Women beware women: young feminists are betraying their older sisters

Where are all the father-in-law jokes? You won’t find them, because fathers-in-law are not fair game in the way middle-aged women are. There is no male ‘Karen’. Men are not mocked as wizards, but we are witches. Victoria Smith has subtitled her timely book ‘The Demonisation of Middle-aged Women’, and if you are one of them you will know that is no exaggeration. Witches, crones, hags, scolds, evil mothers-in-law – up here in middle age, we are used to male scorn. But Smith has a different target: ‘I do not wish merely to present the myriad ways in which older women are belittled, undermined or misrepresented.’ We know all that, it’s obvious: ‘Ageist misogyny has always existed. What I think is different now, and what makes it more intractable, is that it frequently masquerades as feminism.’

These are dark days to be a woman. Yes, we’ve had #MeToo, writes Smith, but we’ve also had Jimmy Savile and Rotherham and Operation Yewtree. We have incels and rape porn and the woman-hating Metropolitan Police; and prosecutions for rape are now so rare that the crime can be done with actual impunity. We are living in misogynistic times. But compounding the problem is the fact that younger women seem to have fallen in with this.

Smith understands why they should dismiss their elders’ experiences: they don’t want to accept that they will eventually be them. No teenager pictures herself as middle-aged. This is a fundamental truth, even without the current cult of gender identity politics, where using the word ‘woman’ is biologically essentialist, and where younger women think that distancing themselves from their bodies will save them from ageing, or being thought phobic or privileged. How much could women have if they all acted as a sex, not as a generation. Intergenerational discord ‘interrupts the passing down of knowledge’.