The neediest female on the internet

FemCel is finally happening

Welcome followers of the Female Neediness© discourse!

Since my Desperation of Female Neediness post responding to James Harris’ post on the Futility of Male Desire, a delicious discussion has erupted in our horny, autistic corner of the internet. Since I have no children or boyfriend to spoil in my life, I channel my nurturing instincts into indulging this debate further with this response to the response to the response.

I am grateful for everyone who engaged with my writing so far. More than 17 thousand people read my two thousand-something-word essay on being hot, young, female and single; who would have thought that shit sells, hey?

I hope you new people won’t unsubscribe when I start talking about British politics. Stay loyal kings. 🙌

One thing I want you guys to understand is I wrote the Female Neediness© out of artistic, not intellectual need. My day job is politics and policy, and I think neither fields have or should have any solutions to the problems I tapped into in my piece. Legislators should keep as far away from dating discourse as possible, especially when it comes to questions such as reproductive rights. They should only start intervening once the couple is already formed and is thinking of having kids, with family-friendly policies to make our societies easier to navigate as a parent and safer for children.

Alas, the nerds got hold of it, and now the comment section is filled with far more analysis than my Girl brain can digest in between my extremely important day job and 24-hour media circle political commentating side gig. But, I have thoughts and will give you some now, in bullet point form, because I can tell you are all busy geniuses by the fact you have found the time to power through thousand-word essays penned by strangers on the internet.

I use the copyright symbol as a joke. I say a lot of things to provoke a laugh, can’t help it, hence why I also do stand-up. Most of you are smart enough to tell when I am making a serious point and when I am clowning for lolz. My post coining the term went viral, but as Ruxandra said in her own follow up piece on Female Neediness, I wasn’t saying anything new or original.

I loved Ruxandra’s piece by the way. Loved, loved, loved it. I loved the historical references,the cultural references, I agree with the conclusions, the advice. I too believe the solution lies in culture, not law and have said so before - hence why I- we- are here. I am glad people with more academic inclinations than myself jumped on the debate and fleshed it out. You should follow her on x by the way because she posts some intersting stuff. I will also link to some past articles by other writers that I think feed into this discussion handsomely.

Some of these are a bit academic for my abused milenial attention span but I have done the graft of reading and picking some interesting bits off of them so that I can drag the debate back down to the gutter with me, which I am sure many of my readers will appreciate. 😇

• New to the Female Neediness© discourse? A nice way to follow this debate is to read Ruxandra’s piece as a theoretical analysis of my empirical essays on Female Neediness and my issue with neo-con women, who Ruxandra more accurately identifies as reactionary feminists (we both had the same group in mind, my term is not quit right).

• Additional reading that I think is illuminating would include this piece by David Klemperer and Morgan Jones about the uneasy relationship of reactionary feminists, specifically focusing on Marry Harrigton who is a phenomenon by herself, with their new right wing court Vs their left wing background.

• For a lot of you it is not that you did not know that women are emotionally needier than men, it is just that you never heard one say it out loud explicitly and without ‘to be sures’ added for good measure. This is why I did this follow-up post, which (understandably) left some people annoyed, where I said that I can afford to admit to feelings of neediness or desperation because I have enough good things going for me to absorb the social knock (or, I suffer from illusions of grandeur- both equally plausible).

• I should at this point make this less about me, as this is both non-conductive to an intellectual debate and unfair to the female population at large who don’t share my experience or dramatic inner voice. Some women’s internal monologue is authentically cool and non-challant- lol, must be nice. It also gets boring and cringe, as my dating life is not that interesting or that unusual and people in the comments and the aftermath pieces are making assumptions about my personal life and personhood that are not true. We can indulge my narcissism in future posts, but for now, let’s focus on the discourse.

• A lot of people commented with their own experiences of either side of the Female Neediness© spectrum, this is a noteworthy example by honourable commentator Viecgncnc:

  As a guy in his early 20s, reading you feels like peaking behind a curtain and seeing certain aspects of the female psyche that are rarely articulated in the mainstream these days. I thank you for these insights and hope that you keep writing.

  When you start dating casually, you quickly notice the female neediness simply by the fact that girls rarely ask the guy: “so where do you see this going?” Or even more brazen: “do you want a relationship”. They don’t ask this NOT because they don’t want this type of relationship (the intimacy they long for when you are with them makes that clear), but rather because they are simply afraid of the answer and the guy’s reaction.

  A lot of these problems could be solved if women simply pursued their emotional interests as ruthlessly as men pursue their sexual interests. That means: Not giving in to sexual demands until there is certainty of commitment (relationship).

• This is advice many people dispensed, that the dating market would be better if ladies put out less. I am not sure that would solve it entirely (help it slightly, maybe); as the feminist shaman Rad Fem Hitler said, it is a fantasy that young people are single because they are having too much casual sex; it is obviously because they are having less sex and are less socialised, which is what I get to in my piece against neo-con women. Social isolation is the problem, and too much stimulation from non-human sources. It’s not too much touching; it’s too many touch screens.

• As RFH tells us in her sermons here and here:

One of the biggest most delusional lies that is perpetuated on here is this idea that the girl who goes out every weekend and socializes with the opposite sex under the influence of alcohol will die alone with cats while the girl who doesn’t talk to men who aren’t related to her, doesn’t leave her house, and bakes cookies and reads the Bible on the weekend will have a husband magically fall in her lap in the year 2024.

Gen z is the least social generation, they’re not going to die single because they’re partying too much, they’re going to die single because they’re not partying enough. Anyone who doesn’t understand this doesn’t understand people.

• As astute commenter kryptogal observed, Female Neediness is, at the very least, exacerbated by economic anxiety (I don’t think it is entirely attributable to it; I think there is an evolutionary basis for it):

High earning and highly educated women are the least likely to be single, and are married at rates far higher than working class women. I'm a lawyer and I hang out with and work with other lawyers, and they are ALL married. The two I know who became widowed or got divorced very quickly remarried. In contrast, about 70% the female paralegals and admin assistants at my firm (who make 1/5 as much and mostly don't have degrees) are either single or divorced. There is plenty of data on this and it's a complete myth that the high powered female doctors and lawyers and CEOs and tax directors of the world have any trouble whatsoever getting married...they don't.

…..

I think these dynamics are only in play with people (who are in the majority of course) who do NOT earn enough to support a household by themselves. It's the women with a BA and $50k in student loans who only makes $60k a year who is desperate to marry a richer guy because if she doesn't, how will she ever be able to have kids? She won't. $60k isn't enough to support a family. But once you get up to the income level where you can easily support paying for a nice house and several kids yourself, plenty of people no longer care about their spouse's income, though more is always better it's not as important. The large majority of women lawyers I know earn far more than their husband...many of their husbands either stay home full time or only work part time while the kids are small, and this is completely not a big deal and no one cares. A few are married to doctors or finance guys but they're in the minority, you have to be kind of a psycho level of ambitious to want that type of life and have nannies raise your kids. I mean, you could actually ask these women and when you do you will see the majority say they actively prefer a man who has a less stressful/time consuming job and who is more nurturing to take some of the load off them: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lawyertalk/s/pR7Jaiis38

I don't think most working and middle class women don't want to get married, they do. But I think nowadays life is too expensive for most people to want to pair up with someone who is coming into marriage in the hole with negative net worth bc of student loans...neither men or women want to start off taking on someone else's debt. And most men in their 20s aren't interested in marriage and most women don't want to marry someone more than 4 years older than them. In fact the huge majority of people end up marrying someone within 2 years of their age and close to their own earning and education level. It's only at the top of income when you're at the level of being able to support a nice residence suitable for a family in one's local area that people become freed from having to worry about their partner's ability to contribute financially and have the luxury of focusing on other attributes.

Worry about the working class people, they're the ones in trouble. People pretend to worry about the educated upper income women and it's hogwash bc those women have no issues at all finding partners in their 30s 40s 50s or beyond.

• I agree with the comment above. I have drafted but not yet published a book review of Julia Fox’s memoir where she describes her sugar daddy relationship and gives a general glimpse into how these kind of dynamics work. I give my take on how I think the financial crisis in my hometown in Greece has impacted how women view themselves and date. In my hometown where opportunities for financial or otherwise meaningful success or engagement (like community engagement would fall under this umbrella) are miagre, women my age are going crazy with their looks maxing efforts. So many girls live with their parents till they get married (which could be their mid 30s) make 600euros a month and spend half of it on keeping their nails professionally manicured and on Zara hauls so that they can show up to the down-town bars in different looks every weekend, all in hopes that one of the male ‘entreprenuers’ will notice them. So much of female emotional neediness can be entangled with subconscious instinct of survival in a bad economy. It’s hard work to recognise that in yourself and fight your way out of that loser mentality. Like yeah, girls, feminists were right all along. There is life beyond men. You don’t need them to feed you or give your life meaning.

• It is simply not true that women always want someone more or as financially successful as them. They want someone who can communicate at their level- this is not about what is in your CV. A LOT, of people commented to say there are tons of poor, ugly men men willing to date me if only I would just shut up and submit myself to the sexual advances of men who make my skin crawl.

• Ok, I am being flippant here, but I needed to illustrate the rediculusness of some of these people, including those who suggest I should move to rural US. Like this response to my piece by Regan Arntz-Gray. I think Regan is perfectly right about her observations of her friend in non-urban US settings and about the unrealistic high standards some urban women harbor (I see that too in women who have more materialist values than myself) BUT her piece and a lot of others drip contempt for women who are, well, pretty fucking above average. Succesful, hot, glamorous, smart, funny, 10/10 and looking for a MAN what of it !!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!11! And guess what, they also want to live in the big FUCKING apple, because they only live once and they were raised on SATC and you know what; Good. For. Them. Don’t overcorrect. There was cringe in Girl Boss Feminism. There was also truth and power.

back to basics

• This ‘move to Ballerina Farm’ is an argument repeated a lot which is why I think focusing on me personally doesn’t help. I am an immigrant in London who worked in (the British) Parliament and whose job (and passion and childhood dream) is British politics. I wanted to become a speechwriter there since reading wikipedia biographies of people I admired in my teenage bedroom in Greece. My entire support network is in London because I went to university here. Do you seriously think my life would be better if I lived alone in a cottage in Lake Destrict or Devon? I can’t even drive, be real. Or, I should abandon all of my dreams and aspirations, which I am lucky enough to have discovered at a young age, to move back to Greece with my insane mother in the hopes that some local Greek boi will notice me and father my children. Some of you really think highly of women and it shows.

• Reminds me of this quote by Andrea Dorkin:

  Women are consistently and systematically denied the respect creative intelligence requires to be sustained: painfully denied it, cruelly denied it, sadistically denied it.

• And this by Ginevra Davis, in her beautiful article How Feminism Ends which Richard Hanania mentioned in his recent podcast commenting on the Female Tragedy debate:

  But even with all the wonders of modern medicine, the female body still demands much more of its owner’s time than the male body; as a result, females will always be somewhat limited in their ability to create, to contribute to the broader human project, with their minds. Fine. We can tolerate a difference in theory—we tolerate it in practice every day. But for the first time in human history, we must also square the unfairness of the female condition with an understanding that females are equal in their minds—a heartening realization, but one that comes with uncomfortable moral implications. Now, we owe females something: an equal experience of life, or, when we cannot provide it, an explanation. But no man, even the most cynical, wants to look his daughter in the eye and tell her that her life will be smaller, that she might be better suited as a vessel for someone else. No one wants a halfway moral victory; no one wants to end a social movement in awkward silence.

• I love that Ruxandra brought Lana Del Ray as an example of the beautiful expression of Female Neediness. She is also one of my most beloved artists for that exact reason. As Ruxandra tells us:

Lana del Rey’s Video Games, to circle back to the beginning of this essay, is not a lamentation of her being abandoned by a fuckboy: indeed, it’s about a relationship. In another song, she asks: “Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?”— not “Will you divorce me?”.Because even within relationships, women have different, higher standards with regards to what counts as fulfilling.

• This ^ explains well my thinking behind the point I made in my essay on neo-con women: the real black pill is to realise that there are more women than men suitable and or willing to have the kind of partnerships most women long for.

• Which bring me back to what I said in my Female Neediness piece:

  This is the crux of human experience: To want and to not get. We are horrified by the naive, the stupid, and the young, who openly express what we all feel but have learnt to repress, like the village fool who becomes hysterical when she realises what we’ve all long understood. Winter is coming, the crops are dead, we are slouching towards starvation, and no one will save us. No wonder they used to burn their witches. Now we cancel them.

This post is getting very long so I will end it here. I will make more posts picking out your comments because frankly some of you are better writers/ more interesting thinkers than myself. Again, sorry if I don’t respond straight away, I am overstimulated by juggling my tv appearances and my day job and writing on top of that, which I view as a pleasant activity but it does make me feel like I am on drugs even if the only thing I have ingested is caffeine. So, I take long breaks from screens.

Perhaps I failed to not make this about me again (bleurgh millenial metropolitan women, amiritght) but… WE ARE FINALLY MAKING FEMCELLS HAPPEN FAM!!! It’s a reverse Megan Markel phenomenon. She is hated for her dating life. Some are loved for their lack of it ❤️