Taking the pink pill

I’m a femcel. This is what it’s like inside my subculture of involuntary celibate females, writes Lin Sampson

Femcel stands for female involuntary celibates — women who feel excluded from romantic relationships, often because they believe they’re ugly. They’ve shared stories and have developed a community on Reddit.

When the most well-known Reddit forum specifically for femcels, r/Trufemcels, was banned from the platform in June 2020, it had just over 25,000 members. It left many stranded without even a mirror to look into.

A while back I wrote about incels for this publication — men who blame women for not finding them sexy and sometimes even top them (Elliot Rodger killed six women who’d rejected him).

Instead of exhibiting violence against men, femcels (female incels) appear to have turned their hatred on themselves.

The pink pill is a notional pill taken by femcels who’ve adopted a nihilistic philosophy that unattractive women will never be sexually or romantically successful.

The women say they gain strength from their grouping.

People wrote intimate messages on the site:

“Please help me figure out my muscle imbalances, half of my face is a potato.”

“I’d rather be able to talk about being ugly than just try to convince myself that I’m pretty.”

This dynamic of raw pain and dumb, ruthless response is palpable on “The Pink Pill”, where mainly ethnic women share their experiences in sometimes torturous detail.

Dominique is a femcel who joined the Reddit group a year before it was shut down, only to open on TikTok to an even bigger audience. “I never had sex appeal. Or should I say, I never appealed to the other sex. I was very plain and my nose was too big.

“However, inside I was a femme fatale. And I went on trying [to be attractive to men] long after I should have stopped. I painted myself up like a beach ball, wore ketchup-coloured lipstick — the trend colour that year — and longed, not just for love, but romantic love.”

Instead she faced rejection after rejection.

According to psychologists, there are women who don’t and never have enjoyed sex. For them, becoming a femcel is often the equivalent of “I’ve got a headache”. It’s even a relief not to feel desired.

Fenella is such a woman: “In the past I saw myself as a sort of buccaneer, facing men with a cutlass in my teeth, but now I’m compelled to acknowledge that this was a delusion — so many of my relationships with men ended in tears and rejection.

“Being rejected for me was like a bereavement, a sense of disfigurement, mortification, even disgrace. I thought, why am I doing this to myself, so I gave up dating, just like that. Identifying as a femcel is a way of protecting myself against too much emotion,” she said.

But for many suffering women the femcel movement came too late. “For my generation,” says Fenella, “It was too late. We were buffeted, bullied, looking for love, desperate for some sort of security, but not really believing it would come from a man or, for that matter, from a woman. It was a crazy time. Recognising that I wasn’t attractive to men, I developed a sort of panache, wore a beret and took up painting. Turns out men don’t like panache either.”

While talking to Fenella, I wondered how many men would recognise her unique, intensive, gently phenomenal personality. Her stories alone were captivating: “A friend of a friend, a man, saw me standing in a queue and said: ‘That looks like the sort of girl I would like to beat.’ Can you imagine any human being saying a thing like that? I think identifying as a femcel can protect one from that sort of attention.”

For some women the slights are indelible.

“I remember the night; a party with a swish posse of metropolitan muscle. I had on my new gypsy skirt, black, but when you swirled around it had a scarlet lining. But I didn’t get a chance to show its lining. No-one asked me to dance. It’s a strange thing, but when no-one asks you to dance and you are sitting there alone, it’s difficult to find something to do with your hands. That’s when I took up smoking. I went to the restroom six times and just sat on the loo ... smoking. I could see right away that it wasn’t just my looks, it was a vibe I gave off: like don’t come near me. I don’t like you. I did a lot of ‘looks-maxxing’. I scrutinised my face constantly and had I had the money, I would have changed every single thing on it, particularly that extraordinary Mount Rushmore in the middle, a nose nobody could love. Do you know I learnt to live my life sideways so nobody would see my nose in profile. Then there was the belt of fat around my middle.”

Unlike incels, femcels tend not to blame the opposite sex. Instead, they tend to feel guilty for not being pretty enough. Some even feel they’ve let their families down, especially those from ethnic groups. “I remember my father said to me,” says Anuli, “with a face like yours you’ll never get a husband.”

Finally though, “owning” a negative identity can be a type of power. It’s oddly more dignified than trying to keep pushing the curse away. There is strength and confidence in calling it as you see it. And confidence can give one attractiveness beyond beauty.