The femosphere | Online pressures facing young women

A 19-year-old tells you she has stopped dating because “all men are trash”, but she also follows three accounts teaching her how to find a man who will pay for everything. She edits every photo before posting it and feels quietly ashamed when she sees her unfiltered face. She has never heard the word femosphere, but she lives inside it.

Public concern about online gender ideologies has focused, understandably, on boys and the manosphere. Young women face a parallel set of pressures that is quieter, harder to name and just as capable of shaping how they see themselves and others.

This article sets out what that landscape looks like, how far it reaches, what we are seeing clinically and how we can help.

What the femosphere is

The term femosphere was coined in 2024 by Dr Jilly Boyce Kay, a feminist media researcher at Loughborough University. She describes a loose network of women-centred online spaces, largely emerging since 2018, focused on gender, dating and relationships.

The femosphere is not a simple mirror of the manosphere, and its communities vary widely in size, ideology and intent. Broadly, three overlapping strands affect young women:

• Dating strategy and ‘dark feminine’ content. Influencers who teach women to treat men with suspicion and relationships as transactions, often encouraging them to seek financial provision in return for performing traditional femininity. Some of this is framed as anti-misogyny; some openly rejects feminism.
• Tradwife and anti-feminist content. Aesthetic, soft-focus videos of homemaking that can carry explicitly political messages about women’s proper place.
• The appearance economy. Filters, ‘that girl’ routines, skincare regimes for tweens and pro-thinness content such as #SkinnyTok. Not ideological in the manosphere sense, but powerful in shaping how girls value themselves.

Alongside all of this, girls also receive the manosphere’s messages directly, through the boys and young men around them.

A useful distinction: the manosphere tends to work through rage bait and explicit ideology, while the femosphere often works through storytelling and the feeling of intimacy. Where the manosphere offers boys surrogate fathers, the femosphere offers girls surrogate friends.

How widespread it is

The femosphere is harder to measure than the manosphere because it is less organised and less often studied. The signals are nonetheless clear.

On relational attitudes, a poll for the New Statesman found that more than a quarter of women under 25 hold a negative view of men, challenging the assumption that only young men are being radicalised in the so-called gender wars.

On appearance, the data is stronger. Girlguiding’s 2024 Girls’ Attitudes Survey found that 54% of girls aged 11–21 wish they looked the way they do with social media filters, and 36% feel pressure to use them.

In Mental Health Foundation research, 54% of girls said images on social media had made them worry about their body image, compared with 26% of boys; 46% of girls said body image worried them often or always.

Pro-thinness content is also persistent. In 2025 TikTok blocked searches for #SkinnyTok after pressure from European regulators; the hashtag had gathered more than half a million posts, mostly featuring young women. Clinicians and creators note that the same content quickly reappears under new tags.

As with the manosphere, much of the evidence is correlational. Longitudinal work does, however, link addictive social media use in adolescent girls with rising anxiety, lower body appreciation and loneliness a year later.

Why it is problematic

Much femosphere content presents itself as empowerment, which makes its costs easy to overlook. Kay argues that it shares three core logics with the manosphere: biological essentialism, fatalism about gender relations, and a retreat from collective change into individual strategy.

1. It turns hurt into cynicism. Young women often arrive with real experiences of disrespect, harassment or heartbreak. The content validates that, then teaches that all men are dangerous or exploitable, which leaves little room for trust or intimacy.
2. It makes relationships transactional. ‘Dark feminine’ and provider-seeking content frames love as an exchange of looks for resources. That can leave young women financially dependent and cut off from their own desires.
3. It ties worth to appearance. Filters, routines and thinness content teach girls to monitor their bodies constantly from the outside. Psychologists call this self-objectification, and it is linked to shame, anxiety and disordered eating.
4. It exploits a real double bind. Some influencers tap into genuine exhaustion with the demand to ‘have it all’, the double shift of paid work and care. The frustration is legitimate; the solution offered, retreat into dependency, is not.
5. It feels like friendship. Parasocial closeness makes influencers seem like trusted peers, so their messages are absorbed rather than questioned.
   Meanwhile, girls also carry the fallout of the manosphere: misogynistic comments at school, sexualised taunts and the fear these create.

What we are seeing in young women

The presentations differ from those in young men, but the underlying themes of shame, comparison and disconnection are strikingly similar.

• Body image distress and disordered eating. Restriction, compulsive exercise and constant body checking, often starting with ‘wellness’ or ‘that girl’ content that shades into thinness goals. Poor body image is linked to anxiety, depression, shame and, in some cases, suicidal thoughts.
• Filter dysmorphia. Discomfort with one’s real face, avoidance of unedited photos, and, in some cases, a push towards cosmetic procedures at a young age.
• Anxiety and perfectionism. A sense of never being finished: the right skin, the right body, the right routine, the right partner.
• Relational hypervigilance. Reading every man as a threat or a resource, difficulty tolerating vulnerability, and withdrawal from dating altogether.
• Disconnection from desire. When sexuality is framed as a bargaining tool or a performance for the male gaze, young women can lose touch with what they actually want. This often surfaces in psychosexual work as low desire, difficulty with pleasure or trouble with consent and boundaries.
• Loneliness beneath connection. Hours of parasocial ‘friendship’ can coexist with thin real-world support.
• Fear and hypervigilance about safety, fed by misogyny encountered from peers.

One difference from boys matters clinically: young women are generally more willing to seek help, but their distress can look like high functioning. The polished, organised client may be the one most at risk.

Countering the misinformation

Because femosphere content often feels supportive, telling a young woman her favourite creator is harmful can feel like an attack on a friend. As with boys, curiosity works better than correction.

• Honour the grievance. Anger at mistreatment, exhaustion with impossible expectations and fear for safety are reasonable. Validate these before questioning the conclusions drawn from them.
• Make the edits visible. Filters, lighting, angles and cosmetic work are routinely undisclosed. Seeing how images are built weakens their authority.
• Follow the money. Many dating coaches, ‘high-value woman’ mentors and wellness creators sell courses, supplements or products. Ask what the content is selling.
• Name the shared logic. Pointing out that ‘all men are predators’ and ‘all women are gold-diggers’ rest on the same essentialist, fatalistic thinking can be a powerful moment of recognition.
• Offer accurate information. Healthy nutrition, what genuine mutual relationships look like, and the long-term risks of financial dependency.
• Diversify the feed. Encourage following voices that show bodies, lives and relationships as they actually are, and time offline with people who know her.

A therapeutic approach

The goal is not to replace one script with another. It is to help young women find their own voice among the many telling them who to be.

1. Explore the function of the content. What does this creator give her? Reassurance, a sense of control, a plan, company? The need usually makes sense even when the message does not.
2. Work with shame and the inner critic. Compassion-focused approaches help soften the internalised observer that constantly grades her body and choices.
3. Bring the body back in from the inside. Body-image and somatic work that attends to how the body feels, not how it looks, directly counters self-objectification. Screen for disordered eating early.
4. Support healthy discernment in relationships. Help her tell the difference between wise caution and blanket cynicism, and between care and control. In PRT work, frameworks such as the Wheel of Consent or Nagoski’s dual control model can help reconnect her with her own desire.
5. Hold autonomy and critique together. If she values a traditional or home-centred life, that is her choice to make. Our role is to ask whether it is a free choice, made with full information, rather than to steer her.
6. Rebuild real-world connection. Encourage friendships, groups and activities where she is known as a whole person.
7. Notice our own reactions. Therapists may feel protective, irritated or dismissive towards content that seems trivial. Take these reactions to supervision.

The femosphere offers young women belonging and a strategy for a world that can feel hostile. We can offer something more durable: a relationship in which she does not have to perform, and the space to discover what she actually wants.

Sources

• Kay, J. B. (2024). The reactionary turn in modern feminism. Feminist Media Studies. Overview: Femosphere (Wikipedia).
• The Week (2026). What is the femosphere? (Reports the New Statesman poll).
• ABC Religion & Ethics (2026). The girls aren’t alright: who’s worried about the femosphere?
• Her Campus St Andrews (2026). When did dependency become the new femininity? (interview with Dr Jilly Boyce Kay).
• Psychology Today (2024). Picture perfect? Mental health, social media and body image (reports Girlguiding’s 2024 Girls’ Attitudes Survey).
• Mental Health Foundation. Body image in childhood and Body image report: executive summary.
• Euronews (2025). France forces TikTok to ban #SkinnyTok.
• NPR (2025). TikTok bans #SkinnyTok, but unhealthy content persists.
• Objectively measured social media use and psychosocial wellbeing among adolescent girls: a prospective study (2026, medRxiv preprint).
• Over, H. et al. (2025). What do we need to know about the manosphere and young people’s mental health? Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 30(3).