Zoe Strimpel: Femcels

[Shedbuilder]

Just heard Zoe Strimpel talking about femcels (girls and women who want male attention/ contact/ sex and are denied it for one reason or another).

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000vrk6

Anyone else hear it? I'm going to have to go back and listen again, but it seemed to me that she was denying the full extent of harassment and arguing for the existence of femcels — women who long for male attention and physical contact.

What she seems completely blind to is the power imbalance between men and women.

I saw the programme listed and decided not to listen, for the sake of my sanity. The blurb said, of the problem with the #metoo movement, “...there is no space in all this for the lives and experiences of the many straight women who don’t have this problem, who do not live in fear of men, and who are not sexualised at every turn.”

FFS is all.

Femcels? Women who really want no strings sex with lots of guys but can't get it?

That's not a thing. Really.

When I was 49, v ordinary and overweight I stuck an ad on a hookup site one evening, and by the time I'd made a cup of tea there were men contacting me. I had my pick for as long as I wanted.

Women in relationships with a partner who's lost sex drive? That happens. They're not femcels either. That's life and it's difficult.

I listened to most of it before I got fed up with it, and found it nonsensical.
Really off the mark and not a reflection of my life in an average-looking body, or of the life of any other woman I've ever talked to or heard about or read about.

Is this just another "women do it too" ?

Not heard of her. Not going to listen to it. Sounds very silly.

I usually enjoy Point of View but this one felt so absurd, I did shout at the radio. I certainly was one of those plain high-schoolers who wasn't getting male attention, and she seemed almost to be arguing that girls like me wanted to be harassed, for the validation - a bit like the premiss of a recent novel discussed here??

My favourite Point of View presenter is Rebecca Stott - love her voice, and how she weaves her theme.

@PermanentTemporary

Femcels? Women who really want no strings sex with lots of guys but can't get it?

That's not a thing. Really.

When I was 49, v ordinary and overweight I stuck an ad on a hookup site one evening, and by the time I'd made a cup of tea there were men contacting me. I had my pick for as long as I wanted.

Women in relationships with a partner who's lost sex drive? That happens. They're not femcels either. That's life and it's difficult.

Definitely. I'm off the dating sites now but I remember thinking that if you were a woman, the whole thing was like a sex buffet if you wanted no strings sex. I also went on a hookup site and had over three hundred messages by the next morning without even having put a picture up. The whole thing was quite overwhelming tbh and I skedaddled pretty quickly. The imbalance is insane. You could definitely make an argument that some women are needy for male attention and can't find the kind of relationship they're looking for, but can't find sex? Nah, definitely not a thing.

Yes a woman who can’t find a nice man and a relationship of the type she wants is not the same thing as a man who hates all women because they don’t want to shag him.

"femcels" has been a major thing on Reddit recently, but I am not sure it works as a parallel to incels.

The incels say they cannot get a "mate" - not only will no one commit to them in a pair bond relationship, but also no one will even have casual sex with them. OK, maybe they cannot "get" a sex partner. But not being able to "get someone to have casual sex" seems a bit different from a woman's perspective versus a man's. Do we not know that a woman might be afraid of some things a man might not be when casually hooking up off an app (yes, I know women still do it - I'm just asking if it's smart.)

There's no comparison.

Incels feel entitled to female attention and that's why they're ragey about not having it.

Women may feel sad, frustrated, embarrassed, whatever about not having male attention, but they don't feel entitled to it in the same way.

@PermanentTemporary

Femcels? Women who really want no strings sex with lots of guys but can't get it?

That's not a thing. Really.

When I was 49, v ordinary and overweight I stuck an ad on a hookup site one evening, and by the time I'd made a cup of tea there were men contacting me. I had my pick for as long as I wanted.

Women in relationships with a partner who's lost sex drive? That happens. They're not femcels either. That's life and it's difficult.

I couldn’t agree more. ‘Femcel’ is an oxymoron.

Strimpel appeared to be arguing that because boys weren’t queuing up to date her when she was a teenager, or rather the right boys weren’t queuing up to date her, that sexual harassment was only experienced by the most attractive women, eg Hollywood actresses.

Which is nonsense, as we all know.

Thanks for the responses, they've helped me clarify my thoughts. I was left wondering what new madness was being proposed. It seemed very like the TRA arguments in that it simply ignored anything inconvenient — power imbalances of all kinds, the risks women run in sexual relationships (from pregnancy through to rape and death), the fact that if a woman really wants sex she can almost certainly get it, the daily issues of harassment etc.

Great points about entitlement. If women felt entitled there'd be male prostitutes on the street.

Agree that relationships and sex are two separate things and that if Strimpel was bemoaning the fact that she couldn't find a decent man with whom to have a sexual relationship she's certainly not alone. But dissing #metoo because it didn't fit her argument was a crap move.

I've looked her up and she writes for the Telegraph, so perhaps enuf said.

I see that even back in 2012 Strimpel was already obsessed with men and relationships and the Guardian was criticising her logic:

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/15/zoe-strimpel-man-diet-review

Caught part of this whilst I was in the kitchen making breakfast, happily switched it off and took my breakfast elsewhere.

The bit I caught, she was talking about how MeToo only gained traction when it was the most beautiful women in the world who started making accusations, thereby proving (to her) that only beautiful women are listened to (or something along that line, I was concentrating on the toaster at that point). Anyway, my reflex response to that batshittery was -

'No, they're not being listened to because they are beautiful, they're being listened to because they are film stars who can command fees of millions per film, and therefore assumed to have some sort of power over their lives; so when we hear that they were subjected to the same treatment as less powerful women such as juniors in the costume department, we realise that the only thing they share is being female and that it is being female that makes you a target to predators you fuckwitted weirdo.'

She did see determined to look at everything through her particular lens and adjust reality to suit her agenda, whatever the hell that could be.

As a side point, IIRC the term 'incel' was coined by a woman about her own life. She might have started an online group about it, can't remember the details, but backed away from it when the drunk-on-male-entitlement arses took over.

Excuse me for having committed a sin, but I just asked DH if he had ever experienced casual every day harrassment from women who wouldn't stop or ridiculed him when he asked them to stop.

He laughed and said "aaah, is someone feeling left out!"

Like, do some women feel the need to acknowledge they can act as badly as some men, just so they are being fair?

Idiotic!

@WhereYouLeftIt yes, the term was coined by a woman about herself

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45284455

[quote FlyPassed]@WhereYouLeftIt yes, the term was coined by a woman about herself

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45284455[/quote]
Thank you! Yes, that's the woman I was thinking of.