'Be ruthless in your evaluation of men.’ ‘Make him invest before sex.’ ‘Don’t date financially challenged men.’ ‘Never split the bill.’ These are just some of the commandments of the ‘Female Dating Strategy’ – a controversial online movement urging women to approach modern relationships with, critics say, outright contempt for men.

It has become one of the most influential corners of the so-called ‘femosphere’ – a fast-growing subset of the internet where powerful influencers exchange advice on love, sex, money and power.

Earlier this month, I explored the rise of the so-called manosphere in these pages, following a hit Netflix documentary in which veteran journalist Louis Theroux sat down with some of the movement’s most notorious personalities – including Harrison Sullivan, known online as HSTikkyTokky, controversial livestreamer Sneako and self-styled dating guru Myron Gaines – who preach dominance over women and a deeply transactional view of relationships.

But what became clear during my research was that an equal and opposite universe has been quietly flourishing alongside it – one that claims to challenge ‘toxic masculinity’, yet often mirrors its most cynical views on dating and sex.

In this parallel underworld, female influencers teach their followers how to ‘level up’; others explain why they have chosen not to interact with men at all, and dating gurus teach how to manipulate men for money. All, often, while slaughtering the sacred cows of modern liberal feminism – especially ‘sexual liberation’ which, they say, has stripped women of their dignity and power.

This week, the Daily Mail spoke exclusively to some of the femosphere’s figureheads – including TheWizardLiz, a self-help guru with more than eight million TikTok followers, who doles out advice including ‘How to receive princess treatment’, ‘How to become extremely seductive’ and ‘How to become rich’ and dating guru Kanika Batra who teaches her 500,000 followers how to master ‘sociopathic’ manipulation techniques.

Their messaging is, at worst, poisonous and, at best, deeply pessimistic about the male species.

And yet it seems to be catching on among millions of young women, some of whom have spurned men altogether, in extreme cases resorting to surgical sterilisation as a ‘political statement’.

‘Rose’, host of the weekly Female Dating Strategy (FDS) podcast – which can reach more than 20,000 listeners per episode – spoke to the Daily Mail this week. Born in America and now in her early forties, she records her podcast anonymously, without video, fearing a male backlash to her controversial message.

The FDS phenomenon began on the messageboard platform Reddit in the late 2010s, where its forum quickly amassed more than 100,000 members. These women developed their own quasi-manifesto – a downloadable handbook offering step-by-step guidance on how to vet potential partners.

It includes advice on how to ‘level up’ from being a ‘Becky’ (a plain-looking, shallow woman) to a ‘high-value woman’ or ‘queen’, how to stop being a pathetic ‘Pickmeisha’ (a compound of ‘pick me’ and a submissive Japanese ‘geisha’) and how to manipulate ‘moids’ (male humanoids) or ‘scrotes’ (worthless or poor men).

Other chapters in the handbook include: an Anti-Predator Guide, How Equality Is Being Used Against Us, and Tell Men To Wear A Condom Or Shut The F*** Up.

In a response to ‘not all men are like that’, one poster insists: ‘Realise that AMALT (All Men Are Like That). Thinking “Not all men” is DETRIMENTAL to your safety... If I gave you a pack of gummy bears and told you one was poisoned, wouldn’t you treat each of them as potentially lethal?’

You get the idea. FDS now has its own website and has spawned the podcast, which Rose co-hosts. Her introduction to the community came, she tells me, during the Covid lockdowns after a series of unhappy dating experiences.

‘What I was struck by was how consistent women’s stories were across the FDS board about mistreatment, disrespect... The overriding theme was that it was the men in their lives.’

Raised in ‘a very traditional American family... very patriarchal’, the group’s language about women’s value was revelatory. Though the movement has attracted fierce criticism for what detractors see as misandry, or a hatred of the male species, Rose calls it ‘pessimistic realism’

‘It is a dangerous world,’ she says. ‘A lot of men don’t have your best interests at heart.’

She claims that girls are brought up on ‘Disney dreams’, an ‘imaginary, fantastical world where a man is a principled... noble individual who is looking for the best for both of us. And that’s just not human nature.’

Casual sex and porn are also anathema among FDS diehards, who recommend that women shouldn’t sleep with a partner in the first six weeks of dating.

‘You shouldn’t be giving yourselves to men who don’t care about you,’ Rose says. She claims that the sexual liberation movement is the opposite of freedom.

‘We despise liberal feminism. Who’s going to care for you if you end up needing an abortion or having to become a single mother? Porn consumption has absolutely rotted the brains, and I would argue the psyches, of so many of our young men,’ she adds.

Still, Rose insists she has not opted out of dating altogether. Instead, she says she now uses FDS strategies when getting into relationships. ‘I want them to show me who they are... and then I just sit back and observe.’

Her message is simple: ‘Hey women, wake up. This is a reality.’

In some respects, the movement bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the Red Pill movement popular in the manosphere (a term borrowed from The Matrix films) whose followers believe they have woken up to the ‘truth’ that feminism is corrupting society.

In the femosphere, however, they call it the Pink Pill: the realisation that men don’t – and never will – care about women.

Both ideologies have developed their own arcane jargon, and are rooted in a deeply pessimistic view of the opposite sex. Both, too, view relationships as a zero-sum game which can be won or lost using calculation and cold manipulation.

Professor Emiliano de Cristofaro and Professor Jeremy Blackburn are two authors of a data-driven analysis of ‘toxic’ women’s communities online – which they claim are ‘analogues of the manosphere’.

‘The narratives with respect to dating strategy are very similar – it’s a game and you try to outsmart the other gender and win,’ says de Cristofaro.

Indeed, one expert on emotional manipulation is Kanika Batra, a 30-year-old Australian author, model and content creator – who has 500,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram. She is a diagnosed sociopath which, Batra tells me, helps her spot patterns in male dating behaviour. Highly intelligent, she says male manipulation is ‘very distinct’, particularly in what she describes as men’s tendency to ‘pretend to like somebody before sex and then ditch them’.

But while Batra insists she doesn’t hate men, her approach toward them is eye-opening.

‘Don’t accept a walk with a coffee as a date,’ is her advice. ‘He should be taking you for dinner. The more money he’s spending on you, the less he’s spending on other women.’

She also recommends dating multiple men at the same time – without sleeping with them – to keep options open. And in a

2022 YouTube video, she encourages women to dangle ‘the carrot’ of sex, to lure men to do a woman’s bidding.

‘Femininity has been used to keep us in our prisons, but men don’t understand how easily we can use it to manipulate them... Your goal is to drain him of his happiness,’ she says.

Batra argues that modern feminism has allowed men to have sex with ‘virtually no investment whatsoever.’ Women are encouraged to see this as empowerment, but, she says, are often left feeling ‘empty’ and ‘used’.

Instead, she suggests, men should be manipulated into investing, both financially and emotionally, in a woman.

All the talk of manipulating credulous men has led critics to label Batra as ‘the female Andrew Tate’ – the British-American former kickboxer who calls himself ‘the original global misogynist’.

‘I am the antidote to Andrew Tate,’ she insists. ‘Men who follow Tate love to ask women what we bring to the table. We are the table! We have everything men desire deeply.

‘They claim that they improve their lives for themselves, but they do everything for us. Why do you think they go to the gym so much? Why do you think they’re trying to earn so much money? For themselves? No, for women.’

I ask Batra’s husband of six years, former tennis player and YouTuber Samuel Matheson what he thinks of his wife’s views.

He’s surprisingly upbeat. ‘She definitely made me work for her – but men respect that. Really, Kanika just promotes a healthy vetting process when dating.’

It’s a process that certainly seems to have caught on.

I speak to Sophie, 27, from London, who tells me that, after an unsuccessful spell of dating, she decided to try a more cunning approach based on the femosphere advice she had seen online.

‘If a man asked me out on a date, I’d suggest an expensive restaurant I wanted to go to. I was convinced that if he was really interested in me or thought I was worth it, he’d be willing to spend the money. If he stopped texting me, I’d ignore him.

‘And I’d refuse to sleep with anyone until I knew he wanted something serious. These rules definitely weeded out the men who were just looking for casual hook-ups.’

The femosphere’s worst suspicions about men seemed to be confirmed last year when hugely popular self-help guru TheWizardLiz – who built a following of more than eight million on TikTok – announced she had split from her partner of three years, Landon.

The influencer, real name Lize Dzjabrailova, told her followers that she had discovered he had been unfaithful while she was four months pregnant with their child.

Critics scoffed that for all her dating advice, she had failed to spot the signs was deeply ironic.

For the femosphere, however, if a woman like Liz could be cheated on, it was seismic proof of the degeneracy and untrustworthiness of all men.

‘The story of TheWizardLiz made me dislike men even more and realise that I truly need to rely on myself,’ said one fan.

Now, speaking for the first time after giving birth, Belgian-born Lize tells the Daily Mail that, after her betrayal, her focus is no longer on manipulating male desire, but on preparing women to be disappointed in men, as she suggests they always will be. ‘I built a whole legacy for myself [with my platform],’ she says. ‘And just because I showed [the breakdown of] one relationship with a man, it threatened to completely destroy my legacy.’

She adds: ‘I watched the [Theroux] documentary, and I was very disturbed. I think it’s really sad – for young men as well.’

That’s why, she says, women should ‘decentre men and focus on themselves’.

‘And men should also not centre their lives around women.’

And she issues a warning for young women embarking on relationships in today’s landscape of mistrust – one she has arguably helped to shape. ‘I would tell young girls: go and build a career for yourself,’ she says. ‘When you are in a relationship – even if it’s filled with love – one day something might happen, and you will still have your own money.’

It seems like reasonable advice. The problem is that, as in the manosphere, the sensible messaging – such as Tate encouraging young men to work hard and go to the gym, for example – is intertwined with dangerous, dismissive and even hateful attitudes toward the opposite sex.

Perhaps the most chilling branch of the femosphere is one calling itself ‘4B’ – and in which women forgo romantic interactions with men entirely, becoming ‘femcels’ (celibate females).

4B emerged in the mid-2010s in South Korea – and quickly caught on worldwide. The name stems from four Korean words beginning with ‘bi’ (meaning ‘no’): bihon (no marriage), bichulsan (no childbirth), biyeonae (no dating), and bisekseu (no sex).

On the 4B Reddit page, with its 25,000 weekly visitors, one member recently claimed she had undergone bilateral salpingectomy – the surgical removal of both fallopian tubes for sterilisation.

‘I’m only 21’, she wrote, ‘but no rude questions were asked and my surgeon said she was happy to do it for me.’

‘Congratulations!’ commented another user. ‘I wish this will be legal in every country. Even if we are 4B, we live in constant threat of assault from males.’

With birthrates across the world plummeting – and in Britain, where they languish at the lowest level since records began in 1938 – it’s deeply concerning.

Yet, as both sides drift further into mutual suspicion, it seems almost inevitable that a generation now coming of age online are being conditioned to see the opposite sex not as potential partners, but as lifelong enemies.