Inside The Femosphere: No Hook-ups And Men Must Pay

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]From the Times and the Sunday Times, this is the story. I'm Luke Jones.

[00:00:12]Short of throwing your Wi-Fi router out of the window, it's been impossible to escape the manosphere of late. From self-described misogynist Andrew Tate to the problematic live streams of HS tick-talkie to clvicular telling boys to hit their own faces with a hammer to give them nicer cheekbones. When you are not attractive, your life is hell. You should be on your computer for hours researching, creating yourself a regimen. How can I ascend? What can I do? The murky, murky world of the manosphere has spilled out from its niche corner of the internet and gone mainstream.

[00:00:50]But bubbling away alongside this, comparatively out of view, is another strange gender specific world of self-help, life advice, and complaint.

[00:01:01]One that's reshaping how some young women approach dating. And it's not about romance.

[00:01:07]I always tell women to be very confusing, to be and cold, and to be difficult because difficult women capture the attention of men.

[00:01:17]>> It's called the FESphere, an ecosystem of influencers, forums, podcasts, and advice, urging women to rethink love entirely. One of my Times colleagues has been investigating and speaking to some of those involved.

[00:01:40]The story today, no hookups and men must pay inside the female.

[00:01:59]I'm a 44 yearear-old married woman. My algorithm is not primed for dating strategy content.

[00:02:07]>> That's Sarah Ditim, writer for the times.

[00:02:10]>> But last year, I got really, really obsessed with an album by an American rapper called Princess and Noia called Girls, which I think I listened to it on repeat for about 6 months. Absolutely loved it. Which is basically I came to realize is extremely femoded.

[00:02:30]I'm not a wife, so talk to me nice. I like you. You a broke boy. Look at your shoes. I am the player and I am the pimp. All of them.

[00:02:40]>> So it's kind of adopts this extremely hostile, negative, basically misundress attitude towards men in lots of ways.

[00:02:55]She raps about how men are liars, rapists, thieves, terrible people generally who you don't really want to have anything to do with. But then at the same time, she's rapping about being like hot and sexy and attractive, being a powerful woman in that kind of arena.

[00:03:16]And I think those two things together, that's the defining attitude of the kind of female influencers that I was writing about in this piece. I think the basic attitude is men are terrible and I want them to want to date me.

[00:03:31]>> And just first of all, before we get into that, where does it exist as you started to actually get deeper into it?

[00:03:37]Where is that message being pushed aside from that one album by Princess Nokia?

[00:03:42]This is something that you'll find on Tik Tok, also on Instagram, also on YouTube, essentially on those social networks that really promote virality and reward, you know, saying outrageous things in short form content, that's where you're likely to find this stuff.

[00:04:00]>> So, if the broad span of this is men are bad, how does it actually talk about that problem? Like everything these days, there's like almost a glossery that you've got to have, isn't isn't there?

[00:04:12]>> Oh, very much. Yeah. It has its own vocabulary. And I think we should remember as well that like there is a long history of women offering quite brutal dating advice for women. So, when I was growing up in the '9s, the big book was the rules. The rules of the rules were that women shouldn't do the chasing, men should buy dinner, you shouldn't put out until a certain point in the relationship. So, it's not a new thing for people to be offering this advice to women that takes quite a schematic approach to the way that you should be relating to men. What's different about the femosphere version of this advice is like anything once it's on the internet, it is just much more heightened and much more extreme in lots of ways. And also I should say as I I want to be completely honest about this, a lot of the women who are doing this are very very funny and I had a fantastic time writing this piece because they are very witty. I mean in some ways as well again to like look at an older kind of ancestor an older precedent for this kind of stuff. If you remember the kind of standup that someone like Jenny a clair was doing in the 1990s again like very men are terrible also I'm a straight woman so what what else am I going to do right that's the tone but there is some acceptance that there are that not all men are bad h how does this world categorize men and what are some of the things that they say women should do straight women should do to try and navigate them for for example am I a high value or a low value Um, >> for example, if you look at something like Female Dating Strategy, which podcast that grew out of a very active Reddit community. What's up, Queens?

[00:06:06]Welcome to the Female Dating Strategy Podcast, the meanest female only podcast on the internet. I'm your host, Ro. And this is Savannah. And I'm Lilith. And today's topic, why going 50/50 in relationships is a scam.

[00:06:19]Female dating strategy has a really explicit categorization of high value men who are men who are both emotionally stable but also financially and socially stable.

[00:06:35]>> The FDS definition of what a high value man is, it's essentially a man with good values. Certain values I would say should be non-negotiable.

[00:06:44]>> He has to add value to your life as well. He has to add value to your life.

[00:06:48]Yeah.

[00:06:49]>> And one of the ways that the female dating strategy recommends that you sort of filter your dating pool for high value men is that if a man asks you out on a date, he should offer to pay for dinner. And so this has obviously been one of the most contentious bits of advice from the femosphere.

[00:07:07]>> I can't believe we haven't talked about it on the podcast yet because I almost take it for granted that men should pay for dates.

[00:07:13]>> It's probably our most controversial one to be fair. This is the this is the point that gets the scrots backs up the most.

[00:07:20]>> People are very hostile to the idea that 50/50 is somehow wrong. I mean, I'm hostile to it as well. Like my default is if I want to start a relationship on equal terms. Not that I've had to think about this for a very long time, but that you should set that precedent in the way you date. and going 5050 is a way of saying that I expect us to be equal partners for the rest of this relationship.

[00:07:46]The female dating strategy repost to that is well look at the financial environment for women overall. So look at the fact that women get paid less.

[00:07:58]Women end up with lower pension contributions. Women do the majority of the housework. Women have the babies. If we're talking about, you know, moving in, if talking about marriage, if we're talking about having kids, again, it is women who are disproportionately bearing the brunt of this.

[00:08:13]>> Also, the fact that women invest a lot in terms of a date when you think about getting dressed up, doing their makeup, all of this stuff. So, you'll find in the Female Dating Strategy Bible, there is a literal line by line breakdown of how much a woman might spend on getting ready for a date in terms of getting your nails done, getting your hair done, the makeup, the clothes, all of this stuff.

[00:08:37]>> And so, there needs to be some kind of return on investment or appreciation of the cost that they've expended on their end.

[00:08:43]>> Right? So the framing for this is suddenly an extremely radical feminist redistribution argument actually >> mixed with Martin Lewis >> right yeah Martin Lewis but you're getting some is that >> or rather you know not getting some until an appropriate time into the relationship actually >> but hand inhand with that as well is it seems like something of a detachment from the kind of emotional and romantic side of any of this it's very transactional >> detachment is a really important part of it and again I think you can really sympathize with where this comes from because a lot of women find themselves in a dating environment where if you think about it in purely numerical terms women are going to be more selective about the men they choose to go on dates with. There's the fact that there's like genuine low but genuine risk of violence and unpleasantness for women when you form a relationship with a man you don't know which I think makes women more cautious.

[00:09:44]There's also a theory that men are just you know like the sexual the reproductive incentives for men reward promiscuity. So men are more likely to be risktaking and more likely to kind of put themselves out there and meet lots of women. What that means like at an interpersonal level once you've kind of rinsed it through the algorithm machine of online dating is that when a woman agrees to meet a man, she has already done a fair amount of selecting. She has already decided that this is someone who she's interested in and may well be emotionally invested to a certain extent.

[00:10:18]Whereas a man is more likely to be, you know, I'll give it a chance, right? I might not be that keen, but I'll go and I'll see how it is. And I think the end result of that is that women often find themselves halfway to being in love before you've ordered the starter and the man is like flicking through Tinder in the bathroom between courses, right?

[00:10:42]Um, so you can see where this comes from. This advice that women should be more detached and should not immediately kind of throw their heart into a relationship. And is that what is described as as dark feminine energy I read in your piece? Tell us about that.

[00:10:56]>> Yes. So what we were just talking about that is what is described as desentering men. The idea of desentering men is that you put yourself first. You have your own personal development and you then don't need a man to complete your life.

[00:11:11]Dark feminine energy is more a way of describing the attitude that you bring in order to attract a high value man.

[00:11:20]and in order to do your desentering of men. So, dark feminine energy, it was described to me by one of the influencer I spoke to as being dark feminine energy is where you're just like, >> f this, you know, I want to be this kind of woman and I'm not going to be told who I can be cuz I set the rules, you know? So, it's like that confidence that like, you know, that magnetism that comes from a woman and all women have it. They just haven't been able to kind of tap into that because they're too worried about what men may think or what society may think. Right.

[00:11:58]>> It's very mysterious. It's very being said being in your power, I think, was one of the phrases she used. So, it's very in inflected with the sort of self-help language that is rampant on the internet.

[00:12:12]There is this idea embedded in the female that you should be that you should be manipulative that it is not a it's not negative it's not ethically dodgy to be acting in ways that are intended to get a particular reaction from the other person. So Kenika Batra who is an Australian female influencer who I spoke to.

[00:12:42]So, I wrote the sociopathic dating bible because I saw basically how badly women were being treated in relationships during the red pill sort of manosphere era whose USP is that she is a diagnosed sociopath and her attitude is that she can help women to understand men because as a sociopath she thinks like men. I was thinking, okay, no, I can put a stop to this because I have the same sort of I guess mind as one of these men because um antisocial personality disorder is quite significant in lowering empathy and I believe that a lot of these men have little to no empathy and then they're teaching these things to men who are pretty stupid. And I was a bit like, okay, you know, I'm a feminist. I write a lot about male violence. I, you know, I can give you chapter and verse on the unfair distribution of domestic labor. And even I was like, this is a bit strong for me.

[00:13:51]I >> always tell women to be very confusing, to be and cold, and to be difficult because difficult women capture the attention of men. Women are too soft. What if it hurts his feelings?

[00:14:03]Whereas it's like, "Lady, are you insane? He would throw you in front of a bus. If there was any material gain for him and I was like, "Oh, yeah." You know, like that's interesting. I mean, is it also a bit manipulative? And she kind of laughed and said, "Yeah, I do associate it with the sort of with feminine psychological tricks."

[00:14:30]>> Because is she But is her suggestion if they are basically psychopaths, we should display psychopathic tendencies as well to basically match them.

[00:14:37]>> Exactly. Her attitude is essentially that women are not even bringing a knife to a gunfight. We're not bringing, you know, we're bringing a rose to a gunfight and then we're being surprised that we get shot down in romantic encounters. A lot of women buy the book, they love the book, but I feel like they should be implementing the book. Um because like there's no way to combat this kind of onslaught like towards women without actually having that defense mechanism that you can use and to actually detach from relationships until they're worth your attachment.

[00:15:14]>> So Saka Benzakur and one of the influencers I spoke to, she literally said that she thinks we're in a gender war and a dating war. So that legitimizes these kind of manipulative tactics. I should also say like in terms of manipulation is pretty low-key. It is again if you go back to something like the rules, it's manipulation in the sense of like you don't text him, you wait for him to text you or like you act a bit horty so that he puts the effort into chasing. You're not really talking about extremely coercive behaviors. And again, the female has a language for stuff that they think crosses the line into coercion and they call that toxic femininity, which sounds like it should be a partner to toxic masculinity, but you know, it is a very different realm of bad behavior, right? You're not talking about violence. You're not talking about exploitation. You are talking about crossing the line in terms of being manipulative, which is bad, but it's not the same.

[00:16:40]Sarah, we're talking about the fem investigating. I can feel my bra, if not burning, already singing at the thought of this. Can you actually delve into some of the origins of what this are?

[00:16:52]because you've laid all of that out there, but I can't understand whether you feel like this is a maybe not a reasonable response, but but it's easily explainable why this is happening because of the circumstances under which many women are living and dating.

[00:17:08]>> I actually have a lot of sympathy for women who are attracted to femosphere arguments. It reflects quite a a widespread sense of negativity that young women have as well. So there was some polling done by the New Statesmen and they were looking more at a again a slightly different aspect of the femosphere. So, the more left-wing political side of the female like young women who are often very attracted to the Green Party, but again have very negative feelings about men. They wouldn't identify with the sort of the financial aspect of the female influence that I was talking to. But at the same time, they share this sense that that men are very disappointing. I think in lots of ways this is a rational response to things that women are either dealing with personally or are exposed to. So if you're a young woman who spends any amount of time online, which is all young women obviously, um you are going to see really hostile, really disturbing stuff from men directed towards women. And again, this isn't, you know, that stuff does not reflect the majority attitude of men towards women. And the kind of the extremes of the manosphere are not the, you know, average attitude of the average man that you're likely to be meeting. But I think you see these things and you are conscious that they exist in the world. If you're conscious that there are men out there who do think these things and who are liable to be deeply unpleasant if you end up in a relationship with them. And so it's not necessarily that women think every single man in the world is a danger and a menace, but the way that women encounter the world and the way that the media environment we all exist in rewards extremity means that women are seeing the absolute worst of men. And again, you know, and this is not, again, I really want to stress that it is not irrational for women to be conscious that sexual violence exists.

[00:19:41]Like men can be very selfish in relationships and that if they invest really heavily in a relationship and it's not reciprocated in the same way, they're liable to end up like bearing the costs in like quite painful ways. I absolutely know women who like gave their heart over to a man who just kind of fafed around for the last 5 years of their 30s and then they ended up not having a kid when they really wanted to have a kid. Like that kind of stuff is heartbreaking.

[00:20:14]>> But it's interesting how economic all of this has got because I mean you mentioned the cost there and I assume you for the most part meant the emotional cost. But I remember actually was on this podcast maybe a year ago when adolescence was out and we spoke to this guy who ran sessions with young I think only like 13year-olds in school and he was saying the amount of them who seem to spout this idea that well you need to be careful about women and girls because you know they're gold diggers they're after our cash and he's like you're 13 you haven't got any cash but already this had sunk into them and then some of the women you're talking to they are moving in a direction it seems where they are okay let's detach from the emotional side of things because we need to make this marriage if we are going to get married financially work for us and we need to think about this person's salary not necessarily whether we like them why has it become such an economic enterprise and concern >> it's very stark isn't it again like I want to respect the sort of nuances in here which don't always come across in um influencer content so there are influencers who will literally talk about being a gold digger Savannah when I spoke to her she was very interesting on this. So she was saying that actually like her personal situation is she does not need a man to keep her, right? She has a nice life on her solo income. So it's not about looking for a man who can keep her. It's more about looking for a man who is her equal, who is someone who can be like an equal partner in their relationship and someone who she wouldn't feel was, you know, she wouldn't suspect was draining her, which again I think it's quite important to look at that perspective in an environment where, you know, for all that the that the wage gap is real and it does exist and whatever, we are in a situation where a lot of younger women especially are out earning their male peers and are conscious of that and they don't want to be mooched off.

[00:22:16]I think this is actually saying in quite stark terms something that is true for a lot of people in terms of how we think about romantic partners. I think most people, consciously or otherwise, when you're looking at romantic partners, the majority of people are looking for someone who is roughly on the same kind of financial and class level as you are, right? There are obviously examples of relationships with big inequalities there. But on the whole, people kind of date like with like, I think, and there are good reasons why people tend to do that. But we don't talk about it cuz it's a bit crass, right? And there's something so incredibly stark about people and especially women. I think it is more shocking when women do it because women are supposed to be nice about women just laying out the kind of dollar and cent value that they put on a relationship. I was quite shocked, you know, where is the romance? Um, and at which point Savannah said that she thought romance was a massive con perpetrated on straight women and marriage was essentially a DEI scheme for low value men, which was brutal.

[00:23:46]How new do you think any of this is? I mean, reading your piece, I was wondering, you know, like what would what would Jermaine Greer, I mean, obviously still with us, but not sort of as vocal, but like what would she have made of this? Because actually some of this, you know, the idea of women being sort of forced into being sort of passive and compliant sort of um agentless kind of players and all of this actually needing to retake some control. I mean, that's what she was banging on about back in the 70s.

[00:24:08]>> Yeah, I think you're right. I think a lot of the analysis that the femosphere is drawing on is really familiar from radical feminism. Definitely. It's talking about wage gaps. It's talking about reproductive labor. It's talking about sexual labor. The difference is that radical feminists kind of took that analysis and they built a sort of a revolutionary perspectus on it. Right?

[00:24:36]Look at someone like Andrea Dawan who in many ways I mean I think I've listened to episodes of Female Dating Strategy that straight up quoted Andrea Dwin and I was like goodness this is unexpected and someone like Andrea Dwarkin who had a really searing analysis of pornography and sexual violence and on the basis of that tried to make legislative changes es that would act against the pornography industry in America. Like they didn't come to fruition in the end, but there was a like a political project that came out of her analysis.

[00:25:20]So the female shares loads of the same attitudes when it comes to pornography, when it comes to sexual violence, when it comes to male sexual entitlement. We see this a lot from the lib fems especially when they accept things like a guy who watches porn in the relationship and then they all of a sudden find out that he's actually a porn addict and it completely wrecks their life.

[00:25:42]>> But rather than looking to make political change, they are looking to kind of leverage this on a personal level. Right? Rather than saying porn is terrible, we should try and get rid of the porn industry. It's like they're saying porn is terrible. You need to filter out the kind of lowv valueue man who uses pornography. If we say a high value man is like honest and he doesn't watch porn that that alone is going to like eliminate probably like 99% of the male population.

[00:26:13]>> And so it is taking a lot of the same analysis but individualizing it rather than collectivizing it. And is the fact that all of this is growing up and and being pushed out on the internet actually making it more extreme because you know if you were Dwarkin, if you were Jermaine Gre or Jith Butler or something like that, these these were considered long form pieces of work that were then digested and chatted about in the public culture. Whereas this, you know, Jermaine Greer, Andrew Dawan weren't trying to get clicks on Tik Tok, weren't trying to retain attention. And so obviously that just pushes these ideas more to the extreme, don't they?

[00:26:55]>> Yeah. And I think the big difference is the siloing of these ideas. So your algorithm is very private to you. And if you are the kind of person who is being pushed lots of femosphere content, you are not going to be seeing the other side of the coin, right? So things are very siloed. Things become more extreme within their silos. And when things kind of when pieces of content achieve escape velocity from their silos, they tend to be the most extreme examples of whatever attitude, whatever influencer sphere you're talking about, which is then sort of glombmed onto by the opposite force here and creates an even more heightened and exaggerated version of rhetoric from the other side as well. So everything tends to become more heightened, more exaggerated and in the case of dating content, more paranoid and more bad faith as well. I think that was the thing that I found ultimately bleakest about the way Femosphere influences talked about this because however much I sympathize with where they're coming from, however much I think that they are offering or attempting to offer genuine solutions to practical problems that women encounter in real life dating in a kind of cartoonish heightened way in lots of instances that there is a real phenomenon that they are responding to.

[00:28:24]But at the same time, I was a bit like, where is the room for just meeting someone you like and hanging out with them? Like, you know, where is the >> where are the where are the mixtapes?

[00:28:35]>> Where are the mixed tapes, right? Where is the just going to the pub and having a snog and seeing how it works out?

[00:28:41]Definitely forbidden under female dating strategy. No, going to the pub and just snogging. Number one, snogging before you've determined whether a man is high value or low value. Very, very bad. And number two, taking you to the pub. That is a low value date.

[00:28:56]>> Busted.

[00:28:57]>> All my dates are just going to the pub.

[00:28:59]>> But just finally, so does that make you feel quite sad about all of their prospects? In the same way that, well, you know, when I see HS TikToki or Andrew Tate talking, you know, saying to young boys that they need a flash car and they need to be sort of traders online to have anyone like them. I mean, do you see some of this and think, "Oh god, pity our species."

[00:29:18]>> I do a bit. I think I think it's always worth remembering with this stuff that there's probably a gap between the professed attitudes and between the actual beliefs that people have. For example, my daughter is 19 and she will quite cheerfully joke about how she hates all men and never wants to have a boyfriend, but she's also actually got loads of male friends who she thinks very highly of and who come around to our house for tea. So, you know, there there is a I think there is a performative aspect to a kind of a venting basically of saying, "Oh, you know, like I despair. This is terrible.

[00:30:01]Men are awful. Men are trash." that isn't actually a full reflection of how young women feel about men in totality.

[00:30:12]But it does make me think that number one, it makes me think that to be attracted to this attitude in the first place, you've got to be dealing with some pretty bleak experiences when it comes to dating and when it comes to meeting potential romantic prospects.

[00:30:27]And that's pretty sad. And it makes me sad because I just think it is closing off bit by bit the kind of arena of good faith where fancying someone and seeing that as a foundation for a potential relationship can exist. I mean I don't know. Call me an old romantic but >> you're an old romantic. You know what could be better than having a pint with someone who's funny and who you fancy?

[00:30:59]That's like that's a high value date to me.

[00:31:10]That was Sarah Dym, Times contributor.

[00:31:12]You can find her piece, No Hookups and Men Must Pay inside the Femosphere online at the times.com.

[00:31:18]That is it from us. The producer and sound designer today was Dave Crey. The executive producer was Kate Ford and I'm Luke Jones. We'll be back tomorrow.