What the hell is a femcel?
What the hell is a femcel?
I recently noticed a post from a blahaj user whose profile was styled after Celeste from Madeleine. She does trans stuff and posts quite a bit, including to a sub¹ called "femcelmemes".
I've seem the word more than a few times in the past year, and I thought it meant "female incel".²
However, the sub in question just seems to post girly stuff and be accepting to all feminine energents "where anybody can post memes that fit the vibe." So what the hell is this vibe? I don't see any incel-adjacent stuff except maybe some facetious self-deprecation, but do you have to get incel vibes to do that?
¹ Until we can truly standardize what we call them: magazines, communities (Lemmy, please pick a better name. This is too vague.), forums, hashtags, etc..., I'm calling them something we can all understand. ² Thinking about the etymology of "incel", "femcel" should actually be "female celibate", but who in the sam hill cares.
Femcel is indeed usually the same as incel, but with vaginas. But there's always mudiness around slang terms, even more than formalized terms.
Also, there is a standard for lemmy. They're communities, or (for the lazy like me, C/s), it's just that reddit exodus people tend to be too lazy to use the standard term.
There's a reason that every community url includes the c/ as part of it. That's how standardized it is, it's in the basic underpinning of lemmy. The choice of c/ wasn't arbitrary. Well, that's what one of the devs said (though not as a quote, I'm paraphrasing) back last year (iirc, could have been before that, I did lurk some on lemmy before the reddit fiasco).
Magazine was used guy kbin, and then mbin, which are similar federated platforms.
We all understand communities, it's only the folks that haven't caught up yet, or haven't paid attention that don't understand.
Ironic given that the term "incel" was originally coined by a woman in reference to herself.
One problem is people don't really love symbols in their abbreviations. I mean, how many people leave out the semicolon in tl;dr?
Yet the / is kinda needed, otherwise you'd need to use something like coms, which has a whole bunch of potential meanings, in addition to already being a common shorthand for communications, a commonly used long word.
Frankly just calling them subs makes the most sense, in addition to already being habitual for a lot of people. They are the sub-unit of the service after all.
Sense or not, it may be habitual for a lot of people, but it's not the established term in use. And there's also the problem that subs is a reddit term, and it mattress makes differentiation between the two platforms confusing to people that use, or used to use, both.
So it doesn't make sense to expect the entire established culture of lemmy to change to accommodate newcomers.
You know how on reddit it would get confusing/frustrating/annoying when people would call subs "channels", or "servers"? It's the same thing. Lemmy was built to be similar to reddit, but it has no obligation to placate reddit refugees by changing what it has been for years before spez shafted everyone.
Here on lemmy, community is the established term. We don't have the character limits that Mastodon has, so there's no need to use shorthand. We can type out lemmy community if using C/ is too much of a problem for the punctuation hater club.
I really don't get how this is such a problem for people. You go to a new site/service, you adapt to it, not the other way around. I dunno when you came to lemmy, but during the exodus last year, those of us that weren't lemmy regular users adapted just fine. Those of us that were sporadic lemmy users (myself included) adapted fine to stopping using the r/community name format and switching to the c/ format, and helped others do so.
It's like moving to another country with a vastly different accent and objecting to that accent.
Also, there is a standard for lemmy. They're communities
communities (Lemmy, please pick a better name. This is too vague.)
By "vague", I mean really easy to confuse with an actual community, e.g. the gaming community. It's just a bad and overgeneral term.
Also, I'm on mbin.
But there's always mudiness around slang terms, even more than formalized terms.
Well, do you know the slangy uses, or at least the meaning specific to that sub?
Mags or magazines used to be the term used, but I've not paid attention for a while since kbin is stalled.
Communities just isn't snappy enough either. I also don't think it's a good word for it. Hopefully something better catches on.
"The vibe" is more or less wallowing in the feeling of not being able to get a partner, from a feminine perspective and usually in a cutesy "haha I can't socialize and my life is a mess" way. This stands in contrast with many/most male incel communities, which tend to promote resentment and blaming a celibate status on everything but oneself (or pathologically blaming it on an immutable characteristic like one's height or canthal tilt). There is a degree of toxic internalization that can occur either way, but I like to think the humorous nature intended by the posts is a way to vent out the feelings and riff on them with others.
The transfem nature which carries over from the Blahaj instance dovetails with the community's theme, since it is rather difficult for most trans women or similar folks to get into relationships, on account of various circumstances relating to transitioning as an AMAB individual. There are the matters of physical appearance which is a facet of the genetic lottery, plus the social aspects of dating while trans. The dating pool for most trans people is, uh, quite a bit smaller, and shrinks further still when looking for medium/long term partners mainly due to stigma associated with dating trans people (especially to cis men being in a relationship with trans women, and especially if one is visibly trans to the general population, think the whole "is it gay" discourse).
So basically, femcelmemes is about acknowledging these challenges and playfully lamenting the celibate condition they bolster, while also allowing (trans)fems to embrace the girly aesthetic and mode of interaction while doing so. It's a gender-affirming way to cope with the situation, so provides some utility despite the generally self-deprecating nature of the posts made there. One also doesn't even have to be celibate (or even trans) to understand and find amusement in this struggle; you can just kind of vibe with the idea of defiantly girlbossing your way through a depressing time of life.
I hope that helps explain somewhat. I'm maybe not the best spokesperson but I've been following the community for a while at this point. If you have any follow up questions I'd be happy to try and provide my best understanding of things.
Thank you! This was indeed pretty explanatory.
There’s this Vice video that claims that most male communities also just facetiously self-deprecate and “don’t really mean it”, but the humor is way worse and shares none of the fem aesthetic.
A femcel is just a female incel, as far as I'm aware. Although, considering that the original incel was a woman, it should be "incel" and "mancel"
EDIT: and "non-sex" for all my fellow enbies
For the edit, wouldn't it be "noncel"?
Except that they are cels. A noncel would just be someone who isn't an incel. Plus "non-sex" sounds like "nonsense"
I assumed it was the female equivalent of an incel and was prepared to block the community when I first saw it pop up, but it doesn't seem to be that at all. Just seems more like trans memes, specifically from a transfem perspective.
The term does mean 'female incel', but the community is different from male incels in terms of how they communicate and how hateful they are. There's plenty of research on this, if you want to read more.
The person who coined the term 'involuntary celibate' was a woman.
Ahh
Celeste my favorite video game character from famous game Madeleine
the user was named Celeste lol
The female version of am incel
From what I remember they hate men like incels hate women