Femcels vs Midwest Dad Energy, or,
Please, Please, Please Don’t Embarrass Me Motherfucker.
Femcels aren’t a new thing — Elle ran “The Femcel Revolution: How An Underground Group Of Women Is Reclaiming Involuntary Celibacy” way back in September of 2021. Psychology Today defines femcels as women motivated by a belief “that unattractive women are underprivileged including in sexual relations.” Elle (thank God) hones in on the social dimension of this belief, positing that femcels view themselves as:
Unable to have sexual or romantic relationships as a result of a toxic blend of misogyny and impossible beauty standards. It’s a female take on male “incels,” so-called “involuntary celibates” who, in general, feel entitled to sex with women — and resentful if they don’t get it.
In opposition to incels, femcel philosophy is less directed at individual members of the opposite sex and more largely (and wisely) focused on the patriarchal systems that have oppressed women. Like their counterpart, South Korea’s 4B movement, femcels fundamentally believe that misogyny and sexism long-supported by societies with patriarchal structures have rendered the men produced in these societies beyond redemption. Although renewed and perhaps restructured by sites like Reddit (which allow women to speak openly and anonymously about these beliefs) femcel philosophy has existed since the Middle Ages.
Sylvia Federici details this in her “history of the body in the transition to capitalism,” Caliban and the Witch, which tracks the shift from feudalism to capitalism in an attempt to right Marx’s glaring omission of women from his own accounting. Federici’s discussion of the heretical movements throughout Europe which espoused nascent femcel views is fascinating. The antinalist Bogomils, for example,
…preached that the physical world is the work of the devil…they refused to have children so as not to bring new slaves into “this land of tribulations.”
Likewise, the Cathars rejected a “life degraded to mere survival” by the poor conditions of marriage and reproduction in the Middle Ages. In short, women who had enjoyed largely equal social and economic rights under a feudal system (which paid families as opposed to men) saw little benefit in a potentially violent marriage that would almost certainly result in one or many dangerous pregnancies.
This mindset is an eerie mirror to South Korea’s 4B movement, which is not merely a rejection of societally imposed beauty standards (and their deleterious economic impact on single women), but a very real response to South Korea’s extremely high rate of domestic violence and sexual abuse. As in the Middle Ages, these are phenomena undergirded by inequalities in legal protections afforded to the sexes.
As I read Caliban and the Witch, I’m often astonished, appalled, and amazed by the parallels between our current moment and six hundred years ago. Where contemporary America has rolled back Roe v. Wade and made way for the control and surveillance of menstruating bodies, contraceptives were criminalized in the Middle Ages only to later be reintroduced specifically for use by men, thus transferring reproductive control away from those with reproductive organs. Whereas 16th C. Europe “invented” or, rather, forced the role of “the housewife” by criminalizing employers who directly paid women, socially ostracizing men who worked along side women, and advising guilds to overlook the production of women (especially widows), contemporary America has a Vice Presidential candidate who explains that it’s okay his wife is the daughter of Telugu-speaking Indian immigrants because she’s “such a good mom.”
Obviously, [Usha]’s not a white person, and we’ve been accused, attacked by some white supremacists over that. But I just, I love Usha. She’s such a good mom.—J.D. Vance
Usha Vance is also a Yale educated attorney. (I highly recommend
’s piece, J.D. Vance Illustrates Five Lessons in Misogyny for more on this.)I’m taking pains here to delineate the history of women who have rejected romantic, sexual, and platonic relationships with men as a response to legal, social, and economic inequities because I’m beginning to wonder if maybe…that’s what Brat Summer really means? Cases in point: Britney Spears and Julia Fox have both sworn off men very publicly this year. While Spears did so via a simple social media post which she later removed, Fox sat down for an interview with Elle to espouse her gospel. “I haven’t had sex in two years. I’m so happy. I sleep so well.” Fox states. When asked if she’s dated, the former dominatrix replies, “For what? No. I don’t see the point. That romanticized idea of men doesn’t exist anymore.”
The pervasiveness of this mindset really hit home for me last weekend, when I listened to Anna Marie Tendler read her new memoir, Men Have Called Her Crazy, on 1.5 speed. The overarching message of this book?
I hate men. I hate them so much. Men are the cause of all my problems. Men are the cause of everyone’s problems. They are stupid and they are arrogant.
I think many people assumed this memoir would be about Tendler’s divorce from comedian John Mulaney. However, as
notes in her review, not a single breath is given to uttering Mulaney’s name, and in fact,The book often felt… like [Tendler] was throwing daggers around a target she wasn’t supposed to hit — Mulaney himself.
I agree — my sense of this book is that Tendler is processing a divorce by looking at the long standing patterns in her life that led her to accept (what I am assuming were) abusive conditions. It’s a type of self-deprogramming; unbrainwashing through writing a book. The most powerful moment of this memoir for me was a scene in which an acquaintance calls Tendler a misandrist. Tendler’s sharp reply: There’s no such thing. It’s an accusation akin to “claiming reverse racism.” This moment crystallized the sense I’ve had all summer that more radical feminist ideologies have gone mainstream.
I think the reasons why are pretty simple: in the overturn of Roe v. Wade, it became impossible to believe this country writ large cares about women. The return of a former president who has been found guilty of rape and who has never apologized for “locker room talk” about assaulting women has likewise made it impossible not to feel a pervasive violence. As Federici notes in Caliban and the Witch, atrocious policies and behaviors such as these left women in the Middle Ages with “indelible marks in the collective female psyche and in women’s sense of possibility.” The same is, of course, true today.
Women’s sense of possibility takes us right back to Brat summer: an acid green moment in which we've seen pop music by artists like Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, and Sabrina Carpenter shift from lyrics about romance to lyrics that humorously undercut it’s possibility. “Please, please, please don’t embarrass me motherfucker,” has run through my head as a mantra of the moment. The wheedling tone of a woman who knows she is certainly going to be embarrassed played over a video of her real life boyfriend doing exactly the embarrassing stuff he does in real life. As Fox says: romanticized men don’t exist anymore.
Except, okay...maybe they do? Another hallmark of summer 2024 was the stunning political theatre accomplished by the Harris campaign, which, as you probably remember, pretty much began and never stopped when Charli XCX posted “Kamala is brat.” The Harris campaign jumped on the “endorsement,” immediately making the VP’s social background KAMALA in the brat font over the now iconic chartreuse background. Simultaneously, people all over the country had their own Kamala/brat merch printed up.
Act Two of this attempt to reclaim the democratic narrative and frame it in a way that would be palatable to all the voters Biden had lost? Find a man who actually won’t embarrass you. Enter: Tim Walz.
Walz a perfect foil to J.D. Vance’s trad husband (Why don't we use that term? Why are only the trad wives codified into collective distaste?). Additionally, Walz provides larger ideological and social relief in the form of retroactive hope. To put that more simply: Walz proves the patriarchy didn’t fuck all men up. He appears not to hate, but to love and respect women, a fact that we see not only in his behavior (dad-hyping Harris every time she enters a room, cuddling piglets, bemoaning his lack of Era’s tickets) but also in his policies.
Some other quick facts from the Minnesota Reformer:
While in Congress, Walz voted for the Affordable Care Act and co-sponsored bills that would have increased access to birth control; supported services for postpartum depression; improved maternal care; and limited medically unnecessary laws restricting abortion.
In his first term as governor, he signed the Dignity in Childbirth and Pregnancy Act to reduce disparities impacting mothers and babies.
When Roe fell, states across the nation began using their newfound power to ban abortion, taking away women’s ability to control their own bodies. Months later, Minnesotans made history by electing the state’s first pro-abortion rights trifecta into government, including re-electing Walz.
Policies aside, Tim Walz has walked onto the scene at a moment when a lot of women are dejected in a myriad of ways about their romantic futures. His appearance has, quite simply, offered the barest shimmer of a glimpse a different path forward. As
Esquire,The Trump campaign is targeting aggrieved young men by promising to restore their rightful place of authority through oppressive legislation of everyone else. In the MAGA view, the American man has been unjustly torn down and humiliated, and the only way to rectify this is by seeking revenge. But Walz is a living counterexample to their claims. In a time when many American men feel lonely and useless, Walz is presenting an alternative: To be loved and celebrated, you don’t need to be a billionaire or a vulture or the king of your own McMansion. All you need to be is a good guy.
Lest this installment of Camp! Kitsch! Schmaltz! Schlock! read as though I’m fan girling Tim Walz (or any politician), let me be clear: I am not. I find the Harris-Walz stance on numerous issues problematic and sometimes abhorrent. The newsletter, like any cultural criticism, is simply a place where I observe and analyze the intersection of trends alongside social and cultural theory in order to, you know, try to make sense of what otherwise seems like a series of random and potentially disheartening events. Likewise, lest this week’s newsletter read as if I also view the contemporary American man beyond redemption or even uniformly in need of redemption, I don’t! I considered giving up on this post a few times because of my paranoia that either of these points would be misconstrued, but at the end of the day I think the ability to think and analyze ideas which one is not yet certain of is a crucial component of critical thought. Thinking should be uncomfortable sometimes. In that vein, this week’s Camp rec is RAYGUN, a local union printed store here in Iowa that gives 15-30% of their proceeds to non-profit orgs. (Almost) whatever your strongly held niche view is, RAYGUN has merch for you.
