So if ya ain't been paying attention lately, there's a new feminist movement out there that's starting to exceed the scale of the commercially-acceptable liberal one everybody knows about. It's composed of so-called "high-value dating" women, femcels, WGTOWs, this whole scene.
For the sake of convenience, I'll refer to these scenes collectively by a term they often call themselves: based, by which is meant like "based in facts". Based feminism instead of woke feminism. The unifying thread behind it all is that this is internet-born feminism rather than campus-born feminism, and it, in terms of theory/mentality, revolves around fusing aspects of evolutionary psychology (something fashionable on the political right) with aspects of radical feminist thinking and terminology, resulting in a new and unique thing.
I wanted to highlight it briefly this evening because, frankly, to me at least, this is a genuinely positive development and a hopeful sign for the overall direction of the women's movement, which, as people here doubtless know by now, is something I'm deeply invested in and passionate about.
Most "based" feminism derives from the "high-value dating" scene, and more specifically from the now-defunct Female Dating Strategy subreddit that's currently being moved off of Reddit and onto an autonomous site. The basic philosophy of FDS is that the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the casual hook-up culture it's given rise to has made women miserable. Which, incidentally, is a fact. Practitioners oppose sex before commitment, pornography consumption, and any sexual practice containing "even a whiff of abuse" such as the fashionable polyamory, bondage, and sadomasochism trends, and encourage women to take all the time they need to assess prospective partners before committing to them. To these ends, the response we've seen to FDS from the liberal press has generally been hostile, often accusing practitioners of being both too square and too radical in the same breath. Hit pieces can be found in spaces ranging from Jezebel (the biggest libfem blog and an offshoot of the old Gawker site) to the Verge and far beyond. Despite their best efforts to besmirch it though, FDS has proven enormously popular with today's college-age young adults, whom have been dubbed Generation Z.
FDS has proven to be a gateway (intentionally or otherwise) to a whole range of yet bolder ideologies that stem from their same basic premise that the current dating pool of men sucks and that casual hook-up culture is, at minimum, a crucial reason why. Among these are the femcels: celibate women (some voluntarily, some otherwise) who feel that it is completely impossible to find genuine heterosexual love in today's world no matter what one does. The #femcel hashtag on TikTok has now been used over 125 million times. Also gathering new converts from the FDS has been a smaller (once fringe) scene know as WGTOWs, which is shorthand for Women Going Their Own Way. The term is a straight-up appropriation of the "manosphere" term "MGTOWs" (shorthand for, you guessed it, Men Going Their Own Way) and describes dedicated female separatists specifically. What's more, both proper conservative and radical feminist thinkers and spaces, ranging from Mary Harrington's Reactionary Feminist blog to the Fourth Wave Women subreddit, have also seen boosts in followership and traffic (as applicable) via FDS. And what it all results in is a tough, assertive, non-partisan movement actually dedicated to women's issues for a change that now looks like this when it's all thrown together in one space. I can't help but be happy about that for two reasons: 1) I've learned a lot about the genuine merits of evolutionary psychology through this new, "based" women's movement, and 2) it shows that the women's movement is finally getting more serious and overall is now clearly trending in the general direction of what my own thinking has been.