Now We Need To Also Consider "Femcels"

Incels have been a big topic for years now, and you can easily argue they are a domestic terror threat. A lot of male mass shooters are, at heart, “incels.” It stands for “involuntary celibate” and while the crass version of the idea is someone who cannot get laid or get dates in their prime female-adjacent years, it is a lot more serious than just that, and usually involves a lot of issues around bad parenting, mental health decline, and feelings of being unloved or not belonging. I personally do not condone incel men culminating with violence — no one should — but a lot of times in the media, we just discuss it as “oh, this kid couldn’t get laid so he shot up a school.” That’s not really the narrative, but I understand we like simple definitions for things.

Ironically, the Trump PA shooter — Thomas Matthew Crooks — probably was an incel, as there are reports he couldn’t get on a shooting/rifle team and wanted to in order to impress a girl. But because he shot at Trump, whose very existence creates an ideological divide almost when you say his name, we turned that incel discussion into a political discussion. Missed the boat there too.

Now there is more discussion around “femcels,” which yes, is the female version of incels. Although — there is one notable difference. Incels typically are seeking physical comfort and companionship from a woman, but also a relationship. You can argue with men, they want the intimacy to come first, because that somehow proves they are “worth” it to someone.

Femcels, the issue is more that they want to date someone — to find a committed partner, to find a guy that doesn’t “sex-zone” them (I just learned that term), etc.

So the femcel pattern is a little bit more relationship-aspirational, and honestly if you’re talking about a late-20s femcel, it could be about fears around the biological clock.

Here is a video that gets annoying, but covers a lot of this.

The good news here, assuming there is any good news, is that a “femcel” is less likely to commit an act of mass violence than an “incel,” in part because of being a woman, in part because of empathy, etc. We’ve had some female mass killers, but it’s very rare compared to men.

The fact that we have these terms, though, indicates how men and women are just talking past each other these days (writ large), and it feels like if you don’t find a partner from work, church, or university … it’s going to be an uphill battle.

This topic is indeed a little bit “moral panic,” but it also has kernels of truth. It definitely seems like there are tens of thousands of men and women out there who are not finding what they want Relationally, and some are being radicalized in the process.