From the false promises of the girl boss to the idea that we can have it all, women are waking up to the lies we’ve been sold. If you feel like you’ve been duped, you’re not alone…
WORDS: MEENA ALEXANDER ILLUSTRATION: LISA SHEEHAN PHOTOGRAPHY: DENNIS PEDERSEN
DANGEROUS LIES
Some lies are so shiny, so perfectly packaged, it’s impossible not to buy them. In the early 2010s, the image of the empowered, expensively dressed girl boss glittered like a mannequin in a department store, and I had my nose pressed firmly to the glass. The promise? That if I was hyper-productive and gently self-obsessed I could build an empire, riding a wave of feminism that was more about cash than community. My university room filled up with millennial-pink guides to being a ‘badass’ and peplum dresses I had no business wearing to 3pm lectures. The influencers, tech founders and motivational speakers I idolised swore this was my route to happiness.
I don’t need to tell you that this turned out to be a crock of shit. I left uni with £50,000 of debt in a recession, and it quickly became obvious that you couldn’t battle the many barriers women were facing with just a BlackBerry and a Ruby Woo smile (especially if you weren’t already wealthy and white). While I’ve been lucky in a lot of ways, I did start building the foundations of my life on a colossal lie, and it’s hard not to feel scammed. In fact, it’s hard not to feel betrayed and let down by all the shiny things we were offered as wide-eyed young women that crumbled in our hands – and for our generation, there have been a lotof them.
In an extensive study conducted by our insight consultancy Think Stylist last year, a theme emerged: the idea of ‘duped adulthood’. More than 75% of women across the UK expected to be financially comfortable by this point in their lives and only 22% are; 75% hoped to own their own home and only 34% do; and 69% thought they’d have a job they love while only 28% can say they do. While every generation seems to think they’ve had it hardest, ours is feeling it powerfully right now. We’ve taken hit after hit, and there’s major disconnect between the lives we thought we’d be living in 2024 and our realities. Because the stories we were sold by society, politicians and even our parents have turned out to be rotten, empty or out of date.
Smug newspaper headlines by men twice our age can harp on all they want about forgoing flat whites to save for a house deposit, but the fact remains: it is now almost impossible to get onto the pr
