Despite our different feminist allegiances, I’ve always admired Youtuber and video essayist Lindsay Ellis’s prowess for media analysis. One of her standout videos, released in 2018, was a retrospective look at the Twilight mania of the mid-to-late noughties. Her focus is not so much the mania of the franchise’s fandom—overwhelmingly adolescent girls—but rather the hysteria of the backlash to the vampire romance saga. Ellis puts her finger on the uncomfortable truth: cultural disdain for Twilight’s key consumer demographic fueled the hatred of the franchise. “We—and by ‘we,’ I mean ‘our culture’—kind of hate teenage girls,” Ellis observes.
This cultural contempt for teenaged girls was evident in the mockery directed toward Justin Bieber and One Direction, who were then in their teenybopper era. The “basic bitch” insult also gained traction around this time. To qualify as a member of this detested category, one must be guilty of such sins as loving Starbucks, pumpkin spice, Ugg boots, and saying things like “YOLO” and “bae.” In other words, to be a “basic bitch” was to be that most contemptible of things: an average teenage girl.
Adolescent females possess two conflicting traits: bodily sexual maturity, paired with psychological and sexual innocence. This combination predictably inspires both predation and hyper-protection. Although these two reactions may sound like opposites, they are often intertwined. The good intentions of those inclined to protection often combine with the temptation toward predation, thereby creating a uniquely paternalistic type of misogyny. Young female precociousness is seen as both scandalous and trivial. Critics of Twilight didn’t just ridicule the sparkly vampires and permanently shirtless werewolves. They also clutched their pearls, performatively and tediously decrying protagonist Bella Swann’s “problematic” relationship with her hot, undead boyfriend, Edward Cullen. Their vast, paranormal age gap was a particular point of contention.
Today, we still patronize and police adolescent girls in similar ways. In last decade, however, a significant cultural change has occurred. The youthful wisdom of Gen Z girls—especially regarding politics—has risen in cultural status, inspiring disproportionate reverence. This phenomenon, which I call “prophet daughter syndrome,” is widespread. Unlike the Cassandras of old, these young prophetesses are not ignored by their fathers. On the contrary, the parents of Gen Z girls are most guilty of elevating these young girls, unquestioningly adopting their wisdom and helping to catapult them into the public eye. In these way, parents are not only failing in their duties as educators and moral leaders. They are also subjecting their daughters to a predictable—and predictably psychologically damaging—onslaught of both adulation and misogyny.
Prophet Daughters and Privileged Cajoling
The most obvious example of prophet daughter syndrome is gender ideology. As a gender critical Zillennial, most people of my generation regard my views with contempt. Exasperated older GC women often ask me why young women are so blinkered by this ideology, to the point of heaping vitriol on them, their feminist foremothers—and sometimes even their literal mothers. These women are being preached nonsense about their own womanhood by the girls their female bodies birthed.
One particularly strange and underappreciated aspect of the phenomenon is the fact that many older women—including many mothers—are depressingly eager to be schooled by fourteen-year-olds’ apparent feminist omniscience. In her 2023 book Hags, Victoria Smith cites the example of journalist Suzanne Moore, who stepped down from The Guardian in 2020 after being hounded for her “transphobia.” In an interview shortly after her resignation, BBC broadcaster Kirsty Wark asked Moore, “Do you think that sometimes you just need to put your hands up and say ‘I’m representing something that’s going to very soon be in the past, and actually the incoming generation has a more enlightened attitude?’” As lazily defeatist and fallacious as Wark’s sentiment is, it’s not an uncommon one to encounter in middle-class yummy mummy circles.
Fathers are guilty of similar attitudes. Earlier this year, I came across an excellent thread on X written by PhD history student Lottie Lewis, in which she coined the phrase “privileged daughter cajoling.” PDC-ing, she argued, is hugely responsible for why so many public figures have retreated in cowardice or become vapid mouthpieces for causes like gender ideology. Lewis highlights former Blairite Chief Press Officer and The Rest Is Politics co-host Alistair Campbell as a prime example. Campbell, by his own admission, formed his (exceptionally uninformed) views on the trans issue based on what his privately educated, “sex positive feminist” podcaster daughter Grace told him to think (namely: J.K. Rowling is a big meanie).
Campbell is a particularly noteworthy example, because his inexplicably popular podcast The Rest Is Politics is manna for centrist dads and upper normies across Britain, who view him and his mid-wit co-host Rory Stewart as having their finger on the zeitgeist. Like the mothers of woke daughters who are happy to dismiss their sexed reality in exchange for a cooler, more radical-sounding “gender identity,” Campbell passively indulges his daughter’s extremely cosseted outlook. This behavior is mimicked by countless Argyle-sweater-wearing fathers at the heads of dining tables up and down the country.
The power of Privileged Daughter Cajoling is, as the phrase suggests, hugely rooted in class. This cannot be overstated. However, because the wealth-to-woke pipeline has been adequately dissected by many other skeptics of progressivism, I want to focus on the fact that is young females, in particular, who wield such cultural influence and whose views are treated with such blind deference by their elders.
Greta Thunberg and the Guilty Grown-Ups
It’s almost impossible to think of a better case study of Privileged Daughter Cajoling than Greta Thunberg. Greta skyrocketed into the public consciousness in 2018 at fifteen years old, quickly becoming the face of the climate change movement. Greta’s bougie show-business parents permitted her to drop out of school to dedicate herself full-time to climate activism.
The “Greta Effect,” as it is known, led young people across the globe to devote themselves to collective climate action, intent on saving the world. What’s more, a great deal of their parents and teachers enthusiastically deferred to Greta’s orders as well, readily supporting her school strike campaign. Somewhat ironically, educational establishments—despite the number of absences she’s caused—cannot hold her up highly enough as a role model for teenage girls. I know from working in an all-girls private school and in libraries of every sector, that her face appears beside that of Michelle Obama, Emma Watson, and Malala Yousafzai on any International Women’s Day display. (The latter two, of course, are case studies of young female political power in their own right.)
In more recent years, Greta expanded her focus from the climate crisis—an all-consuming enough cause, one would think—to trans rights and pro-Palestinian activism. I remember vividly the footage of her during Eurovision 2024, protesting in Mälmo against the inclusion of an Israeli singer to the competition. “And once again, young people are leading the way,” she said smugly to a camera, her keffiyeh folded over her shoulders like resting angel’s wings.
If it sounds like I am taking a cheap swing at Greta, I’m not. If anything, I’m dismayed and worried about the figure of ridicule she’s fast becoming. It is entirely unsurprising that Greta carries herself with the air of a secular prophet. What person subjected to such attention and adoration on a global level at age fifteen wouldn’t? As with Twilight, Greta’s delusions of infallibility are less important than the question of why so many grown-ups were eager to put the weight of the world onto the shoulders of a precocious teenage girl.
Timing is one important factor. It is not a coincidence that Greta’s sudden rise to international fame happened midway through the first presidency of Donald J. Trump. Young Greta was the angel-faced antithesis to the toupéed devil: female, articulate beyond her years, on a mission to unify people to heal the Earth, as opposed to divide them and exploit its resources. Her appeal, though, went beyond symbolism. Her defiance and innocence tapped into both the righteousness of a young generation bitterly resentful of the racism, small-mindedness, and ignorance that they believed had moved their elders to vote for Trump. More pertinently, Greta played on the guilt of said angry youths’ liberal parents, who felt their children’s—particularly their daughters’—futures had been threatened. It was their fellow grown-ups who had placed a climate-denying misogynist in charge of the free world. In atonement for this sin, adults must allow young people—young women—to take the lead.
Greta pulled no punches in her condemnation of grown-ups, as evidenced by her famous 2019 “How dare you!” speech at the United Nations Climate Action Summit. In playing to, rather than playing down, her adolescent fury, she challenged the passions of angry, social-justice obsessed teens; those who wanted to shout at authority figures could live vicariously through her. Likewise, their guilty parents could repent by showing unfettered admiration for her.
Two Sides of the Same Sexist Coin
I freely admit there are overwhelming positives to a society that is keen to empower its young women. I’m not here to criticize initiatives encouraging women to enter STEM fields or engage in politics, and I’m thankful for the development of curricula that include the work of outstanding and overlooked female thinkers. Still, encouraging the development of a strong mind is not the same as worshipping false wisdom. Young women should have access to demanding education and opportunities to use it. They should not, however, be immune to criticism or exempted from the need to consider the hard-earned wisdom of previous generations.
The truth is, treating our teenage girls like punchlines and treating them like prophets are two sides of the same sexist coin. Both stem from the idea that adolescent girls are just too precious to be able to handle certain things, whether PG-rated vampire erotica or being robustly rebuffed or challenged on idealistic but impractical ideologies they might fall prey too. One side demonizes girls’ precociousness, the other deifies it.
The saying goes that the age you become famous is the age your life freezes. For Greta Thunberg, this perhaps applies even more to how the rest of the world sees her. At the age of twenty-two, her image is still that of an adolescent girl. This might never change, regardless of how much she ages.
What has changed is Greta’s reputation and public standing. Since the flotilla fiasco in June, when she illegally entered Israel and was politely but swiftly deported, a stunt she has since repeated with the same consequences, Greta has officially fallen from prophet to punchline. Her behavior and her outrageous claims that she was the victim of a “kidnapping” are certainly deserving of criticism. Nonetheless, she does not deserve the gleeful, misogynistic frenzy that has erupted online.
An unflattering picture of her glaring from aboard her flotilla, with a slight double chin and bob-haircut, has generated something of a competition online to see who can caption it with the best playground bully insult. Many have compared her looks to those of an oompa loompa. Beneath the childish venom, there’s a palpable sense of satisfaction that now, as a legal adult, Greta is fair game for the cruellest vitriol. The false prophetess has been exposed. She is and always was just a stupid little girl.Buried somewhere in this mess—between the misguided feminist overcorrection that exalts young girls as golden calves and the misogynistic backlash that derides them as ignorant, ugly cows—is a lesson for us all. It is high time for us to learn to respect young women as simply human.
