egg freezing - UnHerd

The sexless lives of millennial feminists

Poppy Sowerby — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 23:02:59 +0000

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.”

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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.

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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.

Are women being forced to freeze their eggs?

Clementine Prendergast — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 23:01:46 +0000

“No woman goes running with thrill into egg-freezing,” says Professor Marcia Inhorn. “A lot of these women would rather not be doing it.”

And yet it is the fastest growing fertility treatment in the UK. Between 2019 and 2021, egg-freezing cycles surged by 64%, making it the fastest growing fertility treatment type in the UK. In 2011, there were just 373 cycles; by 2021, there were 4,215. Nor is it now uncommon for women at gold-plated companies to receive extensive “fertility benefits”: Spotify gives female employees £40,000 towards treatment, while Apple and Meta subsidise egg-freezing for up to £16,000.

However, as appealing as it might be, this narrative of career-focused women delaying motherhood barely scratches the surface of a much deeper societal shift. Contrary to popular discourse, recent data reveals a startling statistic: approximately 70% of women who freeze their eggs are not motivated by career ambitions. Rather, they’re either single or struggling to get their partner to commit to parenthood.

To understand this social phenomenon, Dr Inhorn, a medical anthropologist at Yale University, embarked on a decade-long study that looked beyond the fertility clinic and into the changing dynamics of modern relationships. “We’re seeing a growing disparity between ambitious and educated women, and the availability of equally educated and committed male partners. It’s creating a demographic crisis that few are talking about,” Inhorn tells me. Her study of 150 women, later developed into a book published last year, found that many were either in relationships for several years and tried to get their partners to commit to fatherhood, or were single because they were not able to find a partner of equal educational or earning status. According to her research, at the time of freezing their eggs, 82% of the women were single at the time of freezing their eggs; meanwhile, 18% were with a partner when they went through the process, but had relationship issues and were not able to get them to commit to fatherhood.

This shift, largely overlooked when exploring social egg-freezing, points to a phenomenon Inhorn calls “the mating gap”. This refers to the disparity between men and women in terms of relational, and eventually reproductive, expectations. While the women in the study, on average in their mid to late thirties, were ready to make a commitment to a partner, settle down and have children, they found a misalignment with the men they were dating. These men weren’t interested in the responsibility that comes with committed relationships and fatherhood — they wanted to play the field and live as free agents for as long as possible.

As Inhorn notes, “there is a lack of eligible, educated and equal male partners” for college-educated women, who now outnumber men in the labour force, not just in the US, but across developed nations. This pattern of course means a substantial number of women will not find a partner with a similar educational background. And even those who found partners were not always satisfied. “While most of the women in the study were highly educated women who were not able to find a partner of equal status, some of the women were actually in relationships, and tried for several years, but couldn’t get the person ready,” Inhorn notes. “Other women were married, who had hung in there, and got to a make-or-break moment where they were like what do I do?”

Inhorn dubs these male partners the “unready men”. She frequently found that they were neither on the same timelines nor wanting the same things from dating and relationships as their female partners. Wishing for what Inhorn calls the “three P’s” — pregnancy, parenthood and partnership — the women in her study turned to egg-freezing as a last resort to these unexpected social differences.

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But the mating gap isn’t just about education. Inhorn’s study also uncovered a darker shift that relates to a misalignment of values. She explains how the educated women in her study were raised on ideals of gender equality — seeking partners who are their equals and share their ambitions and values. However, she found in her research that women were dissatisfied. “Men have not been socialised in the same way with the same expectations,” Inhorn notes. According to her female interviewees, men “are less interested in being fathers in the way women want them to be”.

The women in the study spoke about the “Peter Pan” men: “They wine and dine you, act like they will settle down with you, but they are having fun in life and have no intention of being with you.” Of course, as many commentators like to highlight, the sexual revolution has changed the nature of courtship and dating — as women are liberated by contraception to engage in casual, consequence-free sex, so too are men able to have their cake and eat it.

While these social technologies, along with digital technologies like dating apps which suggest an endless supply, give men more options, the women in Inhorn’s study and beyond are stuck in a stalemate. The lack of pressure to settle down has meant that more educated women are getting to their late thirties with little choice but to preserve what they have left via egg-freezing. Here in the UK, the HFEA reports that the average age of egg-freezing is 38.

One cannot help but question whether hypergamy, the desire to form a relationship with someone of superior status, plays a role. This dating strategy is defined as women marrying up, seeking a male partner of high social status — proximity to power and wealth. And likewise, men marrying women of higher sexual status — youth and beauty. As women rise the educational and professional ranks, their social need to find a partner of higher social status doesn’t necessarily diminish, but based on these social patterns, their prospects diminish, with a smaller pool of potential partners. And likewise, the longer women focus on their social and economic independence, the longer they leave it to find a partner and, according to this theory, their sexual status diminishes.

When I asked Inhorn about the relevance of this theory, she dismissed it as socio-biological and, thus for her, misogynistic. “Men need to stop being intimidated and to change the way they think about these things,” she explains. “And women need to expand their view of what an appropriate partner is.” While Inhorn says 90% of women did have something positive to say about it, she is defiant that egg-freezing is not a solution to these social divides, but rather simply a stop-gap.

As the gatekeepers of sex, and with more demanding fertility deadlines, it is perhaps no wonder there is so much insight into the struggles, attitudes and behaviours of female courtship. Lower in sociosexuality and cultured into coyness, it is said women court with greater caution than their male counterparts, and therefore hold greater power when making the first move. But perhaps too much emphasis has been placed on women, at the expense of the reproductive equation. As Inhorn notes, she didn’t interview any men in her study. We need more research on male reproductive aspirations — do men desire long-term partnership? If so, what are their expectations of mothers, wives and women today?

“Perhaps too much emphasis has been placed on women, at the expense of the reproductive equation.”

There is no doubt we are in the middle of a relationship revolution; and the growing divide between the sexes is a major cause for concern. Those on the Left wish to feminise men by encouraging them to become more emotionally expressive by engaging in therapy or by imagining a world of female breadwinners and stay-at-home Dads. But it’s uncertain whether this gender role reversal is so appealing to either sex.

Those on the Left wish to feminise men, encouraging gender role reversals which might not be so appealing to either sex. While those on the Right believe women should give up some of their social and economic freedom in favour of a more traditional relationship setup. The toxic experience that some tradwives suffer helpfully reminds us of women’s fight for equity, and the need for a new co-operative and collaborative blueprint for dating, courtship and relationship formation.

In the meantime, we need to ensure new reproductive technologies like egg-freezing don’t create further unintended social consequences. When the contraceptive pill was introduced in the Sixties, we couldn’t have known it was going to lead to hook-up culture and a new sexual revolution of non-committal relationships. I think we must proceed cautiously to ensure the mass adoption of egg freezing doesn’t further exacerbate these issues. Freezing time might be good for our careers — but it might not be for forming relationships.