sorry i'm a femcel guys

turns out being bullied as an adolescent is a one way ticket to heteroexisentialism.

I love the song Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus because it’s about a guy who is a fucking loser, but at the end of the song, the popular girl he’s in love with finally notices him. Yay good for him etc.

OTOH, what happens if the guy doesn’t get his happy ending? He gets to grow up and go on Reddit and complain to all the other losers who don’t know a woman’s touch. He gets to get super good at a skill and either find community with other dudes, or some girl gives him a chance and finds his autism endearing. Or he shoots up a school. Or he follows Andrew Tate. Or he kills himself and people kind of think about it for a while maybe. Either way, he gets called an “incel.” People know what that is.

What happens to a gender swapped Teenage Dirtbag without the happy ending? What if that’s illegibilized, or worse, illegitimized?

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Recently many have asked me how my love life’s going because of *this post*. This post that has gotten 250+ likes in the last 6 months. I wrote it in 2023. People apparently want an update.

When I wrote that post, I was writing it for myself. Sort of. I was writing it because it felt good to make art out of my grief and my sadness. I was also admittedly more solipsistic and kind of like, “well if someone sees it that’d be nice and I hope people relate to this and get me.” I was meek. I was kind of angry but in this dim way. You know that moment when sometimes you’re trying to turn on the stove and it doesn’t catch, so instead of flame, it’s just pumping out gas? That’s the level of emotionality I could muster then about this part of my life, which I’ve kept quiet about for the last year.

Well, now the flame’s coming out. Because imagine how I feel now that it’s going viral and one of my favorite writers has called attention to it. Wait, you likely don’t know how I feel. So let me spell it out. I’m fucking EMBARRASSED as hell. Furious, even. Let’s dig into why:

1. that I could be known as the girl who wants a boyfriend.

   In the years since, I did not in fact have a happy ending or stop caring about the dating game. I FEEL LIKE I WAS SUPPOSED TO. Which feels humiliating, since I feel like people began to parasocially identify with my struggle and now I owe them the act of trying harder, and meta-humiliating, because I should be free or whatever to do what I want. And what I want right now is to crawl into a hole and die. But that’s not true. I don’t know what I want. I’m deeply overwhelmed and struggling to make sense of how horrifying yet relieving it is to be seen by all of you. I can’t believe 300 people read my post and decided, “yeah, that was not shit, so I am going to like it.” *click heart*
   
   I feel like the poster child for “girl who wants a boyfriend” and that’s real rich, because in typical HBO drama style, I’ve remained the perennial bitch without a boyfriend. It’s been 30 years. Some people do me the good fortune of validating that that’s weird, and yes, to some people, I should fear that the longer I go without having had one, the more “red flaggy” it looks. So lo and behold, reason number two —

2. I no longer even feel like I’m even allowed to want a boyfriend. I straight up fucking gave up.

3. It’s actually more humiliating to not analyze the reason why I think I’m not “allowed to.” There are no rules in life, not even for writing. There are “structures” you should make though. And there are structures you have made, that you should figure out so you can then break them. I have decided to try to break my own.

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I know my post wasn’t shit, lol. I know it was a good post. I know I’m a good writer. But what does it mean that I know I’m one yet try to pretend to myself I’m not?

It means I’m ambivalent about my own talent, because I spent so much of my life fetishizing the idea that I’m a lost treasure that if only someone cared enough to uncover me, I’d become their indie darlin favorite. That’s maybe what Chappell Roan wanted, was to be the “favorite artist of your favorite artist” forever, just famous enough to be kind of a big deal but not universally loved enough to get away unscathed with compromising a little authenticity (that’s why she’s so ‘unlikable’. Some aren’t built for fame.).

I haven’t had sex in almost two years and that coincides with when I stopped writing. This feels dirty to admit. This feels wrong. Why? Because every day, I go on the fucking Internet (Twitter), and all these MALE incels are complaining about how they’d die for a woman’s touch. They are angry that they make all this money yet no one wants to fuck them. And suddenly, my trauma (that made me not want to have sex or date anyone) feels dirty. It feels like I’m not allowed to be a fucking femcel. And I’ve been trying to avoid thinking of how I stack up because it’s uncomfortable.

So let me get this straight, I say to that part of me that’s really scared. I’m “supposed” to make the most of this because I have this walking gold shiny coin between my legs that people are dying for access to, but I forget all the time that I even have it. Because when I was a kid, I gave men the deciding power if they wanted me. Most of them decided to be really horrible to me.

I’m now supposed to believe I have choosing power, when everything taught to me early on told me I don’t.

So you know what that makes me? That makes me so angry I become listless with fury when the fellow hot girls tell me I should go out and have a slut phase. It makes me angry when I can’t talk to incels because they take one look at me and automatically go you don’t know what it’s like because you get male attention all the time. There’s no place for me to go. And the most humiliating place I could crawl to, I think, is Substack. Because I jerk myself off to how I don’t know if anyone gives a fuck about me, little old me.

For many fucking years, I thought I was special. And this was cope, because I wanted to be like everyone else and felt like I wasn’t allowed to. So I doubled down.

The problem is I don’t know anymore if I’m special or not special. I’m like everyone else because I want to be in love. I’m not like everyone else because I can’t find where I fit in. I relate to the “incels” but it’s like I can’t relate literally to them because I’m petite and an Asian girl who’s bubbly and a community leader. By all accounts, this should make me hot. But because I had several horrible experiences as a child that made me probably somewhat antisocial in specific regards that I have FIXED enough to look like i MUST have to fit in, I am now at the point where I’m a fucking weirdo on the inside, but “the golden girl” on the outside.

Why don’t I thirst trap? Why do I not turn around if someone catcalls me? Why do I shrink if someone confronts me about my feelings?

I guess I’ll spell it out.

I’ve been circling this post for a long time. I wrote it in a weird order and I’ve Frankensteined it into the structure you’re reading right now.

This originally started with the lines:

“I have a confession that I feel like no one cares about yet everyone cares about at the same time.

I’m scared. This is not going to be very good, probably (or maybe it will be, and I’m just trying to preempt your expectations. Call it Schrodinger’s blog post about sex. Actually, I want it to be good. Oh well. I guess I’ll have to find out. FUCK!!)”

I thought the confession originally was going to be that I’m a femcel who hasn’t had sex in two years. After writing this for a bit, I’ve decided that’s not my confession. Because that’s not really as interesting as what that means. So I’m scrapping the original “takeaway.” Sometimes you have to write the post you think you’re supposed to write to get to the one you really want to write.

My confession is — My femcel status is why I stopped posting on Substack. It’s why I stopped writing. And wow, that’s fucking HILARIOUS AND HORRIFYING

CAN YOU IMAGINE? MY LIFELONG DREAM OF BEING A WRITER, INTERRUPTED BECAUSE “presumably I was too busy and focusing on other parts of my feeling la di da kum ba fucking ya” but actually it’s because I HAVE BEEN JERKING MYSELF OFF TO THE FANTASY THAT NO GUY WANTS TO DATE ME AND I’M UNWORTHY OF LOVE FOR YEARS.

Part one of this realization goes something like — “for 28ish years, I thought that being a writer would save me from and exclude me from that game. Maybe I won’t have to face my fears of being bad at that shit if I just write a lot, hur hur hur.”

Part two of this realization goes something like — “ok, I’m realizing I’m doing that, that’s cringe, I should work instead on trying to belong to society. I’m going to stop writing as much if it’s based on some stupid fantasy that being the “other” is going to make me more interesting.”

Part three — “I got my heart broken so bad by someone who studied my words so hungrily and then took me on a date just to tell me he had a girlfriend at the end and that crystallized my childhood trauma and made me want to throw down the pen forever because god forbid I give anyone that sort of unfettered access to me ever again. It disgusts me. I hate writing.”

Part four — “WOW, THAT IS UNBELIEVABLY FUCKED UP BUT NOW I’M TOO SCARED OF WRITING BECAUSE MY TASTE CHANGED SINCE THE LAST TIME I GAVE IT A GO AND OH, OH NO, WHAT ARE PEOPLE GOING TO THINK”

Part five — “Okay, wow, so everyone is complaining about not being able to find a boyfriend while I seethe and cope about the fact that you all have it better than me because —

Because why? Do you have it better?

What if everyone doesn’t?

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Heteropessimism, a term coined by Asa Seresin, is the performative resignation around heterosexual relationships. Think of everyone who is like:

“Ugh, men are trash, but I keep dating them.”

“Women just want money and attention. Whatever.”

On the other end is heteronihilism, coined by Jacob Johanssen and Jilly Boyce Kay, where the individual no longer believes they can source meaning from within, so they play the game and pretend they don’t feel the degree of hopelessness that the heteropessimists openly voice. Both are still participating though.

So you get a population of people who still long for connection, still desire, still compare—but feel powerless to make any of it real or fulfilling.

"I want love, but I also believe love is dead."

That’s the heteronihilist trapped in a heteropessimist world. You crave meaning through the Other (heteronihilism), but every encounter with the Other confirms your worst fears (heteropessimism). So you get desire that becomes envy, then resentment, then self-flagellation for even having wanted in the first place.

So what do we do? We spiral, meme, punish each other for wanting, and secretly hope to be saved by a partner we no longer believe in.

I’m none of these. But in order to actually dig into why, I have to go back to the adolescent part of my inner trauma, when I remember being endlessly obsessed with and worried about what people thought of me, and punished constantly for attempting to engage with it because I was so fucking awkward.

I think I have to excavate this part of me and show her off to everyone because apparently it’s not a given that people can sniff that off me.

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WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE, is an insane movie, but if you want to understand me, you can watch it. Basically it revolves around Dawn Wiener, a 12-year-old middle schooler who’s bullied at school and ignored at home. She gets called names like “Wiener Dog” and constantly struggles to stand up for herself. At home, her parents dote on her younger, more conventionally cute sister Missy, and her older brother gets a free pass for everything because he’s a gifted student.

Early on, Dawn tries to defend herself at school but just gets in more trouble. She starts crushing hard on Steve, her brother’s bandmate, and gets wrapped up in the fantasy of being seen and loved. Meanwhile, Brandon—a classmate who bullies her and even threatens her—starts showing interest in her in this deeply confusing and inappropriate way. Dawn doesn’t know how to respond, and the whole situation is emotionally loaded and messy and definitely driven by the fact that she has no one to tell her what she’s doing wrong or how to fix it. She has no one to turn to. She wilts constantly and tries to fight back with what she knows best (whether it’s literally or even just trying to play the game) but doesn’t know how in either instance.

Her sister Missy gets kidnapped later in the film, and for a moment, Dawn sees it as a twisted chance to finally get some attention. But then she actually worries for Missy and tries to go find her herself, showing that she’s not heartless—just desperate to be seen. In the end, Missy is found safe, and Dawn is still in the same miserable position, unseen and misunderstood. The film ends with her going on a school trip, staring blankly out the window—no real resolution, just that same quiet ache.

Sad.

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Back to what happens to a gender swapped Teenage Dirtbag where you don’t get the love interest.

Say a girl grows up and gets saved, but doesn’t get to ever leave that hell internally. What if that’s because, after she got stuck in one too many situations as a kid where some boy decides to laugh when she confesses her feelings and humiliate her, she can’t stop living in that shadow? What if she never gets over that? What if that hell is still inside her, despite her best efforts to eradicate it? What if this cripples her?

Well, there’s a place for girls like that. They might get super anxious and eventually commit suicide, as the sequels featuring Dawn Wiener in alternate universes indicate.

But god forbid anyone talk about the red dot airplane meme girls. The girls who make it. The girls who glow up but don’t get why.

Ironically, the actress who plays Dawn Wiener in the ‘90’s goes on to play Lilly Moscovitz in the Princess Diaries, the best friend to another woman who glows up and becomes a princess (Anne Hathaway, hello!). Movies like that, Never Been Kissed, What A Girl Wants, A Cinderella Story, and She’s All That depict a virginal innocent excited woman who gets rewarded with true love for remaining kind and virtuous despite hard ship and initially being fuglyish.

But what happens to Dawn Wiener in an alternate universe where she decides to ego death and get really unique and pleasant, instead of emo and sad all the time, and double down on accepting how much of a loser is and just become good to the people around her and autistic about learning how to get along with people?

What if she becomes beloved by her community and shows up everyone and proves them wrong… but is still too traumatized to try with the final boss of dating, and no one gets why she can’t see herself as the supposedly beautiful person she is because every time she puts herself out there, she’s still afraid she’s going to get put through hell?

She becomes me.

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For a long time, the only place to turn to for comfort was writing. You have no idea how being good at writing saved me when I wanted to die. I in fact, decided early on that there would be no end to the humiliation. That even committing suicide would be fucking embarrassing. That even dying would not spare me the disdain of my classmates or my parents or even myself. I Pascal Wagered myself into deciding my revenge would be to become iconic and insightful and then it would stop mattering whether or not people liked me.

That was 20 years ago. And now, I’m “a hottie” who “has inadvertently turned down several men” because I’m “not really paying attention to anyone.” Do you know how much cope fuels this? Do you know how much my nervous system literally freeze frames every time I get confronted with the prospect of confessing my feelings, but fear I’m about to be completely gaslit and slapped in the face again and again? Do you know how much my “hot girl” persona is actually a liability in that sense?

The connection to my femcel status here is that writing and romantic vulnerability became intertwined for me. When I write authentically, as was my comfort, I expose the same parts of me that would be exposed in an intimate relationship.

After being hurt when I opened up romantically (in a way that I haven’t explicated on except in “Part Three of this Realization^”), I instinctively protected myself by also closing the channel of vulnerability that writing represents.

When this man who came after the one from my original post—this man who studied those very words about loneliness and vulnerability I'd shared publicly—betrayed me, I realized my writing was making me vulnerable in the same way dating does. I was exposing my true self through my Substack, laying bare my thoughts and feelings about wanting connection, inviting others to see the rawest parts of me. The betrayal taught me that my writing had become another way to be rejected, another avenue for humiliation when someone used my own words to get close only to reveal they never truly wanted me.

The trauma of that rejection taught me that being seen is dangerous, whether through my writing or through romantic connection. So I stopped both. I stopped writing because it felt like sending love letters into the void, hoping someone would truly see me and respond with care.

Each time I sat down to write, I felt the same fear I felt when considering dating: that my vulnerability would be used against me, that I'd be rejected for showing who I really am.

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I fear every man I fall in love with is going to hurt me by lying to me he doesn’t want me. What if they smell blood in the water again and pounce on me because I’m so bullyable? Who am I supposed to be angry at about this? That I live fearing men I fall in love with can’t be trusted, because what if they smell blood in the water again and they are sharks?

To me, that’s what men are. I relate to how incels can’t see women clearly — I also fear not the men who will rape me, but the ones who will torture me bc I’m an easy target to pick on. I can’t fathom who could want me because I feel disgusting. And the problem is, it’s on me to believe anyone who tells me I’m not. I’ve been trying for several years to unfreeze my self.

Maybe if I had a lame leg people would get it. If I had scars on my arms. If I could say I was sexually assaulted. Maybe that’s digestible. But imagine having no language for what’s happening to you, so you start praying a lot. You start believing you’re better than everyone to cope. And soon, this has rotted you to where you believe you are exempt from participating in the games others play. You are not. But you cling to this belief because you don’t know how to deal with being a FUCKING LOSER forever.

I have changed lives for years because I write about these kinds of raw emotions. And I want to be proud of this. But instead, I’m embarrassed, because I feel like being this different with this dark of a past means I’m doomed to take up the mantle for society in this way. I used to think I WANTED to be The Voice of This Generation. I don’t know what I want anymore, for the first time in my life.

Noah Smith himself jokingly pointing to me as “What The Youth Are Saying” as “they are saying they want a boyfriend” feels darkly funny in the sense that, I guess I figured out how to be the mouthpiece for thousands of women out there who are also devastated at being single. But my journey with this has felt like, I have so much to fucking offer, and so many years were spent being angry that no one saw it that I stopped trying to speak it into existence.

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I wrote this piece and I’m angry as I do it because admitting this part of me is hard. Admitting I don’t know what I’m SUPPOSED to do because I do not fit neatly into any of the boxes hurts. I feel so fucking scared because I don’t know if I’m “allowed” to complain. I scream and cry because my conception of reality does not fit at all with how my outer world looks. I’m “autistic” maybe? But my special interest is people so I’m really good at them? People can’t decide if I am or not and I’m sick of trying to box myself in.

The problem is that in order to win the sex and dating game now, you have to have a fucking brand. You have to know what your game is. You have to know whose type you are just as much as what your own type is. Jesus fucking Christ, I don’t know? Tall, lanky twink guys who are sensitive and a little scared of women but fucking smart as hell? That’s my type. But I’m no one’s type because I am peppy and cute like an anime girl yet deeply serious and spiritually gassed up and thunder like your father when I’m angry. No one is expecting to fall in love with someone like me. I defy expectations constantly for everyone I know. I don’t know what that means.

I’ve refused to play any of the social games as a kid because I felt unworthy of them. Do you understand why now?

I suspect I was so creatively good at avoiding them, that now I can play them blindfoldedly with my one move: being completely just myself and saying fuck you to anyone who doesn’t like that.

But even this is camouflaged now because I no longer force other people to accept “one version of me.” I’ve learned being myself is also accommodating the part of me that wants to accommodate people (with little to no hurt to myself).

Why am I telling people this? Well, I feel obligated to report this status because in my personal life, this is starting to really eat at me.

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But the happy part is — I stopped fetishizing the idea of having a boyfriend as something that would make me finally fucking normal.

I don’t believe anyone when people try to tell me this is okay. Is it okay that I’ve still never had a boyfriend? Is it okay that I am both kind of okay with it as cope but also okay with the existential fear it brings up in me that I’m about to be selected out of the female populace for having an invisible scarlet letter on my forehead saying DONT’ COME NEAR THIS BITCH, SHE’S STILL A HUGE LOSER

I feel fucking stupid about caring about it in ways I didn’t before. I also feel freer because even if I am going to die of embarrassment every time someone mentions my blog post and even if I haven’t “succeeded” at the dating game, I no longer hate everyone for that.

It’s sad that I have to preemptively let people know about my weird relationship to this more so because I’m hot. I hadn’t really let myself feel how fucked up that is, that I have to almost apologize for being a femcel because I’m conventionally attractive and it makes everyone around me uncomfortable. So they give me the worst advice. “Go have more casual sex” “Go settle for someone” “Just give up and then it’ll come when you’re not looking” “Just kill yourself”

I actually have insane amounts of psychological body dysmorphia because I can’t understand what the average person’s experience of me might be, and that’s what I fear no one can understand. But what if they can. What if everyone felt like a loser in some way and no one talks about it because we’re too busy focusing on the now?

I started reading erotica written from a guy’s perspective and taking notes on it. I feel this intense pressure to make the most of my research when I’m happier not having sex. I don’t talk about this because people sometimes joke I should just switch to porn. But what turns me on is someone liking my mind. Having sex with someone who doesn’t deeply connect with my mind isn’t going to be satisfying, and the shadow of the fact that I don’t think you understand me actually has made me orgasm in the past. Orgasming for the wrong reasons is actually traumatizing in ways not being able to orgasm isn’t.

I don’t know how to deal with how people keep telling me I’m a “hot girl” but I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it because I’m still in the doghouse. I’m still Dawn Wiener. And I feel ashamed I don’t believe it because of my appearance.

This is what happens when I go out into the dating arena: I remember this paradox of being hyper-visible and simultaneously invisible, and I want to die. It feels like men have the choosing power in whether or not I end up married with kids. How can you say to me that I can dom a guy into wanting me, when people find me so closed off they won’t even try to pursue me and I can’t even notice the vibes I’m emitting? It feels like walking through a minefield of modern femininity, internet culture, internalized trauma, desire, shame, and self-awareness—all while I’m carrying a mirror, terrified of what reflection is going to stare back, and refusing to stare into it, while using it to accidentally start fires.

Damn bitch, I fear you think to yourself, must be really hard having a public-facing self that everyone assumes is winning and a private self that’s struggling to even want to play the game. Why should I care again?

By god, I’m afraid to admit to myself I want anyone to care but an essential part of myself that I’m proud I stopped repressing since 2023 is I want people to care and that want is creating good things for me, at least.

I had to be high agency enough to decide to not kill myself. But that wasn’t enough. Now I have to be high agency enough for people to know who I am.

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At this point, I’ve concluded tentatively that I’m neither a heteronihilist or heteropessimist. I’m leaning toward ~heteroexistentialism~.

The sad and kind of embarrassing thing is, I’ve gone so far off the deep end of despair that I no longer see sex and dating as broken systems. I now laugh with a mouth full of blood that they are sites of absurdity, longing, identity formation, and loss. You all want to set yourselves free? Well, by god, I haven’t set myself free yet. And I’m ashamed, because I feel like the only way I can be worthy of love by any of you given how horrifying my adolescence was, is to become an answer to a problem you’ve all arrived at anyway. We are all stuck in this game. Even if you have a partner, you live in the shadow of fearing you will be subjected to this circle jerk of despair and get thrown back into the wringer. (Someone recently described their relationship as feeling like “taking the last chopper out of ‘Nam.” After meeting a couple actual Vietnam veterans recently who said they wouldn’t want to be a young person right now, that was really hilarious and sad.)

For years, I’ve refused to disengage or go numb. But now, I can’t really live in this limbo of defining myself by what I’m not.

Instead, I just go around asking myself: what does it mean to desire, to be desired, to be a woman in this system? I want to fuck and be fucked, but have it mean something I consented to. I want to understand what that even means, and who I’m becoming in the process, without forgetting who the person I desire at the other end of all this is. There’s a recursive loop of wanting, hurting, knowing, and wanting again that I can’t break out of. And I don’t think many of you are qualified to help me. But does that mean you can’t?

I don’t know. I wish I did.

But I’m still figuring it out, and maybe you should examine how you’re going about going about that before you laugh at my journey. Maybe you’ll even appreciate it.

In the meantime, sorry for being a femcel who’s hot and you think *should* have a boyfriend. I wish I had one too. But I’ll work hard to do the work in the way I have to to get one.