Earlier this week, I was on a national TV panel to discuss the Women’s Reservation Bill. Along the expected lines, the most interesting and thought-provoking lines were spoken in the green room, before and after the show. A bunch of middle-aged women, displaying different political affiliations and proclivities, quickly moved from realpolitik and policy to other things. Like, discussing how their younger nieces were dressing up for parties. How it was easier to raise boys these days. How “innocence” is getting lost as early as primary school. “Vulgarity”. “Obscenity”. “My body, my right”.
Why are we so quick at trash-talking our daughters and nieces and their friends and every other young girl? The phenomenon of older women criticising younger women’s clothing and sexual behaviour is nothing new. But it is more than hypocrisy or internalised misogyny. A useful starting point is the concept of patriarchal bargaining, articulated by Deniz Kandiyoti. Women across generations have had to navigate systems that reward conformity and punish deviance. For many older women, especially those who came of age under stricter gender norms, modesty, and sexual restraint were not merely virtues but survival strategies. Respectability, signalled through attire and etiquette, could mean safety, marriageability, and social legitimacy. Adherence to gender norms was a calculated negotiation within limited options. When younger women appear to reject those norms by wearing revealing clothes and asserting sexual autonomy, they are taking risks that the older women tried to avoid — often at the cost of individual fulfilment, personal and professional.
This is where tension emerges. Feminist theorists have long argued that social progress is uneven and often creates generational dissonance. Younger women may benefit from gains made through earlier feminist struggles. They enjoy expanded rights, shifting cultural attitudes, and greater bodily autonomy without fully experiencing the constraints that shaped previous generations. Additionally, feminist theory has consistently highlighted the sexual double bind for women. They are simultaneously encouraged to be desirable and punished for being sexual. Older women, having navigated these contradictions, may view younger women’s openness as exposing them to slut-shaming, harassment, and reputational damage. Their language is almost always judgmental, but the underlying fear is often grounded in lived experience. Through moral policing, rather than solidarity, older women activate the warning systems for the younger ones.
But let’s not excuse internalised misogyny. When patriarchal values are so deeply entrenched, women direct surveillance and discipline towards other women. Michel Foucault’s ideas about social control are useful here. Power operates not only through institutions but through individuals who monitor themselves and others. This is not simply about malice, then. It shows how power sustains itself by becoming diffuse and normalised.
There is also an affective dimension, one of resentment, loss, and identity. Simone de Beauvoir and others have noted that femininity is often tied to youth, beauty, and sexual desirability. Ageing, in patriarchal cultures, frequently entails a loss of visibility and value. Younger women, who embody what society prizes, can become symbolic reminders of what has been lost. Criticism of their clothing or behaviour can thus carry an undercurrent of displaced frustration. And it’s a low-hanging fruit. It is easier to frame younger women as morally deficient than to confront a system that devalues ageing women altogether.
Intersectionality, thrown very casually by almost everyone who’s even half-educated and wants to be seen as socially conscious, was coined more than three decades ago by Kimberlé Crenshaw and further deepens the current issue. Class, caste, and cultural context shape how women experience both restriction and freedom. In more conservative or precarious social settings, the stakes of deviating from norms can still be severe. Older women know that social acceptance can quickly turn into punishment for those without protection or privilege.
Feminist theory does not excuse harmful behaviour, but it does insist on situating it within systems rather than isolating it as individual pathology. It allows scope for intergenerational solidarities among women that are essential for any equitable future where patriarchy is not the norm.
Nishtha Gautam is an author and academician. The views expressed are personal
