What are femcels? The truth about the internet subculture

POV: your TikTok ‘for you’ feed has thrown up femcel-core as the latest aesthetic the ‘sad girlies’ are getting into… and you’re a little confused about what that actually means.

2022 was declared the ‘year of the femcel’ by some commentators, but this internet era is a little more complicated than others. Given the term’s inevitable connection with the misogynistic hate group incels, you’d be forgiven for worrying what the internet’s newest subculture is all about – so here’s what you need to know.

Like the aforementioned incel, a femcel is a woman that is ‘involuntarily celibate’, named as such after the male version of the group – which is these days associated with alarming misogynistic violence, though it was once a general term for single people who struggled to make connections with others (ironically, originally coined by a woman).

Over on TikTok, femcels have largely come to be associated with various pop culture references such as musicians like Lana Del Rey and Marina and the Diamonds, and films such as Gone Girl and Jennifer’s Body – but the original definition is a little different.

Many ‘traditional’ femcels believe that due to the toxic and unrealistic body standards that are set upon women by society, they are unable to find a sexual partner or form a romantic relationship. In the forum world of femcels, there was a lot of talk around ‘ugliness’ – indeed one of the original Reddit threads stated that to be a femcel, you have to have “defects” that “exceed those of normal women”.

One self-identifying femcel told Kaitlyn Tiffany of The Atlantic: “We were all ugly. Men didn’t like us, guys didn’t want to be with us, and it was fine to acknowledge it.”

Typically, femcels place the onus on themselves as to why they are not achieving the sex lives they desire, while more often than not, incels place the onus on the women that are rejecting them.

Like incels, the femcel community was previously very active on Reddit – one popular thread, r/Trufemcels, was banned from the platform in June 2020 for “inciting hatred”, along with 2,000 other forums as part of a big change to Reddit’s content policies. 

After the incel subculture was connected to a number of horrific misogynistic murders – including that of Plymouth shooter Jake Davison, who was involved in the incel movement on social media – Reddit rightfully cracked down on hateful exchanges on its platform, stating: “Communities and people that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.”

While the femcel community has not been connected with any truly violent or disturbing behaviour, it has been linked to extreme feminism, anti-trans language and ‘man-hating’. While incels problematically refer to women as ‘foids’ (short for female humanoid, thus sub-human beings), some femcels refer to men as ‘moids’ for the same reason – others have criticised the body positivity movement and also use terms that originated with the incel movement, such as ‘Stacys’ (a conventionally attractive, sexually-active woman) and ‘Beckys’ (the supposedly ‘average-looking’ woman).