last updated 2025-04-12
The terms ‘femcel’ and ‘incel’ are complicated. Most people know the basic story: ‘incel’ was invented by an LGBT person for queer people who felt rejected by society, then reappropriated by certain murderers to refer to their discontent with society. My experience is that a wide range of people use the term: some of them are cutesy girls with chibi anime pfps who wouldn’t hurt anybody, while others are alt-right extremists who want a new world order. It is a pretty broad concept and I think each person has their own way of defining it, just like any other label.
I call myself a femcel because every one of my friendships has gone up in flames and I have never been in a romantic relationship. I understand male incels’ concerns that it’s easier for women to find a partner, but that doesn’t mean femcels fundamentally don’t exist. I could post a few pics of my frail body in some server and get a response, but I am still an incel because they would block and report me were I honest about myself. Namely, I am disgusting, violent, abusive, and willing to maim, rape, and kill people. I think most incels aren’t (or say they aren’t) that extreme and might oppose me using that term.
Although incel literally means ‘involuntary celibate’, defining incel/femcel solely by celibacy is inaccurate when it’s used to mean a wider sense of loneliness and rejection. Incels shouldn’t be willing to put up with abusive, financially exploitative, and uncommunicative partners—or force themselves to socially engineer, manipulate, and even drug or rape people—if they want sex. In other words, keeping my malignancy to myself and pretending to be normal would be manipulative and hence nonconsensual. I do not accept anybody who suddenly rocks up and asks me for sex because I do not think I deserve their consent without being open with them.
We have many unsaid rules in English: “writer” for example technically refers to any literate person, but we understand it refers to hobbyists and professionals; while “Republican” and “Democrat” technically just mean people who want a republic and democracy respectively, but the terms are used to refer to a wide range of political views; and “decimate”, as any nerd will tell you, technically means to kill every tenth person but nowadays is used to generically mean “cripple”, “conquer”, or even “destroy”.
Sometimes people attempt to insult me for identifying as a femcel and even repeatedly offer to have sex with me. I wonder if they want a moral victory—that when I stop talking to them, they can say that I made the decision to reject them. However, the lack of good faith and acceptance means that I would be paying with my personality and sanity, and they would be having sex purely out of some twisted hate-fuck desire for vindication. (I mean, they would probably be disappointed if the situation was reversed and a woman only wanted them because of her mental illness or a bet.)
I think that inceldom is often defined implicitly in terms of a consensual and healthy relationship, which is itself complicated. Few would argue that mental development is unnecessary, but the brain is so fluid that at some point self-improvement becomes a pretension, and the line is blurred because they’re both derived from the endeavour to fit into expectations. Similarly, we don’t think people deserve the pain of work, but we tend to look down on those who choose not to work. In other words, we can deconstruct healthiness into one of the fundamental philosophical problems—morality, which is clearly complicated. QED.
Then again, I stopped calling myself aro-ace because I’m more dissociative than anything.