This article about femcels is interesting. It researches why women end up as femcels.
It breaks it down into 15 different motivations. Things like inability to find a quality partner, feeling you can’t compete with the women in media and porn, being offended by how violent and degrading porn is and men expecting you to enjoy that, low self worth, body insecurities, being afraid of how dangerous (physically/verbally/psychologically/sexually/etc) men can be,
One theme I’ve seen come up is many women, when you ask them, won’t say that ending up alone with a cat is their worst fear like society tells us is their worst fear. Their worst fear (aside from outright abuse) is devoting years and years of their lives to a husband and family, giving up their own career in the process, just to have him cheat on her and abandon her. Then she has to restart her life from scratch in her 40s. These women are more than happy to be single.
I understand how women could have these feelings except
I have never worried about interacting with women like a normal man. Normal men are dull. I have worried about what a woman will say when I eventually told her I had no car, no money and no job. But, I have never worried about being normal.
Another common trait within the incel community is extreme body dysmorphia. Male incels will become convinced that their jawline, for example, is not prominent enough for women to find them attractive and become obsessed with this one feature, even going as far as seeking surgery. It’s been frequently noted that, when incels in these communities can be convinced to share pictures of themselves, they’re all just mostly average looking dudes with no special trend towards physical unattractiveness that needs to be addressed.
Body dysmorphia has classically been a disorder associated with women, with the psychological establishment only really establishing substantial research around male body dysmorphia relatively recently. Perhaps the reason we don’t see the femcel movement as strongly is because female body dysmorphia has become so normalized. We meet women all the time who are convinced that no matter what they objectively look like, they’re too fat for men to like them so they starve themselves, or they get addicted to plastic surgery and look like grotesque caricatures because that’s what looks “normal” to them.
The idea that you can judge someone from the outside and determine whether they should be able to get sex or not is absurd. Many of the stunning women you walk by on the street every day have such a warped body image of themselves that they would rate themselves as quite ugly, just the same as how there are plenty of men who you think would be perfectly attractive to women are self identified incels.
Not that I’ve seen. The complaints in female groups on social media are mostly accusing men of wanting a ‘bangmaid’ who will do household tasks and have sex with them, rather seeking a true relationship. So they can find guys to date, but aren’t getting the equal partnership/commitment/romance they desire.
There is, however, something called ‘Female Dating Strategy’, which used to be on Reddit, and now according to Google has its own forum. This is all about how to find a ‘high value man’, get him to chase you, and avoid wasting your time with guys who just ‘aren’t that into you’. They would call women who compromised and tried to give men what they wanted ‘pickmeishas’.
Here’s the new forum, there’s actually a recent post titled “Discussion for the celibate ladies”:
Again, not to my knowledge. A reasonably high proportion of autistic women are single, maybe half involuntarily. They don’t know how to find a relationship, don’t socialise enough to meet men, are likely off-puttingly socially awkward. Many said they had given up. They weren’t forming any mythologies about it.
But I think it’s easier for autistic women to date than autistic men, as long as they are reasonably pretty. It’s more socially acceptable for women to be shy and quiet, and since men are the ones expected to do the asking, being a wallflower is not dating death - unless you are also physically unattractive. There’s also a factor that women generally have somewhat better social skills to start with, and women with autism are better at learning/faking them, so there is less of a mismatch in the potential couple.
I can see why that would be the case, but how easy would it be to date someone they actually enjoyed spending time with? I can see an ASD woman and an ASD (or even just socially awkward guy) feeling some attraction, but not being able to act on it. If they could, they might really enjoy dating. Wonder if I missed out that way? I’m not ASD, but my inability to read social cues is one of the classic ASD symptoms that I have.
I have mentioned this before- I had a textbook case of sensory processing disorder that I gradually grew out of. This and many, many other things point to my being genuinely on the spectrum. My sister insists I have some form of autism. Usually, I give little weight to her opinions. She has a masters in special education.
I was diagnosed with ADHD in the third grade.
When I am done with this post, I will click that link and may download the app. NOTE- I am excedingly happy with my Gobhi. I will NOT be looking for romance on the app.
FWIW people just finding each other on line with similar obsessive narrow interests has been going on for a while … and is one proposed explanation for any true increase of autism rates, especially of more severe cases. A little genetic susceptibility has positive features if a bit … eccentric or socially awkward. Doses of susceptibility from both sides creates a more significant circumstance. “Assortive mating.”
I think dating a normal average guy would probably end badly. This is what attractive autistic women complain about: men chase them, but then lose interest when they get to know them. They are unable to find a stable relationship.
Nerdy hobbies are the classic way for spectrum-y men and women to find each other. But it doesn’t work for everyone, since men and women don’t always share the same hobbies and this is also true for autists. As for not being able to act on mutual attraction, I recommend alcohol.
Dr. Brian Gilmartin, who studied “love-shyness” among men (essentially the “incel” phenomenon before it had a name), suggested in a 1987 volume that so-called love-shy men could be paired up with autistic women to solve the dating woes of both.
Thing is, the defining quality of incels isn’t autism, poor social skills or even an inability to get sex; it’s a ravening hatred of women. Until they fix that about themselves they’ll both find it difficult to attract a woman and shouldn’t attract a woman.
As in, “avoid this man as he’s likely a physical danger to you” levels of “shouldn’t”.
If you’re talking about the current incel phenomenon, that seems awfully hard on the autistic women. Trading dating woes for really terrible marriage woes seems like the reverse of an improvement.
A true incel is not necessarily motivated by sex. That’s not hard to find. It’s more than he wants to OWN a woman, and not just any woman, but someone who meets certain appearance standards that do not exist in the real world.
As for the female incel equivalent, I guess I could potentially be an example of that. I eventually came to the conclusion that I am not supposed to be partnered, and that acceptance has made my life much better.
I don’t know anything about your particular question but I don’t think this statement is very accurate. The position is at least in some ways highly asymmetrical. I’m going off memory because I can’t find the paper from a quick google so I hope my numbers below are about right. But there was a paper based on access to a huge dump of anonymised Tinder data.
What it showed was that - at least in the context of Tinder - women basically only select about 5-10% of men (presumably the most attractive). Meaning if you are in the lower 90-95% of male attractiveness, Tinder is close to a waste of your time because it’s highly unlikely any woman will select you.
Meanwhile, men select about 70% of women (on a decreasing curve). Meaning that while in theory 70% of women could meet someone through Tinder they won’t because they only select the top 5-10% of men, who are of course so spoilt for choice they are only going to select the most attractive women.
Of course I’m generalising to some extent. But while I expected some asymmetry before seeing the data, I was still gobsmacked by just how strong and stark it was.
Now pretty obviously far, far more than 5-10% of people end up in a relationship so the impression given by Tinder statistics can’t be the whole picture. I assume that’s because in person women are not nearly as choosy as they are on Tinder. But nonetheless the extreme asymmetry based on Tinder data makes me think there is at least some substantial asymmetry outside Tinder.
I used dating apps for a couple of years after my ex and I broke up, and one of the very first things I noticed was how highly unpleasant some of the female profiles were.
Many of them would have endless lists of “absolute must-haves”, things that “I deserve”, or even more repellent attitudes such as “you’ll need to prove your worth”, “you don’t necessarily deserve an explanantion”, “the way to my heart is an eternal trial”, but, very tellingly, not a single line on what they had to offer. Grossly entitled is how I would describe them.
Unsurprisingly, over those two years, I kept seeing those same profiles, again and again and again. But while I worked on improving mine regularly (choosing better pictures, coming up with wittier-yet-still-honest answers, using positive language, clearly stating exactly what I was looking for, etc.), theirs were letter-for-letter identical.
Grotesque pickiness combined low-effort clearly isn’t a winning move, and the bitterness was palpable.