femcels, r/vindicta, and the myth of objective beauty

how i stumbled upon a toxic community of women trying to weaponizing beauty

big content warning: in this post i’ll be discussing femcels, incels, and r/vindicta, so there will be mentions here about body image, beauty standards, eating disorders, misogyny, incels, the whole works. if any of these topics are triggering to you, i recommend you skip this one. i also don’t recommend checking out the mentioned communities, because the content on r/vindicta can be really damaging, and it was for me as a passive observer over the last few months.

about six months ago, reddit recommended a post to me from r/vindicta through the “because you’ve shown interesting in a similar community” feature. i don’t totally know what other subreddit i visited that related to this subreddit, so it kind of seemed out of the blue. i had never heard of r/vindicta before, and the post was about beauty and glowing up, so i checked it out. it was full of vernacular that looked really similar to incel vocabulary, like “looksmaxxing,” “high value” and “stacy.” as i read on and looked through the subreddit and its wiki, i found the words “pink pill” and knew immediately that this community was going to be a rabbithole for me. i found the whole concept to be incredibly funny at first and kind of pathetic, but i really underestimated its ability to brain-poison me.

for those who are unaware of incel vocabulary, here are a few definitions to be aware of. taking the “red pill” means being transformatively aware of the “reality” of inceldom, which generally means accepting that you will never be attractive if you weren’t born with certain features. taking the red pill is a reference to the matrix, and is used by other communities to mean the same general idea of understanding truth, whatever their version of the truth is. “looksmaxxing” is improving your physical appearance, and the suffix -“maxxing” can be applied to other things you’re trying to improve to become desirable. this is something people generally don’t attempt if they’ve taken the blackpill. the “blackpill” is a fatalistic view one will take long after taking the red pill, where they believe that no matter what they do, they will never escape inceldom because they were born deficient in some way.

and for women, there’s femcels. believe it or not, the first self-proclaimed incel was a canadian woman (talk about CanCon!) today, the femcel community is mostly known for its shitposts and over-identification with movies about female rage. we generally know them as people who love lana del rey and girl interrupted.

so for those women, there’s the pink pill: the view that unattractive women will never be successful or worthy of love. and here’s where r/vindicta comes in.