What Women {Really} Think About Online Simps

“Do I Want Them to Stop?" What Women Really Think About Their Online Simps

Every attractive woman with a visible online presence has them.

The men who appear in the comments within seconds. The ones who call her “my wife” under a skincare post. The ones who write paragraphs in her DMs about how underrated she is, how they have been following her for years, how no one appreciates her mind. The ones who like hundreds of old photos in one sitting. The ones who fight strangers in her mentions like they’re on payroll. And then there are the men who move quickly from devoted to deranged; the ones who ask to be owned, degraded, used, or otherwise welcomed into a fantasy she did not ask to co-author.

We have many words for these men. “Simp” is the most usable one.

But like a lot of conversations about gender online, the interesting part is rarely where the conversation stays. People talk endlessly about the men — mocking them, diagnosing them, ranking their desperation. Much less often do they ask the more interesting question: what does it feel like to be on the receiving end of all that devotion?

Not in theory. In real life.

We spoke to women with significant online followings about the men who flood their comments, build emotional routines around their content, and sometimes mistake access for intimacy.

• • •

“Some of Them Are Fans. Some of Them Are in Love with a Character They Invented.”

Teni, 27, content creator

Teni has been posting lifestyle content for four years. Her audience is large enough now that she no longer checks every notification as it comes in. She has seen enough internet devotion to stop confusing attention with affection.

“The first thing I want to say is that I’m not ungrateful for it,” she says. “I know what it takes to build an audience, and I know these are real people choosing to spend their time on me. But there’s a difference between a fan and someone who has built a version of you in their head and is relating to that version instead of your actual content.”

She says she can tell the difference almost immediately.

The fans are interested in the work. They reference specific captions. They ask follow-up questions about something she actually posted. They recommend her page to other people and can explain why. They engage with her as a creator.

Then there is the other group.

“The ones who comment, ‘I would do anything for you,’ under a post where I’m literally talking about moisturizer,” she says. “And you think, okay. This is clearly not about the moisturizer.”

The strangest part, she says, is that simp attention can become a kind of background infrastructure. You stop being shocked by it and start reading it as information. Who shows up first? Who disappears? Which posts attract a certain type of male attention? Which version of you they respond to most intensely?

I ask if she notices when a particularly devoted follower disappears.

“Yes,” she says immediately. “Not because I miss them personally. But because it tells me something. Either the algorithm changed, or I posted something that didn’t work for them, or they moved on. I notice patterns.”

She pauses, then smiles. “That sounds colder than I mean it.”

It doesn’t sound cold. It sounds like someone who has spent enough time online to understand that attention is emotional, but it is also data.

And that may be the first thing people misunderstand about women with online simps: the attention is not only being felt. It is also being read, managed, sorted, and interpreted.

• • •

“There’s a Sweet Type and a Disturbing Type, and They Look Exactly the Same at First.”

Adaeze, 24, fashion influencer

Adaeze came of age online at a time when simp culture is no longer accidental. Men now perform devotion as a personality. They announce it. Joke about it. Build mini-identities around it. Sometimes the entire interaction feels less like desire and more like theatre.

“There’s a sweet type and a disturbing type,” she says. “And the annoying part is that they can look exactly the same at the beginning.”

The sweet type, she says, is easy enough to recognise eventually. They are enthusiastic. Complimentary. Consistent. They may DM once to say they appreciate her work or tell her they like her style. But they stay within the boundaries of audience behaviour.

“That one is fine,” she says. “That’s just someone who likes what you do. That’s lovely.”

The disturbing type is different. Not always immediately, but eventually.

“They escalate,” she says. “The comments get more personal. They start acting like every post is an opening. You post your lunch, and suddenly someone is writing three paragraphs about how they could take care of you properly. Then, if you don’t respond, the energy shifts. That’s when you realise this was never about the content.”

That shift — from admiration to resentment, from devotion to low-grade punishment — came up again and again in these conversations. It is one of the more revealing parts of simp culture: how quickly affection can harden when it is not rewarded.

I ask if she ever replies to them.

“To the genuine ones, sometimes,” she says. “To the escalating ones, never. Because one reply can mean ten different things depending on who is receiving it.”

Then she says the thing that feels closest to the piece’s central truth.

“Do I want them to stop? Honestly? No. Not the genuine ones. The attention is part of how this works. People have to care. If nobody cares, the work suffers.”

She shrugs.

“What I want is for the caring to stay attached to the work and not to some imaginary version of me they made up in their head.”

• • •

“Sometimes It Feels Like Gratitude. Sometimes It Feels Like They Missed the Point Entirely.”

Sandra, 31, finance creator

Sandra runs a financial literacy platform, so her version of simp culture arrives in a slightly different outfit.

“My simps are funny,” she says. “They’ll write three paragraphs about how I changed their financial life and then come to the DM to ask me to marry them. As if those two things are connected.”

She laughs, but she has clearly thought about this more seriously than she initially lets on.

“I think when content helps someone understand something important about their life, especially money, there’s a kind of gratitude that doesn’t know where to go,” she says. “And sometimes it comes out sideways as devotion.”

“When the admiration is clearly linked to the work, even if it’s a bit intense, I can receive it for what it probably is,” she says. “Someone found the content useful and doesn’t really know how to say thank you in a normal way.”

But not all of it feels benign.

“When someone is clearly just talking about my appearance and hasn’t engaged with anything I’ve actually said, that bothers me,” she says. “Because then it feels like they missed the point of everything I’m trying to do.”

Still, the kind of attention that really unsettles her is not the most sexual or the most dramatic. It is the most dependent.

“The ones I worry about are the ones who sound like I’m their only source of financial education,” she says. “That’s when it stops being flattering and starts feeling like a responsibility I didn’t ask for.”

“I used to think it was funny until I started feeling watched.”

Mara, 29, podcaster

Mara has the darkest answer of anyone I spoke to.

She says she used to find simp culture more amusing than serious. Embarrassing, yes. A little pathetic, definitely. But mostly harmless.

Then one follower started noticing too much.

“It wasn’t dramatic in the movie sense,” she says. “He never threatened me or anything. That’s the thing. It was more subtle than that.”

He always seemed to know where she was. He clocked her routines from stories. He noticed repeated locations. He understood her posting patterns too well. He started sounding less like a fan and more like someone studying her.

“That was the first time I really understood how admiration can turn into surveillance without ever announcing itself,” she says.

She says people underestimate how much women end up editing themselves because of attention like this.

“You stop posting in real time. You stop giving little clues. You think twice before posting your favourite spots. You realise visibility is not neutral.”

What changed most was her tolerance.

“People think simps are harmless because they’re cringey,” she says. “But embarrassment and harmlessness are not the same thing.”

Would she want that kind of attention gone?

“Yes,” she says, without even pretending to hesitate. “Not all attention is worth having.”

“My issue is not the praise. It’s when they start behaving like customers.”

Nkiru, 26, beauty creator

Nkiru is the most pragmatic of the group.

She says the internet likes to talk about simp culture like it’s purely emotional, but in her experience, a lot of it is transactional.

“There are men who give money, buy from your wishlist, send airtime, send random lunch money, and all that is fine until they start acting like they purchased a mood from you,” she says.

She has no issue with gifts in themselves. She has an issue with what some men think gifting should unlock.

“It’s the feeling of, ‘I’ve done something for you, so now I should matter differently,’” she says. “That part is what annoys me.”

Some men, she says, don’t even say it aloud. It just creeps into the tone. More familiarity. More expectation. More disappointment if she’s not especially warm. More resentment if she doesn’t become “softer” with them.

“Suddenly they’re not a follower anymore. They’re a stakeholder,” she says.

That language is funny, but it also captures something else; that some simp behaviour is less about desire than about imagined leverage.

“They think because they’ve been generous, they are no longer standing where everybody else is standing,” she says. “Meanwhile, yes, thank you for the lunch money, but you are still in the audience.”

• • •

Names have been changed at the subjects’ request.

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