Lilly was used to being told she wasn’t a “real man” by a dominant female partner. As it turns out, this partner was right — Lilly wasn’t a submissive, beta man as she had originally thought herself to be, but is actually a trans woman. Still, the 23-year-old in Australia aligns herself with the self-identified beta community, a group composed predominantly of men who believe themselves to be inferior to women and alpha men. Lilly is one of the few women — some of whom are also trans, some of whom are cis — involved in the Reddit groups for betas a la r/FriendzoneCucks. Like the beta men in the forum, these women see women as superior — and get off on feeling inferior to them.
On r/FriendzoneCucks, Lilly and her brethren have shared their experiences being “friendzoned” by other women and finding it romantically/erotically pleasurable. For example, Sara, 27, recently posted her story about having a party at her house where she invited her crush and a group of friends. Despite everyone involved knowing Sara had a crush on this woman, the crush and a fellow partygoer ended up having sex in Sara’s bedroom while the party ensued. “It made me so wet but I couldn’t let anybody know how I felt,” Sara wrote.
As Sara tells me, developing a friendzoning fetish was a means of dealing with the rejection she experienced as a lesbian. For Lilly, however, the friendzoning fetish was familiar to her before she identified as a woman, but aided in the process of that realization. “I got rejected by a couple of straight girls for being ‘too feminine’ for them,” she explains. “I noticed that that turned me on in a weird way, so I kind of got into sissy porn and that kind of feminization-related stuff.” A year and a half ago, she began transitioning. Now as a woman, she still participates in the beta dynamic, and enjoys “simping” for the women she likes.
On the other hand, she also gets some pleasure in making men simp for her, too: “Being attractive and feminine can give you power over dudes sometimes, and it’s fun to play with it.”
Elsewhere on Reddit, there are straight women who identify as betas or cucks as well. Though there are plenty that just enjoy the cuckold dynamic of watching their male partner have sex with other people, some feel as though they can’t compete with other women, or deserve to be subservient to men. r/WomenAreThings, for example, is filled with posts from women who enjoy feeling like objects for male pleasure — and a few who enjoy feeling like objects for female pleasure. Some subreddits take it to a more explicit extreme, like r/MisogynisticLife and r/MisogynyGoneWild. “If female inferiority/male supremacy turns you on, you’re in the right place,” the description of r/MisogynyGoneWild reads, adding that it’s strictly a role-playing subreddit that doesn’t support gender discrimination.
But on r/FriendzoneCucks, the belief (or role-playing belief) that women are fundamentally superior beings persists, even among the women who participate as subordinates. Though the dynamics these women play into may differ at times from those of the men in the groups, the concept remains the same. Lilly and Sara continue to enjoy putting women on a pedestal, even if they don’t always see room on it for themselves.
Magdalene Taylor
Magdalene Taylor is a staff writer at MEL. She covers internet culture, sex and the online adult industry. She lives in Brooklyn but is from God's Country, Western Massachusetts.
