‘It’s difficult to grasp the appeal of Fuentes.’
“I’m the sweetest girl in town, so why are you so mean?” The Lana Del Rey song “Meet Me in the Pale Moonlight” plays over a clip of Nick Fuentes punching a miniature pumpkin in one of many adoring TikTok videos made by fangirl Velvet Groypette. Blooming peonies have been edited in, and a grainy film-camera filter added. “When you gonna ditch that stupid bitch you got, it’s me you should be seeing!” Del Rey wails as footage plays of Candace Owens, the conservative podcaster, in an interview with Fuentes.
It’s difficult to grasp the appeal of Fuentes, a diminutive chauvinist virgin who has described himself as an “incel”, a “loser” and a “chud” — the latter, for those with jobs, is new-gen internet slang for a Right-wing prat. Yet somehow the man who coined the phrase “your body, my choice” has become a boyband-grade obsession for an army of alternative female yearners. If his fans in general are “Groypers”, a term related to the 4chan mascot Pepe the Frog, then these sighing women are his “Groypettes”.
Velvet Groypette is a typical case. They post images of Fuentes edited into album covers, or standing awkwardly at a nightclub with the looksmaxxing streamer Clavicular (the recent Avengers Assemble-style gathering in Miami also included Andrew and Tristan Tate; the group sang along to Kanye West’s song “Heil Hitler”). In their bio, they brag that they have been banned from TikTok three times. To them, Fuentes is Radiohead’s pitiable, misunderstood Creep, which is why one edit plays that song over a clip of our improbable matinee idol saying: “I am a bitchless, rizzless, hoeless, 5’9” chud incel who was over before it began … it’s over for me.” “I could save him,” writes one commenter; he is 2026’s Christian Slater in Heathers, a weirdo masochist who only sensitive girls truly see.
The Groypettes perform lovelorn victimhood, cosplaying as a battered girlfriend in a toxic relationship with this baddest of “bad boys”. The user Grippy Groypette, another exemplary specimen, hangs a pinkified American flag showing Fuentes doing the Nazi salute; “he could hit me and it would feel like a kiss,” reads the caption. “Me too girl me too,” writes a commenter. On Instagram, a user called Groypergirlies says “I’d let him ruin me”; Womenforfuentes takes the urge to self-sacrifice further, committing to a “baby groypling revolution” by churning out children for the cause.
It could, you might say, all be a canny ragebait device; what woman would engage with, let alone fantasise about, a man whose interests are so in opposition to her own? But the community is simply too large to be a trolling fad — if you search for X accounts with “Groypette” in the username, you can scroll and scroll. Besides, Andrew Tate, the OG slaphead king of the manosphere, never boasted a comparable league of female footsoldiers; Tate is massively more known and despised than Fuentes, only a recent inductee to the liberal mainstream’s fascist hall of fame. And if these women truly hope to be hit by a far-Right agitator, there is evidence suggesting Tate would know what he was doing. Nevertheless it is Nick who has been chosen as the “pretend bf” to this burgeoning subculture of troubled “foids” (women, to you and me). Why?
Perhaps it is because, unlike Tate, Fuentes’s violence is only hypothetical and therefore can be seen as romantic; so is his sexual life. Also unlike Tate, Fuentes is boyish, inaccessible and a little awkward. While both are undeniably camp, Tate does it in a hypersexual, dominating way, designed to impress other men; his moral universe is about status and money, and the women within it are only ever cyphers. Fuentes is obsessed with suffering and purity, civilisation and destiny; his is a world which, in a very narrow way, leaves space for the perfect woman. Tate is a brutish warlord, and Fuentes a sad princeling. For a Tumblr princess, the choice is simple.
The Groypette did not come out of thin air. A scour of TikTok, Instagram and X suggests the standard-issue Fuentes fangirl is either white or vaguely Latina, in her early twenties and terminally online; she listens to Lana, she bedrots compulsively, she takes photos of herself crying. She is, in other words, an inheritor of the other tortured female internet subcultures which have so obviously shaped her aesthetic and which have tightened their grip on isolated young women since Covid: the first is clearly ED Twitter, where eating-disorder girlies post thinspo (thin inspiration), list dizzyingly low current, starting and goal weights and competitively make themselves miserable and ill. It is no surprise that many of the self-identified Groypettes also have these stats in their bios, or the telling tag “edtwt”; martyrdom and attention-seeking suffering is native to both communities.
The other, perhaps even more obvious, progenitor is the Tumblr e-girl — a young woman seen on moody collages with long brown hair, hiding her face in adorable despair, taking a picture of her skinny legs and cigarette, and mournfully daydreaming about… herself. She is the grieving maiden of former times, dragged into the 21st century and given smudged eyeliner, bulimia and a phone addiction. And she is perfectly portrayed in another Velvet Groypette banger about the user’s grief in having to withstand Fuentes’s Christmas posting break. In this one, images of pretty girls crying and looking out of windows, clutching their silky hair or lying catatonic like Flaming June, are interspersed with Fuentes thirst traps.
For the Groypette, Fuentes’s beliefs and the broader America First movement are, ironically, secondary to her performative sadness. Where male fans of Fuentes crack sick jokes about the Jewish Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein’s family members “dying in the Holly”, the Groypette focuses mainly on her deathless love. Hitching herself to Fuentes’ bandwagon is less about ideology — these girls almost never post about his racial politics, for example, save from attention-seeking deployment of the n-word — than about recruiting Fuentes as the latest instrument for self-harm. Cutting herself, smoking, making herself sick and even showing off bruises is so aggressively woven into the DNA of the internet sadgirl; posing as the girl not only picked, but hit, by the anti-woman bogeyman of the day appears to have a perverse way of making otherwise unremarkable women feel special.
There is much to despise in the Groypette: she is craven, inauthentic and willing to sell other women down the river for a scrap of online attention. But, as a product of today’s balkanised youth culture, I understand her. If you were nerfed by Covid isolation, have a fragile sense of self and need male admiration to survive your own crushing mediocrity, then throwing yourself in with this band of countercultural “poasters” makes sense. The fact remains that nobody is as simpishly servile to a semi-attractive alt woman than a man who professes to despise her sex. Case in point: such men fill Groypette comment sections with admiring missives such as “the Groypettes might actually be crazier than the Groypers and that’s awesome honestly”; “I need a Groypette”; “WTF? I love women now.” If you’re looking for attention, this is a good place to start.
This thirst for alt-Right women explains why Amelia is probably filling your timelines this week. For the uninitiated, she is the purple-haired girl from a catastrophically misguided anti-far-Right, Prevent-funded video game called Pathways commissioned by Hull City Council for use in schools. Unfortunately, she’s become an instant cult heroine. In AI-generated fan renderings, Amelia burns pictures of Keir Starmer with cigs and tenderly pets British bulldogs; she leads the game’s male main character to brighter futures with fields of poppies, a sort of manic pixie doomer girl. In many ways, she is the platonic ideal of a Groypette: the Amelias of this strange new world aren’t bimboish “Staceys”, big-breasted blondes at the top of the sexual hierarchy; instead they are based noticers or, in plain English, they get the world’s depressing realities and are a salve, not salt, to the downtrodden man’s wounds. They might resemble the liberal e-girls with pronouns in their bios who normally deride the “incel”, but really they are meek, compliant and devoted — all the women, in other words, who have spurned him in real life given an ideology transplant.
For the Groypette, it’s win-win. She needn’t particularly engage with Fuentes’s ideas, or even meet up with any members of this oleaginous movement in real life; her mistreatment is only theoretical, and her proximity to something so overtly sinister is enough to make her feel important, with all the distinction of the not-so-secret self-harmer. All that remains is to wonder whether, when Nick Fuentes does step out with his own First Lady, all the glamour of groypettery will dissolve into a puddle of tears. His professed sexual loserdom seems to be part of his appeal; any woman he chooses would become by definition exceptional. Strange as this all may seem, it appears likely that if and when Fuentes stops being such a massive virgin, his female fanbase will revolt. There was a reason why John Lennon had to hide his marriage to Cynthia.
The fate of the Groypette is an alarm bell for the collapse of liberal feminism: though she has attached herself to a movement which is by definition disempowering, she sees it as a price worth paying for a sense of belonging, for devotion and meaning. An empty and cynical modern feminist credo which has robbed young women of the right to question transgenderism, prostitution, pornography and the consequences of mass immigration is losing ground, because of course it is. The worldview of the Groypette may be hopelessly ironic, nihilistic, racist, even suicidal — but for a small subset of women it is more enticing than the dreary bullshit-artistry of the progressive mainstream. That should worry us.
