Millennial Matrons, Latchkey Crones, and the Inimitable Zoomette

An elegy for Hermione Thought

A lot of people know me for my writing on Zoomettes, about whom I have quite a few opinions and who make it splendid fun to play into one’s image as a sleazy older guy.

And to be fair I genuinely do just have a lot more experience with them at this point than I do with chicks my own age, who as a rule tend only to like me when molested and thus sort of an Honorary Zoomette.

That said all my life’s properly mythic relationships have been with Millennial women.

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Natalie, for instance, was born about a month after me, and Selene a fortnight prior—hence me narrating her in Rakish as an Older Woman, which phenomenologically at least was in keeping with my lived experience—whereas Rebecca and Mara each came into the world the following summer (the Jewess first, which she misliked), followed just a few weeks into the year after that by Diana, who rather lucked out not being premature given 1995 is probs the first year chicks can get away with saying no they’re ackshully Gen Z. Then rounding out my coterie of Millennial Matrons is Gretel, who stands alone in having been sired a couple years before me.

…on the very same day, no less, as Dasha Nekrasova.

I mention that because I first met my dearly deleted kraut on the Red Scare subreddit, which both made Gretel’s date of birth an unusually convenient discursive offramp for her after I discovered she’d lied to me about her age (by 2-3 years, which seemed kind of what’s the point at the time but lowkey tracks now) and genuinely made her register to me as less matronly by semiotically entangling her with someone famous primarily for her talent at aestheticizing a contemptuous repudiation of the normative modes of Millennial femininity as germinated by Rowling and pruned by Fey and then bared naked to the world in as close as dames my age can get to candor by Lena Dunham.

You’ll notice there are two basic genres of Zoomette: those who grew up idolizing Dunham for being the only Hermione brave enough to talk about stuffing pebbles in her baby sister’s clam / be fat on TV, and the ones who grew up idolizing Dasha for being the most iconic dissident against Hermione Thought and one chick willing to own her feminine caprice or openly sneer at fat people and pestiferous old biddies. Between the two of them they defined the basic dichotomy of Zoomer girlhood, which to put it in Millennial man terms is all about aestheticized pain vs. aestheticized cruelty.

Both of which, of course, are forms of catharsis—you’ll find Zoomer femininity more generally is all about catharsis as authenticity—as well as stark deviations from the Millennial ideal of Princess Ariel Register (PAR), which at its core is uncut aspartame.

Under PAR you’re never allowed to break kayfabe in a toothy consequential way and admit to overt sadism or perfidy or liking a feller for his height or muscles or money or fame or Big Fat Cock—the reward being a socially obligate Women Are Wonderful narrative that functionally equates to absolute moral hegemony for any lass who keeps the faith, with the primary release valve for one’s shadow being XoJane-style buttstuff parables that inevitably backsolve for whichever asinine neolibtard growth narrative the girlboss protagonist needs reified to keep up her Matcha Fugue.

And as a rule that works out splendidly for pretty and effortlessly thin white girls in the affluent urban orders who never got raped and aren’t addicted to anything and also don’t have any serious mental disorders, because they kind of just are Hermione.

Basically all other Millennial chicks mostly kind of hate it, not unlike how Millennial dudes vaguely resent having to act like John Mulaney all the time. But much like their male counterparts they also know better than to ever admit to that, as not benefiting from PAR marks you as Not Hermione and is kind of telling on yourself. Meanwhile girls are better at internalizing mythic narratives overall due to their more permeable nature, whereas elite women tend to course-correct dissidence from the fat or brown chick a lot more gently and carefully than she ever will antiMulaneyism, the upshot of which being that PAR is in practice many times more robust than you’d expect after blowing out one of the chickies who finds it annoying.

And that’s why the Dunhamite heterodoxy ackshully kind of is #SoBrave if you think about it—a distaff antecedent, in a sense, to what I myself have done this past year.

Because Dunhamism doesn’t simply invert Millennial chick values a la Dasha Culture beneath an affectation of aristocratic contempt that in practice seems to optimize more around the ability to feel cooler than everyone else / butthole pic brand value than in maintaining even the pretense of offering some actionable path out of hell, holding on instead and against all odds to that embattled Millennial dream that if we just try and think and feel hard enough maybe a different sort of world is possible.

Yet Dunhamism isn’t content with parking the car at XoJane bromides and staying in the Matcha Fugue—for one thing because even with the selfsame bromides you’d a lot of times realize the very bih writing it could tell more than anyone it was fake and gay given how tacked-on and out of step it felt with the rest of the narrative, almost as if groomed into her by some editor in Tina Fey glasses whose own pragmatic Gen X feminism presupposes a certain resistance to cognitive load incurred via hypocrisy.

That worked for Gen X women because A) they genuinely are just harder emotionally, having come up in a far meaner world; B) their mode of womanly opacity is compared to Millennial chicks and Zoomettes a lot more intentional and overtly strategic—or at least sees itself as such—both cause latchkey broads retain a cultural memory of real feminine mystique as something gramma would deploy quite consciously so gramps wouldn’t rape her or w/e and also because they feel less of a need to tell themselves they’re not ackshully lying and instead conceive of their lies as self-evidently justified because of muh patriarchy, which by womanly harm avoidance epistemics overrides a focus on correspondence qua correspondence. And while that’s undeniably quite gay for any sperg-adjacent Millennial man trying to debate them in 2026 I certainly grok on a game theoretic level and mayhaps even empathize with how they’d get locked into such a posture in the 90s trying to prove their credibility in pantsuit domains.

Because to a certain extent I think Gen X women see the world as sexually Schmittian—not in an overtly warlike way, clearly, but more in that they genuinely don’t see any lies told to preserve “Women’s Rights” (either politically or socioculturally as default meaning-makers) as lies in the same sense men would, and it would likewise never occur to them to do anything but roll their eyes if e.g. chastised for holding feminist ideals whilst exclusively dating Mr. Big types, as the world was sufficiently patriarchal (yet shifting) amidst their formative years to feel as though anything in that vein is justified, and internally they’ll always kind of narrate themselves as Princess Leia.

And when inhabiting Princess Leia Register they display that same exact shit-eating, half-conscious, discursively almost quasi-androgenous affect as Zoomer boys today.

Which is actually kind of funnie, as when I asked my cuckulator to spitball equivalent taxonomies for women after feeding it my article on Zoomer boys as Stealth Archers it suggested that Gen X women are Rangers—which is to say their femininity manifests as flexibility, contextual competence, situational awareness (hence them privately at least often finding it annoying when Zoomettes conflate sleaze with predation), as well as a distaff variant of Honor that seems to be fixated on whether or not the boyim take us seriously, which a decade ago looked like reigning in the sentimentalism of Millennial little sisters / direct reports and these days looks like nagging the Zoomette she bore for getting flown out across the country by lecherous Millennials like Walt Bismarck—not even because it’s dangerous so much as because a long distance relationship could distract her from school and God knows the little bitch doesn’t need something ELSE shredding her executive functioning. That said so long as it were private she could live with her daughter selling hole; what’s ackshully intolerable is her comfort being Kept.

Their independence is important to them—probs because of the whole latchkey thing.

Although except for the ultra-libtard ones I find that latchkey crones seldom narrate this impulse as a super duper feminist ideological thing per se so much as a pragmatic situational awareness thing—which ofc is begging the question but just this once I’ll refrain from being a Millennial man about it since the whole point is to motte and bailey ideologically driven optionalitymaxxing with a purportedly down to earth grammar of womanly safetyism that makes dude seem sus if he gets annoyed when she pushes her Zoomette to focus on her studies or girlfren to squirrel away nickels here and there for an esoteric running off with the poolboy fund. And of course if you ever call her out she’ll smirk at you and say she doesn’t know what you’re talking about DUDE and these bitches really are just exactly the same as Zoomer boys.

Still you have to give them credit, because just on a game theoretic level this strategy seems to diffuse resentment and social animus a hell of a lot more effectively than the cloyingly obscurantist epistemic regime Millennial Matrons developed in its stead.

Which in fairness wasn’t truly theirs alone—both cause women don’t have agency and because as mentioned earlier their feminine ideal was as much handed down to them by Rowling and Fey as Zoomette femininity was quickened by Dunham and Dasha.

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Let’s talk about Hermione.

More than any other figure in the canon she basically defined Millennial girlhood.

She’s also basically the only female character in Harry Potter who has a deep and textured interiority instead of being kind of a meme.

Which for sure isn’t to say Rowling denies the other chicks dignity, as it goes without saying that Bellatrix and Luna and Tonks are objectively very cool and smexy af, and both Molly and McGonigal obv have their moments in an old lady way. But none of those gals are especially important to the plot so much as kind of props to get from point A to point B, whereas the two non-Hermione chick characters who are legit narratively consequential—which is to say Lily and Ginny—are respectively the platonic ideal of a Mary Sue and have precisely zero personality to speak of besides once having been shy around a celebrity and then later good at sports.

But it also feels quite retarded to call the books “misogynistic” or something, because for all Rowling genuinely does seem to idealize men—like to the point of flattening our predatory tendencies almost to nonexistence outside iirc Cormac McLaggen at one point being a little sleazy at a party and the cartoonish masturbation fantasy that is Fenrir Aidsback—she idealizes Hermione even more.

Not by making her a Mary Sue, of course, which she plainly is not.

Because only a twelve year old makes their self-insert a Mary Sue.

Authors of Rowling’s caliber use them almost exclusively when they have a character who has a crucial narrative purpose i.e. the protagonist’s mother or eventual wife and so you need to think is coo but also occupies a neurotype / life experiences so wildly divergent from the author’s that it feels kind of boring and gay writing them which makes their scenes on the page all feel kind of limp and lifeless, and so to compensate you have them do a backflip or have Professor Poopoopeepee observe that they had the best taintscratching charm he’s seen in all his years. That’s Lily—and also sort of Ginny, who’s realistically just Lily transfixed down a generation so that the universe I guess can make it up to Harry for taking his mom away by letting him fuck her instead.

Having said that there’s also an extent to which writing the mother and wife as flawless and boring flat characters is a tradition in heroic literature that if you think about it makes sense given that for male readers a woman’s flaws are generally just her being a Silly Girl unless specifically she cucks the hero, in which case she loses all of our sympathy instantly and irrevocably. And you for sure can play with that tension like JKR does kind of hamhandedly with Ginny and the Black Boy Taller Than Ron, but once you ackshully cash that check you can’t come back clean from that… which means ofc that any heroic masculine narrative told straight kind of just needs the mom and love interest to be boring, because once they aren’t boring you’re kind of escaping genre fiction and on a depressingly fast jaunt into Houellebecq territory.

Which you actually kind of get, frankly, once you delve into Snape’s interiority in the later books—though purely in the negative space is the thing.

Because consider we see Harry’s dad being a huge shit to Snape, and then it’s justified retroactively by Snape saying something wizard-racist in the scene and then getting narrated by elder marauders as having always been on track to become a Death Eater despite having been a mischling and besties with a mudblood simply because he was interested in the Dark Arts as a kid and knew a bunch of curses (which presumably scared the shit out of the other boys in his cohort and caused them to gang up on him especially given he’d have limited support from other Slytherins being half-blood…), and then later hear James Grew Up eventually and as an adult wasn’t Like That at all.

Which, again—we hear from James’s friends specifically.

Many years after his death.

And so rereading the novels as an adult the most parsimonious take is quite frankly that James was kind of a bully and Lily enjoyed that, having once similarly enjoyed Severus for the fear he inspired in other boys until James’s social dominance proved a lot more impressive to her older self, which especially after Snape got humiliated by the marauders ultimately impelled her to write the dude out of her story—because note it wouldn’t make much sense for a woman to write his obsession for Lily in such a dignified way if there hadn’t been ANY mutuality at all, even as a puppy love thing.

Anyway this is obviously all speculation but I think it’s another point specifically as to why Lily NEEDS to remain a Mary Sue for the story to work—if you explore her messy interiority with the James vs. Snape thing in any detail more sophisticated than him saying mudblood Changing Everything on a dime you’re going to run into something Lilithy that for most male readers at least will kind of ruin the whole madonna angle Rowling idealizes emotionally and needs to make Harry’s genesis properly mythic.

And it’s not like JKR doesn’t make up for Lily and Ginny being boring, as it goes without saying the aforementioned Bellatrix / Luna / Tonks are loads of fun—so much so that a sizable chunk of Millennial girls ended up making one of those chicks their personality, especially when molested or palpably autistic.

But the well-adjusted girls overwhelmingly leaned hard into Hermione Thought.

And my contention here is that a pretty massive part of that—because remember, Harry Potter was fuckin HUGE for our generation, which it’s easy to forget today—was that Hermione is such a fantastically written character whose arc offers so much dignity to female interiority under late modern conditions (and very crucially in a way that synergized with preexisting Eisnerite Women Are Wonderful narratives) that she became a sord of primordial template for normative Millennial femininity nearly all women could glob onto, with Luna / Bellatrix / Tonks letting the spergy and molested chicks feel Seen which in fairness is a hell of a lot more than they’d gotten before that, and also made 90% of the dudes who read the books develop a huge fucking crush on her even before Emma Watson became our cohort’s sex symbol de jour.

So that said, how specifically am I defining Millennial femininity?

The biggest thing is compulsive rule-following and a sense of self-worth rooted chiefly in procedural competence, which I should note here isn’t the least bit absolutist or totalitarian in self-concept, as Rowling herself foregrounds rather aggressively the failure modes of that approach via Dolores Umbridge—a figure so archetypally potent she was probs partially responsible for Hillary losing in 2016, being far and away more memorable an antagonist than shitty Voldemort who was honestly a snoozefest looking back and would have been a lot more interesting fused with Snape… honestly one of the more interesting facets of the series was that despite being so left-coded its critique of the Right was always shallow and dismissible prima facie whereas its critique of the neoliberal Left was sophisticated and genuinely stung.

But anywho Millennial girls as a rule only act like Umbridge towards men they’ve already decided are incels (at which point it’s kind of exactly like that tbh), but other than that they respond to male aggression and rule-breaking pretty precisely like Hermione, which is to say with wagging finger and rolling eye and wet cunt—though of course that last part’s only legible should you actually cash the check, after which success rewrites past admonitions totalistically whereas failure locks them in.

Which on the one hand is pretty obvious caveman shit and something we observe in basically all cohorts of women more broadly, but Millennial girls tend to do this both the least consciously and most shamelessly by far and have the hardest time laughing at it as a general phenomenon, because at a highly plastic age Hermione gave them a dignified and portable script genuinely compelling to male ears for being a scold yet not a librarian and blisteringly unagentic and yet somehow the archetypal girlboss.

And that’s what makes Hermione so well-written: she’s less a character per se than a semiotic killer app—a social technology for bitches having they cake and eating it too.

Or perhaps we might call it a spell—and JKR herself the greatest witch of all time for having not just groomed an entire cohort of girls into having her personality but also no small fraction of its boys into falling in love with her by proxy and putting up with all of the annoying bullshit done by girls imitating her (and also helping to put some breaks on the whole tranny thing it seems, which honestly kudos).

Because, again, the trick only works because she’s NOT infallible.

Hermione has tons of flaws—same way you do for that question on a job interview.

Still they don’t feel tacked-on and she never seems Mary Sue because A) whenever she acts cunty or solipsistic or sanctimonious it’s frequently played for laughs in an internalized #women way that somehow doesn’t clash with her procedural authority (Parks and Rec did a similar trick); and B) whenever it’s not played for laughs almost always involves her overreacting to Ron doing something retarded or Harry flipping out for no reason; and more importantly C) her operative incentive structure is always weirdly legible to the reader—a lot of times more than fucking Harry’s, frankly, who come the middle books gets afforded by the narration a certain dignified remove to his teenage moodiness (and certainly horniness) that feels both extremely British and very woman author narrating a guy she used to have a crush on.

Meanwhile Hermione’s own girlish opacity—and most crucially in regards to her capacity for sexual caprice—is thoroughly drenched in aspartame so it’s all but impossible to hold her accountable for literally anything that happens to her.

…while simultaneously being milked so aggressively for plot heat via male cuck anxiety in the negative space that Bentham’s Bulldog just started a petition to shut it down.

But of course that check never gets cashed, which means that young male readers never get the catharsis of actualized betrayal—and very crucially, the experience of seeing a female character they’re attached to engaging in female-coded modes of perfidy a la triangulation, post-hoc renarration, bad faith moralization.

…or even just admitting the actual fucking reason she likes Viktor Krum.

Instead the whole thing is narrated as Krum secretly being this nerdy gentle softboi and their brief connection an innocent wholesome chungus libary thing Ron freaked out over for literally no reason due to being a cringey insecure faggot per usual.

…and then later she recycles the same plot with Cormac McLaggen, who’s effectively just a dumber more overtly niggerish version of Krum (Scots kind of being the Bri’ish equivalent to blackpeepo) that frankly gives defective alpha widow backscratcher.

…and then finally in the last book she half-cashes the check when Ron decides to cuck out briefly, but still keeps the whole thing very subtextual and dignified and ofc Harry makes zero moves and again it’s narrated as Ronald’s stupid dumdum Male Insecurity being the problem and nothing else at all as Harry and Hermione are Strictly Platonic and obviously the Harry/Hermione shippers clearly all have Down Syndrome.

Only what was that fucking dance scene in the movie all about then?

Also didn’t Hermione literally kiss Harry in the very first book?

If you’re a Millennial dude I’d hazard you even remember the exact phrasing:
“Then Hermione did something she’d never done before…”

That scene sticks in your head.

And for good fucking reason—because it turns out JKR was lowkey full of shit that whole time she was gaslighting Harry/Hermione niggas and protesting just a bit too much that it was ackshully Ron was her Twue Wuv, because not too long ago she put that whole Dumbledore is Gay retcon to shame by formally acknowledging to the world that Harry and Hermione would have been a better match.

Yeah.

So want my theory on what happened?

In real life an adolescent Jo cucked the ever-loving shit out of IRL Ron with whoever it was she based Krum on—who, no, was not at all le secret nerd softboii who won her heart in the libary but a big mean oaf with a huge fat cock that made her cry and bleed and it was all very rape-coded and she still flicks the bean to it to this day and also she specifically got off on sexually humiliating IRL Ron after his insecurity gave her an ick.

Harry was based on a higher status guy who used her for cunt at some point but in a decidedly soft and gentlemanly Bri’ish way and she narrates as her life’s Twue Wuv.

Whereas IRL Ron was probs kind of analogous to Desi from Gone Girl—a lifelong goodenough backup nigga who may have rekindled something with her at the time she was writing the books, or she may have just been in the pro-beta mindset women often fall into temporarily after leaving an abusive relationship and so in those years started narrating IRL Ron as her ackshual Twue Wuv and earnestly meant it inasmuch as birds do, leaving the Lily / Harry / Krumcuck stuff primarily in negative space.

But it was all there.

And Millennial women sure as shit picked up on it—as women do, without having to say anything in an overt register, all the while rolling their eyes at any man who tries to decode any of it and insisting quite sincerely he’s reading too much into things.

Which for the most part wasn’t necessary, as most Millennial men didn’t pick up on it.

They may have felt a weird unsettling feeling in they belly around those scenes, but it also never cashed out—at least not overtly—and so instead they mostly just idealized Hermione more and more for drifting so close to the flame and nonetheless choosing the broke and insecure ginger with whom she had that iconic #specialconnection.

They took the story as Data—about women, about attraction, about power—when at its core the Ron-Hermione story was the therapeutic retcon of a ruminative single mom fleeing an abusive relationship and trying to emotionally cohere her self-image by retelling her story in a way that felt more dignified or Emotionally True or w/e.

And you have to appreciate broads in that state—on some level they’re the reason niggas like IRL Ron still get they cum ate even when a faggot of mythic proportions.

That said you’re also kind of a fool if you don’t see the subtext is pretty clearly hinting at Harry blowing her out sub rosa.

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So the other big thing I always hear defined Millennial femininity was Mean Girls—which having mostly dated Zoomettes I never got around to watching until 2024, when I did so for the first time with Rebecca over Facebook Messenger as my wily Belle Juive repeatedly insisted in increasingly slurred cadence that no ackshully she wasn’t sneaking shots of tequila each time she Jewishly leaned out of the call frame .

It was a decent enough flick—and I suppose quite “smart” if taken specifically in the context of mid-aughts teen comedies, most of which are interchangeable and I likely only remember fondly by dint of having been 12 when they came out. That said going into it I’d spent well over half my life hearing ad nauseum from Millennial chicks how Mean Girls shows how hard life as a girl ackshully is and also explains all these magic and esoteric pussysecrets men would never figure out otherwise, so I was really expecting to learn something novel. But mostly I just came out kind of annoyed.

…for one thing because Cady breaking up the crown felt like such a fucking faggoty transparent counter-signaling status-seeking as the ultimate status move. But I was willing to forgive that sin because it was 2004 and basically anything released at the height of the Bush years is bound to have at least some of that shit.

More persistently annoying to me was how they let Regina George just be this huge fucking Sin Eater who absorbs literally all the toothy moral consequence at the end— first getting hit by a bus and then consigned to implicitly dykey Lacrosse Hell—when the moral difference between her and Cady / Janis was entirely of affect and not action.

Like if you pay attention to the plot and think about it autistically you’ll notice Cady over the course of the film does objectively far worse things than Regina overall, and Janis is vastly more underhanded and scheming about it versus just ambiently bitchy, but the former also stumbles around a lot looking confused and also gives an XoJane speech at the end whereas the latter is kind of beige and best friends with a gay guy, both of which make all the difference it would seem by Woman Logic.

Honestly Regina is a strawman—meant here in the scary pagan Nick Cage sense—because in the real world hot rich blondes like her aren’t allowed to be confident or aggressive literally at all except very specifically to niggas trying to smash. With other girls they’ll obviously be Queen Bee, but to maintain such a position with any real security need to make everyone at the table Feel Comfortable, which these days includes fat chicks and minorities.

And sometimes the girl who does that will be the implacably bubbly sorority bih who never forgets a birthday, and at other times she’ll be the ice cold Dasha type who downplays everything to keep shit flat and chill, but IRL either would have verbally torn Regina’s guts out behind a smile and had everyone talking about it for weeks.

Because girls as aggressive as Regina are basically never Queen Bee—rather they’re midstatus stepdad fleshlights who become a Girardian Scapegoat in middle school after some canny Dasha type catches them picking on a fat chick or brownoid just little too overtly and immediately smells blood in the water.

And Mean Girls is just pure fucking Girard in how it treats Regina—so much so I struggle to believe Tina Fey wasn’t winking to the camera with that shit.

Then again it was 2004.

Still I suspect we’re delving into yet another womanly negative space situation where like basically all interesting manifestations of female agency Fey’s authorial intent can be understood as mostly diffuse and inchoate and in terms of what it really produced.

The first of which being Mean Girls itself as a cultural artifact—which gets narrated by Millennial women in a very specific way because it was unironically the PERFECT movie for a chick in the aughts to show her earnest chungus Millennial boyfriend to illustrate to him womanly social games in as flattering a light as humanly possible—i.e. ostensibly unflattering but calibrated to provoke sympathy / minimize perceived agency in malice without impugning female intellectual ability (hence the math shit).

The second of which was the Cady Heron Speech—yet another Millennial girl killer app which is basically the XoJane essay as an embodied oral tradition, and grants chicks immense narrative license to Apologize and Take Accountability for being Mean in some way without there ackshully being any toothy consequences, all of which fall entirely upon either the nonMulaney who finessed his way inside her and she now realizes is Gross or any unhappy Regina in her life to dissent from Hermione Thought,

And tbh I have to suspect Fey knew what she was doing here, because unlike the soppy Anglo-Boomer sentimentalism that cuckolded Ron in the shadows Mean Girls feels deliberate about playing fast and loose with narrative reality a la the perfumed Schmittianism of Gen X femininity. And ultimately I think Fey very much wanted to create a narrative about female intrasexual competition—a lot more salient in 2004 than back in her day given women were now in the workforce in great number—that was sticky and portable and would let the girlypops have their cake and eat it too.

The route, of course, being to vehemently foreswear all ill intent and aggressive affect, and in doing so sacrifice Regina’s basic dignity as a human bean to secure more or less unlimited narrative runway for any girl who isn’t Mean and has the dramaturgical chops to narrate a properly neoliberal XoJane lesson out of her Mistake.

In a sense it was the only path forward for feminism now that women had basically caught up to men in hard power and men were at last in fits and starts beginning to push back against continued womanly dominance of the soft power realms.

The only issue with this is Millennial women aren’t really Rangers—they’re Clerics.

For them Being Hermione was never a pragmatic social technology so much as doctrine and ontology. And as annoying as Millennial Girls are at times they also aren’t overtly manipulative at all, and in their years of wine and roses very earnestly did believe they were dating the 6’5 financebro for his smile or whatever—unlike the Xer woman the Millennial chick can’t just smirk and shrug her shoulders whilst gargling Mr. Big’s splooge against a riot grrrl track. She needs reasons; order; telos.

Because in precisely the same way that Millennial men need the world to Make Sense, she desperately needs the world—or at a minimum her own world—to Be Right.

And the inexorable tragedy at the heart of the Millennial condition is you kind of can’t have both of those things at the same time.

Also the negative space exists.

…which it also does in every other cohort of woman, but latchkey crones have what it takes to freeze it out or brute force past it or deny it exists with impeccable poker face, whereas for their part Zoomettes are lowkey kind of besties with Lilith at this point.

But Millennial girls?

Let’s just say there’s a reason lots of dudes my age react to 500 Days like a horror flick.

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Lots of guys on the Right instinctively despise Lena Dunham and never won’t on account of her being a fat slutty Jew broad drenched in ink, but quite frankly these guys are giant faggots who have Down Syndrome and should be tortured to death.

Because Ross Douthat was spot-on about Girls—a work that resolutely pried forth the lips of that tulip so lovingly cultivated by Rowling and Fey and demonstrated at last to all creation that it was full of rancid smegma.

Without Lena you don’t get Zoomettes breaking ranks with Girlbossism in droves wanting a Tradlife or to be kept—and probs don’t even get Red Scare, frankly.

The reason being that Lena was the first and kind of only one to give Millennial girls a language to actually own being a retarded and disgusting whore cynically hiding behind feminism to get her way even in situations where men are at a disadvantage—for sure not intentionally, but that was absolutely the effect, as God love her Lena is for all her faults an immensely honest artist who seems pathologically incapable of not breaking kayfabe even about sissy’s pussypebbles let alone the state of feminism—probs precisely because she’s a yappy little mischling piglet who knows full well she’ll never be a real Hermione and thus has an incentive to defect… also because even though at one point she was hot and interesting enough to reliably fuck elite men (hence her not being dismissed out of hand) she’s likewise been fat and annoying enough to be kind of invisible, and it’s precisely that variance in life outcomes that makes her so blisteringly honest for a woman about how the world works.

Meanwhile it’s not like you can call her a Pick Me with those tats.

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All that said, these days Zoomettes don’t have much use for either Lena or Dasha, now possessing vastly more sexual power than Millennial Matrons in an ecology that in sanctifying feminine choice likewise creates remarkably little room for reproachful aunties to nudge wayward fillies in a somewhat less high time preference direction.

…which in truth they don’t especially need.

Not because Zoomettes aren’t stupid little girls, but because those stupid little girls are objectively the most powerful bloc in society right now by a tremendous margin, treating half the guys their age like cockroaches whilst running circles around the earnest cheugsters financing their retardation. Hell, if anything the rest of society needs to be more adequately protected from them!

Because at their core Zoomettes are every bit amoral as their mothers, but unlike latchkey broads feel basically zero need to affect mannishness in any way to signal competence, as they’ve nothing in particular to prove to men anymore given how insanely scrubbish Zoomer boys turned out to be.

Indeed, the tastes of men have almost no compulsive pull on Zoomettes whatsoever—so much so that a huge chunk of them mostly date each other now (and not like dykes qua dykes but hot feminine women who as Millennials would have been bi mostly incidentally or as a performance for men) or alternatively find their newfound power lowkey revolting and deeply undermining to polarity, hence them getting involved with alternative sexual lifestyles that Gen X women can only see as aberrant and Millennial women would flatten into “lifestyle BDSM.”

Thing is nearly all Millennial women trend submissive too, but unlike with Zoomettes they’re usually quite faggotishly guilty about it and need to impose all these fake and gay sanitation rituals and mediation vehicles on it that lowkey ruin all the fun on the dudeside—the archetypal example being subsidizing her cataclysmically unprofitable home business so she isn’t “just a housewife,” which is kind of the operative dynamic more generally with Hermione Submission: you make the hard decisions and the hard phone calls, you stoically manage her volatility, you shred her cunt in the bedroom, but then the whole thing gets elsewise narrated as Equality.

And I suppose for most guys my age—or at least those with a considerably more agreeable neurotype than my own—that feels like a pretty dece trade overall.

Hell, I’d be saying the same thing had it worked out with Selene.

But around the time you hit the 5000th or so day of summer you kind of just prefer for the little slut to unironically feel like daddy owns her while overtly gushing about your money and triceps and Big Fat Cock, even when—and perhaps especially because— that translates to a rather less bashful stiletto in your ribs down the line.

Obviously part of it’s the power fantasy itself, and no doubt there’s a pedo-adjacent marshmallow shamrock buried deep within there given the arrested development these poor babies all seem to suffer from, but a lot more generally than that I tend to suspect there’s a far broader reason Millennial guys fetishize Zoomettes so much, which is that they’re essentially pure catharsis—just unadulterated feminine id.

When a Zoomette thinks you’re being a fag she’ll usually let you know as such more or less immediately. She never ate up all that insipid social construct Butlerslop that indoctrinated seemingly every last Millennial woman during Obama’s first term, and won’t internalize some anodyne fake and gay politically correct reason as to why she’s dating the 6’5 financebro; she’ll brag about it. Then meanwhile when she decides to fuck you over the standard move thereafter is typically to aestheticize it more than moralize you post-hoc (a register typically reserved for fucking over other Zoomettes).

Every first date with a Millennial chick has one foot in the Slack client, whereas with your little Zoomette it’s kind of like a cross between a pagan goddess and a 12 year old—which means of course in one sense that the Zoomette is the hardest of all women to tame, but in a far deeper sense suggests that she’s the only one who can be.

Because unlike our splenda-sweet Millennial Matrons she’s entirely happy both to let you ascend into the heavens and fall screaming into Hell—often simultaneously, or both of those things back and forth many multiple times over the course of one day.

which of course can be maddening as shit—as is every other part of them downstream of being essentially a Tinkerbell with zero meaningful diachronic agency, which a lot of times ensures these chickies seem very genuinely like a completely different person with everyone they talk to, all of whom will invariably hear whichever version of the story she thinks they want from her.

Which honestly? Fair.

Because on some level it’s literally the exact same thing Millennial girls were doing—only adapted for a more liquid and vibesy social ecology where there’s essentially nothing left imposing stable diachronic order on the world, such that a charismatic and pretty girl especially would honestly be shooting herself in her cute and sexy foot to be anything BUT pure affect nowadays.

And yeah if you ever see how Princess Bubblegum Register has you looking in bae’s group chats you almost certainly won’t have the best time (yet another reason the winning move is to establish an expectation upfront that you’ll be going through her phone at rando), but when you’re next to and inside her is an altogether different story and pretty obviously what matters at the end of the day.

Because in those moments bae is whatever the fuck you want her to be, in a way that runs deeper than has probs ever been the case for any other cohort of women. She’s so purely synchronic—that and committed generationally to cathartic authenticity—she’ll deeply internalize whatever you pour into her during those moments, her ontological membrane being infinitely more permeable than any Millennial’s.

And that’s the dirty little secret about Zoomettes—for all they love sneering at things as “performative,” they themselves are eternally performing, because for them the operative gap between situational or strategic performance and normal synchronic womanly affect has for all intents and purposes collapsed, The Feed having long ago rendered any sense they once had a hapless slave to theatrically capricious sensibility.

Because Zoomettes are ultimately Bards.

---

It happened the way these things always do—ugly, fast, and clarifying.

None of them came away confused about what it was.

What differs is how each woman survives knowing she did it.

—

The Ranger is forty-eight. Grew up letting herself in after school.

Knows how to change a tire—and how to keep a secret.

Obviously it happens on a work trip—no storybook seduction, nor collapse of vows; just proximity, shared irritation, and the old familiar voltage of being seen as competent and dangerous at the same time.

She showers longer than usual after—not out of shame, just reset.

On the flight home she stares out the window; lets the memory dull.
Doesn’t replay it—too indulgent. Instead she inventories damage.

No one hurt. Nothing destabilized. No crack in the dam.

When she lands, she texts her partner about traffic and dinner. The rhythm resumes.

When guilt comes—later and quietly, like a change in the weather—she meets it like everything else, jaw set and eyes forward. She doesn’t seek absolution or narrate herself as a victim, and doesn’t need the world to agree with her.

Her dignity lives in endurance and containment—in knowing not everything needs to be said, and that survival often looks like silence.

Years later, the memory will surface once or twice, usually late at night.

She’ll think: I handled it.

And then roll over and sleep.

—

The cleric is thirty-five. Knows her attachment style and the language of boundaries.

The moment it’s over, the panic hits—less in her body than in her self-concept.

This is wrong. This is misaligned. This is not who I am.

She doesn’t sleep; scrolls; spirals; searches for words that feel like handles.

By morning she’s rewritten the past six months.

He hadn’t been present. They’d been disconnected. She’d tried to communicate.

The act itself recedes quickly—too crude; untidy. What matters is the meaning.

When she brings it up, she doesn’t describe what happened, but how she felt:
“I’ve been lonely for a while.”
“I don’t think we were in a good place.”
“I think something broke before this.”

Her fiancé is confused, but also attentive; wants to understand.

She cries—not performatively, but with conviction. She believes this version; needs to.

And then the conversation turns.

He apologizes for not being there. Asks what he can do better. Promises to try harder.

The balance is restored.

What she did becomes evidence of her sensitivity.
What he failed to do becomes the cause.

She emerges shaken but intact—still moral, still right—and journals about growth.

She feels clean again.

—

The Bard is twenty and just wiped her socials for the third time this year.

It happens late and fast and is honestly kind of mid—but that’s not what matters.

What matters is the shift.

She notices it immediately: the way he’s quieter afterward, the way his confidence slips a notch, the way he suddenly cares what she thinks.

Interesting.

She doesn’t confront him. That would be cringe.

Instead she gets distant. Not mad—just off. Replies slower. Laughs less.

When he asks what’s wrong, she texts back “idk lol. just weird vibes now.”

She posts something cryptic. Deletes it. Leaves him on read just long enough.

He starts offering things—reassurance, apologies, attention. None of it quite lands.

Eventually it materialized. Framed like generosity and care and not what this clearly was.

She accepted it lightly. A heart emoji. A joke. No drama. By Friday it was old news.

She didn’t think of it as blackmail. She didn’t think of it as anything, really.

Just how the world works now.