Reverberations

An Analysis of Fourth Wave Feminism & Gen Z Dynamics

The sheer decadence of history has always taken me. To a point of overwhelming anxiety after watching The Butterfly Effect (2004), and to my first experience with unplaceable rage after finally conceptualizing the magnitude of lives lost over thousands of years fighting humanity’s oldest game. That said, the one through-line I have been especially taken by has always been women’s descent and rise in acknowledgement through the eras. 

Seriously, when you look at it, 4th-wave feminism is the result of decades of attempts, missteps, recalibrations, and tactical maneuvers from all women to navigate honing their human rights in a patriarchal regime. Not to mention the intersectional roadblocks that are doubly integrated amongst the “best” of white feminism icons. 4th-wave feminism is by no means the “outcome” of feminist advocacy. I like to describe it as a time of pushback and balance, as society adapts to a wider understanding.

The way I see it, Generation Z is facing an overload. Gen Z women are facing an overload of expectations—Expectation to be strong-willed, ambitious, motherly, feminine, educated, and well-spoken. Gen Z men are facing an overload of resentment. Resentment of society for suppressing a young man to a small spectrum of identities, resentment toward Gen Z women for standing at eye– or in many cases, a higher level than them in the workplace. Above all, Generation Z is suffering from an overload of content.

This analysis is based purely on personal opinion. My qualifications include many years of silent rumination, four years of political studies, and a tendency to instinctively just know. Still, personal observation remains a meaningful tool for understanding contemporary cultural shifts, and my reflections align with emerging generational patterns.

An unfortunate outcome of feminist advocacy in a patriarchal society is the vast number of different individuals you will face. As technology advances and international relations become more and more a matter of clicks, the avenues for discourse and opinion are increasingly endless. The mobile media landscape has allowed niche opinions to be sown, watered, fed, and weeded until solidified as morale. The increase in women in leadership positions, advocating for their opinions, and publicizing the wrongdoings against them has left the men in charge of maintaining a media, public, or social landscape quite embittered. This tension is not new, but digital platforms magnify and accelerate it in unprecedented ways.

Fashion magazines, pop culture reporting, advice columns—media women know and love (whether from your own interest, or memories of doctor’s office waiting rooms). Take these, add AI, plastic surgery, “youth culture”, and those little girls I see in Sephora, and you have my morning scroll on TikTok. The result is a media environment that blends into a near-constant feedback loop.

Last week, my aunt sent me a primed, framed, loaded-and-cocked gun of a “red-pill” Snapchat story my 11-year-old cousin was absorbing. Yesterday, my roommate sent me a screenshot of our old friend liking anti-immigration Instagram posts. There is an endless stream of brutal, desensitized, violence-based content on everyone’s device—So much so that accountability often feels impossible, because the President already did worse the next day. 

Young men who have allowed their insecurities to become a comfort for their loneliness, or more commonly known as “in-cels”, will commonly take stances on feminist theory that are decidedly literal. A common one that comes to mind is “equal rights, equal fights”. This is a relevant segue, as I believe this perspective on gender equality is a defensive response to intimidation. It is mirrored in modern-day society’s workplace standards; now that women have demonstrated their ability to work outside of the home, a man may choose to separate the concepts entirely for his argumentative benefit. Instead of understanding the effort that goes into homemaking after work, the man may decide to sit back. “She's better at it” is something you will hear about a colleague in a home, but never in an office.

This selective logic reveals how equality can be embraced rhetorically while resisted in practice.

When I said “tactical maneuvers” earlier, I meant it. It is a proven fact that women have evolved over history with different stress responses from those of men. Women feel stress quickly, but can handle more, and are more likely to internalize it. Men tend to have a greater propensity to display outward, aggressive reactions to acute stress (Splett 2025). These findings support the idea that gendered expectations and gendered coping mechanisms remain deeply intertwined. Survival instinct and, if I may get a bit whimsical, female intuition, are strong in women, as we descend from women of unsurmountable strength and resilience. 

I will assume, for the sake of analysis, that one’s mother can be confidently considered the best person one may ever know, or will ever truly know them. Yet our society has enforced a distance between men and any form of feminine guidance. That imposed distance has reverberated through generations, harming people far more than any of the social norms we were taught to protect.

CITATIONS

Splett, Jim. 2025. “UF Scientists Find Key Differences in Male, Female Responses to Stress.” UF Health. January 10, 2025. https://ufhealth.org/news/2025/uf-scientists-find-key-differences-in- male-female-responses-to-stress