so when did ambition stop being cool?

on anti-intellectualism in female-dominated corners of the internet, our tendency towards dumbing ourselves down, and the rightward leaning consequences of bashing your humanities degree online

I deleted TikTok once I woke up to the pseudo, propagandistic ban, and I am now quite happily stranded in digital culture limbo. In those past ten days, I’ve observed something missing from my life: the constant barrage of internet content that seeks to infantilize women, diminish us down to our connections to men, and walk back feminism thirty years. How shocking, I haven’t seen a young woman call her humanities degree silly and easy, a comment section argument on how we should only be dating “providers” and “high value men,” and “why did women ever fight for our right to work, I don’t want to go to work!” in ten days! I am back in the real world, where the women I know are motivated, brilliant, uncertain, brave, tough-talking, and practical. 

The election of Trump resulted in a tidal wave of thinkpieces on how internet culture and trends eerily predicted the rightward shift amongst young people, citing the sudden popularity of the romanticization of Western Americana, Ralph Lauren American flag sweatshirts and “quiet luxury” aesthetics, and “trad wife” content. Visually, this is a compelling case - a quiet, seemingly innocuous movement employing images of traditional whiteness to make a case for white supremacist conservatism, but it isn’t the whole story, nor does it take into account the nuance of these images beyond their ChatGPT signifiers of Trumpism. Instead, the more accurate and insidious predictor of this societal shift towards conservatism is less partisan, less visual, and a whole lot more gradual than the sudden surge in country music in California and cowboy boots in New York City. 

Rather, we ought to have known the stark results of the 2024 election cycle from the surge in anti-intellectualism across female-dominated spaces on the internet. There has been much ado about an unmistakable rise in anti-intellectualism across the board, easily diagnosed as a symptom and a cause of the return to Trump’s Republican party. We recognize this in the distaste for “useless” college degrees, the alarming rightward shift amongst young men, and an alarming distrust of science across the aisle. Check to see how many people you know are following RFK Jr. on Instagram, and you should be alarmed. However, on social media platforms, anti-intellectualism is just as alive and well in gendered discourses on relationships, education, and ambition. 

The general silence on this trend in mainstream media is a symptom of a longstanding issue: the spaces of the internet where cultural discourse is shaped, reshaped, and challenged overwhelmingly by women are rarely taken seriously or overtly analyzed by larger cultural commentaries. Instead, these spaces are relegated to a landfill of larger cultural irrelevancy: romantasy, celebrity hookups and breakups, couples content, designer bag shopping, Sabrina Carpenter concerts, what Taylor Swift wore to the Chiefs game and what it means that she wasn’t at the Chiefs game, boo baskets and splitting rent. Some of this is just fun, and some of this, whether we want to interrogate it or not, is potentially a marker of something that we should be thinking about. Most pointedly, amidst all the harmless pop culture commentary and content overwhelm, I became so exhausted by the tendency to monetize our bad decisions, our dumb moments, and our lapses in judgement for the internet’s enjoyment and to make a  bunch of incels feel validated in their misogyny. I only just realized how desensitized I was to seeing clearly strong, accomplished women on the internet do this each day and I wanted to scream: don’t you know they’ll use this against you?

Despite all of our progress (and there clearly has been insurmountable progress), we still don’t know how to collectively take ownership of our own lives and, most pressingly, our own intelligence, on the internet. We don’t know how to collectively abandon the tendency towards infantilization. Most alarmingly, as our culture shifts slowly but nonetheless steadily towards the right, we don’t know how to distinguish our trends, preferences, and largely harmless choices from a sweeping tide of conservatism. Nuance is disappearing so rapidly in our rearview mirrors. If you don’t think that every decision you make - including the seemingly trivial ones of what and how to post - is deeply political, you haven’t been paying very much attention. 

In my only brief absence from these online spaces, I’ve noticed that we haven’t seemed to figure out how to acknowledge that women still face disproportionate discrimination, threats of violence, and loss of basic human rights - even in “the West” - while acknowledging that we do in fact now have agency. Melania Trump can get a divorce. You can take your humanities degree and write a book while your boyfriend goes to his silly little engineering job. You can have a husband that pays for everything and also a job, a savings account, and some tiny smidgeon of independence. The world is wide and terrible and endless and unfair!  

The decision to infantilize and minimize our lives, accomplishments, and individual agency is a product of a societal tidal wave and, at the same time, a deeply personal and conscious choice. The decision to give into anti-intellectualism and co-opt it as our own - especially, as it so often is, by women who have the privilege to have an education - causes harm beyond the algorithms. 

I believe in intellectualizing everything and politicizing my morning coffee, analyzing my Spotify daylist and watching good movies so I know which ones are bad and watching bad movies so I know which ones are good. My resistance against anti-intellectualism is universalizing and stubborn, without gender and without apology. As women’s rights in the United States are increasingly infringed upon, our agency, our intelligence, and our education are more important than ever. Stop throwing them away and stop minimizing them in digital spaces. Lean into your knowledge. Your education, your experiences, your artistic pursuits, your learned skills. Stop being afraid of your pretentiousness, your overeducation, or your corporate ambitions. Remember how you felt when you were still invincible. 

Learn some nuance. Read badly written romance and six-hundred page epics. Read about something that’s real, then watch something that should’ve never made it out of the writer’s room. Read anything, but make sure you read something that makes you think, or at the very least inspires you. Find meaning in all of it. Go watch all three hours and thirty-five minutes of “The Brutalist!” Cease and desist in calling yourself silly for reading, watching, and enjoying the things you enjoy, and think about what draws you to them (it is most certainly political, or at the very least cultural). Embrace pretension. Embrace modernity. Embrace all the things you’ve known and all the things that have taught you how to know what’s good, what’s bad. 

Get out of bed and find your 2014 girlboss-era ambition again! The young women I know have allowed our dreams to grow smaller (as they inevitably do, in this world that is increasingly not what we were expecting), but the young men I know still plan on taking over the world. It is not for lack of resilience (have you ever seen a man deal with the common cold compared to a woman?) It is not for lack of strength, or willpower, or motivation. To me it is disillusionment, and a culture that doesn’t want us to be bigger than we are. 

I’ve discovered that if you spend too long on the internet and you will learn to hate the ambitious women you once dreamed of being. They will become tedious, annoying, too loud, too manufactured, and too much. You will fall into all the pits of diminishing yourself. You will be incentivized to be well-behaved and pretty; you will be rewarded for playing on your harmless and human stupidity, your naivety, your mistakes, your carelessness, and everything else that can be equated to helplessness. 

I’ve begun to get out of bed every morning and, as I go through my morning stretches, I go through too all the girls I have been, and all the things they have wanted (fame, wealth, love, status, legacy, contentment, no roots, a house by the sea, joy, a bar cart with vintage glassware, three cats, legacy). They are investment bankers, senators, professors, mountain climbers, Oscar-nominated actresses, Olympic gymnasts, directors, wildfire scientists, editors and novelists, scientists who study penguins in the Antarctic and Olympic gymnasts in Paris. How privileged I am to have wanted all of these things, and to have been taught to believe that I could have them, so why would I go and pretend like I have ever been anything other than blissfully ambitious? How privileged I am to have dreams that have died, or that I have killed, or the world has killed.