### Introduction The authors analyze the shifting visibilities of femcels— women who self-identify as being involuntary celibate. - Femcels 1.0: The 'original' femcel digital community emerged on Reddit in 2018, manifesting as despairing discussion. (Earnest, text-based, despairing.) - Femcels 2.0: The second community, often referred to as 'femcelcore,' articulates feminized dissociation, loneliness, and depression in an ironic social media 'vibe,' most especially on TikTok. (Ironic, aestheticized, enigmatic.) The authors coin **heteronihilism** by building on these terms below: - **Heteropessimism**: The sense of disappointment or cynicism about heterosexual relationships. (Asa Seresin, 2019) - **Heterofatalism**: The belief that heterosexuality is inherently dysfunctional, leading to anti-political resignation rather than resistance. (Asa Seresin, 2019) - **Womanly nihilism**: A feminized articulation of nihilism marked by apathy and detachment from collective politics, rooted in disillusionment with societal structures, including heterosexuality. (Robyn Marasco, 2020) - **Heteronihilism**: A pessimistic and nihilistic outlook on heterosexuality, and scaling this disillusionment into a broader rejection of social hope, collective action, and politics. ### Incels, 'traditional' femcels and the femosphere Femcels often refer to the 'pink-pill,' a brutal truth: >The pink-pill philosophy claims that ‘ugly’ women are victims of society’s in-built ‘lookism’ and superficial beauty stereotypes, which are fatalistically understood as ‘hardwired’, innate human prejudices. Femcels constitute one group in the broader '**femosphere**' (Kay, 2024), others include female dating strategists, WGTOW, 'gender critical' women, etc. - These communities are largely reactionary against the manosphere, and the failures of neoliberalism and heteropatriarchy more broadly. However, they often parallel and reproduce these ideologies, often using the language of feminism while borrowing conservative ideas from evolutionary psychology. >\[W]e argue that femcels do not so much oppose manosphere communities as _mirror_ them. Incel communities are not inherently toxic. However, as communities form, they often foster resentment, nihilism, or antagonism, and engage in bioessentialist logics, often including concomitant racism, sexism, and transphobia. ### Contextualising femcelcore, 'sad girl' culture and heteropessimism Online culture is pervaded with romanticized aesthetics of loneliness, sadness, and depression, and especially of women's mental health. These were a pushback of the compulsory optimism and resilience narratives of postfeminist culture (neoliberal feminism). - 'sad girl' subculture on Tumblr between 2014 and 2018. - 'feral girl summer' of 2022 was an explicit reaction against 'hot girl summer,' instead embracing feral or perhaps normal and banal expressions of feminine identity. - The 'Fleabag era' (2016-2019) celebrated antihero, unapologetically flawed women. This type of 'dissociative feminism' has been criticized... - Tends to be associated with white girls and women and so is another version of white, liberal feminism. - Mental health issues become something cool and to strive for. >These aesthetic and affective iterations of heteropessimism, ‘dissociative feminism’ and ‘sad girl’ culture, we suggest, have laid the cultural grounds for the rise of femcelcore. ### Femcels 2.0: the rise of femcelcore Femcelcore does not represent a break with 'toxic' communities such as incels or femcels 1.0: >we argue that the modes of creative pastiche, dissociation and irony of ‘femcelcore’ do not represent a clean departure from, or opposition to, the nihilistic anger of ‘toxic’ communities, and that these three seemingly disparate communities (incels, femcels 1.0, and femcels 2.0) are all symptomatic and expressive of a shared nihilistic conjuncture. Furthermore, as we go on to argue, neither does ‘femcelcore’ represent a radical or meaningful break from neoliberal feminism. The authors examine seven videos that are broadly emblematic of femcelcore. The videos explore feminized and aestheticized themes of the body, messiness, mental health, femininity, and relationships, often in quotidian and mundane environments. Lana del Rey and her 'sad girl' aesthetic, associated with female weakness and dependence, are common. ### From femcel discourse to femcel vibe The femcel videos are seemingly incoherent and disconnected; however, the authors argue that they are all expressive of heteropessimism and fatalism. >The videos depict a predominantly white, middle-class aesthetic that conveys a complex sense of intimacy, disappointment and melancholia. 'Vibes' aesthetically express pre-discursive, ineffable feelings, in a culturally shared manner: >A vibe rests on diffuse and perhaps fragile feelings of connection and shared sensibilities. It is something that is arguably much harder to articulate, capture or pinpoint in words, but is instead expressed affectively, aesthetically and symbolically through visual and aural modalities. While femcels 1.0 commiserated, femcelcore is more solitary, and less resentful and reactionary. As a platform, TikTok downplays interpersonal connection and encourages memetics and virality. The authors argue that femcelcore is an expression of heteronihilism... >not because vibes as such tend towards nihilism, but rather because in this particular case they are predicated on a dissociative disconnection from, and implicit rejection of, collective politics. ### Curating the void: pessimism and nihilism since \#MeToo >Instead of just ‘screaming into the void’ (Bergeron-Stokes, 2023), we might say that femcelcore is an expression of curating the void, in its attempts to aestheticise disappointment, the absence of hope, and nihilism. In these videos, this aestheticising of the ‘void’ is constructed specifically in relation to the body, gender and heterosexuality, speaking of contemporary anxieties around ideal femininity, romantic relationships and mental health issues. Misogyny and 'black-pilled' nihilism of incels is symptomatic of a wider crisis of neoliberalism's failures. A similar dynamic is happening in both iterations of femceldom, whereby the promise that women can wield social power over men via their femininity and sexuality is viewed as a con. The moods of nihilism in a post \#MeToo context is inspired by, and a reaction to, the failure of neoliberal feminism, popular feminism, and the disillusionment with the \#MeToo movement's failure to effect structural change. Both postfeminism and femcelcore, despite their differing aesthetics and mood, eschew any form of collective politics or sociopolitical transformation, and are therefore merely different iterations of individualism. Femceldom while seeming to depart from the bourgeois feminism of 'wanting it all,' nevertheless also express a particular kind of 'womanly nihisilism.' >‘Having it all’ is fundamentally about ownership; it is ‘a formula for owning everything’. It is individualist rather than collective; it is therefore at odds with ‘socialist, anticolonial, and antiracist struggles’ and as such is ‘the opposite of a true freedom’. ### Conclusion **The key argument: "both articulations of femceldom articulate and index the spreading mood of what we are calling *heteronihilism.*"** >We certainly do not wish to argue that sadness is antithetical to feminism or political action; the problem, as we see it, is not feminine sadness but hetero-nihilism; that is to say, when sadness is mobilised in a way that dissipates feminist energies rather than galvanises and strengthens them. In the ‘femcelcore’ content we analysed, there was no sense of a collective feminist project, but rather a dissociation from politics. Feminized heteronihilism is not as politically powerful as the heteronihilistic manosphere. However, it is not wholly benign or politically inconsequential. >The state of being an involuntarily celibate woman is certainly not intrinsically reactionary, and the widespread disenchantment with heterosexuality has some political potential, in that it illuminates the systemic failings of heteronormative culture under capitalism. However, the ‘femcel’ identity has developed within – rather than against – the technologics of neoliberal capitalism, the resurgence of white supremacy, and the broader derision and despisal of social justice (Brown, 2019). It is because of this historically specific formation that the femcel phenomenon – in both its iterations – must be read as part of the nihilistic conjuncture, rather than part of the feminism of solidarity and collective strength which is required to transcend it.