Tucked inside a photo album I made for my daughter—yes, I went old-school, not digital—called A Field Guide to Your Life, with sections like “Times You Were Brave” and “Pets You’ve Loved,” was a flyer of advice I’d made for the road ahead. It is advice I’ve collected over time from other wise women or that has developed in conversations with my daughter.

Sometimes we mistake maternal anxiety for overprotectiveness when it’s actually a rational response to gendered risks. But we always walk a fine line between expanding their sense of freedom and limiting it. We don’t want girls to inherit only our warnings; we also want them to inherit confidence, discernment, and joy.

One of the most important goals in raising girls isn’t just protecting them from sexism. It’s helping them recognize it without letting it define them. The flyer below contains the things I wanted her to know, not so she would be afraid of the world, but so she could move through it freely, with her eyes open.

I mentioned it in a recent live video about raising girls in a misogynistic culture and several people have asked me to share it so I thought I’d make it available here. Paid subscribers can download the pretty (and editable!) one-page flyer but all of the advice is below.

Mom Advice

On Drugs

• No pills. No powder. No injections.

• Never accept a drink from someone else or leave yours unattended. If you do, get a new one. It’s not worth the risk.

On Friendships

• Choose friends who not only pick you up when you’re down, but celebrate your successes, too.

• Be the friend who tells the truth, kindly.

On Relationships

• If someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. Do not make excuses. Do not give second chances that aren’t asked for. Your time and energy are priceless.

• Do not stay in a relationship because you are afraid of being alone. The loneliness of being with the wrong person is far worse than the loneliness of being by yourself. One is temporary. The other is a slow erosion of who you are.

On Sex

• Your pleasure matters. You are not there to provide a service.

• Strangulation is dangerous. Period. There is no physiologically safe or “right” way to compress someone’s carotid arteries.

On Safety and Harassment

Pretending you’re a badass even if you don’t feel that way can save your life.

• Walk like you belong wherever you are — lift your head. Make eye contact. Take up space. Move with purpose.

• Don’t be polite. Your job is to protect yourself, not their feelings.

• Get angry. Go feral. Make a scene. People fear erratic behavior and embarrassment is temporary.

• Never ever go to the second location.

• Being targeted is never ever the target’s fault

On Social Media

• Likes are data, not love.

• If an app profits from your insecurity, question the advice it gives you.

On Academics

• Your education is for YOU.

• Don’t confuse difficulty with inability.

• Don’t confuse grades with worth.

• Do the work before you feel like doing the work → Motivation is unreliable. Habits are not.

• Learn how to actually learn. Rereading your notes is not studying. Test yourself. Explain things out loud. Practice what you don’t know.

• Ask for help. Go to office hours. Find a tutor. Ask the person sitting next to you.

On Work

• Ask for the raise.

• Apply before you feel ready. Men do.

On The Body

• Take care of your teeth and your back. Both will betray you if you ignore them. Both are expensive to fix after the damage is done.

• Never be sorry for taking up physical or emotional space.

• You don’t owe anyone thinness, prettiness, youth, or sexiness.

• Don’t spend so much time trying to look beautiful that you forget to build a beautiful life.

On Character

• Be the kind of person who returns the shopping cart. Character is what you do when no one is watching.

On Being a Woman

• You are allowed to be brilliant.

• You should expect to be heard.

• You do not need to be “likeable”.

Lastly: Come home sometimes. Not because you need to. Just because I like the sound of you in the house.

Click to download and print the PDF below. It is fully editable so you can personalize it or put your own spin on it.

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Here’s Kim explaining (before the video began saving) what sparked this whole conversation to begin with.

Thank you to , and many others for tuning into my live video with . This was our first live and had no idea if anyone would come so what a pleasant surprise!

Here’s what Kim said about it on in her posting of the video:

We talked about what it really means to raise girls in today’s world, not just the obvious challenges, but the invisible ones.

The mental load mothers carry.

The messages girls absorb about their bodies, safety, relationships, and worth.

And the delicate balance of preparing our daughters for the realities of the world without letting fear define their lives.

One of my favorite moments was when we talked about our goal as parents and Dr. Finkelstein said this:

We don’t want our daughters to inherit only our warnings. We want them to inherit confidence, discernment, and joy.

If you’re raising a girl, or simply trying to make sense of the world she’s growing up in, I think you’ll find something meaningful in this conversation.

Have a listen and let me know if you think I should do more lives!

Jo-Ann

Mentions:

Kim’s Podcast featuring Jo-Ann

• On Spotify

• On Apple

Books

Sexism & Sensibility: Raising Empowered Resilient Girls in The Modern World

Boys

Brittle masculinist subcultures flood the digital lives of teenage boys before they've had a first date. Young women, meanwhile, are reporting an extended dry season with less and less interest in dating at all. These, of course, are not two separate weather systems. They are an interconnected climate crisis, each side's alienation feeding the other's.

I don't think it gets fixed by better manners or better dating apps. I think it gets fixed—if it gets fixed at all—years before anyone downloads Hinge, while children are still forming ideas about power, fairness, gender, and what love is supposed to look like.

The terms of relationships have changed dramatically over the last half century, yet we have done surprisingly little to help young people understand why.

Straight women no longer have to tiptoe around male fragility or tolerate misogyny simply because they lack alternatives. Education, economic independence, birth control, and divorce have fundamentally altered what women expect from partnership. They are rejecting the social roles and scripts of heterosexuality and have other sources of purpose and community. It is not they don’t want male love—they do. But they also want equality, shared responsibility, emotional maturity, and respect.

For that to happen, men have to unlearn ideas about masculinity and relationships absorbed from fathers, classrooms, the media and countless everyday interactions that taught them what it means to be a man.

To go from being raised with the assumption—however unconsciously—that your needs and comfort will be prioritized, to being steeped in messages like “the future is female” and “empower women” would be confusing. A boy who has never been taught the history behind those messages may not hear it as a call to correct inequality, but as a message that he is personally the problem. It’s like being handed the slogan without the syllabus. And that’s a vacuum the manosphere has been all too happy to fill.

But even for the men who strive to meet modern expectations, the transition isn't simple. Sensitivity, emotional openness, and communication skills—the qualities many women now seek—aren’t typically modeled or rewarded in boys growing up. And, as Faith Hill recently wrote in The Atlantic, men are often asked to satisfy (supposedly) contradictory expectations: pay for dinner but treat women as equals; initiate romance but never make someone uncomfortable; be confident but emotionally vulnerable; masculine but nurturing.

If those expectations feel contradictory, it's because they're sitting on top of centuries-old gender scripts. Scripts that organized people around gender rather than personality and desire.

Many men overestimate the power and liberation women have and underestimate how deeply those scripts continue to shape women's lives. And many women are exhausted from repeatedly explaining that to them. Equality feels like such a basic moral premise that having to defend it, or point out the endless ways it still falls short, can be maddening. And, frankly, it isn't women's responsibility to keep educating the men they date, so plenty of them give up on dating altogether.

This exhaustion has a name.

Heteropessimism

The cultural theorist Asa Seresin coined the term1 to describe the increasingly common belief that heterosexual relationships are, almost by definition, frustrating, unequal, and emotionally unsatisfying. Women’s dissatisfaction with heterosexual norms is a major strand of it, but it shows up in men too — the ones who gripe about their nagging girlfriends, or incels who blame women for their loneliness.

The internet offers no shortage of cures. Women are encouraged to master the art of seduction, manipulate male psychology, or embrace tradwife femininity, parking your ambition at the chapel and submitting to your husband so he can feel respected enough to love you (and maybe even do the dishes from time to time). Men are told to reclaim dominance, hierarchy, and "traditional masculinity." The assumption is men and women are fundamentally locked in an adversarial relationship.

These methods promise to help people survive patriarchy instead of helping them understand and dismantle it. Sure, our pessimism allows us to take back control; to laugh through the pain with friends who get it. But maybe, as Seresin asserts, it produces nothing but more of itself.

What if, instead of teaching people to out-strategize, control, and manipulate their way into love and being treated with dignity once they’re already living inside heteropessimism, we taught them where it comes from before they ever get there?

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The Missing Framework

What if we stopped expecting young people to intuit one of the biggest social transformations of the last century and instead gave them the historical context to understand it?

I don’t mean including more of women’s contributions in history textbooks, or assigning more novels with female protagonists, although yes, those too. And I don't mean relationship-skills training or another social-emotional learning unit.

I mean teaching students one of history’s most important explanatory frameworks: the concept of patriarchy

We already teach certain frameworks. We teach capitalism, colonialism, slavery, fascism, communism, and democracy not simply because they happened, but because they continue to shape the world students inhabit. These systems help explain how societies were organized, how power was distributed, and why the present looks the way it does. We don't teach these frameworks to tell students what to think. We teach them to help students think.

Patriarchy deserves to be taught for exactly the same reason.

At its simplest, that means teaching what it means to be part of a social system that has historically organized power, authority, and resources around men, while assigning women and men different roles, rights, and expectations. Understanding patriarchy as a social system is useful in a way that goes beyond activism or ideology.

Students stop memorizing that women couldn’t vote until 1920, that married women once lost their independent legal identities under coverture, and that women were welcomed into the workforce once men went to war as isolated trivia. They begin asking the more interesting questions: Why were these rules created? What beliefs justified them? And how much of that logic still shapes our lives today?

Instead of a series of disconnected facts, patterns begin to emerge. That’s the beginning of critical thinking.

Right now, we wait until college and hope the students who most need a gender studies course happen to enroll in one. But by then, many young people have already spent years absorbing explanations about gender from TikTok, YouTube, dating podcasts, grifters with monetization incentives, and algorithms.

I don’t think most students (let alone adults) grasp the extent to which women have historically been treated as less fully human than men. From biblical law to English common law to the early American republic, women’s rights, bodies, voices, and choices have repeatedly been subordinated to men’s. That pattern determined who was considered capable of reason, leadership, ownership, education, political participation, and even full legal personhood.

Understanding patriarchy reveals how deeply gender shapes the way we see the world. It helps us recognize that knowledge itself gets shaped—and sometimes distorted—by cultural assumptions.

Science itself offers a useful lesson. Researchers often assume they're simply observing reality, when in fact they're also interpreting it through the lens of their culture. For decades primatologists watched monkey troops and centered the story on male competition and dominance. Then researchers like Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and Jeanne Altmann took a look and discovered that females weren’t just passive background characters. They were making choices, forging alliances, and shaping the social lives of their groups in ways earlier researchers had largely missed.

Similarly, anthropologists celebrated “Man the Hunter,” as though human civilization had been built almost exclusively by men with spears, overlooking the extensive evidence that women’s labor was essential to human survival. In medicine, male bodies became the default, delaying breakthroughs in everything from heart disease and pain to ADHD, autism, and female sexual health.

These weren’t neutral oversights. They were the predictable result of viewing the world through a narrow lens. What if children understood that the growing diversity of researchers in these fields led directly to different questions being asked, different patterns being noticed, and greater accuracy overall?

Maybe they'd be less inclined to dismiss diversity as a woke political project and more inclined to see it as a pathway to better questions and better science.

When you understand that women's current wariness of centering men isn't just a trend, but the accumulated residue of a very long, very specific history, the "empower women" messaging stops looking like an attack on boys and starts looking like a correction to a system — something to evaluate on its merits rather than take personally.

What Becomes Visible

Teach students the history of patriarchy and suddenly the world starts making more sense. Here are a few ways that understanding might show up in their lives:

Beauty

Beauty ideals are downstream of a long history in which women's bodies were priced, displayed, and trafficked as commodities, and that history has left fingerprints on what we now call attractive. Knowing this, women and girls might reconsider trading freedom for beauty, enduring physical and psychological suffering in pursuit of an ideal that never stops moving. That context matters in an era of filters, influencers, and dating apps that reduce people to a photo grid or a swipe.

Dating

Dating scripts—who pays, who initiates, who’s expected to pursue and who’s expected to be pursued—aren’t timeless rules of attraction. They’re leftovers from an era when women had little independent economic power and courtship was, in many ways, a financial negotiation. Once they recognize these scripts as historical rather than natural, they can decide which traditions still serve them and which they’re simply running on autopilot.

Emotional Labor

Long-term relationships tell a similar story. Emotional labor in relationships— remembering birthdays, knowing the shoe sizes, managing the household’s feelings—still falls disproportionately along the same lines patriarchy assigned centuries ago, when women’s value was tied to caregiving and men’s to providing. Recognizing that division as historical rather than natural is the first step toward renegotiating it instead of resenting a partner or pretending not to see it.

Masculinity

The same framework changes how boys understand themselves. Men’s emotional stoicism—the pressure not to cry, ask for help, or admit fear—is as much a patriarchal inheritance as any constraint placed on women. If women were cast as weak, men had to be cast as strong: invulnerable rather than emotionally expressive, dominant rather than nurturing, sexually experienced at the expense of respect, consent, and genuine intimacy. Understanding that helps boys recognize the costs patriarchy has imposed on them, too, rather than experiencing gender history as a story about blame.

Women’s Wariness

It also helps explain women's mistrust of men. It isn’t simply a personality trait or a bonding ritual among girlfriends. It's a rational response to generations of harassment, discrimination, and violence. Naming that history explains the caution without requiring every individual man to personally account for it.

Identity

Gender policing creates unnecessary identity confusion. Too many children grow up believing they're bad at being a boy or bad at being a girl, when they're just bad at squeezing themselves into a stereotype. Aggression, tenderness, ambition, and nurturance aren’t inherently masculine or feminine. They’re human capacities that can be expressed well or badly by anyone. Understanding where those stereotypes come from frees young people to become more fully themselves instead of performing who they’re told they’re supposed to be.

Consumer Culture

Consumer culture becomes easier to decode. The pressure to prove masculinity or femininity through clothing, body types, cosmetic procedures, achievements, or possessions is itself a marketplace built around gender. Recognizing those expectations as manufactured rather than natural makes it easier to stop performing gender and start making choices that actually reflect who you are.

What Becomes Possible

Imagine what that could look like day to day.

Girls could believe their worth has more to do with the lives they build than the faces, voices, and mannerisms they feel pressured to police and present to the world. Boys could stop treating emotional openness as a threat to their masculinity.

Women could spend less time with their friends dissecting the latest Tinder date who turned hostile the moment she wasn't interested, or the husband who still doesn’t get why the mental load feels so crushing, and more time talking about books, work, travel and her internal life. They could walk to their cars without keys threaded between their fingers. A woman could say she doesn't want children without hearing that she'll change her mind. And when women voice a complaint, men might actually engage with their concern instead of dismissing it because it’s delivery wasn't softened and perfectly expressed.

Men, too, would have more room to become fully themselves. He could choose a lower-paying but more meaningful career without having to defend his masculinity. He could tell his friends he's scared or struggling and trust that they would stay in the conversation instead of cracking a joke. A father could take paternity leave without feeling it signals insufficient ambition, because he would not be the exception. He could ask for help or directions without experiencing it as a small failure.

If we want children to become thoughtful citizens with healthy relationships, we cannot teach them only the history of presidents, wars, and inventions while leaving out the system that shaped who was allowed to become a president, who was allowed to be educated, whose inventions were recognized, and whose voices were ignored.

Kids who understand how gender roles were constructed are better equipped to recognize when an arbitrary hierarchy is being handed to them disguised as common sense. More importantly, they're better equipped to imagine—and create—something different.

For easy ways to explain gender relations and sexism to kids, your partner, your parents, or or even yourself, check out Sexism & Sensibility: Raising Empowered, Resilient Girls in The modern World

Or take a look at my latest for Stop Sexual Assault in Schools: What to Say When You See Sexism: A Practical Toolkit for Teachers, Parents, Adult Allies, and Students

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That "something else," it turns out, is my daughter leaving for college.

The intensity of my feelings about it has taken me by surprise. I love fiercely, but I am not a particularly sentimental person. I am not the mom who cried at Kindergarten graduation—or even high school graduation. As a working mother with little help and a family a thousand miles away, I have enjoyed the growing independence (and fewer tantrums) of my kids.

Sure, I still miss my babies and swoon over videos of them throwing themselves into my arms. And I miss those years between seven and eleven, when things got easier—when they were more independent but still loved cuddles, bedtime stories, and dance parties. The middle school years still crack me up when I remember those first eye rolls and how embarrassing my mere presence felt when their friends were around; when dependency felt humiliating. And as the teen years recede, I know I'll miss those too—the unpredictable pendulum swing between pushing me away and reaching for me.

But missing those stages is different than being preoccupied with them. And right now I can think of little else besides my daughter fleeing the nest. She has been talking about college since she was in fifth grade when she and her then-BFF were planning on UCLA because it had a good gymnastics team for her friend and California weather for her. Other than the horror of leaving her current BFFs behind, she’s ready (except maybe for the freezing cold in the decidedly-not-Californian destination she’s chosen).

The hardest part will be not knowing if she’s safe in her new home every night. But I know I will also miss the sounds of her rattling around the house: the opening of the full fridge, then the full cupboard, followed by a sigh that there's nothing to eat. The sound of her walking through the front door and saying in the sweetest voice ever, "heeeyyy girls," as she greets our dogs. The electric bass drifting up from the basement as she practices, or the sound of her giggling like mad with friends in her room. Most of all, I'll miss the nightly clinking of spoon against bowl coming from her bedroom as she engages in her years-long ritual of munching on frozen blueberries before bed.

How will she survive without those nightly blueberries? I have endlessly researched extra-miniature freezers that she might get away with having in her dorm despite the no-kitchen-appliances rule.

Of course, I want her to be comfortable in a space where everything fits. But I also know that no matter how cleverly I use the vertical space to create more room, no matter how many Command hooks, hoodie hangers, or under-bed organizers I buy, everything will still end up on the floor. I know that with every cell in my body, and yet I can't stop.

And even if I skip the freezer, or she chooses the "wrong" shower caddy, and dorm-room disorder inevitably ensues, she'll be perfectly fine. I know that too. And yet I can't stop.

So what is really going on for me…and maybe for some of you too?

Maybe I'm not really trying to organize a dorm room. Maybe I'm trying to organize something much harder to contain—my feelings.

If I can find just the right storage solution, maybe I can make sense of this jumble of grief, excitement, pride, anxiety, and envy. Maybe I can neatly pack away that strange, messy ache that comes from wanting something so much for your child while simultaneously mourning what it means for you. If each feeling can slide into its own neatly labeled compartment of a five-drawer rolling cart with caster wheels, maybe they’ll stay put, neatly sorted, never spilling over.

But feelings are a lot like stuff in a dorm room: no matter how carefully you try to contain them, they eventually end up in a heap on the floor, demanding your attention.

You can stack storage bins, maximize closet space, and optimize every square inch of an 8-by-10 room. You can’t optimize your way through loving someone enough to let them go.

The feelings find you eventually. They show up as irritability or depression. They masquerade as productivity or procrastination, sending you down internet rabbit holes comparing bed toppers and shoe organizers. They show up as relentless cheerfulness, as if refusing to acknowledge the loss might make it disappear. Or they become writer’s block because your mind is busy solving problems your heart needs you to feel.

And if we refuse to process feelings, we risk doing something far more consequential than buying the wrong shower caddy: we risk asking our children, however subtly, to carry our feelings for us. We hold on just a little too tightly at precisely the moment they’re learning they can and must stand on their own.

The thing that really needs organizing is not my daughter’s dorm room, but enough space inside myself for grief and joy to coexist. They have to learn to live together in the same tiny emotional space.

I don't know if my writer's block is resolved. But this week I had lunch with two friends who have already launched their kids. I complained that I couldn’t write and floated my theory that I’d become consumed by storage because I was trying to find a place to put all the feelings that come with this transition. They looked at each other and smiled.

“Write that.”

They reminded me that we write best when we write what we know—or perhaps more accurately, from where we are in our own lives.

It turns out I wasn’t out of ideas. I was just spending my creative energy trying to solve a problem that couldn’t be solved with Command hooks or rolling carts.

Apparently, where I am right now is somewhere between a hanging hamper and a goodbye.

If you know someone who might relate to this essay, please share it with them. And let me know in the comments if you’d like intel on tiny freezers, hanging hampers, or other highly researched dorm-room storage solutions :)

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Yes, I’m riffing off the famous 1980’s public service announcements: “This is your brain on drugs.” These commercials were dramatic, fear-based and not particularly effective. But the underlying message was accurate: drugs change your brain. And according to a recent study, sexism appears to do so too.

When women describe how sexism affects them, the response is often, “It’s all in your head.” Well, now they can say, “Yes, it is. It’s literally in my brain.” A groundbreaking study examining over 7,800 brain scans from men and women across 29 countries revealed that women exposed to sexism show real, measurable changes in brain structure.

Specifically, those living in countries with higher gender inequality showed a thinner right hemisphere cortex, particularly within limbic regions responsible for emotional control, resilience and managing stress-related disorders like depression and PTSD. In contrast, women in more gender-equal countries showed no structural thinning, matching or even slightly exceeding male baseline thickness.

What's almost as surprising as the findings themselves is how little attention they've received. The study was published in 2023 in one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals, yet it barely registered in public conversation. Had researchers found that a new supplement, meditation app, or brain-training program altered brain structure, it likely would have generated headlines everywhere. A study suggesting that gender inequality may do the same has largely flown under the radar.

I find these findings both devastating and validating.

They’re devastating because they suggest that gender inequality doesn’t “merely” affect women’s opportunities, paychecks, safety, or political representation. They seem to quietly embed themselves in the architecture of the brain. Sexism not only gets under our skin figuratively, but literally too.

But they’re also validating. They confirm what I have observed in more than twenty-five years of clinical practice and what many women have known all along. For years (forever?), so many of us have been sounding the alarm, often only to be ignored, dismissed, gaslit, or further demeaned.

The findings also reinforce a central argument of my book, Sexism & Sensibility: living in a society that consistently undervalues girls and women is not a benign backdrop to their lives. It has cumulative effects on the body and mind, shaping everything from self-concept and relationships to health, well-being, aspirations, and opportunity.1

We often explain gender differences in health through biology or major traumatic events. But this research points to the very plausible possibility that everyday experiences of sexism matter too.

If something as ordinary as learning a new skill, folding laundry, practicing piano, or shooting baskets can alter neural pathways, why would we assume that a lifetime of being underestimated, objectified, interrupted, scrutinized, harassed, or blamed would leave no trace?

In countries with greater gender inequality2 as measured by things like lower female labor-force participation, less political representation, and fewer opportunities for women, there are often higher levels of the daily indignities that rarely make headlines but shape women's lives: microaggressions, the motherhood penalty, invisible labor, restrictive gender expectations, objectification, sexual harassment, and victim-blaming to name a few.

The constant monitoring, adapting, calculating, and defending that many women must do to remain psychologically and physically safe is a form of chronic stress. And we know that chronic stress affects the brain's ability to adapt, regulate emotion, and thrive (Also: Arnsten, 2009; Lupien et al., 2009).

Importantly, the study found that these brain differences were smaller in more gender-equal countries. They were also less pronounced in men, although men living in highly unequal societies showed some negative effects as well.

From Iceland to India, the pattern was striking: as gender inequality increased, so did the structural differences in men’s and women’s brains. The United States fell somewhere in the middle. While the stress-related thinning observed in women was largely absent in highly egalitarian Scandinavian countries, the same cannot be said for the U.S. where it remained apparent.

Gender inequality is not just a moral issue. It is a public-health issue. A vast body of research confirms that structural gender equality directly predicts better mental health outcomes for women. Women in more equitable relationships also report better mental health and well-being. When we improve gender equality, we don’t just improve fairness—we improve health.

But because appeals to morality and public health alone often fail to move the needle when it comes to women's equality, I feel compelled to talk dollars and cents. Stress, depression, trauma, and poor health outcomes carry real costs—medical bills, lost productivity, disability claims, foreshortened careers—and those costs land on employers, insurers, and taxpayers, and not only on women themselves. Improving gender equality would reduce all of that. And the savings wouldn't stop with women. As I've pointed out elsewhere, patriarchy harms men too, and I suspect part of that harm is psychological: a quiet moral toll exacted by knowingly or unknowingly asking women to absorb the costs of sexism. Guilt, dissonance, and suppressed empathy aren't free—they show up in stress and health outcomes just like any other burden. Equality isn't just the right thing to do; it's a smart investment in our collective well-being.

It’s kind of mind-bending to think about country-level gender inequalities affecting individual brains. The distance between a discriminatory law, a sexist norm, or a wage gap and a woman’s cortex suddenly seems remarkably and uncomfortably small.

We have spent decades asking what drugs, trauma, and disease do to the brain. It's time we asked what sexism does.

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But that’s exactly what happened when I read The Blue Dress by . Drawing on the author’s own experiences, the novel follows Yasmin, a 7th-grade Iranian girl who immigrated to the United States a few years earlier. Yasmin struggles to belong in the way many middle-schoolers do, a challenge made even harder by being visibly different from many of her peers. This is compounded by a well-meaning mother who believes the answer to beauty and belonging lies in being thin. Through weigh-ins and skipped meals that make her mother proud, Yasmin is succeeding in becoming thinner. But the message underlying that success—that she is not okay as she is—takes a devastating toll.

The sobbing-psychologist part, at least, makes some sense. Over the years I've worked with many girls struggling with disordered eating, a hypervigilance about their appearance, or a deeply conflicted relationship with their mothers, and often all three at once. When mothers are able to empathize with their daughters, examine the wounds they’re unwittingly passing on, and, perhaps most importantly, genuinely apologize, the improvement in their daughters’ mental health can be remarkable. I’ve grown teary in many a session where I’ve been lucky enough to witness those moments.

But there are too many times it doesn’t happen.

As with Yasmin’s mother initially, many mothers struggle to apologize because doing so triggers deep-seated shame. For narcissistic mothers, or even just emotionally immature ones, the mere notion of being wrong about something can feel like an unraveling of identity, so rather than feeling like a gracious, generous act, admitting a mistake feels like a loss of power.

Women are socialized from a young age to aspire to an ideal of motherhood—unfailingly selfless, patient, and devoted. But being a Good Mother isn’t the same as being a connected mother. The pressure to live up to an impossible standard can turn motherhood into a performance, with children cast less as people to be known than as proof that you're doing it right. You can sew every Halloween costume, keep an immaculate house, have warm cookies and a hug waiting after school every day—and still let your child down if you're more focused on getting motherhood right than on understanding who your child is and what they are feeling or struggling with.1

An apology requires empathy. And empathy is hard when the thought that you've hurt your child feels like a threat to your whole identity. Gaslighting becomes a shield against shame. The tragedy is that the more a parent denies, minimizes, or deflects, the less the child can hold onto the warm cookies and tight hugs—and the wider the rift grows.

Instead, that child is made to question her sanity and must work overtime to hold onto her reality. The bad things did happen! I’m not crazy!

Withholding an apology (and often approval) also becomes a way to maintain emotional power. For mothers who rely on control to feel secure, it becomes currency.

True repair can never happen without accountability. That doesn’t mean they can’t have a relationship, but it will not be a close one. And it doesn’t mean the mother is entirely at fault. Some children are genuinely difficult to parent, and sometimes there isn’t a great personality match. But regardless, the mother is the adult and bears the responsibility of truly hearing her daughter's experience.

In The Blue Dress, Yasmin’s mother who has made her daughter believe her body is unacceptable, becomes a sympathetic character when she’s finally able to open up about her own past, helping her daughter make sense of her behavior. (Cue the middle-aged sobbing.)2

Most mothers are doing the best they can with the circumstances and tools they have. If they are able take real accountability, they just might get to experience their child’s empathy and forgiveness in return. But a parent who is unwilling or unable to examine her own wounds and how she’s acted those out on her daughter, will miss the healing it could bring to both of them.

It’s never too late

Just as I’ve witnessed teenagers and their mothers coming to a beautiful understanding, I have also witnessed this among full grown women whose mothers have finally felt able to take in their daughters’ experiences of them and apologize.

A woman I saw in therapy for nearly ten years once said to me, “My mother either does therapy with me or I’m done with her.” Lynne had grown up feeling as though everything about her was wrong and now she was beginning to watch her mother direct the same criticisms toward her teenage daughters.

Throughout her childhood and into adulthood, Lynne felt perpetually under review. Her mother commented on her weight, hair, clothes, and appearance, sometimes approvingly, often not, but always conveying that these things mattered enormously. Her mother was also disappointed by Lynne's different interests, tastes, and way of moving through the world. Her differences felt like a personal affront. It was as though she couldn't tolerate the fact that her daughter was a separate person. Where Lynne saw individuality, her mother saw defects.

But things were more complicated than they appeared.

As I worked with Lynne and her mother who grudgingly agreed to join us, we came to understand that many of the qualities her mother found so intolerable in Lynne were actually parts of herself she’d never fully accepted. She’d spent her life feeling ungainly, unattractive, and somehow fundamentally wrong. Unable to bear those feelings, she unconsciously disowned them and located them in Lynne instead. Once she did, she related to Lynne as though those unwanted qualities truly belonged to her daughter.

This is one way projection operates in families. A parent’s unresolved fears and self-judgments are unconsciously deposited into a child, who gradually comes to experience them as her own. She learns to see herself through the parent’s distorted lens. What makes this so confusing is that the child’s actual experience is continually contradicted. She is told, implicitly or explicitly, who she is, regardless of who she knows herself to be.

We also uncovered envy and competition. Lynne’s mother admired qualities in her daughter that she had long ago sacrificed in herself. Lynne was freer, less concerned with appearances, less preoccupied with what other people thought. Rather than recognizing those qualities as things she longed for, Lynne’s mother experienced them as threatening and tried to correct them. Her constant scrutiny made Lynne increasingly self-conscious and insecure, diminishing the very qualities that had unconsciously evoked envy and competition in the first place.

Lynne’s mother had been a Good Girl who became a Good Mother, and her daughter became a painful reminder of the parts of herself she had abandoned along the way.

As she gradually learned to distinguish her own wounds from her daughter’s reality, something began to shift. Lynne was able to step out from under her mother’s inaccurate gaze, and her mother became more capable of seeing the daughter who had been there all along. As she grew more honest about herself—her disappointments, envy, and fears—she became more available for genuine connection.

She went from offering a Livia Soprano kind of apology that centers the apologizer—weaponizing guilt, martyrdom, and self-pity (”I’m sorry I’m such a terrible mother”; “I’m sorry you took it that way”)—to genuinely grappling with the pain she had caused. No longer defending herself or managing Lynne’s reaction, she was able to sit with her daughter’s experience and take real responsibility. Watching her mother do so flooded Lynne with love. Once Lynne was allowed to be a full human being rather than a projection, she could embrace her mother's humanity in return.

For Lynne’s and Yasmin’s mothers, the unprocessed shame and trauma that made accountability feel like defeat were the very things that kept them at a distance from their children. Real repair doesn't diminish a parent. It frees a child from having to fight to be seen and makes room for both of them to be loved as they are.

• Find my book, Sexism & Sensibility: Raising Empowered, Resilient Girls in The Modern World, on Amazon, Bookshop.org, or anywhere books are sold

• You can find me on Instagram

• If you’re new here, find more about my work here

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Something has broken in the female collective consciousness. Women’s good will may have finally run out.

It’s difficult to say when the unraveling began.

Perhaps in 1974, when women gained the legal right to hold a credit card in their own name—and with it, the ability to survive without a husband. Or in the decades that followed, when women entered the workforce in greater numbers but remained underpaid and underprotected. Or in 2015, when Bill Cosby, once known as “America’s Dad,” was arrested for drugging and sexually assaulting dozens of women. Or in 2016, when Donald Trump was elected despite openly boasting about sexual assault.

By 2017, that accumulated fury spilled into the Women’s March and seeded the #MeToo movement. For the first time, women spoke publicly about harm they had long been told to absorb quietly—and for a moment, they were believed. Men who had operated for decades without consequence were suddenly being named in public.

But the backlash was swift. #MeToo, people said, had gone too far. A counter-current formed: the rise of Andrew Tate and his cronies, the red-pill internet, and a cultural narrative of the “dispossessed man”—humiliated, abandoned, and betrayed by women’s progress and big mouths.

“Cancelled” men like Louie C.K. and Mark Halperin returned to work. And the man widely seen as a catalyst for the #MeToo reckoning—despite multiple allegations and a conviction of sexual abuse—was once again elected president.

A mixture of fury, resentment, and exhaustion has been building in many women ever since.

That pressure has intensified in the past two years, even in mainstream circles, since the release of the Epstein files. Children are harder to blame than women and watching so many pedophiles and their enablers walk free—with only one woman out of hundreds of powerful men held accountable—proved intolerable.

It came on the heels of the Pelicot case in France, where a man drugged his wife and invited strangers to assault her while she lay unconscious — hundreds of times, over years. The rarity of those men being held to account came with a palpable sense of relief among women everywhere. Maybe accountability really was possible.

But the hits keep coming.

The past few weeks seem to be the straw that has finally broke the camel's back — if the camel were a woman and the straw a series of terrifying acts that are becoming harder and harder to dismiss as aberrations.

On March 26, CNN reported on what a French lawmaker called an “online rape academy”—an investigation into Motherless.com. This “moral-free file host” as it referred to itself, hosted non-consensual “sleep content”: videos of sedated women being raped. Users coordinated through encrypted channels where rape instructions were given, sedation drugs sold, and assaults of unconscious wives and girlfriends livestreamed for paying viewers.

In mid-April, two U.S. congressmen—Eric Swalwell of California and Tony Gonzales of Texas—faced allegations of sexual misconduct, including rape in one case, and both resigned—a reminder that sexual predation is nonpartisan.

Around the same time, former Virginia Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax killed his wife before taking his own life, in their home where his teenaged children were hanging out. His son called 911. This came after his wife filed for divorce, following years of sexual assault allegations and public and private collapse.

On April 19, eight children ages 3 to 11 were slaughtered in Louisana. The shooter, Shamar Elkins, was the father of seven of the children and the uncle of the eighth. He also shot the mothers of those children—his wife, who had reportedly filed for divorce, and a former partner. Both survived.

On April 20, a 15-year-old girl declined to give a 14-year-old boy her number. He grabbed her, lifted her above his head and slammed her onto concrete, then stomped on her head while his friends filmed and cheered. His mother later defended him.

And these are only the ones I know about.

Not all men. (But almost all women)

Maybe the last few weeks were more brutal than usual. But in all likelihood it was a combination of heightened awareness and rage, the fame or sheer scale of some these incidents, alongside a press more willing to cover violence against women.

There were, of course, many many more “incidents” in April alone. Intimate partner violence remains one of the most common and dangerous threats to women’s safety. In the United States, three to four women are killed every day by a current or former partner—and for many women, the most dangerous place is their own home.

Recent FBI data shows rising domestic violence over five years, with over 11,000 murders, and women making up 75% of victims. The already terrible violence women face is getting worse.

And yet men continue to insist it’s not all men; that they are one of the good ones. Maybe so, but if you were handed ten cookies and told one contained poison, you wouldn’t debate the odds. You’d stop eating.

Women are pushing the plate away, and men need to stop insisting they’re being too picky, too angry, too dramatic.

When men say not all men, we hear you saying you bear no responsibility. But you do.

Neutrality is not the same as goodness.

Being “a good man” cannot mean only not being a violent man. It also means refusing silence around violence. It means speaking up when your friends cross lines. It means interrupting the casual cruelty of locker rooms, group chats, bro codes, and online spaces where humiliation of women is entertainment.

If you laugh at the joke, stay silent when a woman is made uncomfortable, excuse “a little” harassment, or interpret a woman’s clothing or drinking as partial explanation for her violation, you are not outside the problem.

You are part of the system that makes your daughter more vulnerable to serious harm from men she knows and trusts.

The title of this piece is provocative. Women do not hate men. Most, like me, love their fathers, partners, brothers, friends. The grief is not about male humanity. It is about male impunity.

We are not responding to men as individuals, but men as a system that too often protects bad men at the expense of women’s safety.

When men are not held to account, the message is clear: you can act out aggression, entitlement, humiliation, sexual power, and social dominance—and others will look away.

Don’t wait until your daughter is assaulted to say something.

Could the tide be shifting?

I don’t have hard data, but I think men are getting braver.

I am seeing more men speak up—calling out misogyny, challenging other men, listening when women point out blind spots.1 At first I thought it was just the algorithm feeding me what I wanted to see. But then I started noticing it elsewhere: in comments, private messages, and conversations around my work. I see more men reading, sharing, and engaging with ideas they may not have considered before.

I saw it recently in my husband who said, “We know men hurt women”—no qualifier—during a discussion with other parents about raising kids to have healthy relationships.

And I think it’s happening because more women are done.

Done being the emotional buffer. Done absorbing diminishment. Done being, over and over again, the collateral damage of male entitlement, rage, and indifference.

I see it in friends’ anger. In the growing number of articles, like this one in The Atlantic, pushing back against the myth that girls are doing so much better than boys. In the uptick in personal emails I receive after a post or in response to my book. And that book—about raising girls in a sexist culture—has suddenly begun selling again in a way I can’t fully explain.

Something is shifting.

I don’t want to be naïve. A significant minority of young men are being shaped by online cultures that normalize misogyny. And recent global research suggests that Gen Z men and women are more likely than older generations to believe wives should obey their husbands.

But maybe, just maybe, the tide is turning.

Women are furious—and more men are finally joining them.

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Anyone else noticing men becoming more outspoken?

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The other day, peeking in my teenage daughters room I saw her getting ready in front of her small coffin-shaped mirror (she’s got a dark sense of humor). I bellowed jokingly, but of course not joking at all: IT’S NOT YOUR JOB TO BE PRETTY!

I think I caught the requisite eye roll in the mirror but as I say in my book about raising empowered girls, I’m willing to be cringey many times over in service of that mission.

If you asked her, I’m sure she’d say I’m repetitive and that she already knows the world is trying to exploit her for profit or break her to fit patriarchy’s parameters blah blah blah. She’s right. I am repetitive because we’re playing the long game here. We can’t expect our teenagers to have the hard-earned perspective we have (on our best days anyway). The hope, though, is that we’re helping them grow into an understanding of just how much pressure is put on them to meet some destructive, soul-crushing, clone-farming standard. The deluge is loud and constant so I figure, in comparison, I’m coming on much less strongly.

What I'm after isn't a single breakthrough moment. It's the slow accumulation of a different kind of voice in her head. One that pushes back, asks questions, that knows, even on the hard days, that the mirror and certainly the culture doesn’t always tell the truth. One that asks: how much of my fashion/makeup/primping/body-related choices are actually mine?

I may be repetitive but I do try to be creative with how I voice my push back to the thousands of subtle and not-so-subtle ways she’s told her appearance and body is the most important and precarious thing about her.

I tell her:

On Beauty

The most magnetic people in any room are rarely the most conventionally beautiful ones. They are the ones who are fully, unapologetically present — who know what they think, say what they mean, and make everyone around them feel interesting. That quality has nothing to do with a face or a body. It is built from the inside, slowly, by knowing yourself and trusting that knowledge.

Your life was made for living, not for display. For taking risks and failing and getting up again. For laughing at yourself, and cackling with your friends, and figuring out what you like and changing your mind. Your appearance should always be the least interesting thing about you.

Your beauty is your singularity. You were never meant to be a copy of someone else's original. Not the curated faces on your screen. Not the ones in the hallway. Your humor, your energy, your single dimple, whatever particular light you carry — those are one of a kind. Selling that short is a genuine loss.

Comparison is never a fair fight. Every time you hold your complex, imperfect, ordinary self up against what you see on a screen, you’re measuring real life against a two-dimensional, highly curated story of how someone wishes their life appeared.

The mirror sometimes lies. Some days your mood (or an annoying hair day) colors everything, including the face looking back at you. That distortion is not fact. It is just a rough day wearing a convincing disguise.

On Bodies

Your body is not a performance piece. Care for it because it houses and carries you, not because someone somewhere has an opinion about it. It’s not a problem that needs to be solved or shrunk or morphed. It just needs the kindness of being lived in well.

Your body will change. Many times, in many directions, across your whole life — and every version of it will have carried you through something real. The goal was never to freeze yourself at some imaginary peak and maintain it forever. The goal is to be someone who lived fully in every body she ever had, so you don’t look back with regret at the things you didn't do because you were too busy worrying about how you looked while doing them.

Let your body be a source of pleasure and rest and silliness — not just something you manage and monitor and hold at arm's length with judgment. Eat the food that makes you happy. Dance badly. Sleep in. Joy is not a reward you earn after you've fixed yourself. It's available to you right now, exactly as you are.

Your energy is valuable. At some point you will realize how much mental energy you have spent on this — on the mirror, on the comparison, on the ongoing project of deciding whether you are enough today. And you will want that energy back. You will wish you had spent it on something that mattered more, on things that help you grow and become more YOU. You don't have to wait until you're older to decide your mind is too valuable for that.

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On Belonging

You can have a million friends and still be completely alone—when the version of you they know is not really you. Fitting in at the cost of yourself is one of the loneliest feelings there is. Being known is better. It takes longer but it’s worth the wait. And the risk.

So if they need you to be more, or less, or different — walk away. Your people will never ask you to break yourself to fit.

Share this essay with your daughter or consider doing a version of this demonstration with her:

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If this essay resonated with you, my book Sexism and Sensibility goes deeper — into all the ways girls' development gets systematically undermined, from their self-esteem and physical confidence to sexuality, pleasure, and equal relationships. If you’re raising a daughter and want a guide for the fight, this is it.

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This was notable. For the past decade, I’ve watched women become increasingly disenchanted with the pool of emotionally underdeveloped men available to them—some opting, often with clarity and relief, for singledom over being mistreated or chronically under-stimulated.

So when they started to fall in love, it felt surprising. And hopeful.

They described men who, when something went wrong, didn’t shut down or lash out—but leaned in, reflected, and took responsibility without collapsing into shame. They used words like pattern and impact and I want to do better.

And maybe most enticing, they showed emotional curiosity not just about my patients, but about themselves. “I want to understand why I reacted that way” they’d say or “I think I got defensive because I was scared you were seeing something I didn’t want to see.”

One patient, a therapist herself, told me early on, “He seems so evolved. He can name my feelings sometimes before I even know what they are. And he doesn’t get defensive at the slightest hint of disappointment. It’s totally refreshing.”

Listening to these tales, I felt a flicker of envy. And a sense of cautious optimism. Maybe something was shifting.

But over time, confusion would set in.

In person, these men were harder to reach than they were via text. They were more brittle or seemed confused about conversations they’d already had. They’d contradict things they’d previously admitted, and minimize things they’d once named. It was subtle, but disorienting.

“I feel like I’m losing my mind,” that same patient said exasperated

She started to wonder if she was misremembering.

Until one night, using his laptop for something mundane, she saw a chat window open with one of their conversations pasted in and underneath it, a prompt:

“How should I respond to my girlfriend? She says I dismiss her feelings.” As she scrolled, she saw hundreds of similar exchanges.

She looked at me and said:

“I’ve been dating a fucking robot.”

AI is the new threesome

The new third party in your relationship doesn't sleep in your bed. It writes your apology texts.

AI use in dating is on the rise—up over 300% in the past year, with roughly a quarter of single people using it to help with profiles, texting, or emotional processing. There are even dedicated “chatfishing”1 apps such as Rizz and YourMove AI which suggest responses to uploaded screenshots of incoming messages; the marketing for YourMove AI claims that it “puts your texting on cruise control.”

I don’t know if women are bringing pre-packaged emotional scripts into their relationships too, but in my practice, it is overwhelmingly heterosexual women who are bringing in this concern. That tracks with what we know culturally: we still do very little to help boys develop emotional fluency, so it makes sense they’d reach for a tool that outsources the hardest parts of intimacy.

Men are also more likely to have AI romantic partners. These relationships are designed to be endlessly affirming, responsive, and conflict-free, which may be reshaping expectations of what real intimacy should feel like.

Women on the other hand are generally more skeptical of AI due to privacy concerns, safety, and the reinforcement of gender stereotypes in AI design. But apparently, the AI-use gender gap may be narrowing. Kate Devlin, a professor of AI & Society at King’s College London told The Atlantic that she thinks this is particularly true when it comes to virtual companionship: “The amount of toxic crap that women get online from men, particularly when you’re trying to do things like online dating—if you have an alternative, respectful, lovely, caring AI partner, why would you not?”

AI may be more satisfying in the short-term (though I have trouble buying even that) and it may even have something to teach us about communication and conflict resolution for those really motivated to learn. But AI can’t touch you. AI can’t smile at you. Its eyes don’t light up when it looks at you. It’s easy to forget that it doesn’t actually empathize with you, even though it’s optimized for emotional validation. And because it’s optimized for emotional validation—not truth—it will reinforce your perspective even when it’s flawed.

One study found that chatbots were nearly 50% more likely than humans to agree with users (even when users engaged in unethical, illegal, or harmful behaviors) and that even a single interaction made people less likely to apologize or fix a conflict. AI can erode the feedback loops through which we learn to navigate the social world. In other words, AI is a terrible couples therapist—but a very effective ego amplifier.

But that isn’t what my patients were reporting. They found their boyfriends’ bot responses effective and seductive.

The problem isn’t that AI might be able help people communicate better—it’s that it can help them sound like they’re communicating better without actually doing the work. What emerges is a kind of synthetic empathy: thoughtful, regulated, emotionally literate responses that aren’t tethered to real-time feeling or self-reflection. Instead of wrestling with defensiveness and confusion, revising one’s self-concept, or metabolizing another person’s perspective, those processes get outsourced. The language of repair shows up, but the substance doesn’t. You get insight without integration. Accountability without ownership. Intimacy without presence. And over time, that gap becomes impossible not to feel.

Here’s how to spot the 🚩 🚩 🚩

1. The responses are too good…or too fast

Immediate paragraphs with structured empathy. Or a long pause followed by something eerily perfect.

2. Conflict feels flattened

No edge, no irritation, no confusion. What seems like smooth, coherent, emotionally regulated replies are oddly bloodless. Real intimacy is messy.

3. He “understands” but nothing changes

They say the right things, reflect your feelings accurately, but their behavior doesn’t shift. Because the insight isn’t integrated, it’s performative.

4. You feel strangely alone

Everything sounds right but it doesn’t feel real. For example, they might say “I can see how that impacted you” / “I take responsibility.” But it doesn’t sound like they actually feel responsible. It starts to feel like you’re talking to a script.

The body often detects what the mind can’t yet name.

5. Keep your eye out for typical bot writing*

• Overuse of therapy-speak: “holding space,” “validating your experience,” “that must have been really hard for you” —Language that sounds right but feels generic or interchangeable and could apply to almost any conflict.

• Writing that sounds good but upon closer inspection says little.

• Restating the question/concern before answering is a common AI tell.

• “Delve into” and “quietly + a verb” are AI favorites.

• A strangely upbeat, motivational quality.

• The absence of typos or grammatical mistakes.

• A series of short, clipped sentences that could all be one sentence.

• Sentences constructed using “Not this, but that.”

• Lots of em-dashes (I hesitate on that one because I have always loved the em-dash and use it frequently…but so does Chat GPT).2

The performance of relational competence with no developmental changes makes for an infuriating and lonely partnership.

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The great news for anyone who knows and loves girls ages 9–15 is that Dr. Markey has released an updated edition of the book, reflecting the rapidly changing social landscape girls are navigating today—consider the revival of ridiculously impossible standards, #SkinnyTok, Ozempic, and diet culture. I weigh in briefly in the book as one of the experts and after reading an advanced copy, I immediately asked Dr. Markey for an interview. I wanted to make sure readers who parent or work with girls wouldn’t miss it. After all, being able to resist appearance pressure is key to not shrinking—to remaining confident and fully present in the world.

Below is our discussion, lightly edited for clarity. Enjoy and definitely pick up a copy of this beautifully illustrated and thoughtful guide (this links to all of her books because I also frequently recommend Adultish: The Body Image Book for Life and Being You: The Body Image Book for Boys.)

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Q: You’ve spent years studying body image and you’re also raising a daughter. Readers buy books not just when they’re interested in the topic but when they can trust the author. Can you tell us a little more about you? Was there a particular moment — as a researcher or a parent — when you realized girls needed a book like this?

A: A few moments converged. As a researcher and professor of psychology, I kept seeing the same pattern: body dissatisfaction shows up early and then quietly shapes so many parts of girls’ lives, including their health behaviors, their relationships, and how they treat themselves. As a parent, I realized how normal body talk is in our culture, and how quickly girls learn to monitor themselves like they’re being watched. I didn’t want to write a book that simply tells girls to “love their bodies.” I wanted a book that helps girls understand what’s happening to them developmentally, socially, and culturally, and gives them information that is empowering. I saw that reading books about puberty with my daughter interested her and allowed her to ask questions. I came to see that it was important to discuss these issues pertaining to not just physical development, but also psychological and identity development.

Q: This is an updated version of the book I loved and read with my own daughter. What changed in girls’ lives — or in your own understanding — that made a new edition necessary?

A: Girls’ worlds have changed dramatically. Social media isn’t just “media” anymore; it’s a constant mirror and a constant comparison machine. Appearance standards have also shifted in recent years with children buying skincare products and GLP-1s changing the conversation about weight loss. At the same time, I’ve learned more from readers, parents, and girls themselves about what they need in real life including practical ways to handle appearance pressure, comments, and comparison. The new edition includes information on not just social media, but more information about mental health and mental health treatment, intuitive eating instead of dieting, and the importance of body autonomy.

Q: The quotes from girls are strikingly honest, sometimes heartbreaking. How did you find these girls and was there anything that surprised you about what they said?

A: I recruited girls through typical research pathways (schools and community networks) and tried to create an environment where they could speak candidly. What surprised me wasn’t that girls had worries; it was how young they were when those worries began. Girls have A LOT of thoughts about their bodies and body images and are quite articulate about these issues at a young age. Their honesty can be heartbreaking, but it’s also clarifying. Girls are telling us exactly what pressures they’re under. Adults often underestimate how much they are feeling stressed about these issues.

Q: I found the advice from experts pithy and wonderful (not just saying that because I’m one of them!). How did you decide which experts to include?

A: I looked for two things: expertise and usefulness. I wanted people who have deep knowledge, and who can also offer concrete guidance a parent or girl can actually use. I also wanted a range of perspectives because body image isn’t one issue. It’s an interwoven set of issues pertaining to development, culture, gender, stigma, and mental health. I hope the experts introduce readers to other voices and that girls will read their work as well.

Q: Parents often think body image is about confidence or self-esteem, but you argue it shapes much more than that. What does poor body image actually change in a girl’s life trajectory?

A: Poor body image doesn’t just make girls feel bad; it makes them smaller. It can shrink their world. Girls avoid activities, clothing, social events, sports, even speaking up, because they don’t want to be seen. It fuels anxiety, depression, disordered eating, and perfectionism. When a girl is busy monitoring her body, she has less mental space for learning, friendships, creativity, and leadership. Her trajectory can shift and limit her opportunities. Body dissatisfaction quietly redirects time and energy away from living.

Q: What is one well-intentioned thing parents commonly say about bodies that backfires?

A: A big one is complimenting weight loss or physical activity, and praising thinness as “healthy.” Parents often mean “I’m glad you’re taking care of yourself,” but kids hear, “smaller is better,” and “my body is always under review.” Another common backfire is “Don’t worry, you’re not fat.” That tries to comfort but reinforces the idea that fat is the worst thing to be. The goal is to reduce the importance of body size in the first place.

Q: If a parent reads the book and remembers only one or two things when talking to a girl about her body, what should it be?

A: First, try to talk about bodies in terms of their functionality and the importance of caring for them. Shift attention from how bodies look to what bodies do. We don’t want girls at war with their bodies but using their bodies to live their life.

Second, do your best to be a “body-neutral” home base. That means fewer comments about your child’s body, your own body, other people’s bodies. It also means more focus respect, care, and function of bodies. When appearance pressure shows up, your job isn’t to argue your daughter into confidence; it’s to validate the pressure and teach her how to question it.

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I’ve been giving Raising Her Voice workshops for girls and come away every time exhilarated (and a little exhausted…but mostly exhilarated).

At the beginning of the day, the girls are quiet, guarded, sometimes skeptical. By the end, they’re engaged, open and assertive. Watching girls own their strengths in real time is incredible.

The focus and depth change depending on the age group, but the goal is always the same: to help girls build the confidence and resilience to use their voices.

Some of what I share comes from research and from my parenting and clinical work. But some of the most powerful moments come from the girls themselves—what their parents do that helps them or what they wish they would do.

Orchestrated workshops like the one I’m talking about are great, but it’s the small, repeated moments that have the most lasting impact.

So here are some things we can all do—simple, concrete ways to build resilience in girls growing up in a world that too often tells them they can’t, won’t, or shouldn’t.

A. Build belief in their ability to improve

When scientists asked half a million 15-year-olds from 59 countries about their fear of failing, girls were more afraid than boys of failing in 56 countries. Girls manage their fear of failure in two ways: 1) They try to be perfect and hold themselves to impossible standards or 2) they shrink themselves and miss out on opportunities to “go for it.”

We need to help them believe in the power of trying and trying again!

1) Teach them to go from “I can’t” to “I can’t yet”

When they say “I can’t,” gently interrupt. “You mean you can’t yet.”

This small shift changes the entire frame from fixed to possible.

You can even play the “Guess Who Thought They Couldn’t” game with them:

• Guess how many Katy Perry sold of her first album? —Only 200!

• Which musician was dumped by her first record label? —Lady Gaga

• Guess who failed the bar exam after graduating from Harvard Law school? —Michelle Obama

• Guess which book was rejected 14 times before becoming a runaway bestseller and a movie? —Twilight (ended up selling over 100 million copies worldwide.)

Struggle isn’t the exception. It’s the path.

2) Create a “hard things archive”

Keep a running list—mental or written—of things they thought they couldn’t handle, but did.

Bring it back when they’re spiraling:
“This feels big. But remember when you thought you couldn’t do that back flip? Or talk to Izzy about your feelings? You did both!”

You’re helping them build a memory of themselves as capable.

3) Make effort visible (not just outcomes)

Shift what and how you praise.

Instead of “You’re so good at that,” or “you’re so smart,” try:

• “You really stuck with that even when it got boring.”

• “Your hard work paid off.”

• “Your strategies worked.”

This builds stamina, rather than pressure to perform. Think: growth mindset.

4) Ask them what might go right

Girls’ totally normal setbacks are sometimes treated as a sign they lack talent. That’s especially likely in areas where people hold the stereotype that girls aren’t naturally talented. Or others may assume their accomplishment was easy or that they just got lucky. So girls become trained to anticipate what might go wrong.

Gently widen the frame:
“What do you think could go right?”

It goes a long way when they’re reminded that a lot can go right, that perfect is the enemy of great, and that you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

B. Help them handle hard things (without rescuing them from discomfort)

5) Don’t rush to remove obstacles—help them think through them

Resist the urge to fix.

Instead, slow it down:

• “What are your options?”

• “What’s one small step you could take?”

Stay close, but don’t take over.

Confidence comes from handling things that aren’t easy.

6) Give them controlled risks

Resilience grows in the space between comfort and overwhelm.

• Let them order for themselves

• Let them email a teacher

• Let them navigate a small social conflict without stepping in

You’re sending a crucial message: You can handle this.

7) Encourage them to take risks before they feel ready

Girls often think confidence comes first.

It doesn’t.

Confidence comes from taking the risk—and realizing they can either survive disappointment or that they’re more capable than they thought.

8) Teach them how to ask for help

Don’t assume they know how.

Give them the language:

• “Can you explain that in a different way?”

• “I’m stuck—can you help me get started?”

• “I’m feeling overwhelmed. Can you help me figure out where to begin?”

Practice it. Role-play it. Normalize it.

You’re turning help-seeking into a skill—not a vulnerability.

9) Let them quit things—but only after a “finish well” conversation

Don’t treat quitting as failure. But don’t make it automatic either.

Pause. Get curious.
Is it not a fit? Or did it just get hard?

Help them stay long enough to finish with integrity when it matters, and walk away cleanly when it doesn’t.

You’re not teaching them to push through everything.
You’re teaching them discernment.

10) Normalize anxiety & discomfort

Sit with them in hard feelings without rushing to solve them.

• “This is uncomfortable, but you can handle uncomfortable”

• “You’re anxious but this feeling won’t last forever”

That’s a deeply under-taught skill.

11) Encourage boredom

Don’t fill every gap. Don’t solve every “I’m bored.”

Let them sit in it.

Boredom is where they learn to tolerate restlessness, generate their own ideas, rely less on constant input.

It’s a skill that’s sorely lacking in this over-stimulating world.

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C. Shape their inner voice

12) Let them overhear you being kind to yourself

Girls don’t just listen to what we say to them—they absorb how we talk about ourselves.

Say things out loud like:

• “I handled that well.”

• “I’m proud of how I showed up.”

• “I made a mistake, but I’ll fix it.”

You’re modeling an internal voice they’ll eventually borrow.

13) Write them notes (and give them a place to keep them)

Write down what you notice:
who they are, what you admire, what made you proud.

Give them a drawer, a box, a basket—somewhere these little notes can live.

So when they’re having a bad day, they have somewhere to go; something tangible to remind them This is who I am. Even when it doesn’t feel that way.

14) Let them overhear you saying kind things about them

Not to them. About them.

On the phone or in the next room. To a friend. To a partner.

It lands differently, and often more deeply.

15) Normalize repair, not perfection

There will always be conflict in relationships, especially close ones.

• Model repair by apologizing when you mess up

• Notice when they repair (“That took courage to go back and fix that”)

Resilience isn’t avoiding rupture—it’s learning that relationships can survive it and often some back stronger.

D. Protect their relationship to their body and identity

16) Expose them to women who are messy, bold, and real

Give them a wider template beyond the “perfect” role models they’re seeing in the media.

• Watch shows, read books, follow creators who show complexity

• Talk about women who take up space, fail publicly, change their minds

Resilience requires seeing more than one way to be.

17) Point out media manipulation in real time

Make this a running commentary—not a one-time talk.

• “That’s a filter.”

• “That’s edited.”

• “That’s lighting.”

You’re helping them question what they see, instead of comparing themselves to it.

18) Bring them to a Korean spa (or any body-normalizing space)

Nudity, especially in puritanical American culture, is sexualized and bodies chronicly evaluated.

We want them to witness bodies that just…exist.

Different ages. Shapes. Sizes. Skin. Softness. Scars.

No posing. No performance. No evaluation.

In a culture that teaches girls to view their bodies from the outside—to assess, compare, and perfect—this offers something radically different.

Bodies aren’t objects to be oggled.
They’re simply bodies—meant to move, to rest, to feel.

And in a space like a Korean spa, where nudity is no big deal, they also get to experience something we rarely talk about: how good it can feel to just be in their bodies—warm, relaxed, unobserved—without it meaning anything beyond that.

We worry, rightly, about safety and privacy.
But in spaces that are safe—including our homes—nudity should be normal, neutral, human.

19) Talk about clothes in a way that centers their body—not appearance

Building body respect is an enormous part of resilience because their bodies will be scrutinized and commented on incessantly as they grow.

Instead of:
“Do you like how it looks?”
“Does it fit?”

Try:
“Does it work for your body?”
“Can you move in it?”
“How does it feel?”

The message becomes:

Your body isn’t the problem.
The clothes either work—or they don’t.

Your body is deserving of comfort and accommodation.
The clothes are what need to adapt. Not you.

20) Let them see you set boundaries (without over-apologizing)

Say no in front of them. Calmly.

• “That doesn’t work for me.”

• “I’m not able to do that.”

• “I need some time to myself.”

Skip the explanations. Skip the guilt spiral.

You’re showing them they’re allowed to have limits. And that having needs doesn’t require an apology.

Resilient girls don’t talk about “resilience.”

But they show us what it looks like:

Knowing they can try and fail and try again.
Knowing hard feelings won’t take them down.
Knowing they are more than how they look or what they achieve.

Resilience is built in what we model, what we say, and what we allow.

Over and over again.

And over time, that’s what gives them something no one can take from them: a voice they trust—and the confidence to use it.

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I wasn’t going to write about the men’s hockey team laughing at President Trump’s “joke” about having to invite the gold-medal–winning women’s team lest he be impeached. So many smart writers already responded swiftly and pointedly.

But then I had a conversation with a group of young men, ages 18 to 21.

They didn’t think the joke was especially funny. But they also thought us critics were being thin-skinned.

“When did people stop being able to take a joke?” one asked — a line that sounded parroted from male internet culture.

An anxious dad rushed in to mediate: “Both can be true. It can be funny and sexist.”

And while he’s not entirely wrong, who tells the joke — and who laughs — matters.

So to this dad trying to “both-sides it” and every parent raising boys right now: here’s what our sons need to hear before they leave our homes.

The hockey moment is as good a teaching tool as any.

1. You have unearned privilege

Tell him if he’s male — especially if he’s white — that the world will assume he’s competent before he’s demonstrated it. He will be interrupted less. Questioned less. Underestimated less.

Tell him:

That doesn’t mean you didn’t work hard.

It means you didn’t fight certain headwinds.

Your job isn’t to feel guilty.

Your job is to notice.

Unless boys understand their privilege, none of the others on this list will make sense.

2. Women often do more with less — and get less recognition anyway

Since women’s hockey became an Olympic sport in 1998, the U.S. women have medaled in every single Olympics. That’s seven medals in seven olympics. The men have won 12 medals in 25 olympics.

Both teams have won three Olympic gold medals. But the men’s victories span more than 100 years — their last in 1980. The women accomplished the same feat in just 28 years.

And yet men’s hockey consistently receives more headlines, more sponsorship money, more cultural relevance.

So when a president makes it clear that he’d rather not have the women’s team there (while making a personalized video call with the men but not the women and then sends a chartered White House plane for them but not the women), we know it’s misogyny.

Ask your son to reflect on why that’s funny.

3. Male bonding often happens at girls’ expense

From locker rooms to group chats to frat basements, boys are often socialized to bond by mocking, sexualizing, degrading, or violating girls.

One comment may not seem like a big deal. But thousands of moments of 'locker room talk' slowly normalize the idea that girls are objects, punchlines, or prizes — and that normalization has consequences. It makes harassment easier to dismiss. Abuse easier to ignore. It creates a culture where violations of women are unsurprising.

Explain why they use women to bond:

We raise boys to fear intimacy with each other. We tell them closeness is “soft”. Vulnerability is suspect. So they prove belonging by jointly objectifying someone else—evidence they are manly—not gay.

It’s a performance — what Liz Plank calls “a constant, anxious audition: are you man enough, are you one of us, do you get the joke?”

And it works — which is why it’s so hard to interrupt.

Show your son the video. Ask him what he notices. Ask him why laughing might feel easier than not laughing.

Then tell him real connection — with boys and girls — requires courage. It’s not unmasculine—it’s the beating heart of life.

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4. Power determines whether a joke punches up or punches down

Many boys ask: why is okay for girls to make fun of boys? Isn’t that “reverse-sexism”?

Power matters.

Mocking a group with institutional power is not the same as mocking a group historically excluded from it. Punching up can be satire. It can be a way of processing powerlessness with others who experience the same thing. Punching down reinforces hierarchy.

It’s not that mocking anyone is ideal. It’s that harm lands differently depending on who already holds power.

5. Proximity to power is not the same thing as having it

Laughing at the right moment can feel like access. Approval. Alignment.

But being near power does not mean you’re powerful.

If you stop thinking for yourself and silence your own moral instincts to gain belonging, you haven’t gained power — you’ve surrendered it.

And sometimes, boys try to reclaim their power by exerting control over people with less of it, like girls.

Trading your empathy or your dignity for a head nod is a bad bargain.

6. Culture shapes what you value

One of the young men in the group told me men’s sports are simply more entertaining — more speed, more power, more spectacle.

But men’s sports get more investment, more airtime, more production value. Ask your son to reflect on what might make men’s games seem more exciting—halftime shows, cheerleaders, better camera coverage, more instant replays. Tell them women’s sports receive less than 10% of media coverage despite making up 40% of athletes.

Entertainment is not purely biologically-determined; it’s cultivated. Some prefer the raw speed and power of men's sports, others the technical, strategic nature of women's sports.

Even if you prefer men’s sports, that preference doesn’t justify diminishing women’s achievements.

Liking one thing doesn’t require belittling another.

7. Successful men usually have women to thank

No elite athlete got to the rink alone.

Someone woke up at 5 a.m. Someone packed the bag. Paid the fees. Sat in freezing stands. Wiped away tears. Rearranged her life so he could chase his dream.

Two brothers on the men’s hockey team have a mother who helped coach the women’s team and who was herself a former women's national hockey player. Ask your son how he thinks she felt watching them laugh?1

Women’s labor — especially mothers’ labor — is so foundational it becomes invisible.

Don’t let it.

8. Be an upstander.

Tell your son that there will be a moment — maybe many — when someone makes a comment that diminishes girls or women.

Say:

You will feel the gravitational pull of the group.

Laughing will be easier.

But character is built in the half-second before you decide whether to go along.

You don’t have to grandstand. You don’t have to shame anyone.

You can simply not laugh.

Or you can do what one player shouted that day: ‘Two for two.’ Pride in both teams. No diminishment required.

That’s leadership.

That’s strength.

And that’s what I expect from you

I’m not in the habit of telling women what to do with their bodies. But if you’ve been feeling a vague, sick helplessness in the face of the astonishing fuckery surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, the rhetoric of Nick Fuentes, and the steady legal erosion of bodily autonomy, growing your body hair is one small, immediate way to make the personal political.

The few straight friends I have who don’t shave ooze sexuality — not because of their body hair but because they’re genuinely comfortable in their own skin. Ask almost any man: confidence is hot. But this piece has nothing to do with “being beautiful regardless” or attracting men.

It’s about not giving a f—k whether you’re beautiful in the eyes of a culture that increasingly prefers women to resemble girls.

Smooth legs.
Hairless vulvas.
No wrinkles.
No pores.
No smell.
No evidence of adulthood.

The ideal woman, in other words, is post-pubescent enough to be sexualized but pre-pubescent enough to be non-threatening—sexually visible, socially powerless.

We treat shaving as neutral grooming, like brushing your teeth, instead of what it actually is: a historically recent beauty demand that requires women to erase the secondary sex characteristics that signal maturity.

So why do we bother with the rituals of shaving/waxing/threading/epilating/tweezing/sugaring/lasering/IPLing?

Men posting on Reddit will argue that men are biologically programmed to like shaved women because hairlessness exaggerates the sexual dimorphic trait that already exists (women having less hair). But I can assure you, men and women have been hooking up for millennia.

The slide into the childlike aesthetic

For most of human history, women were not expected to be hairless. That changed in the early 20th century when sleeveless dresses and rising hemlines exposed women’s skin for the first time and razor companies discovered an untapped market. In that moment, body hair shifted from normal biology to social failure. A “problem” was invented and a billion dollar solution followed.

Across the decades, the visible signs of adulthood were increasingly shunned. Mid-century media fused sexuality with teenage aesthetics.1 Think bobby socks, cheerleaders, schoolgirl imagery. Late-20th-century porn standardized the hairless vulva, removing one of the clearest biological markers of sexual maturity, and Sex and the City sealed the deal with the infamous Brazilian wax episode in 2000. Here we are in the 2000s and anti-aging culture is all the rage: expensive skincare for babies, serums for children, botox in your twenties, and a body defined by the absence of time.

And “barely legal” became a genre.

We’re told men prefer youth because it signals fertility. But as Jameela Jamil notes, “Nothing says ‘fertility’ like a bald vagina that looks like it has not yet reached puberty.”

Centuries of art and literature depicting male desire show women with voluptuous figures, textured skin, and yes — hairy legs, pits, and pubes. They looked like adults. Childlike was not the aesthetic.

The more autonomy women gain, the more demands there are on their bodies. A culture uneasy with women’s power prefers women who appear not to have it. So we socialize men to fetishize vulnerability, power imbalance, and naivety, and the visual shorthand becomes smaller, smoother, shinier bodies.

Which brings us to Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein is the patriarchy’s logical conclusion

We do ourselves a disservice when we call Epstein and his ilk monsters or a bizarre glitch of elite decadence. They are the logical conclusion of systems built to protect powerful white men; an extreme concentration of ordinary permissions. The same culture that tolerates sexism and racism, teaches women not to “make a scene”, doubts girls’ experiences, hands down little punishment for sexual violence, and protects men’s reputations at the expense of women’s safety is what allowed Epstein to operate. Wealth just let him industrialize it.

His network didn’t invent entitlement; it scaled a pattern that exists everywhere from locker rooms to campuses to courts: access to women as status, male bonding built on female violation, institutions choosing stability over truth, and disbelieving women functioning as social lubricant. Women may express shock. But we are not surprised. It is the white noise of our lives.

We are not surprised it took millions of pages of evidence for people to start believing survivors. We are not surprised by how many powerful men, and the institutions meant to safeguard us, helped themselves to the glee of dehumanization or stood by and protected themselves instead.

But we are hopeful. Hopeful that maybe people will finally connect the dots to abuses common at every level of society: incest, domestic violence, child marriage, sex tourism, violent porn, racism that fuels the idealization of white femininity. And also the ambient violations we’re trained to dismiss: being followed, being pressured after saying no, images shared without consent, teachers’ “special attention”, choking normalized during sex, policing girls’ bodies, deepfakes, workplace retaliation, and the constant lesson that discomfort is the price of being female.

These are treated as separate categories. They aren’t. They are variations on the same lesson about whose words, wants, and needs matter.

Epstein is what patriarchy looks like with unlimited resources and no oversight: a world where consent can be negotiated away, witnesses can be exhausted and silenced, and adulthood in women becomes inconvenient because autonomy disrupts access.

Beauty standards live downstream of that logic.

Why grow your body hair

Epstein’s assistant wrote to him: “I ordered sweet young coconuts from Thailand for you and they just arrived…just so you don’t have to drink juices from old hairy things.”

You don’t need every individual man to be a predator for the aesthetic to drift toward pedophilic cues. You only need a culture that rewards it—and women to internalize the reward structure.

We say we shave because it feels good. Because it feels cleaner. Because we like the look. And those things can be true. But preferences don’t grow in a vacuum. They grow in systems of approval. Turning body hair from a fashion issue into a morality issue is just another way of controlling women’s bodies.

The question isn’t: Do I enjoy being hairless?
The question is: Why is this the baseline of femininity at all?

Growing your body hair is not morally superior.
It won’t make you a better feminist.
It won’t fix legislation.
It won’t dismantle patriarchy.

But it does something psychologically clarifying: it exposes how much femininity operates as pre-emptive compliance.

The first time you go out with visible leg hair, you feel watched. And if nobody is actually watching, even better—because you understand more deeply the invisible lines you’ve been staying inside your entire life.

Control over women has always depended less on force than on self-surveillance. A woman worrying about stubble is a woman not worrying about power. A woman evaluating her desirability is easier to govern than a woman evaluating the legitimacy of authority.

Hairlessness isn’t oppression.
But compulsory hairlessness is rehearsal for it.

So no — you don’t have to stop shaving. But it’s worth asking whether your grooming habits are self-expression or cultural fluency; comfort or camouflage.

In a moment when women’s autonomy is openly contested, there is something quietly radical about looking unmistakably adult.

I stopped shaving a few months ago. Not because I suddenly love how it looks — it’s hard to love something you’ve been trained to see as gross or wrong. But it’s growing on me (so to speak). Unlike when I moved to the Midwest as a nubile twenty-something trying on hairy legs, I haven’t gotten any biting comments or side-eyes. And there are some days at the gym or while dancing in a sleeveless shirt that I feel like a badass—which is to say like a woman tired of playing the pick-me patriarchy game and knowing I’m doing one small thing to help burn down the system.

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1

Mid-century media began centering images of youthful femininity in ways that fused sexuality with teenage aesthetics — a trend scholars associate with the rise of the “Lolita effect” and the growing cultural focus on teens as objects of desire in advertising and film.

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Much of what we know about trauma explains what happens when something terrible happens to you once. Many girls, however, are shaped by what happens to them a thousand times.

“Men invented standards they could meet and called them universal.” That line by Rebecca Solnit captures centuries of authority disguised as objectivity—and it describes how we came to understand the body.

In a world calibrated to men’s needs, bodies, rhythms, and social roles, girls’ and women’s experiences often disappear into the background. In a materialist world where science equals what is visible and measurable, we repeatedly fail to understand girls and women.

Across disciplines, the template for what counts as “human” has historically been male and continues to exert influence.

Heart attacks are still culturally imagined as chest-clutching emergencies, which is why women presenting with nausea and crushing fatigue are sent home with antacids or anxiety diagnoses—sometimes hours before a cardiac event.

Medications have been tested on male subjects and prescribed at doses that lingered dangerously in women’s bloodstreams. It took until 2013, and only after next-morning car crashes, for the FDA to lower recommended doses of Ambien for women.

Speaking of car accidents: crash-test dummies long modeled a 170-pound man, while women absorb the injuries. Even when female crash dummies are included now, they’re often just scaled-down male forms, not biomechanically female bodies. The different pelvis shape, neck strength, muscle distribution, and posture in pregnancy aren’t represented. Oh, and they’re usually placed in the passenger seat rather than the driver position.

Diagnostic criteria for ADHD and autism prioritized disruptive presentations more typical in boys, overlooking girls who mask or compensate. The ideal worker is still imagined as endlessly available, presuming someone else performs domestic labor. Office temperatures reflect metabolic calculations from mid‑century men in suits, and leave many women shivering at their desks.

We study men, call the findings neutral, and recast everyone else as deviation.

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The male-coded trauma paradigm

The same pattern holds for trauma.

Modern trauma theory was revolutionary because it reframed symptoms as survival responses that lived in the body. Flashbacks, hyperarousal, dissociation — these weren’t weakness. They were a protective nervous system bracing for danger long after the event was over.

Van der Kolk, Levine, Porges and others helped us understand that when a body mobilizes to fight or flee but cannot complete the action, the energy remains stuck. Healing, in this model, means helping the body finish what it couldn’t do — through movement, breath, sensation, and shaking — so it can return to safety.

But much of the research that made up early PTSD diagnostic criteria were heavily shaped by Vietnam vets (men) and by watching animals escape predators.

Think of a gazelle tremoring vigorously after escaping a cheetah. Think of your dog shaking after being petted, bringing her body back to baseline. Those who can’t escape and feel truly helpless need to find a way to release after the attack or accident.

This framework privileges acute, life-threatening events over chronic, relational threat, and identity-based trauma—forms disproportionately experienced by women. Trauma is viewed as something that happens to a body, not something that unfolds within attachment systems, power hierarchies, and gendered expectations.

For many girls and women, the shaping force is not a single catastrophic event but years of evaluation, accommodation, and relational vigilance inside relationships they cannot simply leave—families, schools, peer hierarchies, workplaces.

Instead of preparing to overpower or outrun, the nervous system learns to monitor, soften, anticipate, and appease. Contemporary clinicians often call these freeze or fawn responses. The body learns to scan constantly for the moods, needs, expectations and danger signs of others.

Hypervigilance here is not a reaction to one event; it becomes a baseline operating system.

A few researchers recognized what the dominant paradigm missed. Pat Ogden’s sensorimotor psychotherapy recognizes that the body encodes repeated interpersonal patterns, not only shock. Judith Herman’s concept of complex PTSD (C-PTSD) describes the psychological consequences of prolonged powerlessness—disrupted self‑concept, shame, emotional dysregulation, and relational difficulty—that don’t map neatly onto classic PTSD.

These frameworks attends to the subtle, chronic adaptations—the slight forward lean of someone trained to anticipate others’ needs, the held breath of someone who learned early to make themselves small, the frozen smile of someone who survives by remaining pleasing.

Yet despite Herman's work dating back to 1992, C-PTSD still isn't in the DSM. The research that gets funded, the treatment modalities most widely taught and reimbursed, the frameworks that shape diagnostic criteria still center acute, event-based trauma. Recently though, the World Health Organization did formally add C-PTSD to the ICD-11.

When trauma is defined primarily as acute threat, the adaptations to chronic social pressure are easily misread as personality pathology, anxiety, or psychosomatic distress rather than survival strategies.

Women seeking somatic therapy may look for a single buried event to release and find none, or "just" a million smaller incidents. The problem isn’t the absence of injury; it’s that the injury never stopped happening. The problem is a system that hasn’t considered women’s lived experiences.

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When the Model Doesn't Fit

How do you shake off years of managing everyone else’s comfort and calling it harmony when it was actually self-erasure?

How do you release the tension of a nervous system trained to track everyone else’s mood before your own— influenced by real stories of violence and countless hours watching depictions of women raped, beaten and killed on screen?

How do you sigh away decades of scanning parking lots and sidewalks at night?

How do you tremor out the chronic swallowing of your anger?

How do you discharge a lifetime of smiling when it wasn’t kind or funny?

A lifetime of being interrupted or ignored then accused of overreacting when you get frustrated?

Of relinquishing yourself bit by bit without realizing what you were giving up?

How do you unwind a body trained to be looked at more than lived in?

Somatic therapy for many women is less about releasing a single event and more about a slow rebuilding of trust in their bodies and a recalibrating of their nervous system through gradual re-connection to themselves.

The Nervous System Under Surveillance

From early girlhood, many learn that being seen is inseparable from being evaluated.

We learn from our mothers that choosing what to wear involves something far more essential than comfort or self-expression. We learn to dress as though an invisible audience is there observing and judging; that some undefined authority can determine whether we are Right or Wrong in how we, as girls, present to the world. Don’t be yourselves, we learn, because you’ll inevitably be found lacking.

Then there’s the beauty industry inundating us with messages that our bodies are fundamentally flawed and need fixing. The relentless evaluation is an assault on our nervous system that must constantly scan itself for Wrongness. Girls take note approximately every thirty seconds of whether their hair’s in place, their legs are in proper position, their shirt is sitting right and on and on.

We comply with the demands made on us and they call us vain. It’s not vanity. It’s a nervous system we can’t power down because the surveillance never ends.

One of the most maddening discoveries I made when writing my book, Sexism & Sensibility, was just how bad self-objectification—not just being objectified by others—is for girls. Girls who self-objectify increasingly experience shame and anxiety about their bodies, putting them at risk for eating disorders, depression, and sexual dysfunction. But the consequences extend beyond mental health.

Self-monitoring consumes cognitive bandwidth, interfering with concentration and performance. It disrupts interoception—the perception of internal bodily states—making hunger, fatigue, pain, and even your own heartbeat harder to sense. You lose the “biological compass” necessary for basic survival and emotional health.

This then can lead to self-neglect: failing to eat, rest, or seek medical attention until a state of crisis is reached. It also diminishes capacity for emotional regulation since emotions are deeply rooted in physical sensations. And it’s associated with poor decision-making, since we’re detached from that “gut feeling”—things like changes in heart rate or skin conductance that help us quickly assess the risk or value of a decision before conscious reasoning even occurs.

The Body Keeps the Score—Differently

The body does keep the score. But for women, that score is often written in chronic pain, autoimmune conditions, and “medically unexplained symptoms” that doctors dismiss as stress or anxiety. Our symptoms are our witness.

Women are more likely than men to experience chronic pain conditions like fibromyalgia, IBS, migraines, and TMJ disorders. Many of these involve central sensitization, where the nervous system becomes hyperreactive to stimuli. The alarm system gets stuck in the “on” position and the body habituates to a baseline of tension that eventually becomes pathological.

Research consistently finds that chronic social-evaluative stress—including discrimination, relational vigilance and objectification—alters cortisol regulation, immune activity, and pain processing. Women’s bodies, then, are literally shaped by the demand to be perpetually accommodating, perpetually monitored, perpetually managed.

Women are told it’s “just stress” as if stress were something separate from the body. As if the chronic activation of a hypervigilant nervous system weren’t itself a form of ongoing harm.

What Trauma Models Miss

Traditional trauma assessment asks: What happened to you?

But for many women, the more relevant question is: What has been happening to you, continuously, since you were a child?

The answer isn’t a single story. It’s thousands of micro-adjustments and millions of psychological papercuts. A lifetime of monitoring your tone so you don’t sound “shrill.” Making yourself smaller so you don’t seem aggressive. Managing men’s egos and emotions at the expense of your own. Of walking to your car with keys between your fingers. Of saying “sorry” when someone bumps into you. Of being told you’re “too sensitive” when you name what’s happening.

Because these experiences are everywhere, they are nowhere. They are ordinary. Because they are social rather than physical, they appear intangible. Because they are chronic, they don’t register as trauma.

Yet the nervous system doesn’t distinguish between a predator in the savanna and a world that constantly evaluates, corrects, and constrains you. Both demand vigilance. and prevent the system from ever fully settling.

The difference is that you can’t shake off a society. You can’t tremor out decades of gendered expectations. You can’t outrun a culture that’s inside your own head.

When stress is woven into the fabric of girlhood itself, when it shapes your nervous system before you even have language for what’s happening, its effects become nearly invisible.

The gazelle shakes and walks away. The girl learns to stay pleasant, attentive, accommodating—and calls it growing up.

We call it maturity. We call it being good.

We call it ordinary girlhood.

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My husband glanced up and said, “Like what?

No reader, I did not strangle him. I didn’t even tackle him despite this man claiming to be a feminist and, I should add, being married to ME—someone who quite literally wrote a book about what people can do to fight inequality.

One could argue—as my husband later did— that this was out of the blue. We hadn’t just been talking about Renee Nicole Good’s execution. We weren’t in the middle of a conversation about ICE’s racism, misogyny, or lack of training. We hadn’t just discussed the gutting of women’s bodily autonomy, the steady erosion of voting access that disproportionately affects women, or the rollback of protections against gender-based violence. I hadn’t mentioned the weakening of workplace protections or bans on curricula that address sexism, gender inequality, or women’s history.

But all of those things (and more) are the air I breathe; the air women breathe.

As women, we don’t have the luxury of tuning out and trusting it will all be fine. We know better. And that’s also how we know immigrants—the people most immediately targeted right now—won’t “just be okay” either.

I’m not saying men don’t care. Some don’t. Many do. But caring is not the same as carrying. And many men don’t carry this in their bodies the way women do. When men—especially white men, or others cushioned by enough privilege (for now) to look away—fail to acknowledge the cruelty and chaos unfolding in the news or even their own communities, it can feel like minimization. Like a subtle suggestion that we’re overreacting. Like gaslighting.

In my clinical work, I see how much this costs women. Many of the women I treat are hurting. They are watching a familiar cycle unfold in which those with the least power are made out to be the problem or blamed for the harm done to them. Even if they can’t articulate it politically, they know it somatically—they feel it in their bones. They know what it’s like to be scapegoated, demeaned, harmed while those doing the harm are protected—and lie with impunity to preserve the appearance of innocence. When men can’t see what they see plainly, or worse tell them not to get their knickers in a bunch, it’s infuriating and lonely.

People shouldn’t “get their knickers in a bunch” is exactly what Scott Jennings said on CNN about the failure to release the Epstein files. I absolutely love the clip below of Leigh McGowan reacting to this egregious minimization of child rape. Every woman recognizes the smug arrogance of a man who has just said something indefensible and then looks at you like you’re unhinged for being upset. But McGowan’s anger doesn’t derail her—it fuels her. His faux confusion doesn’t fluster her. She delivers a devastating verbal smackdown anyway.

Even when men sympathize—hug their partners, validate their feelings—they often don’t share the fear or grief stirred by increasingly degrading policies, rhetoric and actions. Instead, they encourage women to stop paying attention. Sure, scrolling less and taking a breather or a bath might be necessary, but disengagement doesn’t take away the very real danger. It simply shifts the burden of vigilance elsewhere.

This is where the harm is done. That blasé posture erodes a woman’s felt sense of being known—and her trust that her partner truly understands the world she is navigating.

We know men rely on and idealize female nurturing. But when that nurturing turns into vigilance—into anger, fear, or urgency—it becomes inconvenient. So she’s asked to stop caring. In reality, many men can afford not to track the danger because the women in their lives are already doing it for them: staying alert, sounding alarms, calling representatives, writing postcards, standing in long lines to return salt at Target, marching, stocking Plan B for their daughters just in case. And NO—women do not have more time and fewer responsibilities. This is just another form of emotional labor.

Perhaps I’m not being fair asking men to care about what I care about. Would I feel this viscerally if the government slashed funding for PSA screenings and prostate cancer treatment? I’d certainly recognize it was appalling. But would I be consumed by it? Would I take to the streets? Unlikely.

But let’s make it align more closely with what happens when, say, funding for reproductive health, maternal care, contraception, and abortion access is cut or restricted for women. What if prostate cancer care were defunded AND states and insurers allowed to opt out of coverage, the disease reframed as the result of men’s “lifestyle choices,” and treatment delayed until it was advanced or life-threatening—all while insisting this wasn’t an attack on men’s health or men’s rights? I think that might get me marching. Or writing. Or at the very least, feeling a cold fear—empathy not just sympathy—for my husband’s and son’s futures. Because women and minorities understand something others often don’t: power taken from one group is never content to stop there.

"Never forget" is what people have said since the Holocaust—so we remember what happens when we abandon democratic values and lose moral clarity. Never forget that dehumanizing people, normalizing their mistreatment, and turning citizens into enemies leads to catastrophe.

And yet we do forget—especially when we believe we’re immune.

I’ve been reading The Goddess of Warsaw by Lisa Barr, historical fiction about a Hollywood starlet originally from a wealthy Polish Jewish family destroyed by the Nazis. The protagonist reflects:

Somehow, we believed we were immune. How blissfully naïve we were. I now know that the lines in the sand had been drawn all along, festering like cracks beneath our rare Calacatta gold marble surfaces. We fooled ourselves into thinking we were above the common Jews of Warsaw and their "lowly" Yiddish, with our clipped Polish annunciations, stylish clothes, salons, live in staff, influential status. And then later…after the invasion, all the payoffs and bribes my father and uncle doled out to keep us protected. It bought us nine months, before we were taken and thrown into the ghetto with everyone else.

Men should be angrier not just because women are asking them to feel what we feel, but because inequality is morally wrong. Because people they love are being demeaned and harmed in small and big ways every single day. Because history shows, again and again, that believing you’re exempt is how you end up targeted.

Men should be angrier because this is not just women’s fight.

And because when you wait until it’s your turn, it’s already too late.

Related Work

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What happened to Good was so needless and so devastating that we can only make sense of it by naming the system behind it: patriarchy. This is the system that still determines who is seen as threatening, who is dismissed as irrational, and whose life is considered expendable. It remains a powerful driving force for shaping the decisions and outcomes that harm women and anyone who doesn’t fit the narrow expectations of white male power. It also explains the growing fascism we are seeing in this country.

As I wrote another piece,

…you can’t separate fascist politics from patriarchal gender ideology—they are mutually reinforcing systems. Fascism gains strength when traditional masculine authority feels threatened by economic change, women’s rights, or social progress—it promises men they can reclaim dominance and restore their “rightful” place above women, minorities, and others deemed inferior. Both celebrate violence as a masculine virtue. Both seek to control women’s sexuality and reproduction to consolidate power.

Good stirred so much anger and hatred in this man that she was reduced to a fucking bitch who deserved to be shot. Why? Because she thwarted the rules of patriarchy. While seeing angry masked men coming at her and swearing must have been frightening, Good remained outwardly calm, refusing to be cowed by their attempts at dominance. She didn’t cry or get “irrationally” angry. She was perhaps, from her eventual murderer's point of view, maddeningly composed—saying to him "That's fine, dude, I'm not mad at you," as you might to a child who is getting agitated when being told he’s doing something wrong.

Meanwhile, her wife Becca, a woman who doesn’t present as traditionally feminine and refused to be submissive, openly filmed the scene and mildly mocked murderer Jonathan Ross— “Hey, show your face, big boy,” she said. Ross likely knew they were together because Becca said to him as he took down their license plate “That’s OK, we don’t change our plates every morning, just so you know. It’ll be the same plate when you come talk to us later.”

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The law of patriarchy—which this administration is hell-bent on strengthening— demands women’s obedience and fear. It demands women’s servitude to and admiration of men. Together these two women violated that law. With toys and a dog in the car, they clearly had no need for men. This is likely what incensed Jonathan Ross when he shot Good four times—once in the head, once in the arm, twice in the chest—then called her a fucking bitch as her car went careening into other cars.

Her final crime before the shots? An attempt to drive away. Turning her wheels far to the right to avoid Ross who’d positioned himself in front of her car, she “slightly brushed” him. As The Guardian reported, the car was “moving so slowly that the officer is able to easily retain his balance.”

He could have shot her tires. He chose her head.

Since Good’s death, many people have been invoking Margaret Atwood’s famous line, “Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them.” It’s an apt description of what happened. To defend against the small humiliations from two women and shore up his ego, Ross felt the need to, quite literally, eliminate the threat.

While we can’t know whether he would have responded the same way to a cisgender, heterosexual white man, the phrase “fucking bitch” is not incidental. It reflects a familiar, gendered pattern: women who resist male authority often trigger a particular kind of fury—one that recasts them as deserving targets. Research on intimate partner femicide shows that male perpetrators routinely frame their violence as a response to women’s “disrespect,” resistance to control, or challenges to his authority— effectively shifting blame onto her.

This is how Kristi Noem can call Good a dangerous domestic terrorist and rally the Right to say “she got what she deserved” (including right here on Substack in response to a Note I wrote about Good leaving behind children including a six-year- old that also lost his father two years ago).

While a woman who refuses to make herself small is deemed a "fucking bitch," a domestic terrorist, by the Right’s definition, seems to be someone horrified that neighbors are being targeted for the color of their skin and dragged away by anonymous masked men—and who protests it. It's someone on a school board that values social justice (oh, the horror), or as Fox News host Jesse Watters felt compelled to point out about Good, "a self-proclaimed poet from Colorado with pronouns in her bio" and who “leaves behind a lesbian partner and a child from a previous marriage.” The implication is clear: any woman who speaks too loudly, any queer person who refuses erasure, any activist who disrupts comfort—is fair game.

Are you also starting to feel like a fucking bitch and a domestic terrorist? I know I am. I’d feel pretty good about it except for the risk of being shot in the face part.

The truth is, that risk is nothing new. At least not for people of color. I doubt any Black or brown person is surprised by what happened to Good. For white people, it’s a complete shock. We rarely see police violence against white women displayed so openly. But the dynamic is identical to what killed Breonna Taylor, Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, and so many other people of color—nonviolent encounters with law enforcement that end in death because the person is deemed disposable.

I live in Chicago where Silverio Villegas Gonzalez was killed by ICE and I didn’t hear about it for weeks.

To the collective trauma of marginalized people, we/the mainstream media have given a collective shrug. If anything good can come from the state-supported execution of Renee Good, it’s that people—specifically white people—are waking up to the horrific abuses of power that have always been there.

My hope—my fierce, urgent hope—is that this moment cracks something open. That those feeling gutted by Good’s cold-blooded murder allow it to radicalize them, not numb them. That we refuse to be gaslit into believing abuse of power is anything other than what we see with our own eyes. That we recognize misogyny, racism, and homophobia not as fringe ideologies but as the foundational tools of patriarchy, the system that has always decided whose lives matter and whose don't.

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Rest in Power Renee Nicole Good.

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The holidays don’t create these patterns—they just make them impossible to ignore. Below are three of my most popular holiday posts, each sadly still relevant, and each asking the same question from a different angle: What are we teaching our children when we normalize the diminishment of women, even—or especially—during the season of joy?

Read them, share them, argue with them, bring them up at dinner.

I'm not going to wish you a picture-perfect holiday because nobody needs that pressure. Instead, I hope you find pockets of actual peace, the kind you don't have to orchestrate yourself. And while I would never tell you to smile this holiday season, I do hope you have reasons to. But if you don’t, remember, Raising Her Voice is always here—seeing it, naming it, refusing to let it slide.

Yours in cinnamon, sanity, and solidarity,

Jo-Ann

P.S. Looking for a last-minute gift for the feminist in your life (or someone you wish were more feminist)? This newsletter and my book Sexism & Sensibility both make thoughtful, meaningful presents. Or hey! Gift both and get 50% off a one-year subscription—a book and a subscription for less than the subscription alone. Just email your book receipt and I’ll send you the discount link.

In Case You Missed It:

Thank you all so much for your incredible support, shares, likes, and excellent insights over the years. I’m very grateful ❤️.

We live in a time when large-scale systems of power are inflicting widespread harm; when a manufactured Hunger Games of obscene wealth beside crushing deprivation has become the global backdrop; when those desperate to preserve a patriarchal culture built on dominance and control are doubling down on violence to maintain it. “Othering” people as scapegoats for the anguish baked into the system has become the norm. So it’s no wonder interpersonal violence is intensifying too. It can all feel like a foregone conclusion.

And yet. Ahmed al-Ahmed.

A father who treated the world as if it were his family. A Muslim man who put himself in the crosshairs of a violent attack, wrestling the gun away from a man allegedly inspired by ISIS, saving Jews while sustaining gunshot wounds himself. The attack happened at a Chanukah celebration—the festival of lights. And in the darkest moment, Ahmed became one. As Kate Manne points out, his courage offers “a shred of hope that this horrific anti-Semitic massacre will not be used as yet another excuse for Australia’s virulent Islamophobia.”

The simple fact that a man saw other people dying and couldn’t bear it offers something stronger than hope: proof that our capacity for care hasn’t been extinguished. There is something fierce and undeniable in the countless people who refuse to be bystanders—people fundraising because they can’t bear the starvation in Gaza, confronting ICE because they can’t bear the dehumanization of immigrants, boycotting Amazon because they can’t bear the greed.

These acts of care matter because they defy the logic we’re told to accept. The violence erupting around us isn’t random. It grows out of the same patriarchal logic that has always undergirded fascism.

As scholars like Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Jason Stanley have shown, you can’t separate fascist politics from patriarchal gender ideology—they are mutually reinforcing systems. Fascism gains strength when traditional masculine authority feels threatened by economic change, women’s rights, or social progress—it promises men they can reclaim dominance and restore their “rightful” place above women, minorities, and others deemed inferior. Both celebrate violence as a masculine virtue. Both seek to control women’s sexuality and reproduction to consolidate power.

A patriarchal household becomes the blueprint for the authoritarian state: obedience learned at home becomes political obedience. The “strongman” who demands dominance, loyalty, and the right to rule through force is simply the father-as-sovereign writ large.

Patriarchy harms everyone. It forces men to act as if they don’t need others, and forces women to choose between having a voice or having a relationship. As Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider argue in Why Does Patriarchy Persist?, patriarchy requires “a sacrifice of love for the sake of hierarchy”—it “steels us against the vulnerability of loving and by doing so, becomes a defense against loss.” In other words, patriarchy creates loss and then hardens us against feeling it.

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This logic—the devaluation of love, dependence, vulnerability, and care—doesn’t just shape nations and movements. It shapes families who are trying to survive systems that refuse to help them.

Take the Reiners. Their deaths are a private tragedy, but they are also a devastating example of what happens when a society refuses to build real structures of care. Parents caring for a child with addiction or severe mental illness often live in fear and isolation because they are asked to shoulder what should be a collective responsibility.

In the United States, healthcare is not a fundamental right. Losing a job can mean losing health insurance, which can mean losing essential medication or therapy, which can mean losing the fragile stability a family has fought to maintain. Mental health care is inconsistent, expensive, stigmatized, and often impossible to access. Families are blamed while the system looks away.

The Reiners were not alone. There are countless parents, most with far fewer resources, who live with this terrified vigilance, trying to care for a child in crisis with almost no help at all, and lots of judgment.

This is what a culture looks like when care is treated as weakness, feminized, stigmatized, or dismissed. When vulnerability is mocked. When interdependence is pathologized. When the patriarchal script says: handle it yourself, be strong, don’t ask for help—and if you can’t manage it, the failure is yours.

A small, intimate moment keeps coming to mind. While all this violence was unfolding, norovirus swept through my family. My parents happened to be visiting, and watching two people in their eighties become so sick was frightening. My husband drove my father to the ER, where we then spent eleven hours. I drove to three pharmacies hunting for anti-nausea medication for my mother—as she surely did for me countless times. We cleaned up after each other and tried to keep one another hydrated. It was miserable. But it was also tender—this tiny, makeshift infrastructure of care we built because that’s what you do when someone you love is unwell.

Being ill made the violence in the headlines feel even heavier, but it also clarified something essential: domination is never what holds a society together. Care is. Care is what saves us in the smallest moments and the biggest ones. Care is what teaches us how to belong to one another. Care is what interrupts the logic of fascism.

Because a world where wealth is hoarded by a few, where masculinity is defined as domination, where privilege means “better than,” is always a world drifting toward authoritarianism. The only way out is choosing connection over the false safety of indifference—choosing to see one another not as competitors in some manufactured contest, but as humans whose fates are intertwined.

The only antidote to a world engineered for cruelty is a radical insistence on care. But I won’t pretend that choice is simple. Care can cost you. Sometimes it means literally stepping into the line of fire like Ahmed al-Ahmed. More often it means risking your job, your reputation, your peace of mind. How much to give, when to protect yourself, whether to lead with heart or head—these aren’t questions with easy answers. They’re questions we weigh differently in every moment.

We can’t legislate tenderness, but we can build policy around its truth: that people flourish when they are cared for, and societies collapse when they are not. The work, then, is both intimate and collective. It happens in ER waiting rooms and family kitchens, but also in voting booths, school boards, and protest lines.

Care is not soft. Care is infrastructure. Care is resistance.

And in a world bent toward cruelty, insisting on care is how we bend it back.

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If the ideas in this piece resonate—care as resistance, connection as antidote—my book Sexism & Sensibility explores how patriarchy shapes everything from our intimate relationships to the stories we tell about girls and women, and what it takes to raise empowered, resilient girls in spite of it. It also makes a thoughtful holiday read or gift for anyone invested in building a different future.

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*Take 50% off a one-year subscription to this newsletter by purchasing a copy of Sexism and Sensibility. That’s a book AND a subscription for less than a subscription alone. Just email me your receipt and I’ll send you a link.

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But theology? That made the cut.

This isn’t about academic standards, as they want you to believe. The fields they stripped of “professional” status just happen to be the ones overwhelmingly powered by women and people of color.

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Come July 1, 2026, only 11 primary fields will be “professional practice doctorates”: medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, optometry, law, veterinary medicine, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, chiropractic, theology, and clinical psychology. That last one—my degree—was at the center of intense debate and ultimately kept its status…for now.

What got left out? Advanced nursing degrees (including nurse practitioners and CRNAs), physician assistants, social work, occupational therapy, Physical therapy, audiology, social work, and public health programs.

Why this matters

This isn’t just about prestige (though it’s absolutely a statement on what kinds of knowledge this country deems soft, less rigorous, less valuable). The shift directly impacts federal student loan access. Under the new rules, students in programs no longer classified as “professional” will face lower federal student loan borrowing limits: a maximum aggregate limit of $100,000 for standard graduate students, compared with $200,000 for professional students.

For nursing students whose graduate programs often cost $150,000 to $200,000, this change isn’t symbolic. It’s prohibitive.

What happened to nurses being the heroes that got us through COVID? We’re facing documented shortages in nursing, mental health care, and primary care—especially in rural and underserved communities where advanced practice nurses are often the only providers available. Shouldn’t that reality matter to any administration concerned with public health?

And consider social work: Clinical social workers are the largest group of mental health providers in the United States. These aren’t niche professions. They’re critical infrastructure. They’re the connective tissue of our entire health and social-service system.

Let’s look at who works in these fields:

• Nursing: 88% women

• Occupational Therapy: 83% women

• Social Work: nearly 90% of new MSW graduates are women, with a large proportion women of color.

These are professions in which women, and especially women of color, build expertise that directly influences communities, policy, and the next generation. They are fields that advocate for children, stabilize families, address the nation’s mental health crisis, responding to trauma, support immigrants, fight poverty, fortify public health, and strengthen civic life.

So why downgrade them?

Strategic Misogyny

Educated women are the biggest threat to this administration and their goal to strip women of autonomy. A government threatened by educated women does what governments throughout history have done: it tries to shrink the space in which they can wield authority and earn money.

Consider the contrast. The fields that kept their professional designation are almost all historically dominated by men and still disproportionately male at the top. The state sanctions and protects the domains controlled by men, especially affluent white men, while destabilizing the ones that give women and people of color economic independence, authority, and professional mobility.

This is not just misogyny; it is strategic misogyny.

If you want fewer women living independently, fewer women shaping policy, fewer women pursuing advanced education, fewer women leading community institutions, then you don’t have to ban them from the classroom. You simply defund the pathways. You make degrees that lead to professional autonomy financially prohibitive. You degrade the professions that have allowed women to build economic lives not dependent on a husband who could abuse, abandon, or control them.

You make their degrees worth less. You make their fields less attractive. You make their expertise a punchline.

This decision by DOE is part of the broader backlash against educated women, women voters, women workers, and women experts. It aligns neatly with book bans, attacks on diversity programs, restrictions on reproductive healthcare, and the chronic underfunding of care work. It reflects a worldview that treats expertise as legitimate only when it reinforces the status quo—and illegitimate when it empowers those historically kept out of it.

Women’s knowledge is not a threat to society; it is one of the few things still holding society together.

What you can do:

These regulations are still being finalized, which means there’s time for public comment and advocacy. Professional associations are already mobilizing. The question is whether policymakers will listen…or whether we’ll look back in a few years wondering why we can’t find enough nurses, social workers, and therapists to meet our nation’s needs.

Contact your representatives. Submit public comments during the rulemaking period. Support the professional organizations fighting this change.

And call this what it is: an attempt to control women by dismantling the professions that empower them.

Jo-Ann Finkelstein is the author of the award-winning book, Sexism & Sensibility: Raising Empowered Resilient Girls in The Modern World.

Let’s begin with the workplace, which apparently used to be a magical land of cigar smoke and unexamined mediocrity until women came along with their “boundaries” and “HR policies” and “insistence on being paid.” All those girly feelings “wokefying” the harmless fun of calling a secretary “sweetheart” and the four-hour boozy lunch. Now everyone has to attend diversity training instead of golf outings (which Jack Nicklaus predicted they’d ruin anyway). Devastating.

Then there’s marriage. Women decided they wanted to be partners instead of property. They went and asked for joint bank accounts, orgasms, and conversation. They even wanted a say in major life decisions! What’s next—expecting men to do half the housework? Oh wait… The institution will never recover from this assault of mutual respect and shared responsibility.

Comedy? Poof! Apparently, recycling the same tired jokes about naggy wives and bad female drivers isn’t peak humor anymore. Even assault is off the table. Now comedians are expected to be, you know, actually funny. Worse, women have had the audacity to enter the field with smart, personal material and get laughs without being the punchline. The nerve of them!

Don’t even get me started on entertainment. Star Wars introduced female Jedi who could use the Force without needing a man to explain it to them. Gaming now features (some) women protagonists who look and act like actual humans, rather than pin-ups, and wear armor instead of chainmail bikinis. Theater? Ruined by women playwrights telling women’s stories that—gasp—aren’t centered on male wish fulfillment. It’s an apocalypse of representation.

Somehow women have ruined cooking too, even though it’s been taken over by men named Gordon and Anthony who make soufflés on TV and belittle line cooks and children. The irony is exquisite: once women left the kitchen, it instantly became prestigious.

Club culture fell apart the moment women admitted that being groped by strangers wasn’t the highlight of a night out. Now there are these oppressive new expectations around “consent” and “not putting drugs in drinks.” It’s really taken the spontaneity out of things. Western civilization may never recover.

Speaking of which, women have also ruined the West itself. They ruined America by demanding the right to vote, which naturally led to college, bodily autonomy, legal personhood and the ruination of the entire Western world. Imagine wanting to contribute to society through their minds and talents rather than through their wombs alone. Sheesh!

And these ideas have been spreading across the globe like a highly infectious disease—a feminist pandemic. So yes, let’s give credit where it’s due: Women are ruining the whole world!

Apparently blaming women is the one tradition we’ve yet to ruin.

But wait—have men ruined anything?

In the spirit of fairness and equality, I couldn’t possibly leave men out of my ruination diatribe.

Men have ruined:
– The planet (via oil, coal, and industrial everything)
– The economy (see: every recession)
– Global stability (wars, coups, dictatorships)
– Democracy (fascism, again)
– Women’s bodily autonomy (legislation, policing, and general arrogance)
– Lives (harassment, assault, murder, and systemic discrimination)

But sure, the real crisis is that there are female Ghostbusters now.

And then there’s the small stuff: plastic-filled oceans, species extinction, school shootings, tech monopolies, and the absolute disaster that is modern dating.

But you know what? Let’s keep focusing on how feminism ruined Star Wars. That definitely seems like the more pressing issue.

I say we take accountability. If feminism is ruining things like the unchecked authority of mediocre men, the myth that silence equals virtue, the belief that women’s suffering was inevitable, and the idea that you can have equality without giving anything up—let’s take that as the huge compliment that it is.

So yes, we ruined your boys’ club. We ruined the monopoly on power. We ruined the unexamined assumption that your story was the only one worth telling. And maybe…hopefully…we’ve started to ruin the platforms of Ross Douthat and his female, misogyny-apologizing sidekicks.

You’re welcome.

If you enjoy my writing, check out book, Sexism & Sensibility: Raising Empowered Resilient Girls in The Modern World (which gets you 50% off a one-year subscription to Raising Her Voice. Just email me your receipt and I’ll send you a link.)

Happy Tuesday y’all!

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