Who are “Stacys” and “Beckys”? Is Lana Del Rey involved again? And why does everyone seem to be in their Fleabag era lately? In this article, we will dive into the controversial online community.

History and meanings

When asked, people are more likely to have heard of incels, infamous for their misogynistic ideologies and behaviors, than femcels. The reason for this might be in the origin of the term.

In 1997, a Canadian student, known as Alana, created a website called Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project. The early incel community (a blend word of “involuntary celibacy”) was aimed at supporting lonely people, regardless of gender, struggling to find a romantic or sexual partner.

However, later, the term “incel” stuck with heterosexual cis men. Women were excluded, and incels became linked to a specific online community that promotes resentment, anger, and hatred toward women for choosing conventionally attractive men—“Chads”. Incels believe that women can’t experience involuntary celibacy because they think women have greater sexual agency and are always able to attract male attention.

Excluded from the incel community, women had no choice but to create their own. The femcel community gained popularity in the 2010s on online forums like Reddit. By the analogy with incels, femcels are a subculture of women who suffer from the difficulty of forming romantic or sexual relationships despite a desire to do so.

Nevertheless, while incels blame women for being too picky and not giving them a chance, femcels often direct their frustrations inward, feeling overlooked by men and struggling with societal expectations of femininity and beauty. Why? Because incels are wrong—it’s not women who rule the world. Moreover, it’s women who bear the brunt of societal beauty standards, constantly feeling pressured to conform to unattainable ideals in order to be deemed attractive, accepted, or worthy of love and success. As a result, women often place the responsibility for their inability to find a partner on themselves.

Although the terms “incel” and “femcel” are often associated with heterosexual experiences, the underlying concept of involuntary celibacy—a state of desiring romantic or sexual relationships but being unable to achieve them—can apply to people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.

1-10 attractiveness scale

Beauty plays a significant role in both incel and femcel communities, and both use an attractiveness scale to label and stereotype certain social and physical archetypes, often in a derogatory or oversimplified way. However, there is a crucial difference: while incels use an attractiveness scale to categorize the types of men women choose, early femcels used it to categorize women based on their likelihood of being chosen.

Similar to incels’ “Chad,” early femcels referred to a conventionally beautiful, confident woman—portrayed as being highly successful in her romantic and sexual life—as “Stacy.” Judged by the attractiveness scale, “Stacys” were rated 6 or higher, and those who fell below this threshold were called “Beckys.”

The images of “Stacy” and “Becky” are often portrayed in cinema, particularly in rom-coms, where the main character—typically depicted as “Becky”—undergoes a series of cosmetic transformations to become “Stacy” and win the ultimate prize for her efforts: “Chad” (e.g., She’s All That, 1999).

Such classification of people by beauty reinforces harmful stereotypes, creating unrealistic standards that fuel insecurity, self-hatred, and social exclusion. It deepens societal divides, often fostering resentment, toxic behavior, and a culture of judgment rather than acceptance and individuality.

Though they suffered from it, femcels frequently promoted lookism and misogyny, which ultimately led to their ban on Reddit.

New heroines in pop culture

In recent years, the femcel movement developed a new branch and is now associated with so-called “femcelcore,” popularised through TikTok. On social media, femcelcore is related to the articulations of loneliness, disappointment in heterosexuality, fatalism, and the “sad girl” trope, often expressed through a post-ironic tone or melancholic aesthetic (Johanssen and Kay, 2024).

Aesthetics, in general, has become crucial for second-wave femcels, who increasingly resemble followers of aestheticism, prioritizing style, symbolism, and curated imagery over direct discourse. This shift reflects a desire to express their frustrations and pessimism through art, fashion, and visual storytelling.

That is why such singers as Lana Del Rey, Melani Martinez, and Marina, previously known as Marina and the Diamonds, have become iconic figures within femcelcore. Their music, steeped in themes of melancholy, longing, and defiance of conventional norms, resonates deeply with the community, offering both a mirror to their struggles and an aestheticized escape.

Listing the canonical film and TV series characters, it’s impossible not to mention Jennifer from Jennifer’s Body, 2009; Amy from Gone Girl, 2014; and Fleabag from Fleabag, 2016-2019, who inspired an entire cultural movement with her unapologetic messiness and raw vulnerability. The “Fleabag era” has become shorthand for a phase of life defined by emotional chaos, self-sabotage, and the search for identity, all wrapped in humor or brutality.

Noteworthy is that femcelcore’s icons are conventionally beautiful and even dangerous women, reminiscent of femme fatale heroines from 1940s–1950s noir films. However, while noir heroines were portrayed through the prism of the male gaze, femcelcore heroines are often written by women, and therefore, they aren't merely an accessory to the male character.

These new heroines quite accurately convey the modern sentiments of women in the context of neo-patriarchy—sadness and disappointment, but also anger and cruelty. At this point, second-wave femcels are often connected to “dissociative feminism,” the term coined by Emmeline Clein in 2019 to describe the harsh, sometimes detached way women express their feelings when discussing their tragic experiences. In other words, if classic feminism is full of optimistic slogans, dissociative feminism is full of fatigue caused by living in the patriarchal world.

In this way, it can be said that femcels shifted from blaming themselves for not being good enough to find a partner into blaming patriarchal attitudes that prevent them from building healthy relationships with men. Not seeing the way out, modern femcels, as well as their iconic characters, have a kind of striving to do something chaotic or even self-destructive, which can be considered as a protest to the established social norms.

The rise of femcelcore can also be linked to the historical suppression of topics like female loneliness, sadness, and anger. For being “overdramatic,” women were either claimed to be hysterical or sent to psychiatric hospitals. That is why now women have a chance to speak openly about their feelings and share negative emotions and experiences.

No wonder that femcelcore is often associated with such books as The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, and Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, where female protagonists don’t try to be always cheerful and easy, opening the curtain to unfiltered emotions and struggles with identity, mental health, and societal expectations.