Sara Petersen has, by her own admission, been momfluenced. In her new book, she grapples with these fascinating and objectionable women — rich, white mothers who Instagram their lives, often using sponsored content. She recounts how one inspired her to buy a $460 sweater — buyer’s regret soon followed. More unsettling, though, is her confession that momfluencers might have been behind her decision to have another child: “Maybe my longing for a third baby was also impacted, at least a little bit, by momfluencers… who made pregnancy and motherhood look good. I forgot to credit them for being one of the many fucked-up reasons I craved another baby.”

To be any influencer is to perform your real life, and discreetly weave in advertisements. To be a momfluencer, however, means roping your children into the frame, selling their sweetest, saddest, and most awkward moments to as wide an audience as possible. This poses major ethical issues, some of which predate the contemporary influencer era: no one really likes having their childhoods monetised. Much of the argument surrounding momfluencers focuses on the exploitation of minors. But Petersen is more interested in the exploitation of mothers — or, more specifically, the exploitation of the status anxieties that accompany motherhood.

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Petersen self-flagellates for being swayed by these saleswomen, but she can afford to be. As she acknowledges, she shares demographic traits with the women she’s quasi-hate-following: “white, thin, conventionally attractive”, upper-middle-class Americans with giant kitchens. As Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore points out in an Aeon essay: “most momfluencers aren’t struggling, working-class mothers living in public housing and surviving on food stamps, but middle-class women who already exist in material comfort, and whose message to the rest of us is consume, consume, consume”.

If things were different, there would be a feminist case for supporting momfluencers’ endeavours as a way of making parenting lucrative — and increasing society’s respect for domestic work. But momfluencers are not, as a rule, achieving financial independence from their labour: they are making peanuts. We could call them privileged, because they do not need to work. But how do we define need, in this situation? If a woman’s husband makes enough money to support the family, that’s something, for now. But what if his income changes? What if they split up? There was a time when feminism recognised that even women with very gainfully employed husbands are harmed if they fall out of the workforce entirely.

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Petersen writes that her “husband’s job sustains us financially”, an aside that reminds us a serious book author is in the same economic situation as a momfluencer. And this is the case for plenty of female writers. When poet Maggie Smith lamented that her now-ex-husband, a lawyer, prioritised his career over hers, it was hard not to think of the financial dichotomy that almost certainly backed up his assessment. In one sense, this isn’t about sexism, but rather about some careers paying better than others. In another, there’s a reason it’s women who often wind up in these lower-paid, creative, and flexible endeavours. Pregnancy, childbirth, and being the primary carer of young children are all roles which lend themselves to financial dependency, at least temporarily. Momfluencing offers at least the prospect of a middle-ground path: a way to work without having to be separated from your young children or spending your entire salary on childcare.

But it also offers something to more traditionally employed mothers: a dream they might be able to buy into. Much of what Petersen writes about being “addicted to shopping”, as a means of self-improvement resonates more than I’d like it to. Shopping, at least the kind of shopping Petersen describes, is a manifestation of powerlessness. It’s what you do when you’re not getting validation in other parts of your life. It is also the only activity available to you if it’s 3am and you’re feeding a newborn and you don’t have the mental capacity for anything more than scrolling. But all mothers are vulnerable. Once you’re the one in the household buying the practical stuff — a task that tends to fall to the lower-paid partner — why not treat yourself? The temptation is there, even when the money is not, and consumer capitalism exploits it.

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And the backdrop of Petersen’s story is the pandemic, which turned even normal people into very-online neurotics, offering ample opportunities to sink into social media, form parasocial relationships with rich people half a world away, and click “purchase” on whatever they were selling. This was fertile territory for the momfluencer phenomenon, though it persists in the post-lockdown age. It was also fertile territory for the social justice movement that took off in those years. Petersen makes sure we know that, though she buys what the fancy white-lady momfluencers are selling, politically, she thinks they’re awful. After all, they valorise whiteness, thinness, wealth, and other traits that Petersen may personally share, but thinks ought not to be treated as aspirational.

Here it helps to remember that 2020-2021 was the “Karen” era. After some years of #MeToo, pussy hats, and a liberal notion that women are society’s victims, George Floyd’s murder led to a liberal epiphany that it is in fact only black people whose victimhood should count. This meant that white women were not merely part of an oppressive group but, worse, oppressors guilty of seeing themselves as victims. Progressive white women — moms and otherwise — offered up tearful promises to “do the work”, which tended to involve reading fellow white woman Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility. White, female influencers — Leandra “Man Repeller” Medine, Emily “Cupcakes and Cashmere” Schuman — apologised for past misdeeds and platformed women of colour. As a good white liberal, Petersen goes out in search of unproblematic momfluencers, and finds them in abundance: black, transgender, disabled, lower-income, or fat, these women are posting about motherhood, too. They’re not influencing anyone to buy unnecessary high-end household items, though: they’re serving a different function, reminding us that being a good parent doesn’t demand being a rich white lady with a design-magazine-worthy kitchen.

A binary springs up: as Petersen presents it, a generic rich white lady’s posting is performative at best, white supremacist at worst. But the minute the poster happens to be marginalised in some way — that is, in a way that registers for today’s progressives — she is engaging in important online activism. I’m thinking especially of when, acknowledging her own “thin privilege”, she gives the floor to a plus-size momfluencer named Mia, whose concerns are arguably too specific to merit an airing. “Mia wishes Kindred Bravely [a company that makes nursing bras, presumably] would do better; she says their nursing bra is incredible but only goes up to size XXL.” Elsewhere, Petersen atones for having purchased a “The Future is Female” shirt prior to learning that the slogan “is widely considered problematic, exclusionary of trans people, and inherently anti-intersectional feminist”. If buying the shirt in the first place was extremely 2016-2017, apologising for having done so was extremely the vibe of the years that followed. Petersen, always, is on trend.

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But she is at her best when she doesn’t write as though trying to appease an implacable sensitivity reader — when she steps down from acting as the voice of liberal white moms, and instead delves into her own specific experience. It’s here that she winds up, paradoxically, getting to the root of maternal self-flagellation. “Most days,” she reads, “I’d rather vacuum the Cheerio crumbs under my baby’s high chair than read a Sandra Boynton book to him. I’d rather scroll through someone else’s tender moments than try to locate my own.”

Confessing that one is sometimes bored when entertaining one’s baby is riskier than acknowledging one’s privilege. It sets things up for a reader to ask whether you actually love your baby, you monster, even though of course you love your baby, that’s not the issue. The issue is that baby-minding, even when it’s your own uniquely fascinating-to-you baby, can be a dispiriting mix of strenuous and monotonous. It should be possible to admit this without it reading as an insult to the baby. (We were all, once, that baby.)

The challenge of being in the moment with even the most delightful baby has no policy-based solution. It’s not specific to American capitalism. It is something experienced by women — yes and some men, but, you know, you know — of all nationalities and demographics. It doesn’t matter how rich, thin, or white she is, or how paraben-free her medicine cabinet. Momfluencers allow their mom-followers an escape from the realities of motherhood by way of a fantasy version of the same. But in doing so, they make mothers feel bad about their lives not matching up to that ideal. That feeling, in turn, summons the credit card. Not that it helps.

The #MeToo era was, among other things, a peak moment for what I have called photogenic feminism: a feminism focused on the plight of the young, gorgeous and ceaselessly hassled. While any women’s rights movement needs to concern itself with assaults in the lingerie-modelling audition room, a movement solely interested in stories that just happen to titillate broader audiences can feel limited at best — and at worst, counterproductive. What about all the unsexy issues affecting women: motherhood, menopause, mid-life crises?

Behold, a new book about ladies who have reached the top of the hill and kept going. Hags is Victoria Smith’s alternative to what she calls “non-confrontational, smooth-skinned, pre-menopausal feminism”. It is an alternative, too, to the witchy feminism peddled by writers such as Sharon Blackie, who last year released the similarly-named Hagitude. Where Blackie speaks of “energies” and “journeys”, Smith is decidedly unromantic. Getting older does not automatically bring women into a cosy sisterhood, she argues, but rather highlights disparities when it comes to wealth or care work. She’s not interested in harnessing mysticism, or recycling “you go, girl” platitudes, or supporting the (unconvincing) argument that older women don’t care what people think about them.

Instead, she comes out in defence of Mumsnet, and, more generally, of women who’ve aged out of peak hotness continuing to exist in society. Smith’s hag feminism is about speaking up even when no one is looking at you. It’s about using the wisdom that comes from years of life on this planet as a woman, rather than demurely agreeing to fade into the background. It’s a break from photogenic feminism, with its intense interest in the experiences of the most visible women. But it is also different from the woo-woo world of witchy feminism, with its coven-chic and its inspirational t-shirts.

Smith offers up a thorough survey, backed up by evidence, of the ways women past a certain age become villains. They are “Karens”, demanding to speak with the manager, and sporting the wrong haircut. They are “Terfs”, speaking of female biology rather than gender identity, and, quite possibly, sporting the wrong haircut. Smith writes: “Once upon a time getting a bad haircut might just have meant having to purchase a fetching hat; now a woman might find herself having to record and distribute a public statement claiming a rare mismatch between politics and frumpy appearance.” Throughout the book, Smith is very, very funny. But she’s making a serious point, all the same, about the way that women past a certain age are not merely ignored, but treated as all-purpose antagonists, their flawed faces signs of outdated politics. Not bad guys, but bad gals with the occasional unplucked chin hair.

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Bear in mind that Smith isn’t writing about old women. The middle-aged are her focus, not the elderly. But for women, old can start young. I remember being madame’d in Paris at 27 and knowing that this marked the end of something. Stephanie Cole was hired at 48 to play a firebrand pensioner — in Nineties sitcom Waiting for God — while Graham Crowden, the actor who played her love interest, was 19 years her senior, and therefore the same age as the character he was playing. I am not, to be clear, offended that an actor was cast as a character whose biography doesn’t match their own, but rather am struck by how readily the viewer accepts Cole as an old lady. It seems that 49 and 79 are, in a woman, the same deal: all part of an undifferentiated life stage called “past it”.

I say “are” but should really have used the past tense. One of Smith’s most interesting points is that nowadays our ability to look young into old age means that looking — and even feeling — one’s actual age reads as a choice. Where once it was only celebrities like Barbra Streisand who were commended for things like choosing to “keep” her nose, today — with hormone replacement therapy and anti-wrinkle injections — any 49-year-old women can choose to look like a 29-year-old. People who are middle-aged these days, unlike in previous eras, don’t look it unless they nobly eschew cosmetic measures — or cannot afford them. As Smith writes: “When Sex and the City was rebooted for the 2020s as And Just Like That… much was made of the fact that the now middle-aged characters were older than those in the first season of Eighties sitcom The Golden Girls yet looked much younger.” A trip to the hair salon and a good 10 hours a week at the gym and you, too, could be a “glammie”. This makes looking young forever seem both plausible and — due to such dull factors as time and finances — frustratingly out-of-reach.

Add to this the handwringing over whether a good feminist should love her hard-won wrinkles, or, conversely, do what she can to mitigate visible signs of ageing, so as to stay viable in the sexist and ageist workforce. It can feel as though it went from being anti-feminist to wear lipstick, to being a feminist imperative to look as you did 20 years prior. This new order has been sold to older women as empowerment. Visibly ageing is no longer seen as going the natural (or frugal, or low-maintenance) route; it is seen as conforming to negative, outdated stereotypes about what an older woman looks like. As Smith writes: “it is easier to justify lookism — and the attendant moral judgments — if you can convince yourself that looking like a middle-aged woman is a genuine choice.”

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The crux of the problem for Smith is that she’s pleading with an unyielding audience: younger women who’ve internalised society’s ageist misogyny, and who have convinced themselves that older women are those other ladies, and not themselves in a few years’ time. “Hawking a non-ageist feminism is like hawking life insurance to people who’ve been promised eternal life.” Smith presents herself as a recovering Cool Girl, a woman who reviled older women in her own youth, only to realise how wrong she’d been. This is partly an age-old, gender-neutral question of young people deeming their elders dorky and out-of-touch, but is also a specific issue in feminism, where younger women view older ones as avatars of a retrograde past that they are, or want to be, well rid of. It’s not clear to me that any cohort of young women will ever feel differently, but it’s also unclear that Smith anticipates that outcome. Given how much of a young woman’s power often derives from her youth, it seems unlikely that a cross-generational solidarity is imminent.

There are others to whom Hags might not get through. It is not going to reach, for instance, an audience of people who think that, actually, it’s men these days who have it worse, that it’s boys who are really suffering. And that’s fine, lots of people can be right about different things that seem to contradict one another but maybe do not. Which gets us to that other thing. You know the one. The real audience Hags stands to alienate will be those who have correctly assessed which team Smith is on when it comes to the only feminist issue anyone seems to care about these days: trans stuff. She’s with J.K. Rowling and not Owen Jones.

Most of Hags isn’t even about gender identity, but all books about women and girls are obliged to take a side these days. I find this unfortunate. Surely both sides agree that the vast majority of violence against women comes from male-identified men, and not from men claiming womanhood to sneak into women’s spaces? Surely they agree, too, that the vast majority of violence against trans women comes from men, and not from middle-aged ladies who roll their eyes at the expression, “people who menstruate”? Wouldn’t it be simpler, more accurate, and better for women if feminism reminded itself frequently of these facts?

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But the “Terf” label is as much about age as actual ideology, and “Terfdom” can serve as a pretext to label older women generally irrelevant yet potentially dangerous to listen to. Smith is onto something when she mentions the refrain, which I’ve also seen circulating, about how trans women look more like women than “Terfs” do. This is meant as a pro-trans rallying cry, equating beauty with goodness, and implying that gender-critical feminists are all sitting around wishing they looked like Barbie dolls, as though their non-resemblance to them were not intentional. What it winds up doing is defining true womanhood, cis or trans, as, to use Smith’s phrase, “femininity-fertility-fuckability”.

Photogenic feminism wavers between insisting that it’s empowering to devote your resources to looking like a pin-up, and decrying the objectification faced by those with hourglass physiques. Hag feminism, meanwhile, is not, as one might suspect, about the right to be seen as young and gorgeous when one is very likely neither of these things. (If you’re expecting Hags to be about the importance of putting ordinary-looking 50-year-old women on the cover of Vogue, you’ve got the wrong book.) It simply skips that focus in favour of the right to be respected and understood as having an inner life regardless of whether the typical man wants to sleep with you, or whether the typical woman hates herself for not resembling you physically.

Old-lady feminism, then, has plenty to offer young women. It might even benefit them at least as much as their seniors. It is, after all, young women who tend to experience the most severe angst regarding their appearances. This is easy to forget once you reach the Botox pros and cons life stage yourself, when it can feel as if virtually anyone younger than you is gorgeous and has nothing to complain about physically. But if anything, it’s the young women posting hot gym videos of themselves on TikTok — the same generation of women forming strong opinions about their “buccal fat” — who might stand to benefit the most from a feminism whose focus shifted towards women’s self-actualisation and away from an exhausting analysis of what men see when they look at us. What hags lack in collagen, they — we? — more than make up for in their ability to just get on with it.

It’s always a challenge to balance professional and personal responsibilities, no matter your gender or nationality. The 2022 Autumn of Cough was not just a US phenomenon. But the American mother is always, at any given moment, doing the wrong thing — and, at least in theory, being shamed for it. American motherhood literature emerges, then, from that situation.

An earlier microgeneration of American moms had to contend with parenting advice. Books that explained whether you could drink a glass of wine while pregnant, or how to get your children to eat vegetables. (The answer in all matters was: be like the French.) Today’s reading material, growing out of the lockdown and school closure era as it does, is more nihilistic. The message is: it’s not your fault; everything is systemic. A portrait begins to emerge, in contemporary American mom-lit, of a mother who, rather than taking small steps to ease her suffering, wants to use her own struggles as a starting point to highlight still-greater ones. She’s not a sassy bad mom, but if she moms badly, it is because the system has (and it has!) set her up for failure.

This year, for instance, we have had New York Times parenting journalist Jessica Grose’s book Screaming on the Inside: a well-reported, head-on attack on American mothers’ struggles, which are structural, and worse for the marginalised. We have had, too, the science journalist Chelsea Conaboy’s Mother Brain, which takes a more roundabout approach. Here, too, everything is structural, everything is impossible, but extra impossible if you don’t happen to be straight or white. Arguing contrary to conventional wisdom, Conaboy’s conclusion is that being a mom (or a dad, or a non-binary parent; she doesn’t exclude) can actually make you a better worker.

These books — like the various articles, posts and newsletters making similar cases — are written not, of course, by mothers generally. They are written by a subset of American women who happen to be both writers and mothers, and who apply the liberal critiques common to the world of mainstream journalism to the intractable problem that is American motherhood. They speak to an audience of women who agree with them, but who are too resigned, too exhausted, or privately too convinced the American way is the only valid one, to materially shake things up.

And they, the writers of American motherhood-crisis lit, have a way of blurring material challenges with ambient (and at times imagined) social pressures. Health care bureaucracy and the absence of paid leave, which the writers I mention point out repeatedly, are facts. The requirement to wake up at 4am to bake “dinosaur-shaped muffins that taste like rainbows but are made of steamed arugula” is the stuff of satire but not an actual demand. The suburban writer who recounted, in the New York Times, that “pulling up with the stroller in anything besides smudged black leggings would earn me glares from other moms” at her local play area was reporting on a vibe, not a reality. Who’s to say that if she’d shown up in couture anyone would have cared?

This blurring is an issue because such nebulous plights seem to weigh more heavily on the well-off, but get wrapped up with the ones that operate the way usual plights do, namely by primarily harming have-nots. Grose acknowledges her class privilege, not in a handwringing sense but in a matter-of-fact way, noting that her experience of being able to leave a job without another lined up while pregnant related to her husband’s income. She mentions her mother being a psychiatrist, a plus when she’s having her own struggles with mental health.

The trouble with privilege disclaimers is that they inevitably go on to be about how things are that much worse for those without the same advantages. But are they always? When it comes to things like getting to spend the vomiting phases of pregnancy at home, money helps. Yet some of what Grose describes regarding the pressures to be a “supermom” are specific to the sort of milieu where families have the extra bandwidth to worry about such things. A highly stratified society might be the source of both woes, but it’s unclear whether a year of guaranteed mat leave would impact the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses of school pick-up.

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That is not to say that social pressure on moms isn’t a real thing, or a bad one — or one that purely affects middle-class women. Mothers across the socioeconomic spectrum doubtless feel insecure when they look at those influencer accounts where the flawless-looking mom, surrounded by five perfect angels, holds forth about being #blessed. That is, after all, the business model — you feel bad about your own inadequate life, so you buy whatever it is their sponsored posts are selling.

Grose speaks of algorithms as foisting images of maternal perfection upon unsuspecting women, who then feel they have no choice but to scroll their feeds or even watch their television shows. One sees this a lot in even the best commentary about momfluencers: this idea that you can be minding your own business when suddenly, a white woman with a centre part and beachy waves appears before you, selling you special handbags for “busy moms”, or judging you for your own children’s refusal to try even a small amount of bell pepper. Momfluencers, though, are entirely avoidable, in a way that needing to be in a work meeting and at your child’s doctor’s appointment at the same time is not.

Is there something in the American national character that encourages perfectionism? Something in the baseline impossible situation of American motherhood that promotes aiming higher still? Is the supermom concept just a natural next step, once everyone’s striving in vain regardless? And does all of this idealism serve to obscure the unassailable material facts that no woman can wriggle out of? “Why,” asks Conaboy, “does the United States still lack [a paid maternity leave] policy, more than a century after mothers here formally began lobbying for one?” Her answer is, in part, that “the belief in maternal instinct and biology as destiny — women hold the capacity to care for children, their highest and best use — plus the absolute primacy of the maternal-infant bond”.

Her answer to this is that we must challenge the idea that biology is destiny. She objects that if “the entire infrastructure of mainstream online and in-person support groups is exclusive to birthing, cisgender women, then not only are we telling other birthing parents that they are on their own but we’re sending a message to fathers and partners that this stuff just isn’t really for you”. It’s an interesting idea, but the problem in the States seems more that the people who personally, physically, have babies — the overwhelming majority of whom identify as women — are treated as biologically inconvenient. Easier to just hire a man.

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I was pregnant with my second child during Covid, and expectant fathers, or non-birthing parents otherwise identified, were not allowed to attend obstetrician appointments. This was unpleasant but understandable in the context of an inherently unequal role distribution. The reason the expression “we’re pregnant” grates — and it does — is that only the mother-to-be is avoiding sushi, not that she wants it anyway what with her morning sickness. She’s the one going through ten different dress sizes in the course of a year, and needing sensitive parts of her body stitched back together. Gender identity discourse can serve as a distraction from the material questions of how a society deals with the practicalities of perpetuating the species. And Americans seem uniquely incapable of sensibly dealing with this fact of life.

A culture that actually venerated “the absolute primacy of the maternal-infant bond”, as Conaboy says America does, would prioritise giving new moms a year home with the baby. By not offering paid maternity leave, the US effectively asks new mothers whether they want to have careers or whether they want to be present for the first months of their baby’s life. Are you going to be a businesswoman or a trad wife?

Another way is possible. In Toronto, where I moved in 2015, after growing up and spending most of my 20s in New York City, it’s normal for even the most ambitious women to take a year off work after having a baby. The women one meets at library baby time — and it is almost only women at these — are not, as a rule, stay-at-home moms. This state of affairs exists not because Canadians are somehow more enlightened than Americans about gender essentialism but because of a 1981 postal worker strike. But for whichever mix of cultural and political reasons, American mothers bemoan the status quo, without being empowered to change it.

There’s something bleak about Conaboy’s insistence, central to her book, that contrary to popular belief, being a mom actually makes you a better worker bee. All this scientific backup for the much-repeated pleas about how moms are pros at multitasking — to what end? American employers view having a child as an inconvenient lifestyle choice that they have no obligation to accommodate. Imagine going to the American boss who has groaned when you’ve shared your good news and saying, look, studies show that my brain will be sharper than ever when I get back, see you in a year! Although when you’re in that situation, your choice of words could not matter less.

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American motherhood lit can at times be hazy about what’s specific to the US and what’s a broader facet of having children in the modern world. Even in countries with superior paid-leave policies, employers whinge when expecting mothers announce what’s coming. There are mothers all over the world who find themselves effectively shut out of the workforce because childcare is too expensive. And the existence of paternity leave doesn’t prevent the arrival of a baby from changing the gender dynamics in a hetero household. Some of this is just, life has its challenges, and no particular policy shift, in any direction, would make things otherwise.

And yet. The solutions to the American motherhood crisis are mundane: maternity leave obviously, socialised medicine indirectly, and maybe reduce the chance of school shooting by not effectively handing out guns to anyone who so much as ponders getting one. All of this could transpire without any sort of communist revolution. There could still be fast fashion and plastic toys and food colouring.

But US exceptionalism is a powerful drug. To change what is at this point the American way might mean accepting that other places sometimes — no, not always, but sometimes — do in fact, objectively, have the right idea.

The Miserable Older White Woman emerges from the same blend of old-school misogyny and ageist ugh-mom-ism that brought us first the Wine Mom and then the Karen, in the summer of 2020. In theory, a Karen was a white woman who called the police on black people who were simply minding their own business. In practice, the term started getting used (and is indeed still used) in reference to any woman over the age of 25 who has spoken up, in any context. In the early pandemic days, I was once called “Karen” after asking some teenagers on public transit to put on masks. But anti-maskers also got labelled Karens too, so we can’t win (unless we stay silent).

Who has it in for these women? A significant number of the Twitter accounts piling hate on middle-aged women seem to be controlled by young men who give off incel vibes. They are also angry at young women for rejecting them, and their mothers for not sending their favourite meal down to them that evening in their proverbial basement. What is clear is that these women are an avatar for complaints that span, or defy, the ideological spectrum. The Miserable Older White Woman inspires an intense, if difficult to pin down, political fury. Both progressives and the Right seem to agree that “Liberal white women on antidepressants will be the end of our civilisation”, but the stereotype allows a range of people to channel a variety of frustrations. She’s the 53% of white women who supposedly (but not actually) voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but also the tear-strewn pussy-hat wearer at the Women’s March protesting that election’s outcome.

For the Left, the privileged lady wrangling a prescription for her non-problems can be blamed for all of society’s woes: racism, imperialism, the housing shortage, the cost of living, climate change, perhaps even monkeypox. Her antidepressant usage can be categorised as yet another indulgence she engages in while other people suffer, akin to a day at the spa: “White women live off of Starbucks and antidepressants.” The Left-produced caricature lives in a large suburban house with a rich husband and resents her perfect life: “Excess red wine, antidepressants, free time and money has truly done wonders to boomer white women.” This is a women whose problem is that she has it too good. If she had to deal with the same adversity as everyone else, this would build character, and she’d stop the whinging.

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For the Right, the Miserable Older White Woman is the opposition: “Democratic party supporters are self-hating college-educated white women. Basically if you live in an apartment in LA and own four cats, a massive ‘sex toy’ and consume a lot of antidepressants you are a Democratic party voter.” And she is getting her comeuppance for her decades of liberalism. She foolishly bought into the feminist myth that women have brains and should have high-powered careers and look at her now, all alone with her cats, pining for the life she could have had if she’d settled down when still turning heads. If she’d stayed a virgin until marrying Ward Cleaver at 22, she wouldn’t be popping pills of any kind. She’s sad because she’s alone, but don’t feel sorry for her, it’s a misery of her own making. A lesson for young women: get married before you’re middle-aged — and why not to one of the charming young men who spend their days online mocking older women?

And yet critics from the Right also have it in for the Miserable Older White Women who have settled down, but who fail to have either aged into traditionalist matrons or remained chipper 20-somethings. Pratt, of “Welcome to Hell”, more recently made the rounds for introducing Twitter’s cynical masses to the Peach Mom, a comic about the angst of an apparently well-off stay-at-home mom (albeit with side hustles) who despises her husband for doing less of the housework and childcare. The woman behind these evidently autobiographical comics then got widely ridiculed, in part because it is objectively ridiculous to post comics to the internet that bash your spouse, but also because she was a Miserable Older White Woman, unhappy with her lot, but for no good reason. Why wasn’t she grateful that she had a provider husband who also did some housework? (Much was made of the fact that he apparently does childcare when she goes out in the evening to teach yoga, as though the teaching of yoga is an indulgence and not a part-time job.) She should be grateful, was the gist.

But the common ground of why she’s demonised is that she represents liberal modernity, to people across the political spectrum who object to it. The Miserable Older White Woman is a normie, a Hillary not Bernie supporter. An AWFL (“affluent white female liberal”); a Twitter search for that very-online acronym paints a similar picture. Her reaction to Kamala is an enthusiastic yaaas. She posts milquetoast liberal messaging to her Instagram, about Black Lives Mattering and trans rights and abortion rights, but in a cringe way.

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The cruel world of yoga

By Kat Rosenfield

There’s a perception, among her detractors, that liberal modernity has given women of this demographic too much ground, which has made them (as well as everyone else) worse off: “Affirmative action, war on poverty, and the modern feminist movement empowered white women. This newly empowered group remade society in a way that harmed men that couldn’t adapt. This new society is not so great and white women begin taking massive amounts of antidepressants.” Men’s rights activists agree with far-Left advocates for the true marginalised: white women are spoiled pseudo-victims. They are society’s actual most powerful, but imagine themselves oppressed.

Does it all come back to Hillary Clinton? Hillary — per her haters — the privileged complainer. Hillary, the embodiment of the dorky, stodgy mom who does not know how to relax. Unlike other ways of medicating away bad moods, antidepressants have exactly zero reputation for being edgy or fun. Much like you know who. Even Hillary’s supporters faulted her, during the 2016 US presidential campaign, for not appearing to have a good time. (Too young, too attractive, and too fun-loving is also a problem, as a certain Finnish prime minister could attest.) The people who wanted to vote Democrat in 2016 but just couldn’t stomach Hillary are, in their rhetoric, very like those who see a stat on older white women’s antidepressant usage and go: “makes sense.”

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Middle-aged women don't want sex

By Mary Harrington

There’s also cross-ideological consensus that older women have committed the crime of having aged out of hotness. A Reddit theorist suggests older white women are upset because “they’re the most protected and coddled class when they’re young. When their looks fade they stop getting preferential treatment which is hard for most to adjust to.” The thing where “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”, in other words. So, according to their critics, these women used to have too much and are now bitter over a normal existence.

To appear old is, in a sense, to look miserable. Society values women for youth, a fleeting quality, which is enough to make anyone miserable. But there’s also the specific fact that the changes to facial features that happen naturally with age read, on women, as anger. Women sick of being told they seem angry seek Botox — an anti-aging treatment — to remedy the situation. One wonders whether Miserable Older White Women are as miserable as all that, or just look that way, and are disproportionately prescribed antidepressants because their doctors — fallible humans like the rest of us — interpret their ordinary facial expressions as ones of distress. The medical establishment has made stupider mistakes.

Women, particularly housewives, have long been prescribed drugs at a much higher rate than men. One can look at this as society throwing drugs at women to distract them from their situational misery so that they don’t question the situation itself. But one might just as easily see this as a case of men not having access to proper mental health care, or indeed to the drugs that can be used relatively safely to make them less miserable. Are the men who sneer at antidepressant-using women just repulsed, or are they also, perhaps, envious? Do they wish they could be like the women who face somewhat less stigma for going ahead and making an appointment with their GP? Is the Miserable Older White Woman’s crime being miserable, or is it valuing herself enough to do something sensible about it?