In the summer of 2022, newly anon on Twitter.com, I was an Internet virgin.

This is the most accurate descriptor because it is true. I had been on the Internet before, of course, but I had only lurked, and even that was a late advent. I grew up in rural Montana with no Internet connection at home, my mother is generally anti-technology, and I was too neurotically cautious to speak to strangers online.

When my sister and I first discovered mid-2010s fandom culture as solace to teenage loneliness, she jumped into her own array of online accounts, while I kept myself surface-tethered. The Tumblrs I read were accessed through my browser and never engaged with directly, I did not speak to anyone wholly anonymously until a chat room conversation in college (with a girl on Wattpad; we talked about k-pop, of course).

I was sometimes very deep in the Internet, but I was not online. 

I found incel Twitter after a binge of reading detrans blogs and then detrans Twitter and then going through their likes to find other, funnier accounts, anon accounts who seemed obsessed with sex in the same way I was (22 years single) and who used their alienation as both currency and self-identification.

I was functionally a mainstream conservative and so knew, of course, what inceldom was, but here was its stranger, nymphomaniac sister category, where I was now default shelved-under by dint of being a real girl online and my vaguely erotic tweets: femcel. 

“Femcel” is a fluid identifier, used by a wide enough range of women that any attempt to pin it down exactly leaves out some caveat, some small and angry exception.

In my first draft of this piece, I proposed that the defining characteristic of the woman involved is rage, but now I think it is much simpler and sadder: it is loneliness. 

Loneliness can, of course, be aestheticized. 

As rage or desperation or sex, or some combination of the above. Femcel has been connoted as such through many internet eras, its public personae and inner rules shifting with generational trends. Each iteration of “femcel” retains just enough credible feminism to stay defensible. And there is always just enough chaos to keep the subculture appealing to those girls weak to the siren song. 

First there was the misanthropy of early Internet femcels, whose alienation closely mirrored that of involuntarily celibate males. There is, most recently, the "femcelcore" rage of Gen Z, encapsulated in TikToks of a small girlish hand brushing prescription pill bottles and hair pins from a stack of books: My Year of Rest and Relaxation, The Bell Jar, Girl, Interrupted, etc.

In both, there is a shared language of disillusionment, a despair at once performative and deeply felt. 

Like all stereotypes, there is something so unconsciously true here that any prescribed meaning seems overstated. I spent nights awake in my dorm room listening to Marina and the Diamonds ("Lonely Hearts Club / Do you want to be with somebody like me?") convinced that I was a virgin because I was too ugly and awkward for male attention, that my ironic/horny/suicidal poetry was a revolution of the self, that if I could not be prettier than other girls I could at least be smarter than them — completely unaware all the while that I was embodying an internet trope.

I learned what “femcel” meant the same way I learned the rest of the 4chan lingo inherent to the meme-posting in my former corner of Twitter: I lurked, and when that did not work, put meaning to it through an embarrassing process of using it incorrectly and being corrected by anons ("uwu plz explain this to me" was extremely lucrative as a low follower e-girl, especially when your ignorance was genuine and your “brand” was a sincere sort of cringe).

Internally, I was unsure if I preferred to be a “femcel” or an “incel.” I considered myself fairly masculine (this turned out to be, in retrospect, just a side effect of being single) and identification with the starker, romantic calling of Doomed Male Singleness seemed more honest than being the second-tier, girl-version of loneliness.

But self-identification, or at least online identification, with “femcel” was liberating somehow. “Femcel” described the loneliness that I used to arouse myself or lacerate myself, the loneliness I used as justification when I imagined the prettier girls from my high school shot through the mouth and laid out in caskets, the loneliness ignited with a wet and overly pathologized idea of sex that I rearranged into a pretty anime boy crawling on top of me.

Loneliness is always tied up with rage: rage and loneliness are always tied up with sex.

The archetypes these emotions melt into — a general sense of being the outsider, of always being misunderstood — are universally appealing. Hence you have perhaps averagely attractive girls from normal families employing “femcel” to describe their coming-of-age: the melancholy, the weirdness of female loneliness, makes for the perfect adolescent aesthetic.

It is too elusive to be understood by dull adult binaries. It transfers perfectly into image —Tiktok, Tumblr — because it already is image. 

There are many allusions that might be made here, but we all know the archetype. The mad woman locked in the attic, the Gothic Id shut out from public consciousness, Ophelia drowning in weeds, senseless and frail but at least finally self-possessed. The Victorian women diagnosed with hysteria and swooning in parlors after listless days of social calls. Feminine loneliness and rage and subverted sexual desire are, like everything else, part nature and part nurture and seem "new" only from the strangeness of their latest reincarnations via the shifting faces of the internet.

My fiancé and I have discussed "femcels” as a subset of high-IQ autistic (in the 4chan sense, though perhaps in some cases literally so) women who conflate sexual self-actualization with external, specifically intellectual, validation.

This variation of femcel has built her identity around being misunderstood; consequently, male attention must perform the dual function of validating her sexually (confirming that she is pretty) and intellectually (she, like anyone else, wants to be understood). 

Here is female loneliness from confusion: it sucks to be smart and sort of pretty and neurotic. It still fits the archetype. 

On Twitter, I finally found the secret answer to my undesirableness: I had just been looking for men in the wrong places. I had been in the wrong places. My physical awkwardness did not matter when I was a disembodied personality on the internet. My sort of intellectual, sort of horny tweets were attractive to a specific subset of men: Catholic, Substack-in-bio, questionable views on certain historical events.

“Just be yourself” plus a little internet mythmaking was, irritatingly enough, working out for me. I embarked on e-dating. 

I can smugly assure the reader that there was no carousel of Twitter men, no endless whoring in DMs. I spoke to someone for two weeks, learned I was actually quite good at flirting, and lost ten pounds from stress. I read the first two hundred pages of Infinite Jest. The situationship imploded.

I began speaking to his friend, first in one way and then in another way. The friend did not have a philosophy Substack, but he was calm and emotionally mature and the smartest person I have ever met. He had a lot of opinions about robots from 70s and 80s anime. He was tall. He had brown hair, blue eyes, the vampire-pale coloring I like. His life was a weird parallel of mine, themes and ideas that began uncertainly in me ending with absolution in him.

Our wedding is in October. 

We have burned through the first thrill and are now in mundane bliss, the bliss all the more remarkable for its mundanity. I am happy. This recounting must be, then, the memoirs of an ex-femcel. I can write about it still because self-identification with inceldom, no matter the variety, is not so easy to cast off. 

The worst part of loneliness, as I have recently discovered, is no longer feeling like yourself once you are happy. There is a sense of yourself changing as your habits change and as you struggle towards a cessation of expecting to be always disliked, but there is no top-down transformation, there is no recovering the core. Climbing back into myself - for writing or thinking’s sake, or for perverse nostalgia - is clambering around sad, careful parts of a personality built to stabilize rot.

I believe in complete redemption of the soul, of course (I am newly Catholic, embarrassed to admit to the cliche that I was converted from Protestantism partly via Twitter). But there is no making up for the dull— and very dull to talk about— childhood pain of divorce, social rejection, daddy issues (gag), etc. There is my textbook analysis of the pain and then there is my body as a separate thing, the keeper of the scores, where the fear has only been shrouded. 

“Incel” and “femcel” are something you care very much about when you are in the thick of loneliness; when you are trying to cleave yourself away, the answer seems obvious in retrospect. The difference between “incels” and “femcels” is just the difference between men and women: men make their loneliness a spiritual burden to be suffered through, women make it an aesthetic. The aesthetic becomes appealing to any vaguely disaffected and bored girl, the Image becomes Meaning even as the true believers - the real femcels, whoever they are - thicken the dialectics and inner-politics to deter the vogueists. 

The heart of the debate has always been, for me, whether the self-identified femcels are actually unattractive women. This is an inherently unsatisfying question because attractiveness is generally subjective, even within an established paradigm of Truth/Beauty, universal and historical standards, and all the rest.

More accurately, self-perceived attractiveness is notoriously subjective. So much of beauty depends on social cues — I rarely thought of myself as ugly, but if I was given little to no social attention by both men and women for the entirety of my teenage years and early twenties, then surely something must be actually wrong with me —and any belief otherwise was self-delusion. I told men on twitter I was a “three at best” and now have someone who says I am beautiful, who wants to marry me. When is negative self-perception born of low-self esteem, when is it born out of honesty? 

At risk of sounding like a defeatist, I do believe women have a generally accurate sense of where they fall in the beauty hierarchy. There can be objective markers of “ugliness” that keep “femcel” from being entirely an affectation. I have a physical disability; there are parts of my body that are inarguably unattractive.

This, sadly, is my best claim to loneliness as a subculture. I know this because I have tried to write around it. I have tried to write characters who are “literally me” - who carry my same weird grievances and childhood hang-ups- but until I slash them down from physical normalcy to disability, they are unlikable and inconceivable; suddenly, when I give up on fiction and just write myself - embodied as is - the personality fits, the character becomes redeemable. 

“Femcel,” as with all identities forged in the crucible of the Internet, is a tension between self-perception and reality. It is the thin line between the sincerity and the narcissism of loneliness, the grey area between the romanticization of pain and the spiral into depression and self-hatred that is beyond romanticization.

 Loneliness is my sad ghost, my impossible bargain between feeling like myself and feeling better. But it is also a weirdly pleasurable passcode into subculture and a sort of belonging. I must remind myself: I am not ontologically a pariah; all social circles are not highschool; “femcel,” like any archetype, is something that can be grown into and slipped away from. I am left, with everyone else, wondering when the internet’s eternal adolescence will lose its pull on me, wondering when I will grow up.  

Follow venus on X at @springisoutside.