According to [new/old/even older] research, [Gen Z/Millennial/Gen X] women have had it with going out to work. At long last, we’ve realised that the feminist movement conned us with its myth of [Girlboss/career woman/shoulder-padded ballbreaker] empowerment. Turns out proper work – the kind of stuff men do – isn’t the Barbie-with-a-briefcase fantasy we thought it was. Alas, being the kind of idiots whose brains can only manage ‘pottering about a bit with babies while doing a bit of dusting’, we let ourselves be brainwashed into viewing said ‘pottering about’ as oppression. Honestly, what are we like?

Earlier this week I spotted a tweet announcing that ‘Gen Z women are officially done chasing the “girlboss” grind’:

“A new poll shows 47% of Gen Z aspire to be a tradwife — married, with kids and the husband as the top earner.

Girlboss ranked 2nd, digital nomad 3rd, and a strong 14% aspired to be a trophy wife — the classic MRS degree.

The biggest lie women were told is that success comes from the workplace. Success is expanding humanity for its survival. The joy of motherhood is indescribable and better than any job title.”

Hear that ladies? You’ve all been lied to! Having babies is the best!

I feel I have been seeing variations of this argument my whole life. I was born in 1975, into a not-very-feminist family. I benefited from second-wave feminism’s fight for improved workplace conditions for women, without having to do any of the fighting myself. The backlash to this was ever-present. It’s never gone away, yet it always seeks to portray itself as something new.

Growing up, I noticed how men treated women who ‘didn’t work’ (or rather, did work, but not for any pay, or for lower pay than the men). I saw the way the disrespect extended to ‘housewives’ was matched by that extended to ‘working mothers’ (parasite or bad mother, either way you were morally inferior, especially if there was no man around). I watched all the ‘career women are bitches who’ll regret neglecting their kids, or become extra-bitchified by not having kids at all’ films that emerged in the late eighties and early nineties – Fatal Attraction, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Baby Boom, Immediate Family, Working Girl – that Susan Faludi takes apart in Backlash. The US-imported ‘mommy wars’ – supposedly pitching stay-at-home mothers against ‘working mothers’ – always seemed a pretty transparent way of telling mothers (and women in general) they were their own worst enemies, whatever they did.

When I started university in 1993, my dad commented on what a waste it was to see so many female students as “they’ll all go off to have babies” (I was never sure whether I counted as a “waste”. In any case, male students still outnumbered female ones in my college – which only started admitting women in 1980 – by three to two). In 2007, pregnant with my first child, I read Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels’ The Mommy Myth, which warned of the rise of “the new momism” – “a highly romanticized and yet demanding view of motherhood” – and sought to pitch this as ‘true’ choice and liberation for women:

“Central to the new momism, in fact, is the feminist insistence that women have choices, that they are active agents in control of their own destiny, that they have autonomy. But here’s where the distortion of feminism occurs. The only truly enlightened choice to make as a woman, the one that proves, first, that you are a ‘real’ woman, and second, that you are a decent, worthy one, is to become a ‘mom’ and to bring to child rearing a combination of selflessness and professionalism that would involve the cross cloning of Mother Theresa and Donna Shalala.”

Is this sounding at all familiar? Oh look – doing exactly what women did before (in 1950s adverts, at least) is the real feminist choice! And no, it’s not taken Gen Z women looking at their exhausted Gen X mothers to ‘realise’ this. Gen X and Millennial women have been told this all their adult lives, too. And still we keep getting paid jobs, as if we need money, and maybe even careers, as if there’s other stuff we’re interested in or good at, like the idiots we are.

At this juncture I should probably tell you how important my kids are to me and how being a mother is indeed the most important thing in my life etc. etc. (as Douglas and Michaels emphasise, “we adore our kids […] The smell of a new baby’s head, tucking a child in at night, receiving homemade, hand-scrawled birthday cards, heart-to-hearts with a teenager after a date, seeing them become parents – these are joys parents treasure”). But that’s just a bit insulting, isn’t it? Yes, I am quite aware a spreadsheet doesn’t love you back but honestly, why does this need saying? There is an enormous legacy of feminist work on how we can value motherhood more, and improve the experience of it more (I have a Fairer Disputations piece coming out on this soon), and it is incredibly frustrating to see generation after generation ignore this work and its recommendations in favour of “we’ll just tell women how lovely it is when your baby smiles at you”. Like we couldn’t have worked that out for ourselves!

There is so much to say about changing workplace, economic and family structures in order to make mothering better and easier. But what I think is often unsaid, but increasingly obvious to me, is the way in which the drive to push women out of the workplace – or at least out of jobs that men might want for themselves – trivialises and undervalues what women do as paid workers in much the same way that the work of mothers is undervalued and trivialised. It’s not so much that ‘women’s work’ or ‘motherwork’ is devalued – it’s that anything women are doing isn’t classed as ‘real’ work. That’s why infantilising caricatures of women playing at being workers, strutting around being ‘girlbosses’ or barging others out of the way with their shoulder pads, have been so enduring. As if men still do the real work but women, having had a major tantrum in the mid-70s, are being humoured and it’s time for them to give it up.

This is the story we are told: feminists – who invented feminism to compensate for their lack of properly feminine qualities such as maternal instinct and the desire to be soft and decorative – told other women – who apparently hadn’t ever worked outside the home before – that having a career would totes be empowering and fun. Alas, these other women – who did have properly feminine qualities, which included being stupid – let themselves be duped into going along with this, with many of them forgetting to have babies. These women then found that being a worker, far from being like Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, was really hard, and often quite boring. They hadn’t realised this because 1) men never, ever moan about work, being the superior creatures they are, and 2) women are eternal children, for whom ‘liberation’ is nothing more than some teenage ‘when I grow up, I can do whatever I like, and no one can stop me!’. Therefore it’s best they only have actual children for company, lest they go getting ideas (as an added bonus, being at home with babies and cooking for men, in addition to being the entire meaning of life for women, is also a piece of piss, so men don’t have to be particularly grateful for it or work out a system of rewards that grants stay-at-home mothers the same levels of financial freedom or social status).

It is true that when you are young, you might think that because adults have more choices, and because you wouldn’t make the same rubbish choices as the adults around you, growing up will be a wheeze. You’ll get your own place! You’ll earn your own money! You’ll show them all! The Girlboss Idiot narrative treats women as though they never grew out of it, while supporting the idea that 1950s imaginary housewives were pampered children who didn’t know how good they had it. We’re like petulant kids who decided to leave home, got to the bottom of the road, hung around getting cold in an attempt to save face, then eventually slunk off back to Mummy (and Patriarch Daddy).

I, too, find adult life is not exactly how I imagined it would be when I was five. Like absolutely everyone, I find adult life full of compromises I didn’t always anticipate, some of which might be remedied by making the kind of structural changes feminists (including maternal feminists) have been requesting since forever, and some of which are inevitable because you have to close some doors to go through others. When I look at the survey results triumphantly shared on X, it strikes me that I wouldn’t mind if my partner suddenly got a massive pay rise that made him ‘top earner’ – not because I strive to be subordinate him, but because we’d have more money (I wouldn’t mind if I got a massive pay rise, either). I wouldn’t mind having fewer mundane tasks to do – the kind of life where I could cherry-pick which bits I did and didn’t do. I wouldn’t mind having ‘a wife’, as Judy Brady Syfer’s classic essay put it. I wouldn’t mind things just being easier.

On paper, I’m someone who ‘left it late’ to have her third baby at forty, but I wanted a third child long before then (having two children full-time at nursery got us into debt, and made us put off having other children, for years. One of us staying at home would have made matters worse). I’m also someone who was ‘reckless’ when getting pregnant with my first child (not married, partner on a temporary contract, newly estranged from my family, so new to my own job I didn’t qualify for maternity pay). For women – particularly women who benefit from things that were not available to previous generations – the ‘making it up as you go along’ aspect of life is all too often recast as, well, was it the perfect choice? If not, blame feminism! But it’s never the perfect choice.

When everything women do is cast in this way, it masks the actual contributions women make, not just to their families, but in the wider world. Male workers are seen to deserve higher pay because they nobly commit themselves to hard graft (and being noble hard grafters is so integral to their identities, it’s selfish of women to take ‘their’ roles). Women, meanwhile, see work as a kind of accessory, like a new lipstick. Men work to provide for their families; women work instead of caring for their families (despite the fact that it is men who spend more on themselves). Whatever women do, they don’t ‘deserve’ as much as men. Either you’re outside the home, doing something contrary to your ‘true nature’ (so you can’t be doing it as well as a man), or you’re in the home, doing something that comes so naturally it isn’t really work.

Even if “the joy of motherhood” is “better than any job title”, mothers don’t just coast around on maternal joy, just as female employees don’t just coast around in a state of perpetual gratitude at being ‘allowed’ to work (or pretend-work, when it’s something the men want to do themselves). These are things women give, not postures we adopt. Whatever choices and compromises we make, it’s about time they were recognised as such.

The uncritical use of the term ‘girlboss’ by feminists – whether to celebrate women in particular kinds of roles, or to denigrate them as bad feminists – has really bothered me in recent years. While I’m quite aware that the ‘feminism’ of Sheryl Sandberg hasn’t exactly helped things, ‘girlboss’ is such a patronising way of describing any female worker, one that feeds into the idea that women are just playing at it. It’s all very “look at you, with your big, important job! Totally girlbossing it today!” It sounds like a lipstick shade (actually, there are several ‘girl boss’ lipsticks, although there seems to be some disagreement on whether it should be deep red, dusk pink or a range of shades with a “no-budge, matte finish for a killer pout”).

It reminds me of terms such as ‘manageress’, ‘WPC’ and ‘coed’, words given to women in places or roles that ‘originally’ belonged to men. ‘Girlboss’ covers anything a bit important – so a whole range of roles and positions where men are just managing or leading or whatever it is that important men do. It makes the women in question seem unnatural, babyish, self-serving all at once. [...]

Obviously there is much to criticise in actual Lean In-style feminism (one woman making it to the boardroom is not a victory for all women, and isn’t the most pressing issue facing most women today). Still, the criticism of ‘girlbosses’ offered by edgelord feminists such as Lewis reminds me of their criticism of ‘Karens’, and the way these criticisms end up merging with those of the kind of people who’ve always wanted women to sit down and shut up. Like the right-wing woman who makes a career of telling other women they shouldn’t have careers, there seem to be a lot of white, middle-class feminists who want white, middle-class women to be quiet (but not them) and not to have jobs which might rely on the labour of lower-paid women (which academic and journalistic careers totally don’t, if you discount all the times in which they do).

The Amur Leopard and Clouded Leopard (which recently celebrated its 50th cub born at the zoo!)

The Sumatran Tiger

The Red Ruffed Lemur and Ring-Tailed Lemur

The Cotton-Top Tamarin and White-Cheeked Gibbon

The Colobus Monkey and De Brazza’s Monkey

And the Mexican Spider Monkey!

I’m not getting a major surgery just so shirts will “fit me like a frat boy” YOU are projecting that onto me. Men do not have a monopoly on masculinity. If having boobs makes me “less butch” to you then I fear you don’t fucking know what it means to be butch.

Yes this is real shit ppl say to me just because I am a woman with short hair and pants

friends and family automatically switched to male pronouns and used my new preferred name without another question.

none of my doctors brought up ANY concerns with me going on cross-sex hormones despite my extremely complicated medical history

and at 20 i walked into a “gender affirming care” clinic and walked out with a testosterone prescription after less than 30 minutes. no questions about all the medications i was already on due to my other medical issues.

i’ve been rejected as a patient by multiple doctors in the past when came to extremely common, harmless procedures. like, i’m talkin when i had to get my fucking wisdom teeth removed it was a whole ordeal where my life was apparently possibly at stake. but injecting myself with cross-sex hormones? of course! that’s a no brainer! no mention of how that could potentially cause issues with my heart or my liver. nothing about atrophy, or an increased risk for autoimmune diseases…

nooo none of that was told to me by anyone, the patient who’s body is already working against me as it is. i had to figure out all that out through my own research afterwards! the lovely “doctor” at that “gender affirming care” clinic told me the worst thing that could happen was maaaaybe i’d get some acne. but nothing a real good skin care routine couldn’t fix! so much for that “informed consent” huh?

funny how when i thought it was trans it was a constant: “YESYESYESYESYES” from my friends to my doctors who are so overly cautious they’re afraid of poking me with a damn 50 foot pole out of fear that it might permanently damage me.

and then when i said i WASN’T trans…

“are you SURE about that?”

“how do you KNOW though?”

“i support you and everything but like… what if you’re actually wrong?”

Of the 30 people under age 30 who received psychiatric euthanasia in 2024, in the Netherlands, 25 were female.

This kind of thing, taking off, is going to be a form of femicide. One of the things protecting women from suicide was literally just being female. Female people are much less inclined to kill themselves by violent means, and more passive means (taking prescription pills) are much less effective. Now, with medically assisted suicide, women are going to be over-represented in suicide.

Allowing vulnerable mentally ill women and girls the option to to more easily and accessibly chose death in a world that actively hates them is an act of outright medical femicide

There is only “no prospect of improvement” from sexual or interpersonal trauma if you simply don’t consider spending the time and effort to heal women a worthwhile course of action, a worthy endeavor, something that needs to be done.

There is only no “reasonable alternative” to death for depressed and traumatized women if you simply don’t consider their lives to have inherent value, just because they happen to be struggling and suffering and messy and inconvenient

I am depressed myself and have been for a very long time, and I’ve had dark thoughts at times, but i still think this is truly an act of great and terrible evil. That it violates so many of our social contracts to take care of each other and help each other and not cause harm, and worst of all it seeks to dispose of the unwell rather than even try and continue to treat them.

How sick and hateful and evil and apathetic do you have to be to see someone at the bottom of a pit of abject despair and instead of tossing down a rope you offer them a gun instead? And then to go so far as to act like that’s a kindness? A mercy killing?

Everyone who had a part in making this happen, sincerely sincerely sincerely burn in hell

In the footsteps of tigers: the all-women patrol team protecting Sumatra’s rainforest

Nayla Azmi, who founded Nuraga Bhumi Institute, an all-female Indigenous ranger team, stands above Lake Toba on Sumatra, where most of the Batak community is concentrated. Photograph: Danielle Khan Da Silva

The oldest written versions of Cinderella come from Asia, I thought the names sounded chinese. And the culmination of the story is that only she can fit her foot into the tiniest shoe.

I always thought the shoe thing was odd, because surely someone else wears the same size? Why is it so important that her foot is the smallest, what does it matter?

And it hit me today. This is about chinese foot binding. They glorified tiny feet. Maybe that's what the story is for, making it seem positive, making it a difference between becoming a princess and living in poverty.

Indonesian Woman Honored for Marine Resources Activism

Marta Lotang, leader of a non-governmental organization called CBO Cinta Persahabatan in Alor, East Nusa Tenggara province, was one of six women marine resources activists honored by the newly-launched CTI-CFF Women Leaders Forum in Manado, North Sulawesi on Monday, May 12, 2014.

The grassroots women leaders are from six Asia-Pacific countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua Nugini, the Philippines, Solomon Islands and Timor Leste – members of the regional marine resources initiative known as the Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security (CTI-CFF), a multilateral partnership to safeguard marine and coastal resources of the Coral Triangle region.

Marta Lotang and her organization in Alor carries out awareness-raising activities among local fishermen to protect coral reefs and encourages local law enforcers to pursue cases against those who use dynamite and other unsustainable methods of fishing. She has succeeded in getting communities in Alor to care for their marine resources and strengthen their livelihoods by income generating activities such as improving the capacity of women selling fish and mobilizing communities’ assets as their source of capital …

She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.

Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.

Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.

The record label will never put her name on the album.

Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.

The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.

Carol could do it on the first try.

She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.

But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.

That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.

She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.

Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.

She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.

The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.

For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.

Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.

And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.

But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.

Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.

I love writing characters who think they’re fine but are actually walking emotional house fires with bad coping mechanisms.

They stop doing the things they used to love and don’t even notice. Their guitar gathers dust. Their favorite podcast becomes background noise. Their hobbies feel like homework now.

They pick the path of least resistance every time, even when it hurts them. No, they don’t want to go to that thing. No, they don’t want to talk to that person. But whatever’s easier. That’s the motto now.

They’re tired but can’t sleep. Or they sleep but wake up more tired. Classic burnout move: lying in bed with their brain racing like a toddler on espresso.

They give other people emotional advice they refuse to take themselves. “You have to set boundaries!” they say—while ignoring 8 texts from someone they should’ve cut off three emotional breakdowns ago.

They cry at something stupidly small. Like spilling soup. Or a dog in a commercial. Or losing their pen. The soup is never just soup.

They say “I’m just tired” like it’s a personality trait now. And not like… emotionally drained to the bone but afraid to admit it out loud.

They ghost people they love, not out of malice, but because even replying feels like too much. Social battery? Absolutely obliterated. Texting back feels like filing taxes.

They stop reacting to big things. Catastrophes get a blank stare. Disasters feel like “just another Tuesday.” The well of feeling is running dry.

They avoid being alone with their own thoughts. Constant noise. TV always on. Music blasting. Because silence = reckoning, and reckoning is terrifying.

"In woman there is a sensitiveness both of mind and body—even dreams seem real—sympathies are keener, and bad news depresses unreasonably."

We are all familiar with the old stereotype that women are more emotional, hysterical, unsensible and irrational. How much of that was a real trend, but caused by burnout and overworking? Frazzled nerves and exhausted bodies obviously lead to emotionality and irrationality, as this post on burnout covers.