Reporting From Inside the Femosphere

The Survey Center for American Life recently posted data with a title so controversial, yet so blasé and factual, that it took X by storm: Young Democrat Women Most Likely to Blame Men for Their Problems. 

The graph referred to problems women face in society, not their personal problems — but the nuance was immediately lost on scores of commenters, all excoriating young women for driving men away with misandric remarks, for being “anti-men,” or, generally, for destroying society. The same center also recently posted data demonstrating that Gen Z men and women are diverging politically at an astonishing rate — women Left, men Right. 

And both sides seem to hate each other passionately. The male side is, in many ways, fostered by the well-documented social media “manosphere,” led by influencers like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate. It is predicated on the belief that feminism is ruining society.

The female side is less documented, but I’m more familiar with it. I fell into the “femosphere” years ago, and I haven’t escaped my social media silo yet. Five minutes on Instagram yields me content like—“feminist facts that radicalized us,” “The invisible cost of being a woman,” or even, “Men used to take parts of women’s brains out of their heads for daring to have an opinion”—a carousel about the mass lobotomies performed on women like Rosemary Kennedy in the early 1900s.

It’s changed me. I’ve noticed myself more agitated — more alert to injustice — quicker to question my male peers. I’ve found myself catching my tongue before angrily informing my husband of yet another historical evil perpetrated by his sex. But my female friends all know what I’m talking about: we’re all stuck in the same silo. Interestingly, we all get manosphere content too — clips of pastors saying women shouldn’t vote, tradwives arguing that women shouldn’t work outside the home.

The manosphere was first labeled by researchers in 2009. Meanwhile, the term “femosphere” was coined in 2024 by media researcher Jilly Boyce Kay, who described a “loose ecology” of women’s Reddit communities that emerged in 2018 as a reaction to the manosphere.

It has since proliferated across platforms, uniting women who feel disillusioned by men — including those who’ve given up on men entirely. In Kay’s words, it is a “gender-flipped” mirror of the manosphere, sharing its bioessentialism, fatalism, and rejection of unity. Extreme femospherists, like manospherists, believe that the other sex is immutably corrupt — something to be strategized around, not reasoned with.

Yet a key difference between the two is that the femosphere is grassroots. All the feminist or misandric content I’ve consumed comes from different women — including doctors, lawyers, and homemakers — often operating relatively small accounts, in contrast to the manosphere’s billion-dollar machine and wealthy influencers. In other words, the femosphere is less contrived — re: less artificial — than the manosphere.

Regardless, what both feeds have done to my and my friends’ psyches would probably stun a longitudinal MRI scan. Manosphere-ists tell us how to be, sit, breathe, act, while denigrating our intelligence and capabilities. Femospherists tell us not only that many men are working against us, but that men have, for centuries, oppressed our whole gender. I am unsure if Gen Z men have similar experiences, but I feel like a tent left out in a hailstorm: constantly battered, slowly shredding into rags. 

Kay writes that both spheres perpetuate an “anti-hope” feeling — and indeed, they make me feel hopeless. To be sure, they don’t keep me entirely away from men. I have many male friends, I love male-centric movies like The Odyssey, and I even recently married a wonderful man — who listens seriously when I talk about feminism.

But in our increasingly isolated age, women who retain hope in men seem to be the exception, not the norm. Only 35 percent of single women are looking for a relationship or even casual dates. Three-quarters of unmarried women ages 22 to 35 said they hadn’t dated at all, or had dated only a few times, in the past year. And 55 percent of single women believe single women are generally happier than married ones. Dating-app burnout may be partly to blame, but burnout can’t explain why more than half of single women say they would be less likely to date a man who voted for President Donald Trump. 

In short, the sexes are rapidly separating, driven by cherry-picked evidence and some misaligned values. The result is two versions of reality — a generation no longer dating each other, marrying each other, or even desirous of living in the same America. Much of our present political chaos follows from that, and it will likely continue.  The manosphere and femosphere have likely not yet gone as far as they will; the culture wars generated by the Lindsay Clancy trial and the Cornell 7 are at least proof of that.

There’s a way out, but it requires something both spheres refuse to do: take the other side's grievances seriously. 

Misogyny is alive and real in America; anyone who has heard of the Epstein files or has an X account knows that. But many young men are also lonely and adrift, and when the only people acknowledging it are Tate and Fuentes, it’s no mystery where they end up. 

Both feeds profit from maligning or mocking the other. This isn’t the solution. The manosphere and the femosphere insist individuals can’t change — the best way to prove them wrong, to reunite young men and women, is to talk to each other offline, curiously and earnestly.

Sydney Jezik is a senior at Brigham Young University. She is a Young Voices contributor. 

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