TikTok feminism can feel empowering, funny and familiar, but is it giving Gen Z women the full picture?
Eight months on since the US election, the gender polarity in voting behaviour is still playing on my mind. The world quickly moved on from what I still find a startling fact: the chasm between voting behaviours between 18–29-year-olds. This trend is not exclusive to the US. In the UK, young women are twice as likely to vote for the Green Party as men. In Germany, recent surveys have shown that men aged 18-29 were twice as likely to vote for the hard-right AfD than women of the same age.
It’s not simply a political chasm, but a cultural one. King’s College London published a 30-country study earlier this year, highlighting that, of all generations studied, Gen Z are the most divided generation on cultural expectations of gender roles. Interestingly, the little common ground the Gen Z sample could find was that there was tension between men and women today. Across the 30 countries surveyed, 59% of Gen Z reported tension between men and women today, a higher percentage than any previous generation surveyed. Women and men are voting differently, but they are also thinking differently.
What does TikTok have to do with this?
What does this mean? Why does this matter? And what does TikTok have to do with this? Social media is moulding the psychology of our generation. It is designed to polarise, to consolidate echo chambers, to profit from division. Its business model works by designing algorithms that show us content which not only consolidates what we already believe but also pushes these views to their extremes. We are living in an attention economy, and extremity is what keeps us online.
Plenty of research has been done now on the impact of social media on men’s psychology. With the rise of figures like Andrew Tate, we’ve seen extreme misogyny enter the mainstream in real time. It’s visible, it’s violent, and it’s almost impossible to ignore. Even TV dramas, like Adolescence, have captured the stark implications of these ideologies on young boys. In this cultural climate, this work on the intersection between male psychology, social media and misogyny is urgent and crucial. But I think we have missed a blind spot. I rarely, if ever, see commentary about how social media might be affecting women’s perceptions of gender detrimentally.
In other words, we’ve forgotten to examine the other end of this disconnect. Why is this generation of women thinking so differently about gender, and is it always a positive change? The impact of social media on female psychology is more subtle, but if examined closely, it offers one answer to the cultural disconnect between Gen Z men and women.
What is TikTok feminism?
‘TikTok’ feminism, as I call it, is the soundbites of feminism that we get funnelled through social media. Unlike the vehicles of feminism of previous generations – books, films, articles – they offer a little taste of an idea, a ‘feminist’ take, with little elaboration or nuance. It started in the early days of social media, but TikTok is its latest medium. My teen years were coloured by Instagram #GirlBoss posts, and high-profile women like Beyonce, Hilary Clinton and Taylor Swift being glorified as feminists (usually for the sole virtue of being successful women).
This 2010s feminist culture has made a violent resurgence in recent years. Clips of the iconic Barbie monologue that was circulating last year, the “I’m just a girl” trend, paired with the resurgence of pink and bows, dominated my feed. They are all soundbites that appeal to a feminine solidarity and make claims to a universal feminist experience. TikTok’s feminist lexicon has expanded to include phrases like ‘de-centre men,’ ‘How do you explain this feeling to a man?’, and ‘women in male fields’ memes. Culturally, I think we should interrogate these trends a little more. They are well-intentioned, but I fear that these, often satirical or mocking, soundbites of feminism essentialise gender. They make claims of what the feminine experience is by defining it against the masculine. They bring women together in communities online, but they do so by placing femininity in contrast, if not direct opposition, to the male experience.
These online trends are, of course, innocuous and harmless. But, crucially, they do hold up a mirror to the Gen Z generation. What is reflected back unsettles me. I see a generation of women whose thinking has been conditioned by content which feels feminist, but remains passively engaged with, or completely uninterrogated. Social media encourages us to do this.
Second-wave feminists, the women of the 1970s and 1980s, conducted politics in a very different space. For these new feminists, the cultural milieu was one in which women physically got together, read books and discussed ideas, or even, like my grandma did, went back to university to do an MA in Gender Studies. I don’t think we should go back to the 1970s. But I am nostalgic for a time when you physically had to get yourself to a library, read a book, join a political society, and talk to real people. This, in my opinion, is a far better education on feminism than what social media can provide. Social media feminism gives you the illusion of understanding the collective feminine experience, all while staring at your screen from your sofa. Jumping on trends because they feel like they appeal to a collective feminine, in my opinion, is creating a kind of cultural rot, a distinct unoriginality and shallowness to feminism.
If women feel empowered, educated, and united, then what’s so wrong with TikTok feminism?
One answer is that the TikTok feminism we are being funnelled is not feminism at all. It’s neoliberal conservatism. Here me out.
The culture our mothers consumed – through TV shows, tabloid magazines, films, adverts – was still pedalling the narrative that the primary event in a woman’s life was finding love (a man) and settling down. This was a pernicious and rigid expectation, but now I fear that perhaps the cultural pendulum has swung too far the other way. Too much discourse, especially in the feverish world of TikTok, underscores the idea that women can and should do everything themselves. In hustle culture, what should be at the forefront of your mind is building a successful career, finding financial independence, and filling your cup through self-love. The language and trends I see online satirise, leave absent, or sometimes reject entirely, the presence of men in our lives.
Where does that leave us? At dizzying heights, because the flip side of unbridled ambition, fierce self-reliance, total self-investment and autonomy is sole responsibility for our emotional, physical and financial needs. Remind you of anything? This is the foundation of the neoliberal conservative state.
Before I go any further, I should clarify that there are plenty of women in the world who still have no choice, for whom this sentiment doesn’t apply. But, at least in the Western world, we do have more freedoms than we had 50 years ago. The biggest of which is the accepted notion that women can, and should, step out in the public realm. They should ‘lean in’ to their careers, as Sheryl Sandberg puts it, and climb the corporate ladder.
Feminists of the early 2010s, like Annie-Marie Slaughter, did consider where our personal lives may fit into this, but usually spoke of it through the ambiguous lens of the ‘work-life balance.’ The goal became to find career-personal harmony. Where this left women, in practice, was under the dual pressure to excel professionally and have a fulfilling private life. Now, in 2025, the ‘life’ part of the ‘work-life’ balance does not seem to have a place in the cultural conversation at all.
TikTok feminism, with its trends and satire, now equates liberation with financial and emotional independence, and de-centring men entirely. When we do face the inevitable contradictions of this neoliberal feminism, we patronise ourselves by chalking it all up to ‘girlhood,’ or applying the vapid banner of ‘I’m just a girl’ (the subtext of which is ‘so I’ll do what I want, and that’s fine’). The only prominent voices I see talking about family, children, love and relationships are the American trad wives. When the only people who are optimistic about men, relationships and motherhood are the trad wives, I think we need to re-evaluate the feminist space…
TikTok feminism encourages us to be very pessimistic about men in general. We are constantly on guard, looking out for ‘red flags,’ ‘icks,’ or de-centring them completely. But this generation of Gen Z women will inevitably, at some point, work with men, be friends with men, and might even want to start a family with a man. This is where feminist education via TikTok trends falls short. Big time. Feminism has given us some brilliant linguistic and emotional tools to talk about our own identities, to express our needs. We have mastered the art of self-empowerment, of true independence. In a neoliberal age, we are now thinking of this liberation through a highly solipsistic lens. We’ve left little to no room in our discourse for the fundamentals of life: community, family, love.
So, what do we do about it?
So, where’s the way out of this? bell hooks provides some answers. She is one of the only feminists of recent generations who talks about where ‘love’ fits into social activism. There is a huge amount to be angry about in the world, she argues, but the way to live a fulfilled life is not to be constantly on the defensive. Opening yourself up to relationships across divides and demographics strengthens rather than diminishes political activism. My vendetta against TikTok feminism is that it does not encourage us to do this at all.
I’d like to reiterate a point that I don’t see enough in the online feminist space: you can fight against patriarchal injustice and still love men. My second way out: stop thinking about yourself so much. We’ve reached a stage of evolution with the feminist movement online, which is incredibly neoliberal. How can I find happiness? How can I be the most financially successful? How can I empower myself through constructing an identity which feels authentic to me? They are all important questions to ask. But if this is the only version of liberation which TikTok feminism is offering, I don’t want it. True freedom, the essence of feminism, also comes through community building, loving, crossing bridges, and being relentlessly optimistic in the face of cynicism. If we are to make a start in healing the chasm between Gen Z and women, being a bit more open, intellectually and emotionally, would go a long way.
I’ll conclude with a question that I don’t think is asked enough. For most of us, we have freedoms which our grandmothers could only dream of. It doesn’t feel like that, because injustice is everywhere. But, if you can’t visualise the generational difference, think of it this way. As women are being cynical or satirising men online, I often think, you physically would not have the platform, or social permission as a woman, to say that 50 years ago. If you dared, you would be cast out as a kind of social pariah. So, the question to ask is this: what do we do with this new intellectual freedom? Getting offline is a good start. Speak to real people, read books, absorb physical media. Educate yourself in a way which is evolutionary, not instantaneous. Formulate your opinions from living, rather than scrolling. Women and men have a lot to learn from each other, but we can only do this by putting the phone down.
