Shrews and Cougars Give Bad Advice
Why Young Women Don't Get Advice from their Elders Anymore
Sons of Anarchy is hardly known as a chick show, but strangely enough, the operatic show about an outlaw motorcycle club had some pretty raw moments of psychological truth when it came to women.
The primary female in SoA was Dr. Tara Knowles, a gifted surgeon who returned to Charming and fell back into a relationship with Jackson “Jax” Teller, the club’s vice president and eventual president. Tara was smart, ambitious, and increasingly aware that her love for Jax was pulling her into a life that would eventually consume her. She knew this. She stayed anyway. The show never pretended that was simple.
At the hospital where she worked, Tara’s boss was Margaret Murphy, a prim, stuck-up administrator played by McNally Sagal. Immediately, Margaret is set up as an antagonist. The audience cheers when Gemma Morrow threatens her with physical harm in an elevator). She’s the worst kind of HR harpie, so we don’t feel bad for Margaret. We certainly don’t think her obvious disdain for Tara’s involvement with the club should be taken seriously. Tara tolerated her the way most young women tolerate older women who disapprove of their choices: she ignored everything Margaret said and privately categorized her as a jealous, dried-up shrew who couldn’t possibly understand the pull of a man like Jax Teller.
But in the ninth episode of Season 3, we all got smacked with reality.
Hector, a disgraced former gang member with a vendetta against the Sons, kidnapped both Tara and Margaret at gunpoint. When Tara insisted her boss had no connection to the motorcycle world, Salazar lifted Margaret’s shirt and found a massive tattoo covering her entire back. Faded, old, but an unmistakable sign that Margaret was in that life. She wasn’t just some prissy office Karen.
Later, when they’re tied up together, Tara asks about the ink, a look of shock and confusion on her face. Margaret reveals that, as a young woman, she had run with a biker gang. She had been in love with the club’s president, and it was the real thing, consuming and total. On Christmas Eve, 1989, the two of them overdosed on fentanyl-laced heroin. He died. She spent months in a coma. When she finally woke up, she rebuilt herself from scratch, carved out a respectable career in hospital administration, and kept the tattoo as a permanent reminder of the woman she used to be.
Every cold look Margaret had given Tara, every attempt to intervene in her relationship with Jax, every act of bureaucratic obstruction that Tara had interpreted as petty hostility was suddenly recontextualized. It never occurred to Tara (or the audience) that Margaret might know something about life, that she herself had once been young and sexy and wild. All we saw was the suit, the glasses, the lines of pinch-mouthed disapproval etched into her face, and we wrote her off. She wasn’t willing to watch Tara, a talented surgeon, walk the exact road that nearly killed her, and the antagonism Tara resented so deeply was actually the most desperate form of mentorship Margaret knew how to deliver.
Tara had decided, as young women so often do, that the older woman in her life had nothing of value to offer. That Margaret’s disapproval was rooted in bitterness or envy or sheer small-mindedness rather than hard experience.
The episode aired in 2010, but this generational antagonism has only deepened in the years since. The mentorship pipeline between older women and younger women in America has collapsed. It has been poisoned from both directions, by younger women who refuse to listen and by older women who have forfeited the moral authority required to be heard. And the wreckage of that collapse is now so total that when a magazine recently tried to offer young wives basic guidance on sex within marriage, the loudest criticism from both the religious right and the feminist left was the same: Why aren’t these girls just asking older women?
The answer to that question is the subject of this essay. And the answer is ugly.
Sex is Everywhere… Except in the Marriage Bed
In February 2026, Evie Magazine announced its spring print edition: “The Sex Issue.” If you’re not familiar with Evie, it positions itself as a conservative alternative to Cosmopolitan, the kind of women’s magazine that features sundresses and skincare routines alongside articles questioning hormonal birth control and hookup culture. Its Instagram gets a hundred million views a month. Whether you love it or find it insufferable, it has clearly identified a gap in the market and planted a flag in it.
“The Sex Issue” was explicitly designed for young married women, particularly those raised in religious or traditional households. Brittany Hugoboom (@brittanyhugoboom), Evie’s co-founder, described the target audience as women who grew up with negative associations around intimacy but were expected to become uninhibited the moment they said “I do.” The magazine promised articles on core sex positions, an orgasm roadmap, how to plan a date night that actually leads to sex, and how to navigate your wedding night as a virgin. It was, by Evie’s own admission, the most explicit thing they had ever published, wrapped in bridal lingerie and glossy paper and framed entirely within the context of marriage.
The backlash came from every direction, which is always a sign that something interesting is happening.
Feminists and progressive outlets attacked it as a Trojan horse for right-wing gender politics, which… I mean, good. The criticism from the left was predictable and, in its own way, beside the point, because Evie was never trying to win those readers. Cosmo already has them.
The criticism from the right was more revealing. Religious commentators and conservative women pushed back with a version of the same argument: this is not the job of a magazine! Sex is intimate; you’re acting like a feminist and making it dirty! Look how beautiful the cover model is, you filthy harlot! Young wives should be learning about this from the older women in their lives, from mothers, from mentors, from the Titus 2 women that scripture specifically commands to teach the younger ones.
The Book of Titus, for the uninitiated, is a short letter from the Apostle Paul instructing older women to train the younger women in how to love their husbands, manage their households, and live with self-control. It is one of the most frequently cited passages in evangelical women’s ministry, and it paints a picture of generational female wisdom flowing naturally downhill, from the experienced to the naive, in an unbroken chain of godly counsel.
It’s a beautiful idea. It is also, for millions of young women in 2026, a complete fiction.
The Titus 2 framework assumes that older women possess relevant wisdom and are willing to share it, that they have earned the moral authority to be trusted, and that younger women exist in a relational context where that trust can actually develop. Every single one of those assumptions is broken. Some of them were broken by the culture. Some of them were broken by the older women themselves.
A young bride in 2026 did not grow up in the world that Titus 2 describes. She grew up in a world where her mother might be on her second or third marriage. Where her aunt posts thirst traps on Instagram. Where the dominant cultural message aimed at women over forty is not “pass down your wisdom” but “prove you’re still hot.”
She grew up watching real housewives pull each other’s hair and Hollywood actresses high-five each other for being sexually relevant at fifty-five. She grew up in a world that invented the word “MILF” and turned it into a top-ten search category on every porn site on the internet.
And someone wants to know why she won’t ask Grandma about her wedding night.
(And also, WHO is asking their mom about orgasms? WHO?)
Forever Maidens: How the Matriarchs Became Competitors
To understand why younger women stopped listening, you have to understand what older women started doing.
There was a time, within living memory, actually, when a woman’s progression through life had a certain dignity built into it. You were young and beautiful (maiden), and then you were a mother (or matron), and then you were a matriarch (crone). Each stage had its own power. The matron’s sexual power was confined to her husband, and the crone’s power was solely in her wisdom. She had survived things. She knew things. Nobody confused her with her daughter, and nobody was supposed to.
That model is dead, and the women who killed it will tell you they were liberated by its funeral.
Open Instagram on any given Tuesday and you will find an endless scroll of women in their forties, fifties, and even sixties posting photos engineered to prove one thing: that they are still sexually viable. The “hot mom” aesthetic has become its own content vertical. Though they sometimes couch their thirst traps in the context of “wellness” or fitness, these are not women celebrating health or vitality. They are women in bikinis and bodycon dresses, standing next to their teenage daughters, captioning the photo with something like “people think we’re sisters!” as though being indistinguishable from your own child is an achievement rather than a warning sign. The comment sections are full of men saying exactly what these women want to hear. And yes, dear reader, there ARE mother-daughter OnlyFans accounts. Christ have mercy.
If you think a twenty-three-year-old bride is going to sit down with one of these women and ask for guidance on building a marriage, you have not been paying attention to what the word “guidance” requires.
An elder woman’s advice was only useful (and sought after) because the younger woman was assured that she would not fall victim to the fake flattery and sabotage she would get from her peers—from her rivals.
But now in many cases, a forty-five-year-old woman does indeed fancy herself the twenty-three-year-old’s rival, and she acts accordingly. The divorce rate in America has hovered near fifty percent for decades, and one of the underexamined consequences of widespread divorce is that it turns mothers and stepmothers into sexual competitors within the same family structure. A twenty-five-year-old woman whose father left her mother for a younger woman, or whose mother left her father and immediately reinvented herself as a cougar on Hinge, has absorbed a very specific lesson about what older women value. It is not wisdom. It is not generational continuity. It is the maintenance of sexual market value at all costs, even when those costs include the emotional stability of the next generation.
Hollywood has reinforced this with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The celebrity magazine industrial complex spent the last two decades celebrating women like Jennifer Lopez, Halle Berry, and Jennifer Aniston primarily for one quality: their refusal to age out of fuckability. The compliment was always framed the same way. “She looks incredible at fifty.” “You’d never know she was forty-seven.” “She’s hotter now than she was at twenty-five.” The implication, of course, is that the worst thing a woman can do is look her age, or act her age in a “mom role.”
Because looking her age means accepting that her sexual chapter is over, and in a culture that treats female sexual power as the only power that counts, that acceptance is indistinguishable from death.
So older women got the message. They got the Botox. They got the Brazilian butt lift. They got the divorce and the dating profile and the gym selfies. And intentionally or not, they forfeited the one thing that would have made them genuinely useful to the women coming up behind them: the willingness to be finished with all of that. To say, “I’ve lived through the part you’re entering, and here is what I learned, and I am telling you this because I am no longer in it.”
You cannot offer that testimony while you’re still posting mirror selfies in a crop top. The medium contradicts the message.
The religious conservatives who say “just ask an older woman” are describing a relationship that requires a type of older woman who has become genuinely difficult to find. Not because she doesn’t exist, but because the culture has made her invisible and uncool, while elevating the older woman who refuses to put down the weapons of youth.
“I’m Just a Girl” Tee Hee!
It would be dishonest to lay all of this at the feet of older women. The pipeline is broken from both ends, and the younger end has its own particular rot.
Because even in cases where an older woman has done the work, where she has genuinely moved past the competitive phase and has real, relevant wisdom to offer, she will frequently find that the younger woman in her life has no interest in hearing it. The door is closed before it was ever opened, and it was closed for reasons that have very little to do with the older woman herself.
Young people have always thought themselves the first humans to experience anything. This is not new. Every generation believes it invented heartbreak and discovered sex and figured out something about life that the previous generation was too stupid or repressed to understand. What is new is that this generational arrogance now has an infrastructure.
A twenty-four-year-old woman in 2026 does not just privately believe she knows more than her mother. She has an entire internet telling her so. She has TikTok therapists explaining that her mother’s advice is actually “trauma bonding.” She has Reddit threads where thousands of strangers validate her decision to cut off the older women in her life for being “toxic.” She has an algorithmic feed that serves her an endless stream of peers who share her exact worldview and never, ever challenge it.
The constant stream of reels and self-referential internet culture means that Zoomers and Alphas seem to genuinely think nothing existed before them.
In previous eras, a young woman might have resented her mother’s advice, might have ignored it, might have done the opposite out of spite. But she would not have had a framework that told her the advice itself was a form of violence. The modern young woman does.
She has been trained by a culture of performative mental health to treat unsolicited wisdom as a boundary violation. Her mother saying “I think you should reconsider” becomes “she’s not respecting my autonomy.” Her grandmother saying “marriage takes sacrifice” becomes “she’s normalizing codependency.” The language of therapy, stripped of its clinical context and deployed as a social weapon, has given young women an entire vocabulary for rejecting guidance while feeling morally superior about it.
This is true even within families who share a faith tradition. A young evangelical woman who attended a Christian university and posts Bible verses on her Instagram is still, in most cases, a woman who grew up with a smartphone in her hand and a TikTok algorithm shaping her sense of what is normal. She may believe in waiting until marriage. She may attend a church that preaches Titus 2 from the pulpit every Mother’s Day. But the cultural water she swims in has taught her, at a level deeper than doctrine, that older women are either competitors, obstacles, or relics. That their experiences are interesting the way a museum exhibit is interesting, worth a glance but certainly not worth reorganizing your life around.
So here is Evie, standing in the rubble, holding a glossy magazine full of sex positions for newlyweds and acting like this is a revolutionary act. And the saddest part is that they might be right.
The real story is that the oldest and most natural form of women’s education, the passing of intimate knowledge from one generation to the next, has collapsed so thoroughly that a magazine is now doing the job. And it is doing the job because the women who were supposed to do it first either could not stop competing long enough to teach, or could not stop performing long enough to be honest, or could not stop clinging to ideology long enough to be useful.
Tara Knowles never got to choose whether she trusted Margaret Murphy. The kidnapping made the choice for her. What she did with the information afterward was up to her, and to the show’s credit, it changed the way the two women related to each other for the rest of the series. Margaret became an advocate, an ally, someone who pushed Tara toward a life outside the club because she knew, from the ink and scars on her own back, what staying would cost.
But that is television. In real life, such dramatic re-evaluations don’t generally occur (which is probably a good thing). Instead, there is just a young woman clicking “preorder” on a “conservative” magazine because nobody in her life would tell her the things she needs to know… and an older woman somewhere, scrolling through her own feed, wondering why her daughter never calls.
I'm a Christian man. This piece is well-written, and certainly spoke to me. Obviously I'll keep the majority of my opinions to myself, but I can speak to the other half of this generational divide thing: A similar phenomena has been occurring with the men, where the older would-be mentors are either sexual/financial competitors, disinterested, or predators. And the young men are often radicalized, NEETs, or already on the wrong side of the law. Of course there's cross-pollination as well.
Kristin, this is sharp and I share some key concerns here — particularly the "forever maiden" diagnosis and the way you hold both ends of the pipeline accountable without false equivalence. I'm a fan of Kurt Sutter's work and the Margaret Murphy framing does real work.
But I want to offer something from outside your framework that might support what you're reaching for, because I think your instinct is bigger than Titus 2 can carry.
In almost every animal species, females die at or shortly after menopause. The evolutionary logic is blunt: a post-reproductive female who sticks around competes with her own daughters for resources. The solution, in most species, is death. Get out of the way.
Humans are one of a tiny handful of species — orcas, pilot whales, us — where females survive decades past menopause. That's expensive for a species to maintain, and evolution doesn't preserve expensive traits without payoff. The leading explanation is the grandmother hypothesis: elder females who stopped competing and started contributing — provisioning, protecting, teaching, leading — increased their grandchildren's survival enough to justify the cost of keeping them alive. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_hypothesis] (I can nerd out on orca grandmas if interested.)
Which means the role you're looking for isn't just prescribed in scripture. **It's written into the whole species for thousands of years across every culture and society**. So your "forever maiden" observation lands with full weight: a culture that pressures post-reproductive women to keep competing for sexual attention is pushing them back toward the behaviour pattern that, in every other species, is solved by death. Your Botox Methuselahs aren't just undignified. They're vacating the role that evolution specifically preserved them for — or maybe more accurately, failing to claim it. And you'd be within your rights to reach beyond your faith in that concern and that critique.
But here's where I think the frame could open further. Titus 2 hands you sex education as the content of that role — that was applicable in ancient Rome, but it's the one function that least needs the grandmother delivery mechanism in 2026. A literate woman with a smartphone has access to more intimate guidance than any Iron Age mentorship could provide. What's genuinely scarce is everything else the grandmother role carried: how to read people, how to survive institutional politics, how to hold a family together through crisis, how to know when to stay and when to leave — which is what Margaret Murphy was actually offering Tara. How to be *formidable* rather than *desirable*.
Elder women in developed economies are sitting on more resources, more experience, and more institutional knowledge than any generation of post-reproductive women in human history. The signal competition you've diagnosed isn't just culturally corrosive — it's a catastrophic misallocation.
Your instinct is right and I think it's bigger than the frame you've cited. The grandmother role isn't about what you teach in the bedroom. It's about what you become when you stop competing. That's your sphere to develop within your community — I'm just the outsider noting that both biology and anthropology agree with you.