The Misogyny Machine: How the Internet Taught Us to Hate Women as Content
Not long ago, I found myself in bed scrolling TikTok when the algorithm “discovered” I might enjoy hating Blake Lively—specifically, Blake Lively in an old interview responding to a question about her fashion choices with what could be described as excessive confidence. My feed, usually filled with socialism memes and fan edits of Russian writers, suddenly became a pipeline of women behaving badly, with Lively as the algorithm's selected target of the month. "She's so full of herself," I thought automatically, feeling a familiar revulsion rise in my chest like heartburn. Within seconds, I'd watched three more videos analyzing her body language, her tone, the tilt of her head. Before I knew it, I'd fallen down a rabbit hole of Blake Lively takedowns: her plantation wedding, her racial blind spots, her nepotism, her audacity to have both beauty and opinions. It was only when my phone battery hit 15% that I realized I'd spent forty-five minutes consuming these morsels of righteous disgust with the mindless pleasure of eating chips, each crunch of indignation releasing a tiny dopamine hit until the bag was empty and I was left only with salt on my fingers.
As I plugged in my phone and rolled over to sleep, a question lingered: Why is it so effortlessly satisfying to hate a woman I've never met?
The Rules of Engagement
Take Jordan Hudson, who I'd never heard of until last month when my feed suddenly overflowed with clips of her "controlling" her boyfriend, former Patriots coach Bill Belichick. As long as Hudson played the role of silent, decorative girlfriend to a powerful man five decades her senior, no one particularly cared about their relationship. The 24-year-old dating a 73-year-old legendary football coach barely registered as news. There was no widespread concern about the staggering power imbalance between a college student and one of the most powerful figures in professional sports when they reportedly met in 2021. No outrage about him signing her textbook. No think pieces about brain development and prefrontal cortices.
But then came The Interview. When Hudson briefly interrupted Belichick during a CBS segment to redirect a question, something shifted. “Bill! Blink 3 times if you need help,” wrote one commenter on a TikTok that garnered .2 million views. “It's like elder abuse,” declared another. Suddenly, everyone was deeply concerned about poor Bill Belichick—the man renowned for his ruthless coaching style, who just landed a prestigious head coaching position at the University of North Carolina—being "controlled" by this young woman. When news broke about Hudson's $8 million real estate portfolio, the pattern became even stranger. She was simultaneously cast as a vapid gold-digger and a cunning manipulator—too passive (just after his money) and too active (controlling his career) at once.
The reaction was bizarrely naive—as if nobody understood the fundamental terms of these relationships. We all know why a 24-year-old dates a 73-year-old millionaire, just as we know why he's attracted to someone young enough to be his granddaughter, yet suddenly everyone was outraged at Hudson for playing her expected role in this centuries-old exchange. The implicit contract—her youth and beauty for his power and wealth—was perfectly acceptable when she remained decorative and silent, but the moment she seemed to benefit meaningfully from it, she became a scheming opportunist.
The more I learned about this story, the more I found myself disgusted—not with Hudson, but with Belichick. A 73-year-old man leveraging his fame and wealth to date someone whose pre-frontal cortex is still developing. But here's what's truly revealing: society focused its outrage on her instead of him. The hatred flows automatically toward the young woman, not the powerful man who created this dynamic. This is exactly how the machine works.
Manufacturing Outrage
Once I started noticing these patterns, I saw them everywhere—even in supposedly neutral cultural commentary. When New York Magazine published “It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl” last week, something clicked. These young women—exemplified by influencers like Miranda McKeon with her million-plus followers—were being processed through a familiar mechanism. The article operates a perfect double-bind: simultaneously promoting these women as aspirational lifestyle icons while mocking them as vapid, privileged stereotypes. The same media companies that sell advertising space for Outdoor Voices leggings and Glow Recipe skincare then generate traffic by deriding the women who consume these products. The machine metabolizes women's consumption into content with surgical precision.
The profile lingers lovingly on details designed to provoke irritation: the women all “have seemingly endless disposable income,” wear “identical puffer jackets,” and make the neighborhood “their whole personality.” Their interests are reduced to “brunches, coffees, dinners, drinks with your girlfriends—that type of energy.” Even their attempts at depth—"You can have a Cartier Love bracelet and still care about immigrant rights”—are presented with just enough skepticism to invite eye-rolling. What the article won't acknowledge is how this uniformity itself is manufactured: algorithm-driven recommendations that push the same products, the same aesthetics, the same behaviors onto young women until they achieve this supposedly "organic" sameness that the piece then mocks.
The article reveals its calculated priorities clearly: thousands of words dissecting white women's consumption habits while treating the neighborhood's overwhelming whiteness and $5,995 average rent as unremarkable backdrop. The universal whiteness of these "West Village Girls" isn't some quirk—it's the predictable outcome of price-based exclusion. But rather than interrogating who gets locked out of neighborhoods like this, we're analyzing whether their juice choices are authentic enough.
One resident's quoted frustration exposes the deeper machinery: “I don't want to be an old-lady bitch, but this is the pinnacle of what happened to this fucking neighborhood... I see less gay men and, more than anything, groups of four or five girls. They're always talking at a high, high pitch. It is so intolerable.” She opens with internalized misogyny—apologizing for being female and old—then targets women's voices and public presence. Most telling is her nostalgia for gay men while condemning young women, establishing a hierarchy where gay men enhance the neighborhood's character while women degrade it. By identifying women as “the pinnacle” of neighborhood decline, she makes them scapegoats for gentrification while billionaire property owners like Rupert Murdoch warrant only passing mention.
Don't get me wrong - there are valid critiques embedded in the West Village Girls phenomenon. The extreme uniformity of wealthy young women does reflect troubling class dynamics and algorithmic homogenization. The insular nature of these social media performances deserves scrutiny. But when these critiques come wrapped in such obvious misogyny—both in the article's condescending tone and its calculated omissions—I must wonder: are we actually engaging with these legitimate issues, or are we just finding intellectual cover for hating women?
Where are the think pieces about the finance bros in Murray Hill, terrorizing everyone’s eyeballs with their identical Patagonia vests and aggressive shouting in sports bars? Where are the deep dives into tech workers who've transformed neighborhoods like Williamsburg into playgrounds for the digitally wealthy in their matching Apple Watches? These men display the same uniformity, the same insular social behaviors, the same obliviousness to their impact on local communities. Yet somehow, it's only when women congregate that their presence becomes a cultural crisis worthy of thousands of words analyzing their consumption habits, their voices, their audacity to take up space. This selective scrutiny reveals exactly what we're dealing with: a system that processes legitimate concerns through misogynistic lenses, training us to hide our biases behind reasonable-sounding criticisms. The machine doesn't just hate women—it makes us complicit in that hatred by convincing us our contempt is justified.
The Professionals Behind the Curtain
When Blake Lively filed sexual harassment allegations against her “It Ends With Us” director and co-star Justin Baldoni in early 2025, the machinery itself became visible. Beyond the workplace conduct issues she detailed—including sexual harassment and attempts to damage her reputation—what followed revealed how manufactured outrage operates. A New York Times investigation revealed text messages between Baldoni's team that read like an instruction manual: “He wants to feel like she can be buried,” wrote one publicist. “You know we can bury anyone,” responded crisis manager Melissa Nathan. Suddenly, the Blake Lively content that had invaded my algorithm—clips of her being “difficult,” “condescending,” and “rude”—made sense. I wasn't alone in seeing these clips; they were being systematically pushed to millions of others.
The real disturbing revelation came when Nathan observed the manufactured campaign working exactly as designed: “And socials are really really ramping up. In his favour, she must be furious. It's actually sad because it just shows you have people really want to hate on women.” This message exposes the machine's most cynical feature—the operators understand they're exploiting misogyny, recognize that “people really want to hate on women,” yet continue manufacturing the hatred they claim saddens them.
The campaign's success was brutal. Within weeks, public opinion had shifted dramatically in Baldoni's favor. Lively faced a deluge of online harassment, with users declaring they'd boycott her films and products. Her hair care brand saw sales plummet as customers turned against her. The coordinated effort had successfully reframed a harassment allegation as a story about a difficult woman attacking an innocent man—despite Baldoni's own text messages revealing the calculated nature of his team's response.
How do such campaigns achieve this level of effectiveness? Recent analysis revealed that over 80% of pro-Baldoni posts were likely inorganic—created by accounts showing patterns consistent with coordinated campaigns. During the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial, Bot Sentinel found that 24.4% of accounts using viral anti-Heard hashtags were created just months before the trial, with users who posted anything supportive of Heard facing harassment from newly created accounts specifically dedicated to attacking her.
What's particularly insidious is that much of the hatred we feel toward women isn't even real—it's manufactured in boardrooms, funded by interested parties, and then fed to us with surgical precision. We become willing consumers of our own manipulation, believing the outrage that was designed specifically to exploit our worst impulses. The algorithm's genius lies not just in what it shows us but in what it learns from watching us watch. Scrolling through those Blake Lively clips, I realized it wasn't merely serving me content—it was studying my engagement patterns, learning exactly which fragments of outrage would keep me scrolling longest.
This creates an insidious cycle where minor transgressions from years ago can be recycled indefinitely. I've now seen the same fifteen-second clip of Lively's “dismissive tone” from 2016 at least a dozen times, each time recontextualized to seem newly relevant. We're not experiencing organic public sentiment—we're consuming industrial-grade misogyny, mass-produced and tailored to our individual psychological vulnerabilities.
The machinery doesn't just run on organic outrage; it generates artificial outrage at industrial scale. But here's what's most revealing: these coordinated campaigns are only necessary for white women. When Megan Thee Stallion was shot by Tory Lanez—a literal crime—no PR firm needed to manufacture doubt. Society did it automatically. Instead of widespread outrage at the violence, many people labeled her a "snitch" for pressing charges after being shot. There was skepticism about her credibility, memes questioning her story, and Drake mocking her trauma in lyrics. Three years later, Megan has said she "will never be the same" while still struggling with an unfair reputation, and her career suffered more lasting damage than his. The machine doesn't need to generate artificial hate for Black women—real hate flows effortlessly.
When Hate Becomes Policy
What I've come to understand is that this isn't just about digital content—it's about a comprehensive system that processes women differently based on race, class, and conformity to expectations. Conservative commentator Candace Owens discussed the Lively/Baldoni conflict at least 25 times on her platforms, explicitly framing Lively's alleged mistreatment of Baldoni as evidence that she "is not a kind person... largely due to the fact that she is a modern feminist." This cultural hatred of women becomes a weapon against feminism itself, which then directly fuels policy proposals.
The Trump administration's aggressive pronatalist agenda offers a clear window into how this digital misogyny translates into governance. The administration is considering baby bonuses, weighted voting systems that value parents' votes more highly than childless people's, "National Medals of Motherhood" for women with six or more children, and prioritizing infrastructure funding for areas with higher birth rates—policies that aren't just conservative positions but represent the same impulse to control women's behavior. The motherhood medal proposal eerily mirrors Nazi Germany's Honor Cross of the German Mother from 1938—a coincidence that should alarm anyone with a functioning sense of history. Both the political machine and the content machine operate on the assumption that women have a proper place: in relationships, they should be grateful and quiet; in society, they should be mothers and wives. When women step outside these roles—whether by interrupting an interview or remaining childless or speaking up—they face consequences.
But these policies aren't about encouraging everyone to have babies—they're about ensuring the “right” people reproduce. The pronatalist push directly connects to right-wing anxieties about replacement theory, the white supremacist conspiracy that nonwhite immigrants are deliberately being imported to replace America's white population. The racial targeting is explicit: Trump claimed immigrants bring us “a lot of bad genes” and are “poisoning the blood of our country,” while Vance told the March for Life he wants “more babies” parented by “beautiful young men and women.”
Meanwhile, policies systematically limit reproductive access for others. Seven states still maintain “family caps” on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), denying additional benefits to low-income families who have more children—historically targeting Black mothers with racist "welfare queen" stereotypes. The proposed tax credits benefit married couples, not single mothers using sperm donors, and work requirements for Medicaid ensure benefits flow upward. Moreover, none of the pronatalist proposals would manage the demands of parenting – policies like expanded access to healthcare, childcare subsidies, and support for caregivers of disabled children. Some wombs are clearly more valuable than others.
For all the Republican party's claims of being pro-family, look at how they treat mothers who don't stay quiet. Ashley St. Clair, a conservative influencer who authored anti-trans children's books, aligned herself perfectly with the party line. She had Elon Musk's child—the same Musk who promotes pronatalist policies and the replacement conspiracy theory. Yet when St. Clair sought legal recognition and support, she discovered how conditional male protection really is. According to recent reporting, Musk's representative described treating the mothers of his children as employees in a “meritocracy” where women receive benefits when they “do good work”—that is, when they remain silent and compliant. When St. Clair refused these terms and spoke to journalists, her child support payments reportedly dropped significantly. Even for women who perfectly embody conservative values, the message is clear: motherhood is valuable only when it comes with silence.
The throughline from social media pile-ons to governance reveals a coherent system: cultural hatred of women becomes political weapon against feminism, which then justifies policies that control and constrain women's lives. The same logic that makes us scroll through Blake Lively takedowns also shapes who gets tax credits, whose children get medals, and whose voices are worth hearing in the halls of power.
Inside the Machine
I notice the machine's operations everywhere now—in my reflexive judgment of a celebrity interview, in the articles I click on, in the outrage I consume with breakfast. Despite my conscious efforts to avoid participating in the judgment of women, the algorithms seem determined to pull me in. I clicked. I watched. I had opinions about her tone. The contradiction isn't evidence of hypocrisy so much as testament to how thoroughly these mechanisms have colonized even our resistance to them.
What I've come to call the “misogyny machine” operates through two primary mechanisms: manufacturing outrage through hypervisibility for white women who transgress social boundaries and enforcing strategic erasure for women of color regardless of their behavior. These systems don't operate randomly but reflect intentional design choices in both algorithmic and human systems.
Take Blake Lively versus FKA twigs. Lively's harassment allegations prompted coordinated PR campaigns, exposed text messages, and sustained cultural discourse. Yet FKA twigs' detailed allegations of sexual battery, assault, and emotional abuse against Shia LaBeouf barely registered as news—people felt bad for her, sure, but there were no exposé campaigns, no think pieces, no viral discourse. Meanwhile, LaBeouf's career continues unabated, with a steady stream of film projects despite years of delays in addressing her lawsuit. Lively faced hyper visible destruction through manufactured outrage, while twigs encountered strategic erasure through quiet dismissal—yet both mechanisms serve to silence women who speak up.
The machine runs on different fuels depending on which woman enters its chambers. Capitalism extracts profit by commodifying women's behaviors into consumable content. Patriarchy enforces expectations that women remain passive, punishing those who assert themselves. White supremacy determines which women receive sustained attention and which vanish from public consciousness. These systems don't operate separately but function as integrated components of the same factory floor.
What fills me with rage isn't just that the machine exists—it's how transparently it operates and how willingly we participate. Every time I see a TikTok asking “How is Jordan Hudson controlling Bill?” or see another post complaining about the West Village girls, I'm furious at the obviousness of it all. The system wants us to hate women, and we do. We click. We scroll. We judge. Even me, despite everything I know.
There's something almost comically predictable about writing an essay critiquing how we process women as content, only to catch myself processing women as content while writing it. The platform that might publish this will place it alongside the very content I'm critiquing, with the same advertisements appearing in both. We're all trapped inside this machine, pretending we're above its operations while feeding it our attention anyway.
The most infuriating part? Deep down, we all know what's happening. We recognize the bait when we see it. But the machine has made participation so effortless, so automatic, that resistance requires constant vigilance. And honestly? Most of the time, we don't even want to resist. We want the dopamine hit of righteous indignation. We want to feel superior to women we've never met. We want to believe that our judgment matters, that our outrage has meaning, that we're not just products being sold to advertisers.
The machine doesn't need to be subtle anymore. It can be boring and predictable and we'll still consume whatever it serves us. That's the real tragedy—not that we're being manipulated, but that the manipulation is so crude and we're so eager for it anyway.