Femcels the feminine version of incels – minus the violence

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Well, no one’s dead yet.

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And women who can’t hook up aren’t unleashing their fury on bedroom frequent fliers. At least not yet.

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A new word has entered the lexicon and it’s gaining steam: Femcel or involuntary female celibate. They are the opposite numbers of the notorious incel digital cult who have murdered scores of people from California to Toronto.

Femcel defined are women who feel excluded from romantic relationships. Mostly, according to the London Evening Standard, these women are insecure about their looks.

Now they have developed a community. On TikTok, #femcel had 550 million views as Thursday.

One 20-year-old British woman told the Standard she spent her teenage years “uncomfortable, self-conscious — just horrible every time I looked in a mirror.”

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Anna added: “I was bullied a lot at school. It’s not enough to look average anymore. I found it difficult to make friends and just accepted that I was unlovable and unattractive. I would mainly just spend my spare time online.”

Then she discovered the femcel subreddit.

According to the Standard, the movement has grown and “far from a fringe group, TikTok’s femcels are the extreme face of a growing celibacy movement which has Gen-Z gripped.”

“I think youth subculture trends are usually a reaction against the mainstream,” Louise Perry, author of the upcoming book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, told The Standard.

“Our public life is hyper-sexualized and has been for some time now so it makes sense that some people have begun turning to celibacy to make a political statement — it’s a deliberate reaction against the status quo.”

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Tinder and porn, Perry said, has created a toxic environment for young women. She added that the sexual revolution has primarily been a benefit to a “minority of men.”

But unlike Incel patron saint Elliot Rodger, who kicked off the movement by murdering six people in Isla Vista, California in 2014, the femcel movement is non-violent. His clarion call to kill good-looking women and men resonated with love’s losers.

Anna added: “We do live in a world where you get treated differently depending on how you look. It felt good to be able to acknowledge that and also to vent about how unfair it is.”

She added that she sees a connection between pornography and violence against women.

“So I’m not conforming — and that’s fine. I’d rather just opt out,” she said, adding that she and her fellow femcels feel anger at the system and society.

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But like incels, femcels appear to be focused on looks and romantic attainment. Some blame the toxicity of the incel movement for promoting discord.

Last January, Reddit shut down a femcel page because it allegedly promoted hate.

Anne Speckhard is the director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE). She told Global News that the incel culture promotes self-hatred. Femcels? Not so much.

“In the case of male involuntary celibates, it’s a really hopeless, despairing, ugly community,” Speckhard told Global. “The femcel communities are much more regretful that society is organized the way it is — that it’s painful to them.”

They are, she said, “celebrating oneself.” And unlike incels, they’re not blaming the opposite for the state of affairs.