This summer I saw a TikTok of a girl explaining, with complete confidence, that you have to stop being a feminist at 22 because it’s embarrassing.
My first reaction was: what the fuck.
My second reaction was: rage bait, close the app, drink water.
My third reaction, the one that stuck: oh. This is what the manosphere plus a literacy crisis produces. On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, around 40 percent of American fourth graders scored below basic in reading, the highest share since 2002, and about a third of eighth graders did the same, the highest ever recorded. As TIME reported in 2025, this is what happens when critical thinking has been so thoroughly deprioritized that a 22-year-old can watch the news, look at her own life, and conclude that the framework designed to advocate for her is the embarrassing thing. Not the conditions that made it necessary. The framework.
We’re going to talk about this. Get comfortable.
When was the last time you called yourself smart?
Not “I’m okay at things.” Not “I did well in school.” When was the last time you sat with yourself and said: I am genuinely, actually, kind of a genius?
I’m going to guess it’s been a while. Maybe never out loud. Maybe you did it once and immediately followed it with “I mean, not like, a real genius,” because the ceiling on female self-assessment is apparently set very low and we’ve all absorbed it.
Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex, published in 1949, that men are made uncomfortable by women who have “too much audacity, culture, intelligence, or character.”
It’s 2026, and we are still having this conversation. “Intimidating” is still the word people use when a woman walks into a room knowing things. A woman can list her credentials and be called arrogant while a man lists his and is called qualified.
The problem has never been that women aren’t smart. They are. The problem is that we’ve been trained to hide it, apologize for it, and now apparently perform the absence of it for social acceptance.
The trendification of female intelligence, and why it’s a trap
Let me walk you through the last three years of how the internet has handled women being smart, because it’s genuinely one of the more dizzying things I’ve witnessed.
First we had “I’m just a girl,” the self-deprecating meme that started as a joke about weaponized incompetence and became, for a hot second, an actual aesthetic. Haha, I don’t understand things, I’m just a girl. Funny. Cute. Deeply uncomfortable if you think about it for more than thirty seconds.
Then we got “disgustingly well read” and “disgustingly educated.” Okay, I have feelings about this phrase and I have had them for a while. Does being disgustingly educated mean that if I haven’t read the approved list of books I’m uneducated? What if my education looks like knowing the full context of the Partition of India and Pakistan, or understanding the oral storytelling traditions of West Africa, or being deeply versed in post-colonial theory? Does that count, or does “educated” in this context mean what it usually quietly means: a very specific Western canon, a very specific kind of cultural capital, dressed up as universal?
Ted Cruz has a JD from Harvard. He is not, by any meaningful definition, educated in the way that matters. Or take Phia: two young female founders, tens of millions raised for their online shopping startup, now accused, per TechCrunch reporting, of knowingly engaging in “cookie stuffing.” Intelligence and education are not the same thing as wisdom, ethics or awareness, and we’ve been collapsing those categories like they’re interchangeable.
Then came “not everything is that deep,” which arrived right on schedule, as it always does, to shut down the women who had gotten a little too comfortable thinking out loud in public. Not everything is that deep. Calm down. You’re overthinking it.
The trend cycle of female intelligence goes: perform dumbness, perform education but the right kind, perform not caring about any of it. And we cycle through fast enough that most women never land anywhere solid. Just dizzy, constantly repositioning, never quite sure which version of themselves is currently acceptable.
Who are we doing this for? I’m asking genuinely.
Who benefits from women who can’t find stable ground in their own intelligence? Hint: it rhymes with fen.
The part where I need you to hear something
You are already disgustingly well educated. Not because you’ve read the right books or accumulated the right credentials, but because you are a woman with a brain and some semblance of free will, navigating a world that was not designed with your full personhood in mind, and you are doing it with your eyes open.
That is its own form of intelligence. The emotional intelligence it takes to maintain relationships in a culture that doesn’t teach men to reciprocate emotionally. The historical intelligence of knowing, even instinctively, that the thing happening to you now happened to women before you, and they survived it, and you will too.
Listen up. Your female ancestors who weren’t allowed to read, who published under men’s names, who sat in front of panels of men and proved they had written their own work, they didn’t do that so you could perform dumbness for a TikTok trend or for someone else’s insecurity, usually a man’s. They did it so you could walk around knowing things and not apologize for it.
You are their biggest dream realized. Act accordingly.
In conclusion: you’re allowed to be a genius about it
Stop waiting for permission to call yourself smart. Stop qualifying it. Stop making it smaller so the room stays comfortable.
That is genius. Yours specifically. Not the Harvard JD kind that produces Ted Cruz. The real kind.
The girls absolutely need feminism. And feminism absolutely needs the girls.
Nadia Noor is a writer and culture critic covering girlhood, feminism, and the internet at The Text Itself on Substack. You can also find her on TikTok at @thenadiannoor and Instagram @thenadianoor1. A version of this essay ran in Issue 004 of The Galconomist, The Play Issue.