Flight of the Femcel
Perhaps led by Rowan and Gabriella or just a tired discontent from women, the notion of the femcel is one that is exasperating. Despite this sudden influx, it is a cause that has lived tucked tightly and secretly within the ventricles of my heart for a longggg while. Long before my only ever half boyfriend at 15 (I readily escaped the relationship after one month on an early school morning via text. I knew I never really liked him because he sent me messages that said ‘sweat dreams,’ and once accidentally fingered a girl's bum). I’m self-aware enough to acknowledge my own femcel inclinations were aptly harvested from the bone of rampant insecurity (a consequence of our androcentric standards of beauty, something I remember feeling as early as 7). Although this femcel feeds most ardently off solipsism wink. Like any almost adolescent chubby girl with glasses – a roaring-teetering-toward grating voice and an attitude that frequented an awkward meanness – people did not seem to like me much. Especially not romantic conquests or myself (I point to these details not for sympathies but a culmination of valuables that have led to my way of being so we can follow these developments precisely and together). I’ll spare the gritty details of my adolescent friendship attempts – truth or dare snap stories, and eventual sending semi-nudes foibles – and jump to a direct manifestation of these trials (note that I have overcome many).
Traits I mark as official femcel criteria:
Sensitive to touch, PDA, embarrassment and affection
Independant
Fascinated/consumed by clutter, hoarding and dust, can involve mould, grime and sludges
Cool, has some kind of niche skill, e.g. sewing or drawing and has great music taste
Not strictly heterosexual
Masturbates
Usually depressed of some kind and has a relationship with self harm or self-deprecation
Very selfish/isolated
Sensitive to the universe, spirituality and destiny
Showers less than they are supposed to
Simultaneously smart and stupid
Treats female friendships like romantic relationships
Confused, chastised and fastidious
My first interaction with incel media was Dazai’s No Longer Human. The narrator, in a very Joker-eque fashion, dwells on his carefully tended fake smile saying it was "not the smile of a human being: it utterly lacks substance... merely a blank sheet of paper," womp womp… He spends the entire novel inflating his monstrous traits, how awful and unloving and evil he is, cementing the difference between his coaxing self and the ‘rest'. This is my incel. ‘Oh how horrible I am, how disgusting the world is,’ — it involves ego and killing and repression, being the unwanted ‘other’ by way of the American Psycho. Though most importantly, it involves a resentful malleability of character. As the modern-day ‘incel’ has progressed and warped into discord mods, facesmushed streamers and man living in one's parent’s basement, it has only gotten worse. They are self-deprecating, aware of their despicability (they froth over it) and resolute with their entitlement to romance, a right that comes with being alive and wielding a sexual organ of course.
Femcels, however, are not formed of this same clay. Yes, the term may be a portmanteau but this ‘involuntary celibacy’ does not stem from not being desirable or able to finesse romantic attention. It is a definition (incel→femcel) and larger culture that I will loudly claim with not much tact or viable merit as false. The sexual repression of the femcel is self-inflicted, directly manifested from our fears and complexes exactly like The Castle of Busirane. Women will always be desired, eroticised and fetishised by a man. Femcels were never running around in the fashion of damning all men as evil cretins of unfair persecution. It has never been about fashioning attention: we are all too cursed by being objects of desire. It was always about us, the misandry is formed asexually, born from our understanding of self and the relationship that is fostered between mind and body. That is the femcel way… it's quite spiritual really.
Stark Difference 1: A Femcel can, and likely will be, passing the Bechdel test at all times of the day.
Billy in Buffalo ‘66’s incel functioned , by my definitions, in a femcel mode of being. Ignoring the Vincent Gallo of the circumstance, his character in all its abnormality was something I saw a lot of myself in. He is seemingly unbothered by any actual prospect of sex or a woman, yet he assumes all the behavioural characteristics of the persona. To be a femcel or a billycel there must be a slight tinkering toward the possibility of a very angry asexual. The quick quips, ‘don’t fucking touch me’, the rising anger, and his nonsensical, almost spasming frustration. How his eyes skewed and bulged as if constantly sniffing. And the jittering look of being uncomfortable in his skin, ostensibly made of itchy yarn, waiting, and waiting and waiting to scratch. Sooo me right?
Stark Difference 2: Celibacy as an ambivalent consequence, not a motivator.
Similar to Billy, May is celibate though she is bursting with desire, to touch, and even more so to be acknowledged. When I first watched May, its aesthetics pointed to early 90s—2000s charm, the grain, the kind of muted look that has something effervescent and inexplicably rom-com about it. It has all the discomfort of the rotting chicken carcasses under Daisy Randone’s bed and the awkward misguided romantic determination as Doki Doki Literature Club or Yandere Simulator. May is weird and beautiful. I had to pause the movie several times (which does not happen often) as the screeching clawed through my ears, scrunched my limbs and congealed my cringing eyes. May wears glasses like me, she has a lazy eye like me. The movie starts with our shared bone of rampant insecurity, her eye-patch, our glasses. The other day walking down Enmore Road, gelato in hand, I was reminiscing on the kinds of relationships I thought I'd be capable of when I got older, that eventually I'd find love in someone who would love me as a fetish. The ‘I don’t know why I love her but I need her,’ where my glasses and height, my face, side profile, ugly, ugly, weird, strange, annoying self would be exactly what some person wanted so badly and struggled to admit to themself, they'd LOVE me. I guess that’s what happens to May. She had to be someone's fetish to be loved, until she out-freaked those prospects and through abjection her world collapsed very very bloodily.
Stark Difference 3: Femcel cannot be loved as fetishcel.
Stark Difference 4: Femcel gore is actually funny.
There is one other way I observe femcel sexuality unfolding. The fate of getting everything wrong. Explored in both Welcome To The Dollhouse and The Piano Teacher, somewhat even in Belle De Jour. Each protagonist listlessly knits an ever-growing blanket of trying to understand the interstice between desire and their ability to engage in any sort of idyll. Like me, convinced that I could only be loved as a fetish, they believe they can only be loved at the hand of violence. For these women, the concrete is laced with endowed self hate: Dawn thinks she is utterly lame and angry, Erika, trapped in her repressive maternal comeuppance hates almost everything about herself (mostly her lack of control) and Séverine hates that she is not content. They inevitably land on the fact they ‘want’ to be hurt and deviant, that galling ‘love’ would be the only way for them (gruesome ladies) to engage with such relationships. They believe their desire itself is depraved — thus their answer, and their fulfilment, must be the same. When I watched The Piano Teacher for the first time it reminded me a lot of how I felt when I first read No Longer Human at 3am in my messiest room, at my highest screentime and my luteal peak. I have convinced myself that I want and that I am things of similar gravity.
Stark Difference 5: The violence of a femcel is always ultimately egocentric AND femcel sex is always evil.
Anyways… femcels are cool. I am one myself by my own measures and definitions. That's what really matters. The details of its implications on my life I'll keep private for now. But femcel, to me, is a transient state, not finite. It is an intermediary that you eventually escape via some major tribulation (like stabbing oneself in the chest or murdering several people??). I see that the movement continues to grow alongside other things, like the rise of pseudo-intellectualism (which I could be contributing to right now. I do hope it doesn't come across like that). Regardless, femceldom is not a club everyone can join nor diss, more something that exists for weird girls – and not weird in an Addison Rae way, weird in the Frankenstein way (and, yes, one may even identify with Victor over the monster). I do believe more and more femmes will turn to this plight. I’m not sure if we (femcels) can understand the stolen bits of brick that make our (my) foundation, how it swells with water and breathes under the pressure of a bouncing step. I’m not sure we (I) know what we (I) actually want and what our (my) mind(s) tell(s) us (me) we (I) do, if anyone (me) truly and honestly wants anything or if desires are some dream we (I) just tell our(my)sel(f)ves about, like the dreams that Wendy’s father locks away in the box by his bedside table and visits just before he closes his eyes before bed (with his really leng wife ofc). It’s hard to really be sure of anything knowing that half of it we sell to ourselves, tying narratives together with the bits of hair that have been falling out in stringy cotton candy masses making some kind of half ugly half lovey story.
Finally, you cannot be a femcel and be banging or have over 2000 followers or if you haven't grown up in a perpetual very severe awkward phase. I have attributed myself both gatekeeper and key master or whatever. Sorry Rowanpls you’re kicked out of the club to which I just denied existence (it’s an ephemeral club).
Good luck my femcels, and sorry if this was your way of finding out you’re one of us, sincerely.
Stark Difference 6 : Femcel sexual derivatives are always allegorical to self-realisation.
Stark Difference 7: More hope in healing, no hope of an idea.
