In the limbo between leaving one job and starting another, I found myself on Twitter more than was healthy. “Mum, what are you doing?” my 15-year-old daughter would ask from across the room, to which the answer was often, if I was honest, “I don’t know.” I was tracing an argument about the “right” kind of feminism back to its origins, bemused and compelled by the meanness, the bad faith, the battle lines of likes and retweets and sometimes the simple expressions of support, dim glimmers of hope in the combat soup.
Often they weren’t even arguments but something more one-sided. A columnist tweeted that she was bored of reading younger women’s epiphanies, as if they had discovered inequality for the first time – why couldn’t they just admit that they hadn’t cared about motherhood, marriage or the menopause when such things affected only “gross” older women? The post got 2,000 likes and launched a Gen X-millennial pile-on. Elsewhere a millennial wondered when choking during sex had become “normal, for good or ill”, and was condemned for endorsing violent porn. More recently the New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum tweeted that “sometimes I am irrationally mad at younger women bc they didn’t take abortion rights seriously”, as if their complacency had hastened the fall of Roe vs Wade.
Content from our partners
