Dear Daughter (Part 3): The New Face of Patriarchy Wears Lip Gloss
Beware the femo/womanosphere
Don’t miss parts 1 & 2 of the Dear Daughter series:
Dear Daughter,
You’ve heard all about the manosphere—that online echo chamber where fragile masculinity cosplays as deep-man philosophy. Well, guess what? It’s coming for girls now, rebranded as the “womanosphere” or “femosphere.”1 Behind the cottagecore filters, milkmaid dresses, and blissed-out tradwives lies a darker message whispered to young women: your highest calling is to be skinny and fertile. Submit to your man—but stay secretly in control.
It might sound like a joke to your progressive ears but this is serious. We didn’t think boys would fall for it but the manosphere was persistent. And clever. They capitalized on the very real crisis of loneliness and economic instability haunting young men. And here we are with an anti-woman, pro-fascism President whose victory is widely attributed to those pushing the manosphere agenda.
The womanosphere or femosphere is no different. It is homing in on the miseries that girls and young women hear again and again from their mothers and older sisters—that this life isn’t sustainable, that childcare demands impact their ability to get ahead in careers, that their labor is at best invisible and at worst demeaned, and that their partners are threatened by their success.
It’s true. Women are buckling under the pressure of competing work and childcare demands. But instead of fighting for things like paid leave and affordable childcare, or demanding that men join the modern age and become equal partners to them, the womanosphere offers a glossy rewind to the days when women were expected to find fulfillment only as wives and mothers, taking on most of the domestic labor (with a smile) and submitting to their husbands.
It is a gender-essentialist view that says if we just accept our maternal instincts and stop trying to be like men who build stuff, we’ll be happier. That we should stop taking men’s jobs so they can earn money and spoil us. That if we make them feel like “real men,” they’ll be less likely to beat us physically and bruise us emotionally.
Our rights to our own bodies—to appreciate them regardless of what they weigh, to decide when and if we want children, to love who we love, and to express our identities freely—are framed as threats to the natural order and the cause of our pain and confusion.
If we could just stop wanting so much (read: our full identities) everything would be better.
Because I always want to know what women’s liberation is up against, I signed up to receive Evie—a magazine like Cosmo but for married wannabe cowgirls—and came across gems like: “skinny sex is the best sex” and diatribes on the perils of “mediocre motherhood”. These are all the traps that have undermined women for so long—it’s hard to believe we’re back here again.
So here are a few things you’ll need to remain conscious of as you slowly, unwittingly absorb the cultural romancing of being a “traditional woman.”
Listen closely…