out with the girlboss, in with the trophy wife
Gen Z’s rejection of millennial feminism, in 3 tiktoks
Each new generation casts off some of the lies of the previous generation. I think young girls today are sick of the lies of millennial feminism. Let me illustrate, in three TikToks.
Exhibit A: Yelena. She wore fur earmuffs and gazed at me through the mirror of a sparkling luxury-hotel bathroom. Her caption read: “Another regular day as a stay-at-home / world-traveling girlfriend.” She described skiing at a Switzerland resort, a private spa, two meals of beautifully-plated pasta, a bubble bath. I scrolled a bit. Yelena used to live in Paris, earned a business degree, started a job but didn’t like it.
Then she met her super-wealthy boyfriend, and he said: you don’t like working? Ok, then don’t. Now her life involves full-time travel and luxurious self-indulgence. She glances at a piece of jewelry; he buys it for her. She mentions liking a city; he rents them a penthouse there. She says nothing at all; he sends her an extravagant flower arrangement. On TikTok, she brags about all this, and about how obsessed he is with her hair, and about how she stays model-thin despite her diet of expensive pastas and desserts.
My immediate reaction was: haha, oh wow, can’t wait to see the bloodbath in the comments section. But actually, she seems to get no hate—only admiration! Her comments are full of girls being like, omg you deserve the best, you’re my idol, how can i be you, how do i attract a man like that. (In my opinion, her boyfriend is not at all good-looking, but no one seems to mind that part). In response to her fans’ inquiries, she offers tips on how to spot a rich man who is nice and moldable, how to passive-aggressively groom him into treating you like a princess, and how to develop the conviction that you fully deserve to be spoiled by a wealthy man.
I was shocked. It’s possible that she just deletes all her negative comments, but still—I came of age in the era of Sheryl Sandberg and Hillary Clinton, a time when captioning your Facebook photo with “girlboss” was confident instead of cringe. It’s hard for me to imagine that her content would’ve been at all well-received a decade ago, when I was in my late teens.
Exhibit B: A teen girl lambasting the popular clothing brand Brandy Melville, which only makes clothes in one size (extra-small). She points out that, far from acknowledging customer demands for them to be more size-inclusive, Brandy Melville has done the opposite: they’ve shrunk their store doorways, so that fat people quite literally cannot fit into their stores. Similarly, they continue to feature almost exclusively white models and store associates. Also, they never run ads, they never have sales, and they never offer free shipping, no matter how many clothes you order. The message is: this is our store; if you don’t wanna shop here, then don’t.
So I opened the comments section fully expecting everyone to agree that this was highly problematic. Nope. Let me read you the top comment: “i wanna have a brandy melville kinda attitude” (105k likes).
This one really surprised me. As recently as 2020, the NY Times ran an article titled “Can Anna Wintour Survive The Social Justice Movement?”—basically predicting that Anna Wintour, the queen of thin, white beauty standards (and basically the grown-up version of Brandy Melville), will be relevant no longer. Around that time, Brandy Melville had to disable comments on their official Instagram account to stem the flood of woke anger against them, unleashed by the BLM movement.
Still, I remember seeing teen girls wearing Brandy tops to BLM protests—even after news broke that Brandy Melville executives frequently exchanged neo-Nazi, pro-Hitler, anti-Black comments. And now I guess they’ve gone even further, to the point of aspiring to embody Brandy Melville’s attitudes.
Exhibit C: Eva talking about how she routinely starves herself (i.e. eats nothing but apples for 4 days straight), in order to get bikini-ready for vacations. Again, I expected the Gen Z girlies to cancel her in the comments for promoting disordered eating. Again, no. Not a whiff of that in the comments. Everyone’s just thanking her for being honest.
What should we make of all this?
When I was coming of age, I was sold on a fairly specific narrative about how women could and should grow their careers like men. Hillary Clinton ran for president wearing pantsuits; Sheryl Sandberg told women to Lean In to taking seats alongside men in boardrooms.
The millennial girlbosses required us to believe in a lie: that women could be asexualized in the workplace, that women could move about the world in the same way as men, that appearance didn’t matter, that plus size is just as beautiful. It denied pretty privilege; it denied the power of sleeping your way to the top.
A few months ago, the Economist published an article subtitled, “It is economically rational for ambitious women to try as hard as possible to be thin.” Why is this at all news to anyone? Why did some economics department need to go “research” this? Because the millennial girlbosses wanted to have us believe it wasn’t true, when it obviously is.
Gen Z is casting off this lie. Or maybe they tried to believe in the lie for a bit, and realized that life doesn’t actually work that way. But they know: thin girls are just prettier. You cannot eat all the pizza you want and still look hot at the beach. The more attractive you are, the more attention you’ll get on social media and with men. And maybe one of those (a social media career, a rich husband) will become your ticket out of a 9-5 job. We all know Gen Z hates 9-5 jobs. If the cost of avoiding a 9-5 is to become a trophy wife… so be it, this generation seems to think.
Should we be alarmed? Is this a backsliding in feminism?
I actually don’t think so. Whereas millennial women see being a trophy wife (or even just a plain ol’ stay-at-home mom) as a shameful position of subordination to their husbands, Gen Z seems to find a certain power in being a trophy wife. When you think about it, who actually has the power in Yelena’s relationship? He’s the one taking work calls in the hotel room while she’s out skiing and buying herself fur earmuffs with his salary. Sure, he holds the purse-strings and can cut her off at any time—but she’s not totally dependent on his goodwill; she’s an educated, beautiful girl who could easily find a new job or boyfriend. Plus, he seems much more emotionally dependent on (and easily manipulated by) her, than she is on him.
Eva also aspires to become a trophy wife and similarly doesn’t seem to view it as degrading. She captions one of her videos: “Manifesting being the tall, beautiful, eloquently spoken wife of a very wealthy man who works long hours and doesn’t bother me. My duties include throwing tasteful dinner parties, interviewing au pairs for our children, and making strong cocktails.”
Notably, everyone in the comments section highlights her ideal husband “not bothering her” as being the most desirable and relatable part of her description. As a millennial, I’ve been conditioned to dismiss trophy wives as being ornaments and sex slaves. But I mean, the way Eva puts it… it kind of just sounds like a shortcut to attaining financial freedom, especially if you already naturally enjoy upper-class dinner parties and such (as Eva obviously does). You don’t even need to do any housework, because he’ll pay people to do them for you! Is it so wrong to imagine that the wife in this situation may be getting the better end of the stick?
Here’s how I’d characterize Gen Z feminism: young girls still aim high, they still want power and conventional success, and they don’t want to be subordinate to men. But they don’t believe that women can—or should—move about the world in the same way as men do.
Crucially, millennial women saw their sex appeal as a strictly negative factor to their success—inviting only unwanted sexual advances and ugly rumors about them sleeping with their bosses. Gen Z women instead view their sex appeal as just another asset in their toolboxes. Yes, sexual harassment happens, it’s ugly, Gen Z gets it. But Gen Z also slyly sees another face to that same coin, and they no longer think it taboo to contemplate using their sex appeal in their favor to get the things they want.
It’s a view of womanhood that’s more grounded in the realities of gender dynamics. I find it refreshing, even if I can’t say I personally aspire to trophy-wifeism.
the substack algorithm recommended this to me, and without any desire to be needlessly mean: you are wrong. most crucially, you misread the vibe; it might be because you are not gen Z. the girls in these videos are playing along with viral catchphrases and aesthetics, holding these memes weakly and posing with them for TikTok’s fantasy realm. they might as well be roleplaying. memes are not wholly meaningless, but they need a rich, expansive, playful analysis. by themselves, read with the literal-minded and inelegant eye of this piece, floating images tell us almost nothing about the world as it is. bumbling internet critics will use them to come up with a "theory" about "culture" only for their false insights to be blown away when the next meme comes along
you also fail to adequately contextualize your argument... “[young women] no longer think it taboo to contemplate using their sex appeal in their favor to get the things they want” is something that could have been written in the 1970s, and i think it might even be lifted from a 90s recap of sex and the city. this is not some post-feminist truth. the belief that women get ahead by using their bodies is very old and widespread, almost as old and widespread as the belief that skinny = hot. the fact that young people are repeating it tells us simply that we still live in a world where these ideas are still in circulation. no ideological movement forward here, only the rattle of the same old ideas in tiktok's cacophony machine
you also fail 2 address the weakest points of your argument. it's below us to go into the obvious dangers of marrying rich, so i'll go into the 2nd weakest point: in looking at the woke era you make a really common and simple mistake. you say that millennial feminism lied, but in fact its messages, like body positivity and “leaning in”, began as attempts to reckon with how sex and sexism intersected with social dynamics. in the late 2000s, they didn't say "being pretty doesn't impact your social status", they said "being pretty impacts your social status quite dramatically, and women waste a lot of time and effort trying to be pretty, how might we change this". obviously then the whole thing became corporatized, increasingly shallow, the subject of obnoxious marketing campaigns and soft-pink pantsuit photoshoots, etc
anyway there is no real power in starving yourself into weakness and no real power in flirting your way to the top (again, women know that the "skinny = hot" formula is as efficiently enforced as the "sexual woman = whore" formula. this, too, hasn't changed). beauty is not power, though i see why you might think it is. beauty is simply a valuable currency. if beauty were real power, it would not depreciate with time, and you wouldn’t need men (your boss, your husband) as intermediaries through which to enact your will into the world; you could just enact it yourself. a lot of the dynamics you describe here are incompatible with stuff like dignity and self-respect. women know this and that's why they're not fleeting the workforce and instead they're 4B-posting (another mostly meaningless tiktok meme). your post is written as if you were simply making an observation, but you also seem to think that this (inaccurately read) shift is good, and even a form of progress. it's very weird
anyway, power and freedom, that’s what matters. i’m an immigrant + in college. my mother still remembers friends of her mother who were beaten to death by their husbands. those women couldn’t leave: they had no money of their own, struggled finding jobs, and nobody believed them when they asked for help. that's actually how many women lived in the world before the last 60 years. you and me and these girls are not immune to this fate. in fact, as fun as it is to talk about becoming a “pink pilates princess” and "using pretty privilege" or whatever, we are closer to it than we might like to think
The unacknowledged reality is that few young women are sufficiently attractive to garner the rich guy, fewer will marry one and most all of them will be ejected sometime in their 30’s (if they make it that far). The other reality is that there are proportionately fewer rich men given the declining numbers of college-educated straight men. It’s going to be interesting in 10 years….