Was asked in the discord, so might as well make the essay a hexbear post, right? My most recent research can best be described as "analyzing all mentions of FDS during the week on reddit", which is far from exhaustive, but the allegations against FDS are not new in general.
So at the root core, the sub has a sociopathic philosophy of exploiting value out of men, and dehumanizing men that have less value for exploiting. This includes using terms like "scrotes" and "LVM" (low value men). The central idea behind "value" can be oversimplified as "marry a guy with money". The sub is dedicated to strategies around that philosophy.
I just happen to be a Marxist Feminist, which vaguely means I think exploitation is bad.
They use some kind of script to autoban people who post in threads in other subreddits that criticize FDS.
They ban people for stepping out of line with the core philosophy or questioning the rules.
I've seen reports/allegations that at least one mod could be racist, transphobic, anti-sexworker, etc.
During my research, I found that most conversation about FDS was going on in MGTOW and redpill type subs. The primary complaints I did see seemed to be about the actual toxic behavior in FDS, even if the male comments in complaint threads were also expectedly toxic.
The main counternarrative to FDS is to describe them as "female incels" which I find distasteful because femcels actually already exist, and is punching down at both incels and femcels, and they seem to be technically more voluntarily celibate, if only for the sake of withholding value to extract value.
There wasn't a lot of feminist conversation going on about it, other than a single example of a black woman in r/blackladies complaining about an allegedly racist mod.
One sub explicitly mentions "Do not dehumanize others. RedPill, incel, Femcel, FDS, PUA, MGTOW, etc. content is not allowed. Ignorance of these hate groups is not an excuse to parrot their ideology." in a comment removal message /r/datingoverthirty
I did get some tradwife vibes from a few things.
somebody created r/femaledatinghelp which I joined instead of continuing to promote r/twoxdating.
The transphobia was a major part of why r/FDS got noticed by other subs as being reactionary, as it's fairly bioessentialist in its description of men and that naturally leads them to not recognize trans women as women, and especially see trans lesbians as infiltrators. They may have started to de-emphasize their TERFness in reaction to TERF subs getting banned (along with several other TERF subs deciding to speak in code to stay on the platform), but the fundamental explanations they use for why men and women are different are ultimately incompatible with any recognition of trans identities.