Around 2016, an obscure clinical psychologist and professor named Jordan Peterson aptly diagnosed the malaise troubling so many young men: a chronic lack of purpose.

Not only did Peterson give voice to these frustrations, he was also one of the few to offer a solution. Legions of aimless, disaffected young men responded to this unlikely role model’s simple yet powerful message: The essence of manhood is responsibility, he reminded a generation raised to believe that masculinity was "toxic," and it is only by willingly taking on responsibility that a man will build a life worth living.

The uncompromising 'trad life' left her demoralized and unhappy.

Women, by comparison, appear to be thriving. They dominate education by virtually every metric, from performance and enrollment to graduation rates. In those few areas where they lag behind, such as participation in STEM, incentive programs have made headway in raising the numbers. It is the same in the workforce. Though male-dominated industries still exist, the gender gaps are closing even there. According to 2022 Pew Research, women under 30 are out-earning men of the same age in several U.S. cities.

Lost girls

Why, then, do women seem less happy than ever? They may be thriving materially, but spiritually, they're lost. Women are navigating uncharted territory, growing up in an overtly sex-positive society where "professions" like prostitution and pornography have been destigmatized if not outright encouraged. A wide ideological gap is forming between the sexes, with dates resembling uneasy diplomatic negotiations more than romantic meet-cutes.

Every week, a new "normie" woman seems to go viral on X by posting a video in which she confesses, often in tears, that she’s at the end of her rope. Trapped in unfruitful cycles of self-sabotage intermixed with unsavory digital footprints, a short-term mating strategy that won't lead to long-term commitment, and an absence of deeper meaning beyond dopamine hits via social media, they have a mass psychosis of learned helplessness.

Healthy role models are in short supply. Girlboss caricatures, shameless, hypergamous sugar babies, and raunchy podcasts encourage young women to have fun and ignore those nagging fears about age and fertility. On the other side, they face antagonism from condescending manosphere gurus and conservative trad girlies who are more interested in flexing their moral superiority than steering them in the right direction.

Maybe women need the kind of firm but empathetic authority that cuts through the nonsense and offers them straightforward, time-tested advice on how to live. In other words, women need a Jordan Peterson of their own.

Rage-baiters need not apply

I can tell you who isn't — professional rage-baiters like Pearl Davis, Megha Lillywhite, or Isabella Riley Moody, despite their vocal insistence and desperation to be some revelatory voice on gender relations. Their insights range from the lazy — "men good, women bad" — to the downright disturbing. Moody promised Zherka, a man who thinks it’s cool and edgy to claim that he’s a pedophile, that she and her husband will have their newborn baby "ready for him as a virgin." If it sounds unhinged beyond belief, that's because it's performance art. They're provocateurs uninterested in good-faith dialogue. They create more noise than any meaningful dispute.

It isn't all doom and gloom out there, however. There are some prominent women whose contribution to the discourse is like finding a gallon of water in the Sahara desert. They run the gamut from conservative to apolitical, from mommy bloggers to young women yet to have children. All serve an important role in steering women past the various nihilistic and hedonistic dead ends our culture offers. These women beckon us not to choose between the defeatist learned helplessness of fringe leftism or the meme of limiting tradwife ideals in the 21st century but to choose a secret third thing: a "return" to normalcy.

Freya India

Freya India

Freya is an English Zoomer writer who publishes the newsletter GIRLS on Substack. She rightly attributes much of the rift between the sexes to American universities, which tend to be poisoned by radical leftist academics.

Not only do more women than men go to college, but women tend to have the kind of personality traits — high agreeableness, neuroticism, risk aversion, and compassion — that leave them open to the seductions of various social justice crusades.

Increasing screen time doesn’t help, either. Women average over eight hours a day, much of it spent consuming far-left propaganda, which their algorithms continue to feed them in what Freya deems an "algorithmic conveyor belt." The solution, she suggests, is to delay young girls' entry to social media, to stop documenting your every lived experience, and ideally to get offline.

Helen Roy

Helen Roy

Helen's writing is a breath of fresh air in the mommy blogging world, always managing to find profundity in simple, everyday life.

You may not think you care about motherhood, but Helen’s eloquent discussion of its unique trials, tribulations, and joys makes you realize you should care about it. Her prescriptive anecdotes about managing your time, effectively training to prepare for motherhood, and navigating a culture that is unfriendly, if not antagonistic, to mothers, are incredibly insightful and philosophically derived, though not untethered from real-world experience.

She manages to walk the perfect balance between idealism and pragmatism. Her biting remarks criticizing the ideological blinders of pro-sexual revolution feminists and trad cosplayers are compelling and contain just the right dose of tasteful snark. Helen provides fresh angles to examine popular narratives, finding the underrated contentions everyone would rather conveniently ignore than be pained to engage with. You can read her sharp analysis here on Blaze News, listen to her aptly named podcast "Girlboss, Interrupted," and subscribe to her substack.

Brett Cooper

Brett Cooper

Brett Cooper brings a much-needed young female perspective to the Daily Wire, where she espouses socially conservative ideals that are neither an uncritical deference to the way things "ought to be" nor some desperate zealous trad LARP characteristic of newly born-again Christian converts on social media. She boasts an approachable, down-to-earth communication style; her reasonable appeals to tradition allow for more nuance than one usually expects from her grumpy, less emotionally intelligent colleagues.

What especially makes Cooper stand out from her peers is a familiarity with struggle and suffering. Her upbringing was tumultuous and marred by loss: Her parents went through a messy divorce; she lost one brother to cardiac arrest when she was just five; and another brother spiraled into drug addiction and schizophrenia. As a young working actress, Cooper was already living on her own when she emancipated herself from her parents at fifteen. Cooper hardly comes from the kind of privilege that so many critics like to say accounts for the "sheltered" worldviews of conservatives.

Cooper’s background in the arts gives an appreciation for them as a significant driver of culture, something her contemporaries seem to gravely underrate. Storytelling matters; it's why liberals have a choke hold on the culture as we know it. You can watch her content on her YouTube channel, "The Comments Section with Brett Cooper," and soon enough, you can see her play Snow White in the Daily Wire's upcoming production "Snow White and the Evil Queen."

Lauren Southern

Lauren Southern

Southern has had the most staying power of anyone on this list, though her turbulent personal and political career has cost her a lot over the years. She rose to fame for her bold political conservative activism, which saw her banned from countries, interrogated for hours, and forced to cut contact with close friends.

Southern retired from political life and made an attempt to live out the trad lifestyle that she so earnestly promoted in her early career. As documented in a recent interview with Mary Harrington for Unherd, the uncompromising "trad life" left her demoralized and unhappy. Worse, it turned her into exactly the kind of figure that trads tend to villainize: a divorced single mom.

After recalibrating the personal with the political, Southern settled into a less antagonistic form of activism. She gives a firsthand account of where trying to live up to impossible standards set by fringe online charlatans can lead you. Despite unforeseen circumstances and vicious attacks from her own side, she's remained resilient, an eternal optimist.

Southern models an intellectual honesty rare among people who have burned in the sphere — owning the mistakes she's made and refusing to denounce conservative traditionalism altogether while offering reasonable anecdotes of its pitfalls when taken to its extremes.

She also offers uniquely valuable perspectives, like her "Conservative Sensitivity Training" video, during which she pleads for conservatives to reclaim the value of sensitivity rather than allowing it to be co-opted by progressives as a synonym for mollycoddling.

Her most important contribution recently? Beckoning us to go outside — to touch grass. That's the thing about those pipelines; they just don't have any grass. When she is online, you can catch her content on her personal channel or over at TENET Media.