The sexless lives of millennial feminists A dream has been mis-sold

It was a good time to be a Millennial girlboss in 2018. #MeToo was tearing through institutions and canceling pervs. Beyoncé became Coachella’s first black female headliner, a phenomenon known as “Beychella” (bonus points for the cringe portmanteau). Blogs such as Jezebel, Man Repeller and Refinery29 were still setting the agenda, before their bathetic banishment into internet irrelevance. In Washington, too, girlbosses were making their mark. A record-breaking 102 women entered Congress that year, with four newly minted representatives kickin’ butt under the nickname “The Squad”. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the most famous and divisive of the lot, told an interviewer that she and her squadmates — Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — in fact preferred to call themselves the Spice Girls. As she explained: “We’re sisters, not clones.”

In the Millennial-pink pantheon of the 2010s, that comparison made a lot of sense. Like others of her generation, the now-36-year-old AOC was brought up in the age of girlpower. Her schooldays would have been soundtracked by spangly enticements to “spice up your life”, or boys-suck battle cries like “God help the mister that comes in between me and my sisters”. The Spice Girls’ worldview was about being gobby and exuberant, intractable with men and fiercely loyal to your golden galpals. 

But now it’s 2026, and the girlbosses of yore are pushing 40. This month, AOC has faced the wrath of the MAGA internet for documenting the invasive and maligned process of freezing her eggs. It was reported that she’d broken up with her partner of more than a decade; in a characteristic stunt, while the spotlight was on her anyway, she appeared on livestreams injecting herself with hormones and used the controversy as an opportunity to stick her boot into her Republican critics. “They talk about being pro-family,” she said during one stream, “but all of a sudden when a 36-year-old talks about having a baby they’re mad.” 

Of course, the objection among conservatives is not the fact of her wanting a child; it’s that this decision has, in their view, come 10-plus years too late. Allie Beth Stuckey, a Christian influencer with three daughters at just 34, accused Cortez of “glamorizing the lie that women can have it all”. Stuckey, who has no small personal investment in promoting a way of life for which she herself has presumably sacrificed a lot, is right to point out that Cortez’s choices will influence the young women who come after her. Many women of my age — 27 — who have only vaguely engaged with headlines about AOC’s egg-freezing, will probably register it as proof of there being infinite time. What many of us don’t want to reckon with is the cost, both financial and physical, of such a procedure — and the fact that even for those of us who can afford it, it is still no guarantee.

But Stuckey and the Republicans who have keelhauled AOC for simply wanting a baby this week are missing the broader picture: tumbling birth rates are the legacy of Millennial culture as a whole. AOC is merely the public face of a generation of girlbosses who are encountering, for the first time, the real-world limitations on that Spice Girl optimism.

Girlbossdom was about the beautiful marriage of feminism and capitalism; its victors would enjoy the same spoils — money, status, power — as men in the corporate world. Structural problems became individual ones to be negotiated with endless ambition and confidence — and making all the right choices. To that extent, egg-freezing itself is a spiritually girlboss procedure. It tries to fix an imperfect world with an expensive self-optimization project; motherhood, with its inconvenience, mess and tendency to clog up calendars, is magicked into the future as coolly as rescheduling your monthly mani-pedi. 

This is the caricature which women like Stuckey despise. The row recalls that much-reposted New Yorker cover from 2000, showing a golden-haired mother cradling four bonny bundles, a gorgeous, curly explosion of maternal light, while a minidress-clad party girl, all blue-pale and angular, shrinks in horror at the cooing collective. The mother’s leonine grin and her neighbor’s stricken brow suggests the single girl will not be binning her contraceptives anytime soon. 

I believe that 26 years ago, when this cover came out, the joke would have been that the mother was in fact happy, even though her choices horrify other, more liberated, women. This is the feminism AOC, herself a New Yorker, would have been steeped in from girlhood. Today, though, the image has a different valence: it has been recirculated time and again online in recent years, throwing up a newer and nastier reading. Our cold, empty party girl is today the object of pity; the timeless flower-crowned mother-goddess is, in the end, the victor of our culture wars, though she would not then have heard the word “trad-wife”. 

Nor is this shift so surprising. Back then, after all, the party girl lived in the urban choice-feminist playground, guided by principles of liberation. Independence was not shameful but a supreme virtue; education was emancipation; work was identity; female friendship would ward off dour dealings with men. So it was that being single, having a clutch of degrees, being chained to your desk and laughing about awful dates with your girlboss friends was the highest aspirational plane. 

Now, though, it is 2026, and these guiding principles are not the comfort they once were. In the place of independence we have sexless solitude; too many graduates drift in an oversaturated market; the job does not love us back; the girlboss’s ride-or-die friends are too busy wiping babies’ chins to go to the club. If the girlboss thrived in a shared sense of defiance, it must then be highly demoralizing for her to see professional disappointment and mediocrity picking off her peers, who look to marriage and motherhood for the fulfillment they were told a master’s degree and consulting gig might afford them. After years of job-market stagnation and economic shocks, many of the movement’s strongest soldiers have abandoned prickly “praxis” for prams and diapers.  

Altogether, then, AOC’s fertility treatment is in fact not about her at all. Instead, it’s a bigger story of loneliness, of societies diving well below replacement rate, and of former Epic Bacon Millennials looking 40 in the face with a furious feeling that a dream has been mis-sold. 

Why did Millennial feminism fail? Basic economics is surely part of the answer: only a select few, it turns out, can climb the corporate ladder to girlbossdom. But there’s more to it than that. When relationships became optional, the offer was supposed to improve. Men and women were meant to have closer and more compassionate lives together, built through conscious and careful choice and not social pressure. In the event, the sexes simply grew apart, pushed into apathy by the very same internet which was meant to connect them, and which briefly brought Jezebel and the rest so much fame. 

All the while, I suspect my Gen-Z peers will face the same catty bollocks from resentful trads in 10 years’ time when we go in search of fertility treatments; unless the sexual settlement improves, more generations will continue to stare down 40 without children or a partner, against their hopes. The problem has never been “selfish” women freezing their eggs — the online fertility-treatment-shamers this week should stop their prattling. It was that many women who wanted to settle down earlier have had to seek out treatments at all. As ever, a familiar culprit hides skulking in the corner: none of this can be fixed until our culture addresses the growing estrangement of men and women. That’s, after all, how babies are made.