Following the highly publicised separation of influencer Lize Dzjabrailova — better known as The Wizard Liz — from her partner (who got exposed on social media for cheating on her and calling their relationship fake), and the ensuing fallout over child custody, hot takes on “pink-pilling” the “femosphere” have been all over my social media feed.
As you know, girl online is all about digital girlhood, and the so-called femosphere is central to our primary questions: what are women doing on the internet & what is the internet doing to them. While this subculture — a collection of influencers and schools of thought that became popular around 2023 but dates back to 2018 — is central to those questions, I haven’t really written about them yet. The reason is that, while I hold little regard for the cynical relationship advice peddled by these creators, I refused to legitimise the manosphere by engaging in the false construction of a female mirror-image. But watching all the piss-poor takes on the femosphere by both conservative and liberal commentators online, I had to put my thoughts into words.
In this issue of girl online, we discuss the intellectually dishonest bothsidesing of gender politics and why perpetuating the existence of a “femosphere" is more than just a bad take.
The term “femosphere” was coined by feminist media researcher Jilly Boyce Kay in a 2024 paper published in Feminist Media Studies. Kay uses the term to describe the sprawling digital ecosystem of content creators and coaches, ranging all the way from dark feminine mindset coaches like The Wizard Liz, dating strategist for “high-value” women like Shera Seven or Kanika Batra, and forums like FDS (The Female Dating Strategy). The core of this subculture revolves around teaching women how to navigate relationships through hyper-confidence, emotional detachment, strict financial vetting, and radical self-interest.
This is not to be confused with the womanosphere, which is a label often applied to conservative commentators like Brett Cooper or Candace Owens, tradwife influencers like Nara Smith or Hannah Neeleman, and “godly womanhood” coaches. The womanosphere is neither an independent female movement nor an alternative female-led ideology. It is an auxiliary branch of the manosphere itself. So grouping these women with the ones mentioned earlier is a disservice to both ideologies.
While the womanosphere is red-pilled (the belief that society has been corrupted by female liberation and demands an ideological reclamation of male dominance and female submission), the femosphere is widely regarded as having been pink-pilled. To be pink-pilled means to accept the existence of gender inequality and even insist that the world is inherently unsafe and unfair for women. But instead of overthrowing the patriarchy, you must learn how to extract maximum financial, emotional, and physical security from men within that broken system.
The value system of the femosphere can be traced back to the notions of “reactionary feminism,” a branch of feminism that originated in the UK in the late 2010s, championed by writers like Mary Harrington and Louise Perry. Reactionary feminism rejects the sexual revolution and transactivism, and instead advocates for traditional family structures and limits on individual autonomy to protect women as a distinct sex class.
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Whether it is Shera Seven advising women to treat dating like a business contract, The Wizard Liz preaching total emotional detachment to avoid getting played, or FDS categorizing men and women into “High-Value” and “Low-Value” dating classes; most of the femosphere echoes Perry’s words in her 2022 book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: “The most important piece of advice I can offer to the young women of today is this: get married and do your best to stay married.” So while the femosphere’s sermons are deeply cynical, often misandrist, and inarguably fueling the polarisation of the internet’s gender dynamics, it is fundamentally reactive. There is no love lost between me and this movement, but treating a reactive survival mechanism as a distinct twin of a misogynist, violent movement is bizarre.
The pink pill is not a political manifesto; it is an individualistic retreat from collective female solidarity into mercenary self-interest. The femosphere, unlike the manosphere, doesn’t preach that the men are inferior beings who should be legally disenfranchised or forced into domestic servitude. They operate on a capitalist promise of risk mitigation: in a relationship men hold the social and financial bargaining chips, so your only rational choice is to ensure you aren't left behind when things go wrong. The manosphere, on the other hand, is “men’s rights” activisits lobbying against domestic abuse protections or red-pill pundits calling for the repealing of women’s right to vote. One is a misguided survival tactic, the other is a violent movement.
The worst output of the femosphere is toxic dating culture and commodified intimacy. I don’t subscribe to the notion that the femosphere leads to the creation of a generation of cynical and emotionally guarded young women. It is the patriachial society that gives rise to (rightly) cynical young women. The hands of the manosphere though, is bloodied. From Isla Vista to Plymouth, the pipeline of male radicalization has repeatedly resulted in mass shootings, vehicle rammings, targeted stalking, and terror watchlists.
Also, while the misandric content of the femosphere and the reduction to men to mere wallets is abrasing and exhausting, it lacks the structural apparatus to ever be a worthwhile opponent to the manosphere. It is atmost an online echo chamber. The worst that can happen is that the followers of these gurus are humbled in their real-life experiences of dating and partnership. Because at the end of the day, a creator telling her followers that men who can’t provide are “low value” cannot mobilize institutional power to restrict men’s bodily autonomy, deny them healthcare, or curtail their democratic rights.
The manosphere desperately needs a villain. To convince young, disaffected men that they are the true victims of modern society, red-pill grifters must manufacture an organized, malevolent female counterpart. By branding individual women's cynicism as a coordinated "anti-male agenda," they generate the very grievance that keeps their audience enraged and subscribing to their courses.
The so-called femosphere is just young women with dating fatigue retreating into transactional cynicism to maintain an illusion of control in a society not designed for them. While these dating gurus are taking advantage of their audience’s frustration with the post-pandemic dating landscape to further their own monetary gains, by continuing to validate it as a legitimate counterweight to the manosphere is doing no one any good. Its just another way to pity us against each other, to keep us fighting between us, while the patriarchy furthers on.