus on the atomized individual so often disregards relationships of interdependence, or even sees them as antithetical or hostile to individual freedom. But this mentality ignores the inherently social nature of our species, as well as the absolute material necessity of social arrangements.
Lots wrong in this article...
“I used to be a feminist before I saw the effects of third wave feminism,” Batra said. “This has forced women into masculine roles where they are pursuing men.”
But that's dumb, for a shit ton of reasons it works out best when women are the ones who first show interest rather than men hitting on anything that moves
- I think if it were true that women made moves first sometimes, it would help all of society in ways we cannot even comprehend. It would not be a bad thing. But it's still pretty rare in the places I've lived.
- Do you mean there's lots wrong in the movement or the actual article because that's just a direct quote
  
  I meant there are lots of things wrong in the article.
  But that quote was dumb.
  I realize that's almost exactly word for word what I said the first time, but I can't think of any easier way to say it.
  It's two distinct statements, I guess it would have been clearer to put:
  But:
  "Quote"
  Instead of putting the "but" after the quote but that just seemed cumbersome and it flowed better keeping the text together
Thankfully this is a community that was left on reddit. Same with the manosphere.
There seems to be a lack of gender culture war bs on lemmy that you see on a lot of other platforms. It's good that there is a pretty progressive consensus on gender here. Probably enforced by a legion of trans people, and to that I say thank you for your service.
- There literally is a femcel meme community on blahaj.zone.
  
  And it is unironically the best meme com on lemmy
- The Blahaj mods are doing everything possible to fuck this up
  
  Can you explain yourself? I haven't seen much other than positive messages and commiserating over the future of the queer community from Blahaj.
The article doesn't really address the brand of revenge "feminism" I've seen on that sub and mostly frames it as women who want to become trad wives because it's easy. What I've seen is that they basically want to find sugar daddies while also really, really hating men in general, especially the "low status" ones.
How did they get to that point? I suspect it's a variation of mean world syndrome, fueled by ideas like the poisonous M&M analogy (understood not as a call to be cautious but to treat every man as if they were bad) and seeing men and women as as coherent classes engaging in warfare. All watered down to simple talking points that fit in a punchy tweet. If men as a group do/don't do this for me then it's okay to be awful to any individual one because he's the enemy too.
Hateful, dehumanizing thinking. So yes, they do mirror the Andrew Tate dudes pretty much exactly, including being trans-exclusive.
- There was one female content creator who I was passively keeping an eye on who just went alt right. She blames other women for having more the ten partners for her inability to find/keep a boyfriend.
  
  I'm a happily married man but if I were single, I wouldn't be interested in a woman that hasn't had more than ten partners.
The gender war continues, and my nonbinary ass is sitting back and not getting involved.
- The best part about being in the middle is that both teams hate you! /s
  I personally identify as a non-conforming man and the amount of hate I get from traditionalists on both sides is deeply disappointing.
  
  Genuine question, what do you mean by non-conforming?
  
  Yeah, people feel threatened by any behavior that doesn't conform to their norms. I practice apathy towards their attitudes, and keep an eye out for violence.
- Ace here. I feel you. I may be male presenting but I have no interest in anything beyond platonic, and even then that’s a stretch.
  
  I've got some ace friends, we all see the insanity in the world, then focus on playing a board game. Current favorite: Terraforming Mars
- "If there's war between the sexes then there'll be no people left..."
  
  ... Only left leaning people.
- First they came for the gendered minorities..
I'm ok with this on one condition...
- Fucking hell I lost
  But so have all of you.
  
  The only winning move is not to play.
On one hand? Woo equality I guess
On the other? This shit again? We gonna get a Femdrew Tate or some shit? Eesh.
- One can't dream that they will marry each other and finally leave the rest of the world alone?
- There are some seriously scary trad wife content creators.
Damn, I worry this is going to create a lot of psychically and emotionally damaged people of all genders.
My advice to anyone dating is to protect yourself, but be open to the idea that someone may be a good person. If someone can’t be your friend, then they’re not lifelong partner material.
Don’t commit resources to someone until you get married, giving people money for a “relationship” is pretty much the formula of pig butchering scams.
Be careful out there folks.
“It’s incredibly conservative, but it’s trying to reframe it as being this empowering strategy.”
- That is the exact vibe I got about whatshername shooting the dog.
They had this some 20 years ago, only then it was called “The Rules”.
My only exposure to the term femcel was from lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/femcelmemes which appears to be the antithesis of what this article describes. My perspective on some irl comments I've heard has totally changed.
Looking over at reddit for a femcelmemes equivalent it seems like r/femcelgrippysockjail is the closest but damn do they hate men over there. Yet are weirdly cool with trans women?
I'm assuming femcelmemes on blahaj.zone is ironic or just unrelated? Either way, going to steer clear of anyone who associates with that term cuz damn that's a lot of hatred and negativity.
- People are comfortable with using "femcel" more loosely and jokingly than "incel" because women aren't the Violence Gender™
- Yet are weirdly cool with
  other women
  
  Their point is most groups this hateful reject trans women just as violently as Cis men. This is a case of odd internal consistency and I'd give them points for it except for everything else
“Femcel” influencers urge their followers to give up on gender equality and use men for financial gain
I'm kinda struggling with the math here.
You might be able to date several men simultaneously and get some free dinners and maybe trinkets and baubles, but it would seem difficult to get much more "financial gain" than that given that most men don't have enough money to say, rent a posh apartment for their side dish.
The only way to really get "financial gain" is through marriage, which of course is a game that has been played since the dawn of time, but is not particularly engaging content in that you need to be married for several years to be able to separate and carry off a significant chunk of the marrital assets.
Surely, if you had the requisite appearance and guile for any of this the quickest and easiest pathway to financial gain would be taking money from incels on onlyfans.
I guess they have been empowered to choose how to live thwir lives as they please.
- I think most of the problems we have in society are from isolating and ignoring these communities.
  Police think everyone is a crook. Doctors think everyone gets cancer. Mechanics think that every Nissan rogue will have its transmission fail at 100,000km.
  It's a perception bias. If I wanna change the mechanics mind, I need to get him out of the shop, into the real world. Let them drive around some rogues who's transmissions DO work.
  We basically provide the tools to sequester these communities and are surprised what crawls out of the petri dish.
Thanks for sharing this. TIL that femcels exist.
Is there a humanosphere as well? Or would that just be plain ol' Fediverse?
- I think that’s just most people.
  
  Yes, but what most people think is not represented properly on mainstream social media, unfortunately.
Our FEMCEL memes are cheeky and fun. Their femcel memes are tragic and cruel
This is basically my experience of western millennial women from upper middle class. But they do it unconsciously.
They read all the feminist literature and talk about it a lot. But then they for sure expect you to pay for everything and handle all practical things.. After all you earn more (because you're older, work more and didn't go for a useless art or HR degree). Also, you have to account for all bad things that happenes to other women in different places and time. Grrr..
They also feel very confused because of this big central hypocracy in their life. But whatever you do, don't mention it or question their self-image. That will just cause more work and expenses.
- I'ma go ahead and give you an acknowledgement here as it is my experience with this population, too... You know... Before the downvotes come running in.

121 comments