The right-wing press has spent April warning us about radicalised young women with green hair, nose rings and Green Party voting cards. Here’s what we noticed when we read the actual articles.
If you’ve opened a newspaper in the last fortnight, you’ll have met her: the Angry Young Woman. She’s between 18 and 30. She has green hair. She has a nose ring. She votes Green, doesn’t want children, and has been “radicalised” by Greta Thunberg. She is, apparently, a threat to civilisation as we know it.
She is also, suspiciously often, “attractive.”
This whole panic kicked off with the New Statesman‘s mid-April cover story, Meet the Angry Young Women: the new feminism reshaping Britain by Emily Lawford. It’s a long, mostly sympathetic piece reporting on a generation of women who polling suggests are now the most progressive demographic in the UK. Within days, the right-wing press had picked it up and decided this was actually a national emergency. The Telegraph led the charge with Rowan Pelling’s “Forget the manosphere. It’s angry Leftie women we need to worry about.” The Critic, American Greatness, American Thinker and several Substack columnists followed.
We read all of them so you don’t have to. Here’s what’s actually going on.
What the New Statesman article actually said
The headline finding from the magazine’s Merlin Strategy polling: women aged 18–30 are now the most progressive demographic in Britain. They are 26 percentage points less likely than young men to feel positive about capitalism. They are 21 points less likely to think they’ll out-earn their parents. The gap is biggest among women who went to university.
The piece goes round the country talking to feminist influencers, hanging out at a Unison ceilidh, going on the national Palestine march, sitting in on a feminist book swap in Leeds. It quotes a TikTok creator with 80,000 followers who was radicalised by the Epstein files; a 27-year-old with endometriosis radicalised by the Personal Independence Payments process; a Leeds student whose feminist society wouldn’t date a man with different politics.
It also opens by telling us its first interviewee has “bright, green eyes, three silver nose rings and cropped blonde hair.” You will be hearing about her hair a great deal.
The right-wing meltdown
Pelling’s Telegraph piece, published 16 April 2026, argues that young women have been radicalised by Greta Thunberg and AOC; that they live in “ceaseless dread and fury”; that they want to overturn capitalism without understanding it; and that all of this — not the manosphere — is what we should really be worried about. She compares being on TikTok to being groomed.
Her proposed solution, and we are not making this up, is Lefty Island: a civic version of Love Island where Green-voting young women are stranded with a troop of cavalry officers or Royal Marines. She thinks it could be “the salvation of humanity.”
Other commentators went further. The Critic dismissed Angry Young Women as a Gen Z update of the Mrs Jellyby Left. American Greatness called them an “expanding coven of radical, unstable, men-hating, activist women.” American Thinker headlined their piece “Young, Angry Leftist Women are Destroying Britain and America.”
Quite a lot of energy, for a generation that allegedly just sits on TikTok being sad.
Five things we noticed reading all of it
1. The “manosphere = femosphere” comparison falls apart on contact
The manosphere — Andrew Tate, the late Charlie Kirk, the whole boys’ lounge — is built on hatred of women. It promotes inequality. It has actual body counts attached to it. The “femosphere,” as described, is young women on TikTok talking about Gaza, periods, the cost of living, and femicide statistics.
Yes, there is some genuinely misandrist content out there. The New Statesman piece names a few examples. We’re not pretending it doesn’t exist. But the scale, the violence, and the political reach are not in the same postcode. To equate them is not a serious comparison. It’s an attempt to launder manosphere harm by inventing a both-sides version of it.
2. They cannot stop describing what these women look like
Notice the pattern. The New Statesman piece — the sympathetic one — opens with nose rings and hair colour. Pelling refers to “Green Amazons.” Pelling lists her own nieces (one dating, two not interested in children) versus her four nephews (all “happy-go-lucky” and “baby-positive”) as evidence of a national trend.
If a man wrote a serious political piece, no one would describe his piercings. We’ve been having this exact conversation about women’s politics being read through their bodies since the suffragettes were called hysterical. We are, in 2026, still doing it.
3. “Luxury beliefs” is a cop-out
Pelling leans hard on the American commentator Rob Henderson’s “luxury beliefs” framing — the idea that privileged women complain because they can afford to. Educated, middle-class women, the argument goes, would be perfectly happy if they had real problems.
A few inconvenient facts. One in four women in England and Wales has been raped or sexually assaulted. Police log around 3,000 offences relating to violence against women and girls every single day. There is nothing “luxury” about being angry about that. And dismissing women as too privileged to have legitimate complaints is not engaging with their argument. It’s undermining their right to make one.
4. The right-wing press is scared. Genuinely scared.
Read these pieces side by side and it stops being subtle. They’re scared of the Green Party. They’re scared of women not getting married. They’re scared of women not having children. They’re scared of women voting differently from the men in their lives.
The Left Foot Forward writer Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead made the same connection in late April: this isn’t a discrete cultural panic. It’s part of a broader project that links anti-feminism to falling birth rates, to anti-immigration rhetoric, to pro-natalist policy, to “traditional family” politics. Reform have already floated the idea of taxing women who don’t have children. Just last week, a Reform candidate at a Welsh hustings said women should stay at home rather than work.
So when the Telegraph calls a 23-year-old with a nose ring a threat to humanity, that’s not really about the nose ring. It’s about a generation of women who might vote against the future these columnists want.
5. This isn’t new, it’s just visible
The thing that frustrated us most when reading these pieces is the pretence that radicalised young women are some baffling new phenomenon dropped down by TikTok. Both of us were “angry young women” in the 80s and 90s. We went on anti-apartheid marches. We went to Riot Grrrl gigs. We had shaved heads and DMs. We were in pubs and at gigs and reading zines. We coordinated by photocopier.
Today’s angry young women are doing the same thing in public, on a phone. That’s not radicalisation. That’s just broadcast.
So… are they justifiably angry?
Honestly, we are surprised more women aren’t angry. This is a generation that grew up with the iPhone, then MeToo, then Sarah Everard, then Covid, then Gaza, and is now watching the Epstein files drop in real time on the same phone. Add stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, a healthcare system that takes ten years to diagnose endometriosis, and a benefits system that strips your dignity for sport, and the question stops being why are they angry and becomes why isn’t everyone.
What we’re also seeing, and what the panic articles miss entirely, is that it’s no longer just women with green hair. Plenty of “conventionally attractive,” mainstream women who used to post about body image and skincare are now posting about femicide. The radicalisation, if you want to call it that, has left the alternative-girl bubble. That’s the bit that should worry the Telegraph. Not the nose rings.
The full episode
We get into all of this – Lefty Island, luxury beliefs, what we were angry about in the 90s, why fashion gets called frivolous, and tailoring gets called serious, and what happens when angry old women decide to back the angry young women up – on Episode 23 of Friday I’m In Bed. Out now wherever you get your podcasts.
Living your best life… but in bed by 10.
