“Men should always do the chasing, women should seek financial contributions from men.” No, this is not dating advice from the 20th century—it’s appearing in online spaces like TikTok and Youtube, part of what researchers are now naming the femosphere.
In a paper published in Feminist Media Studies earlier this year, Loughborough University professor Jilly Kay traced so-called femosphere online communities back to 2018 in a defensive reaction against the manosphere, the misogynistic communities that vary from anti-feminism to more explicit, violent rhetoric towards women. “In the femosphere, the red pill is often reframed as a ‘pink pill’ philosophy to signal a distinctively female-centric ethos,” Kay wrote in her paper.
Now these communities are recruiting members across social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit.
While the manosphere has influencers like Joe Rogan and Jordan B. Peterson, the femosphere flourishes in Reddit forums like Female Dating Strategy, which has more than 260,000 members. Branding itself as “the only dating subreddit exclusively for women,” Female Dating Strategy promotes a six-point ideology that presents men as sex-driven and lazy, and encourages women to only seek out men who can provide for them financially.
The Female Dating Strategy subreddit has even spawned a podcast of the same name, which claims to be “about the ruthless advancement of women.” In the paper, Kay calls the advice the FDS promotes “characteristic of its anti-hope structure of feeling, in which any utopian desires for large-scale social and political transformation are disavowed, and instead replaced with hyper-individualistic ‘strategie.’”
The same goes for the phenomenon of female dating influencers on TikTok and YouTube. Influencers like Kanika Batra (called the “Andrew Tate for girls”) teach emotionally manipulative techniques for “managing [men’s] dopamine levels,” as a way to take back power for women in dating. Another influencer, TheWizardLiz, who at the time of writing has 7.42 million subscribers on YouTube, creates viral advice videos such as “How to receive princess treatment,” “How to create your dream reality,” “Take your power and energy back,” and “How to stop being lazy and pathetic.”
This content mirrors a broader cultural shift. The 2010-era “girl boss” ideal of liberal feminism has faced widespread rejection, in part because it didn’t lead to all that many improvements for women: Women still make up just 28% of corporate executives, earn around 84 cents for every dollar a man is paid, and experience discrimination in the workplace on the basis of gender. And so women are increasingly turning to so-called “dark feminine” and tradwife influencers for a new kind of philosophy, one that mirrors the manosphere’s ultraconservative values.
“In this case, certain ideas from left feminism seem to be getting mixed up with reactionary conservative ideas,” Kay told The Guardian last month. “It’s part of broader reactionary politics, the role that digital culture is playing in rearranging traditional coordinates of left and right.”
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