The Pick Me Girl Over the Generations: From Snow White's Glass Coffin to Karoline Leavitt's Podium
- Ash A Milton
- 1 day ago
- 28 min read
She's everywhere right now. She's the woman in the comment section assuring everyone that she doesn't get offended by jokes. She's the podcast guest nodding along as the host explains why women are too emotional to lead. She's the influencer whose entire brand is telling other women they're doing femininity wrong. She's the "I'm not like other girls" girl — grown up, rebranded, and more media-savvy than ever.
She's the Pick Me Woman. And she's not a new phenomenon. She's just found a bigger stage.
What Is a "Pick Me," Really?
The term started as Gen Z slang — a woman who seeks male approval by distancing herself from other women, often by criticizing, undermining, or dismissing feminist concerns. But the behavior is as old as patriarchy itself.
Pick Me energy is what happens when women internalize the message that male approval is the most valuable currency available to them — and decide the fastest way to get it is to throw the rest of womankind under the bus.
It looks like: "I actually agree with the men on this one." It sounds like: "Women are so dramatic." It performs as: "I don't need feminism — I have common sense."
And it's effective. At least in the short term. Men applaud. Platforms grow. Book deals happen. The woman gets "picked."
Until she doesn't need to be anymore — at which point she discovers that the men who cheered her on never actually respected her. They just enjoyed the show.
It's Not a New Trick
History is littered with women who built their platforms on publicly opposing other women's liberation.
When suffragettes were marching and getting force-fed in prisons, there were women's anti-suffrage leagues — populated by women who genuinely argued that other women shouldn't have the right to vote. They wrote pamphlets. They signed petitions. They were celebrated by the men in power and held up as proof that women themselves didn't want equality.
When the Equal Rights Amendment was gaining momentum in the 1970s, Phyllis Schlafly built an entire political career on opposing it. Her argument? That equal rights would destroy the special protections women already enjoyed. What she didn't mention: those "protections" were the same legal frameworks that allowed marital rape, employment discrimination, and the denial of credit to women without a male cosigner.
The Pick Me Woman has always been a useful tool for the patriarchy. She provides cover. She says the quiet part loud so men don't have to. She allows the people in power to point and say: "See? Even the women agree."
A Century of Progress — And the Resistance to It
To understand the Pick Me Woman, you have to understand what she is reacting against. And to understand that, you have to zoom out — all the way out — to the very beginning.
The first recorded marriage ceremony dates to Mesopotamia, roughly 2350 B.C. It was not a love story. It was a property transfer. A woman moved from her father's ownership to her husband's. Her consent was not a legal requirement. Her happiness was not the point. Her body, her labor, her children, and her future belonged — legally, socially, and in most religious frameworks — to the man she was given to.
For nearly four thousand years, that was the deal. It was not presented as a deal, of course. It was presented as nature. As divine order. As the way things simply were and had always been and would always be. The institution of marriage, the expectation of motherhood, the centering of a woman's entire existence around a man's needs — these were not choices most women made. They were conditions most women were born into, so thoroughly woven into law, religion, culture, and story that the language to question them, let alone the freedom to refuse them, was largely unavailable.
And then, slowly, agonizingly, generation by generation, that began to change.
The Long March Forward
Silent Generation (born 1928–1945)
Silent Generation women came of age in a world where the options were starkly binary for most: marry, or be pitied. Higher education existed for women, but largely for those of elite or upper-middle-class backgrounds, and even then it was widely understood to be a finishing school for better wives. Most women could not open a bank account without a male cosigner. If a husband was violent, the law largely looked away. If he raped her, it was not legally recognized as rape in most jurisdictions at all.
Their Disney princess was Snow White (1937) — beautiful, gentle, domestically gifted, and almost entirely passive. She cleaned house for seven men while waiting for a prince she had met exactly once to come and save her. The glass coffin was not incidental to the story. It was the story: a woman preserved, motionless, beautiful, waiting for a man to animate her life. For many Silent Generation women, that was not fantasy. It was expectation dressed up in a ball gown.
Their soundtrack was largely compliance. The music women were permitted to make was decorative — harmonies behind men, love songs written about them rather than by them. The women who stepped outside that frame — Billie Holiday singing "Strange Fruit," Nina Simone demanding to be seen — were not celebrated by mainstream culture. They were tolerated, or punished, or both.
And then, right at the edge of that era, came a 17-year-old named Lesley Gore who stood on a stage in 1963 and shook her finger at the entire premise. "You Don't Own Me" reached number two on the U.S. charts — kept from the top only by the Beatles — and announced, in plain language, something that had never quite been said so directly in a pop song: a woman is not a possession. Gore still closed her shows with it four decades later, saying she simply couldn't find anything stronger. Wikipedia It was, in the most literal sense, the article's entire closing argument set to music — and it arrived sixty years before we needed to write that argument down.
And yet — even here, the cracks were forming. The Silent Generation produced Betty Friedan, who in 1963 published The Feminine Mystique and named "the problem that has no name": the suffocating emptiness of a life reduced to housewifery for women who wanted more. She didn't invent the feeling. She gave millions of women the language for something they had been told they weren't allowed to feel.
Baby Boomers (born 1946–1964)
Baby Boomers inherited that crack and blew it wide open. They marched. They organized. They lobbied Congress and changed laws. Title IX in 1972 meant girls could compete. Roe v. Wade in 1973 established constitutional protection for a woman's bodily autonomy.
Two Supreme Court rulings created the foundational legal architecture for that autonomy. Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) established by a 7-2 majority that the Constitution protects married couples' right to use contraceptives without government restriction — the first time the Court recognized a constitutional right to privacy. Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) then extended that right to all individuals, with Justice Brennan writing that "if the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child." These two rulings together gave women legal ownership of their own reproductive decisions. They are, right now, in the crosshairs.
The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 added another critical layer. It amended Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to explicitly prohibit sex discrimination on the basis of pregnancy — a protection that had to be legislated because the Supreme Court had ruled just two years earlier that firing a pregnant employee did not constitute sex discrimination. Congress looked at that ruling and fixed it. That is how progress works: imperfectly, painfully, one fight at a time.
And while lawmakers were arguing about women's bodies in courtrooms, Loretta Lynn was making the argument in a different register entirely. Her 1975 country song "The Pill" — a plainspoken, comic-tinged celebration of birth control — was banned by approximately 60 radio stations. She had recorded it in 1972 but her label held it back three years, fearing the conservative country music world wasn't ready. When it was finally released, rural doctors reportedly thanked her, telling her the song had done more to promote acceptance of contraception in their communities than any pamphlet ever had. She nearly got banned from the Grand Ole Opry for singing it. She sang it three times anyway and told them they could shove the Opry if they didn't like it.
Their Disney princesses were Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1959) — still largely passive, still dependent on a prince. Cinderella at least had longing encoded in her ambition. Aurora didn't even get to be conscious for most of her own story.
Their soundtrack began to shift. Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman" (1971) became an accidental battle cry, roaring up the charts at the same moment women were marching for the ERA. Reddy wrote it because she couldn't find a song that expressed how she felt about being a woman — so she wrote one herself. She thanked God "because She makes everything possible." Carole King's Tapestry (1971) proved that a woman writing about her own interior life with authority and specificity could produce one of the best-selling albums in history. And then there was Loretta Lynn — not performing feminism but living it, song by song, banned record by banned record.
Generation X (born 1965–1980)
Generation X — my generation — grew up in the aftermath of those battles and made a different kind of progress, quieter but no less significant. We were among the first generation of girls told, with some sincerity, that we could be anything. The stories changed. We had Princess Leia instead of Sleeping Beauty. We had Mia Hamm winning World Cups. We had Murphy Brown choosing single motherhood on primetime television.
And we had Dana Scully — and that one matters more than it might sound. The Scully Effect, documented by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, found that many women who grew up watching The X-Files were measurably more likely to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Not inspired in a vague, motivational-poster way — actually redirected, in documented numbers, toward STEM fields they might never have entered had they not watched a woman be brilliant, competent, and uncompromising on their television screens every week. That is what representation actually does in the real world, with real consequences for real women's lives.
Our Disney princesses showed that cultural shift in real time. Ariel (1989) in The Little Mermaid had desires, curiosity, and a hunger for more than her world offered — and she also gave up her voice for a man she had never spoken to. She surrendered the literal instrument of her self-expression in exchange for the ability to pursue a prince who didn't know she existed. Millions of little girls filed that lesson away without knowing they were filing it. Belle (1991) read books and refused the handsome suitor — and then fell in love with her captor, which carries its own complicated freight. Mulan (1998) picked up a sword, went to war in her father's place, and saved China — and then Disney tacked on a romantic subplot at the end, Li Shang appearing at her door because apparently saving an entire civilization wasn't a complete story without a man arriving to signal the ending. Even in a genuinely revolutionary film, the studio couldn't quite commit to letting a woman's story end on her own terms. Some habits run very deep.
We also had the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 — landmark legislation that said, for the first time with federal teeth, that violence against women in their own homes was a crime, not a domestic matter. That a woman was entitled to safety even within marriage.
Our soundtrack shifted accordingly. No Doubt spent the 1990s being loud, ska-punk, and impossible to ignore, and Gwen Stefani's "Just a Girl" (1995) is one of the sharpest pieces of feminist irony ever to hit mainstream radio — a woman performing exaggerated helplessness to expose exactly how patronizing the expectation of female helplessness actually is. The joke was on anyone who didn't get the joke. Meredith Brooks' "Bitch" (1997) did something equally radical: it refused to resolve. The woman in the song is contradictory, complicated, difficult, and unapologetic about all of it. No tidy ending. No apology. Just the full, messy reality of being a woman who contains multitudes. Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill (1995) arrived like a hand grenade thrown through the window of the Cool Girl mythology — a woman expressing fury, betrayal, and irony with such unfiltered specificity that it made half the listening public deeply uncomfortable. That discomfort was the point. Tori Amos was mapping the interior landscape of female pain and desire with a piano and a refusal to soften anything. TLC told women to leave men who didn't treat them right. Shania Twain — operating within country music's conservative constraints — still found room to declare "Man! I Feel Like a Woman" and mean it as liberation rather than performance.
Millennials (born 1981–1996)
Millennials grew up with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hermione Granger, and Beyoncé declaring herself a feminist in forty-foot letters at the VMAs. They grew up with the internet, which meant they could find each other — feminist theory, survivor communities, women across the globe asking the same questions. They gave us #MeToo, which didn't just name what was happening to women — it named who was doing it, out loud, with receipts, in public.
Their Disney princesses reflected that shift. Tiana (2009) was defined not primarily by who she loved but by what she worked for — a dream, a business plan, and the grit to pursue it. Rapunzel (2010) escaped her tower under her own curiosity and determination. Both men are flawed and primarily follow the female lead. The women still have to settle.
The Millennial soundtrack was the loudest feminist statement popular music had made since Helen Reddy. Beyoncé built an entire visual album, Lemonade (2016), around Black female pain, resilience, and sovereignty. Lady Gaga was dismantling beauty standards and sexual politics in real time on the pop charts. Lily Allen's "Hard Out Here" (2013) skewered the music industry's treatment of women with a precision that made several executives visibly uncomfortable. P!nk spent the entire decade refusing to be decorative and paid a commercial price for it that she never seemed to notice or care about. Where other pop women of the era were carefully managed into palatability, P!nk was doing aerial acrobatics over stadium crowds while singing about a bad marriage, a complicated mother, and the specific exhaustion of being expected to perform happiness — and doing it all with the kind of physical and emotional fearlessness that made teenage girls understand, sometimes for the first time, that strength was not the opposite of feeling. And Taylor Swift was beginning to reclaim her own narrative — a process that would accelerate into one of the most politically significant uses of a pop platform the U.S. had seen.
Generation Z (born 1997–2012)
Generation Z arrived already fluent in the language of identity, rights, and intersectionality. They watched Christine Blasey Ford testify before the Senate and watched it not be enough. They watched Roe v. Wade fall in 2022 — a constitutional protection that had existed their entire lives, gone in a single ruling. They responded — at the ballot box, in the streets, on their phones — with a fury that is still building.
Their Disney princesses finally centered something other than romantic love. Brave (2012) gave us Merida, who simply did not want to be married — full stop — and the entire film is her fighting for the right to determine her own fate, with no love interest and no rescue. Frozen (2013) arrived like a small detonation in the Disney formula: Hans is a villain, the prince is the trap, and the act of true love that saves the day is a sister choosing her sister over her own survival. It took Disney 76 years to say out loud that female solidarity saves the day. Moana (2016) sailed an ocean and restored the heart of Te Fiti — not for love, but because she was called and because she was capable.
Gen Z's resistance isn't only political — it's artistic, and it's finding massive audiences.
Paris Paloma's "Labour" (2023) became one of the defining feminist documents of the decade before most people had heard her name. The British singer-songwriter's indie folk ballad catalogs the invisible, endless, unreciprocated work women perform in relationships — "therapist, mother, maid / nymph then a virgin, nurse then a servant / just an appendage, live to attend him / so that he never lifts a finger" — with the exhausted precision of someone who has been keeping the accounts for a very long time. It went viral on TikTok weeks before its official release, women across the globe using the sound to share their own experiences of misogyny and domestic labor. The most extraordinary version came a year later: Labour: The Cacophony — a re-recording featuring the voices of hundreds of women of all ages who answered Paloma's call, their voices layered into a choir of accumulated female experience that spans generations. Children's voices are audible in the mix. The cycle she is singing about, the song insists, begins early.
Morgan St. Jean's "Not All Men" (2021) built its devastating argument on a single lyrical pivot: from "it's not all men, but it's some of them" to "it's not all men, but it's all women." Most women walk faster after midnight. Most women have run the mental calculation of how to get from point A to point B safely. The song went viral overnight, built a community of women sharing their own experiences, and helped launch what St. Jean calls "feminist pop."
Dua Lipa closed Future Nostalgia (2020) not with a dance floor banger but with a chamber pop reckoning — "Boys Will Be Boys" catalogs with quiet fury everything girls do by second nature to stay safe: walking home before dark, keys between knuckles, laughing off the fear, covering up to avoid the comment. The chorus flips the oldest excuse in the patriarchal playbook on its head: boys will be boys, but girls will be women — four words that name exactly what this article is about, the forced, unearned, unreciprocated maturity demanded of girls from the moment they are old enough to attract male attention.
Lydia the Bard's "Feed Us Your Girls" (2025) takes Little Red Riding Hood — that oldest cautionary tale told to girls about the danger of existing in public — and turns it inside out. The wolves don't lurk in distant forests. They wait on busy streets. "Boys will be boys, wolves will be wolves," the song observes, with the cold clarity of a woman who has been told this her entire life, "but what does mother know?" It is three and a half minutes of folk music doing what the best folk music has always done: naming the thing most people can see and few will say.
Gen Z also has Olivia Rodrigo writing breakup songs so viscerally specific they feel like testimony, Chappell Roan becoming an unlikely icon by being loudly and defiantly herself at a moment when the algorithm was pushing young women toward softness and submission, and Doja Cat refusing to be contained by any single genre or expectation. The music Gen Z women are making and consuming is not small. It is not decorative. It does not apologize.
The Point Is Not to Judge. It Is to Illuminate.
Here is what a century of progress looks like: with each generation, many more women have had greater rights, more freedoms, stronger legal protections, more economic independence, and more stories that reflect their full humanity. The patriarchy has been losing its grip — slowly, unevenly, with vicious backlash at every step — but losing it nonetheless.
And with each generation, the Pick Me Woman has adapted. Because the Pick Me Woman is not merely a personality type. She is a response to a system. She is what happens when women are still being rewarded — in approval, in platforms, in safety, in social belonging — for centering men. As long as she thrives, the work is not done.
This article is not a trial. It is not a verdict. The women named here are not monsters — most of them are intelligent, capable, and in many cases genuinely talented, and every single one of them was shaped by the same world that shapes all of us.
The question this article asks — the question every woman deserves the chance to ask herself — is this:
Am I doing what I genuinely want? Or am I doing what thousands of years of institutional conditioning have trained me to want?
There is no shame in the asking. The shame belongs to the system that made the question so hard to answer.
Marriage can be beautiful. Motherhood can be profound. Choosing to build a life centered around family and partnership can be an act of genuine fulfillment. But it must be a choice. A real one — made with full knowledge of the alternatives, full legal protection to pursue them, and full understanding that a woman's worth is not contingent on whether any man has selected her.
A Hall of Shame: Pick Me Women Through the Generations
The Silent Generation (born 1928–1945): The Gracious Deferrer
Marynia Farnham, co-author of the 1947 book Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, argued that feminism had made women neurotic and their natural fulfillment lay in domesticity and deference. She was a psychiatrist — with a medical degree she earned while publishing work telling other women that careers would diminish them. Dorothy Thompson, one of the most prominent journalists of her era, spent significant energy warning that women's liberation would destabilize the family — this from a woman who had built an international career that most men of her time could only dream of.
They were often sincere. They had also been taught, from early in their lives, that their security depended on a man's approval. The system that created them deserves as much examination as they do.
Baby Boomers (born 1946–1964): The "I Did It Without Help" Woman
Phyllis Schlafly successfully campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment while employing a full staff to manage her home and children — a staff she could afford precisely because she had a thriving career as a lawyer, activist, and author. She campaigned against the ERA until she died — just long enough to endorse the candidate who appointed the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade.
Camille Paglia built a significant career on agreeing with men that feminism was hysterical and that women who were assaulted had likely made poor choices. Ann Coulter once argued in print that women shouldn't have the right to vote — the right that women were imprisoned and force-fed to secure — and has built a multi-decade career saying whatever powerful men in the room were hoping a woman would say.
The Boomer Pick Me's signature line: "In my day, we just worked hard and didn't complain." Translation: "I survived something difficult, therefore it should remain difficult for everyone."
Generation X (born 1965–1980): The "Cool Girl" Apologist
Gillian Flynn diagnosed the Gen X Cool Girl precisely in Gone Girl — the woman who performs effortless ease and agreeability for male approval — though Flynn herself was dissecting the trap, not endorsing it.
Katie Roiphe published The Morning After in 1993, arguing date rape statistics were overblown and feminists were turning women into victims. She was 25. She was celebrated by every prominent male commentator in the U.S. Christina Hoff Sommers rebranded as the "Equity Feminist" — the kind men approved of — and found a permanent home at the American Enterprise Institute arguing that boys were the real victims of gender politics. Wendy McElroy argued so persistently against the Violence Against Women Act that she became a go-to citation for men's rights activists for decades, framing it as libertarian principle while the men citing her framed it as proof that even women knew feminists were lying.
The Gen X Pick Me's signature line: "I'm not a feminist, but I believe in equality." Which is, of course, the definition of feminism.
Millennials (born 1981–1996): The "Accountability" Influencer
Pearl — the "How to Be Feminine" TikToker and YouTuber — built a large following telling women to be softer, more submissive, and less ambitious, framing diminished expectations as enlightenment. Meghan Murphy started as a legitimate feminist critic and ended up a reliable ally to conservative men who had never shown concern for women's rights. Candace Owens built a media empire on telling conservative men everything they wanted to hear — arguing against the Violence Against Women Act and framing reproductive rights as a conspiracy against Black families. She is extremely good at her job, which is being useful to people who do not have her best interests at heart.
And then there is Karoline Leavitt — perhaps the most polished Pick Me the genre has produced, and the one who should concern us most.
At 27, Leavitt became the youngest White House Press Secretary in U.S. history. She is sharp, telegenic, and composed under pressure. She also stands at a podium defending an administration systematically dismantling every legal protection that made her career possible — the Title IX-protected education, the workplace discrimination laws, the reproductive autonomy to plan her family on her own timeline. She presents herself as proof that women have already won, while the women who will never stand at that podium are losing healthcare access, workplace protections, and reproductive rights in real time.
The Pick Me Woman is most dangerous not when she is obviously retrograde, but when she is young, accomplished, and standing in rooms that look like progress. Karoline Leavitt is the current high-water mark of that danger.
The Millennial Pick Me's signature line: "I used to be a feminist until I actually did the research." The research, invariably, was a lengthy podcast hosted by a man with no interest in primary sources.
Generation Z (born 1997–2012): The "Trad" TikToker
Estee Williams (@traditionalgirl_) amassed millions of followers with videos about "being a lady," letting men lead, and why feminism made women miserable — content that TikTok's own internal research has shown the platform pushes aggressively to young female users regardless of whether they sought it out. Hannah Neeleman (Ballerina Farm) presents a more aspirational version: the former Juilliard-trained dancer on a Utah ranch with eight children, making butter from scratch. The fantasy is real. The replicability, for most women, is not. Sydney Watson built her U.S. audience by telling men on podcasts that feminism was an illness and women secretly wanted to be led — skilled, rhetorically sharp, and entirely in service of an audience that views her as a performing curiosity rather than a peer.
What distinguishes Gen Z's moment is the machinery behind it — and the ferocity of the pushback against it. These young women are often being used by platforms that have discovered gender backlash content drives extraordinary engagement. Many don't know it yet. But many do. And they are writing songs about it.
The Gen Z Pick Me's signature line: "I just think there's something beautiful about traditional femininity." There is. There is also something beautiful about a woman on the open ocean navigating by the stars, and a girl in a red cloak who knows the woods better than the wolf does.
The Internalized Misogyny Pipeline
Pick Me Women are not the enemy. They are a symptom.
Internalized misogyny is what happens when women absorb the message — delivered relentlessly by culture, religion, media, and family — that women are less than. That a woman who advocates for herself is a problem, but a woman who advocates for men's interests is admirably reasonable.
Pick Me behavior is, in many cases, a survival strategy. In environments where female solidarity is punished and male approval is the primary path to safety, influence, or resources, distancing yourself from other women can feel rational. Looking at women like Schlafly, Coulter, Roiphe, and Owens across decades, we see the same pattern: real intelligence, real capability — all pointed in the direction of the people already in power, because that's where the reward was.
There is also a multi-million dollar infrastructure specifically funding and producing anti-feminist female voices. Organizations like the Heritage Foundation, PragerU, and the Daily Wire have made deliberate strategic investments in platforming women who will publicly argue against women's rights. Candace Owens didn't simply find an organic audience — she was elevated by a well-funded media apparatus. It reframes the Pick Me Woman not only as a personal choice but as a manufactured product, which should make us angrier at the factory than at the worker.
The Complicated Case of Hillary Clinton
Hillary Rodham Clinton is not a simple case. She is a Yale-educated lawyer who championed children's rights before it was politically fashionable, who withstood decades of misogynistic attacks with composure that would have broken most people, who shattered enough ceilings that the shards are still falling. To call her simply a Pick Me would be reductive and unfair to a genuinely complex political figure.
And yet.
The feminist case about Hillary Clinton is not about her ambition or her policy record. It's about the specific and repeated moments when she chose proximity to male power over solidarity with women who needed it — and the cost of those choices to real people.
When Bill Clinton's affairs became public, Clinton allies actively participated in the public discrediting of those women. Monica Lewinsky was characterized as a troubled stalker — a framing that served Hillary's political interests and required no pushback from her. Juanita Broaddrick, who accused Bill Clinton of rape, was largely disappeared from mainstream feminist discourse. Hillary's silence was loud enough to fill considerable space.
Then there is the Epstein question. When the Epstein files began their heavily redacted release, the Clintons' documented social relationship with Jeffrey Epstein became impossible to ignore. Bill Clinton flew on Epstein's plane, repeatedly. The flight logs are not in dispute. Hillary Clinton's public response has been essentially silence — a studied absence that would be notable from anyone, and is extraordinary from a woman who built a global brand on advocating for women and girls.
None of this erases what Hillary Clinton genuinely achieved. Complexity is not the same as absolution. But here is the uncomfortable truth her case forces into the open: it is possible to champion women's rights as an abstraction while betraying specific women in practice. That is not feminism. That is feminism as costume — worn when useful, removed when inconvenient.
The 19th Amendment, Birth Control, and the Fight That Isn't Over
Here is something that should not need saying in 2026, and yet must be said clearly:
The right to birth control is not safe. The 19th Amendment is not safe. We are being asked to go backward, and the answer must be no.
The two Supreme Court rulings that established the constitutional right to contraception — Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) — are now explicitly targeted for reversal. Justice Clarence Thomas has made clear he wants the Court's majority to overturn Griswold, the foundational case for the legal right to birth control. This is not speculation. It is a justice of the Supreme Court stating in a written concurrence that a six-decade precedent protecting the most basic reproductive privacy should be eliminated.
Project 2025 seeks to severely undermine two cornerstones of U.S. contraceptive provision: Title X, the national publicly funded family planning program, and the federal contraceptive coverage guarantee of the Affordable Care Act. The plan proposes allowing any employer to deny contraceptive coverage for any reason, removing emergency contraception from ACA coverage requirements, and inserting personhood language into federal policy that could effectively outlaw IUDs and certain hormonal contraceptives. The same forces that overturned Roe are coming for birth control.
The lesson of Roe v. Wade is instructive: a constitutional right can be dismantled not only through dramatic reversal but through decades of incremental restriction that hollow it out from the inside. The same strategy is now being applied to contraception.
The federal legislative path to protecting contraception has been repeatedly blocked — Senate Republicans have voted against the Right to Contraception Act multiple times. That leaves the states, and the states are where this fight must happen right now. Women, advocacy organizations, and state legislators in every state where it is politically viable need to push for the codification of contraceptive rights in state statute — explicit, durable, freestanding state law that does not depend on Griswold surviving intact and cannot be eliminated by a future Supreme Court ruling.
Loretta Lynn nearly got thrown out of the Grand Ole Opry for singing about the pill. The least we can do is show up for the state legislative session.
A Word to the Pick Me Woman Herself
We see you. We understand, more than you might expect, why you're doing what you're doing. The approval feels real. The platform feels real. The sense of being chosen, elevated, set apart from the ordinary complaints of ordinary women — that feels real too.
But ask yourself one honest question: When the men who are applauding you right now no longer need you — when you have served your purpose as the female face of their argument — where will you be?
Schlafly spent a lifetime campaigning for a party that never gave her the political power she deserved. Coulter has watched the movement she helped build turn on women like her when they became inconvenient. The tradwife influencers whose marriages end discover that the audience that cheered for their submission has very little interest in their survival.
The approval of men who don't respect women is not love. It is not security. It is not freedom. It is a performance review — and the moment your performance no longer serves their interests, the review ends.
You are more than the exception they need you to be. You always were. The door is open. Come when you're ready.
What Every Generation Can Learn From the Others
Here is what the generational view reveals: every generation has been both right and wrong, both brave and complicit, both visionary and blind in ways it couldn't yet see.
The Silent Generation knew something about endurance and the private courage required to survive within a system you cannot yet openly challenge. They also modeled a dangerous accommodation — making peace with oppression and calling it contentment. The lesson they offer: survival is not the same as freedom. Naming the problem, even quietly, even to yourself, is the beginning of something.
Baby Boomers showed us what organized collective action can accomplish — laws changed, institutions moved, rights established. They also showed us how quickly a generation can convince itself that the work is finished once its own battles are won. The lesson they offer: structural victories require structural vigilance. A right written into law still requires people willing to defend it.
Generation X showed us the cost of buying into "post-feminism" — of accepting the cultural message that the work was done and the women still fighting were killjoys. We got the benefits of battles we were told had already been won, and many of us didn't pay close enough attention until the rollback was already underway. The lesson we offer: skepticism toward the narrative that equality has been achieved is not pessimism. It is accuracy.
Millennials showed us that personal storytelling at scale — #MeToo, viral testimony, communities built online — can shift cultural conversation faster than any previous generation thought possible. They also revealed the limits: shifting the conversation is not the same as changing the law. The lesson they offer: cultural change and legal protection must advance together. One without the other is incomplete.
Generation Z is showing us that the resistance can be joyful, creative, and musical — that the political and the artistic are not separate projects. The lesson they are still teaching: fury is a legitimate response to injustice. Organize the fury. Vote. Create. Do not let the algorithm tell you what to think about your own life.
And the lesson all generations must pass to the next is the most fundamental one of all:
Question what you have been taught. Ask yourself what you actually believe.
We have all been shaped by a culture that, for thousands of years, told women their value was relational — defined by their fathers, their husbands, their children, their usefulness to men. That message is encoded in our stories, our religions, our laws, and our neural pathways. It does not disappear because we intellectually reject it. It requires active, ongoing interrogation.
The question is not whether you choose marriage or children or domesticity. The question is whether you have genuinely chosen — with full knowledge of the alternatives, full legal protection to pursue them, and full awareness of the conditioning that shapes every desire we think is purely our own.
Which brings us to something that should require no argument in 2026 and yet still does:
Child marriage is not a tradition. It is a human rights abuse.
As of July 2025, child marriage is legal in 34 U.S. states. Between 2000 and 2021, roughly 315,000 minors were legally married in the United States. The vast majority — approximately 86% — were minor girls married to adult men. In many of these marriages, minors were wed at ages below the legal age of sexual consent. Children in these marriages typically cannot file for divorce, cannot seek a protective order, and cannot leave without being classified as runaways.
This is happening in the U.S. Right now. In 34 states. The common factor in virtually every case, advocates consistently note, is a patriarchal desire to control a girl's body. It is the Mesopotamian property transfer, still operational, dressed up in a marriage license.
Every woman who cares about women's freedom must also care about this. There is no version of feminist progress that leaves child brides behind.
Generation Alpha (born 2013–2025): The Generation We're Still Writing
Here's where the story gets to change.
Generation Alpha is the first generation to grow up entirely in the post-#MeToo world. They are watching, in real time, the consequences of electing leaders who dismiss women's rights. They are online earlier than any generation before them — which means the algorithms are coming for them earlier, too.
But they can see the whole pattern. The receipts are all there. Project 2025's full text is publicly available. The history of what happened to women before they had legal rights is documented, digitized, and searchable.
And they are growing up watching women who refuse to perform smallness. Simone Biles walked away from an Olympic stage, was called a quitter by everyone with a platform, returned to win four more medals, and never apologized. Amanda Gorman claimed the inaugural podium at 22 with complete authority. Malala Yousafzai was shot for wanting an education and responded by founding a global organization. Taylor Swift used the largest platform in popular music to drive tens of thousands of voter registrations with a single post. Reese Witherspoon got tired of reading scripts where female characters had no agency, built Hello Sunshine into a $900 million media company, and created a Filmmaker Lab to teach girls aged 13 to 18 how to tell their own stories. Geena Davis turned her experience of Hollywood's limitations into a research institute that documents gender disparity with scientific precision — giving the Scully Effect its name and its receipts. Rihanna built a beauty empire on the radical premise that every skin tone deserved to exist, retained ownership of her brand, and performed at the Super Bowl while visibly pregnant without hiding or minimizing her body.
And Generation Alpha has Raya (2021) — Disney's warrior princess tasked with rebuilding a fractured world by learning to trust across difference. No romantic arc. No prince. Just a woman with a weapon and a purpose and the hard work of making something broken whole again. If Snow White was the story of women's past, Raya is an image of what women are being asked to do right now.
Generation Alpha has the tools to name what's happening. What they need from us — Gen X, Millennials, elder Gen Z — is the context to use those tools wisely. That means teaching them the actual history: not just that women got the vote, but what it cost and what it still costs to keep it. Not just that workplaces have harassment policies, but why those policies had to be fought for. Not just that reproductive rights exist in some states, but what life looks like in the states where they don't.
It means helping them understand how algorithms work — that the "For You Page" is not showing them what is true. It is showing them what keeps them watching.
It means teaching them to recognize the Pick Me Woman not as a villain but as a warning — a signal that the system is still powerful enough to make betraying other women feel like the safer choice.
Generation Alpha's soundtrack is still being written. But the seeds are already audible — Paris Paloma's cacophony of hundreds of women's voices, Morgan St. Jean's feminist pop, Lydia the Bard's folk fury. The next generation is growing up knowing that their anger is valid, their experiences are worth naming, and their voices are not something to be traded away for a prince who doesn't know they exist.
We Will Not Go Back
Women are not property.
That sentence should not need saying. And yet here we are, in 2026, watching a coordinated effort — funded, organized, politically embedded, and staffed in part by women who have chosen approval over solidarity — to return women to a condition of legal, economic, and social dependency that most women in the U.S. have not experienced within living memory.
The suffragettes who were force-fed in prisons were called hysterical. The women who fought for property rights were called dramatic. The women who pushed for the Violence Against Women Act were told they were exaggerating. The women fighting Project 2025's assault on contraception and the 19th Amendment right now are being called radical.
Every generation of women who expanded freedom for the next one was called something dismissive by the people who wanted to stop them. Every single time, those women kept going anyway.
Here is what four thousand years of history — and one century of documented legal progress — makes absolutely clear: when women have genuine choices, genuine legal protections, and genuine economic independence, most of them do not choose dependency. Most of them choose themselves. Their families, yes. Their partners, yes. Their communities, yes. But themselves first — as full human beings, not as property, not as vessels, not as supporting characters in someone else's story.
Marriage, freely chosen between equals, is a beautiful thing. Children, wanted and planned for, are a profound thing. A life built around love and family is a meaningful thing.
But it must be a choice. It must always be a choice. For every woman. At every age. In every state. In every country.
We are the beneficiaries of every unreasonable woman who ever refused to go quietly. From the suffragette in the prison cell to Loretta Lynn telling the Grand Ole Opry to shove it. From Betty Friedan naming the problem that had no name to Simone Biles redefining what strength looks like. From Dana Scully inspiring a generation of scientists to Paris Paloma recording a cacophony of hundreds of women's voices insisting, together, that enough is enough.
Each of them left the door a little more open than they found it.
Generation Alpha is walking through. Let's make sure the door stays open.
We will not go back. Women are not property. Not when the law says so. Not when powerful men say so. And not — not ever — just because other women say so.
What are your thoughts? Drop them in the comments — and share this with every woman in your life who needs to hear it.
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