Suzanne Harrington: Girls don’t like guys, or want to be like them

A cohort of Gen Z women believe the only way to survive patriarchy is to worm their way into it

'If you had to nominate a high-priestess of the femosphere, it’d be Melania Knauss,' writes Suzanne Harrington. 

If you type ‘manosphere’ and ‘femosphere’ onto a page, that crinkly, red, spelling-mistake line appears under ‘femosphere’, while ‘manosphere’ is deemed a legitimate word.

There you have it, ladies. Even our laptop spellchecks are in cahoots with patriarchy.

So, is the femosphere like Barbieland, full of empowered women having fun together? Should we sign up?

According to research from The New Statesman, just 35% of women under 25 hold positive views about men, while 72% of their male equivalent have positive views of women. 

Could this female negativity stem from the fact that young women are watching the world — and their futures — being destroyed by (male) toxic tyrants and oligarchs? 

Simultaneously, those women are dating their male porn-addled peers, young men raised on a diet of staged sexual violence and misogynist influencers, who may view asphyxiation as foreplay.

No wonder Gen Z women are angry. Also, these young women have realised so-called girlboss feminism is just digital-era Thatcherism, the ladder snatched away as they elbow their way upwards within capitalist structures. Hence why so many Gen Z women are splitting off and moving towards more progressive political outlooks than their male counterparts.

But not all of them. Some are moving towards the femosphere, the place your laptop still thinks is a spelling mistake. Here, women are approaching things differently: They’ve tossed notions of gender equality and intersectionality aside in return for fancy handbags and men paying for dinner. Spoiler: It’s not Barbieland.

And, yes, that entire sentence should be flagged as a spelling mistake, but here we are, in 2026, with a coterie of Gen Z women believing the only way to survive patriarchy is to worm their way into it, like Trojan show ponies; to abandon ideas of economic parity and autonomy in return for male financial protection and creating their own contemporary remake of a bonnets-and-carriages saga.

Bizarrely, the femosphere still identifies as feminist. Men are terrible, advise its influencers, but can be played by engaging the feminine dark arts: Looking pretty, while withholding sex. Do this and you’ll nab yourself a high-value male who will pay for your life. You can become a trad-wife: Do homesteading; do cottage-core (which, to Gen Xers and Boomers, means something very different indeed).

If you had to nominate a high-priestess of the femosphere, it’d be Melania Knauss. She’s the gold standard of someone who has harnessed her physical self to further her financial and social self, embedding herself in the — silly me, I almost wrote ‘heart’ — of patriarchy.

Once embedded, she pulled the ladder up, like that time she wore a garment emblazoned with the words, ‘I really don’t care, do u?’ while visiting a migrant-child detention centre approved by her husband. Even the late Queen Elizabeth, according to Craig Brown’s biography, “believed Trump ‘must have some sort of arrangement’ with his wife, Melania, or else why would she have remained married to him?”

The femosphere is hardly an original concept — it’s how Melanias have survived for millennia. In the past, female choice was binary: Socially sanctioned sex work via marriage, or starvation. Post-feminism, we still had occasional throwbacks like The Rules, a book published in 1995 (two years before the first Gen Z was born) that advocated the old-school husband-bagging strategies of looking pretty and withholding sex. 

Even three decades ago, this was laughably retro. Yet here we are again. And while you can’t blame Gen Z women for being furious, the way forward is not attaching yourself to someone who can buy you a Birkin.

Retro only looks good if it’s fashion or furniture, not feminism — which is why the femosphere should remain nothing more than a spelling mistake.