Between Hetero-Fatalism and Dark Femininity: Discussions of Relationships, Sex, and Men in the Femosphere

Emilie Francis


Abstract
The ‘femosphere’ is a term coined to describe a group of online ideological spaces for women characterised by toxicity, reactionary feminism, and hetero-pessimism. It is often portrayed as a mirror of a similar group of communities for men, called the ‘manosphere’. Although there have been several studies investigating the ideologies and language of the manosphere, the femosphere has been largely overlooked - especially in NLP. This paper presents a study of two communities in the femosphere: Female Dating Strategy and Femcels. It presents an exploration of the language of these communities on topics related to relationships, sex, and men from the perspective of hetero-pessimism using topic modelling and semantic analysis. It reveals dissatisfaction with heterosexual courtship and frustration with the patriarchal society through which members attempt to navigate.
Anthology ID:
2025.woah-1.29
Volume:
Proceedings of the The 9th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)
Month:
August
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Agostina Calabrese, Christine de Kock, Debora Nozza, Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco, Zeerak Talat, Francielle Vargas
Venues:
WOAH | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
325–341
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.woah-1.29/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Emilie Francis. 2025. Between Hetero-Fatalism and Dark Femininity: Discussions of Relationships, Sex, and Men in the Femosphere. In Proceedings of the The 9th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH), pages 325–341, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Between Hetero-Fatalism and Dark Femininity: Discussions of Relationships, Sex, and Men in the Femosphere (Francis, WOAH 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.woah-1.29.pdf
Supplementarymaterial:
 2025.woah-1.29.SupplementaryMaterial.tex