What does it mean to be a woman in the 21st century? From mascara to myths to ice ages, Daisy Onubogu unpacks the origins and contradictions of modern womanhood.
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Episode 4: 21st Century Womanhood
What does it really mean to beEpisode 4: 21st Century Womanhood
What does it really mean to be a woman in the 21st century?
Between chasing the ever-shifting rules of femininity and questioning the very foundations of “womanhood” as a category, the modern experience of gender can feel like running two marathons at once — one for survival, one for understanding.
In this expansive episode of Strange Life, Daisy Onubogu maps both sides of that struggle. She traces the architecture of gender back not just to patriarchy or politics, but to ancient climatic shifts — like the Younger Dryas, the sudden freeze that upended ecosystems 12,000 years ago and shaped the societies that followed. From there, she asks: how did those environmental shocks crystallise into cultural ones? And how did “womanhood” become a role to be policed and performed?
Along the way, she takes us through themes of:
Performance & approval: why so much of femininity is judged by external reward structures.
Biology vs. culture: exploring the ongoing debate over what is “natural” in gender, and what is constructed.
Myth & narrative: how stories we inherit (from Eve to Barbie) continue to script modern womanhood.
Resistance & reimagining: what it looks like to reject or reinvent the scripts altogether.
It’s a sharp, sometimes irreverent exploration — one that insists on taking gender seriously, but not solemnly.
✨ Further Reading & References ✨
Curious to dig deeper into the ideas behind this episode? Here are some of the texts, thinkers, and resources that shaped it:
🌍 Climate, History & the Roots of Society
Younger Dryas — Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/science/Younger-Dryas-climate-interval
Hank Green explains AMOC (Gulf Stream): https://youtu.be/pThcIgJyNME?si=xOuugYcR0TgcWJgL
NASA Earth Observatory: https://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/GlobalWarming/page3.php
Guns, Germs, and Steel — Jared Diamond: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns%2C_Germs%2C_and_Steel
The Dawn of Everything — Graeber & Wengrow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything
👩🏽🦱 Gender as Category & Performance
Gender Trouble — Judith Butler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Trouble
The Second Sex — Simone de Beauvoir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Sex
Masculinities — Raewyn Connell: https://www.raewynconnell.net/p/masculinities_20.html
💄 Womanhood, Beauty & Social Approval
The Beauty Myth — Naomi Wolf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beauty_Myth
Femininity and Domination — Sandra Lee Bartky: https://archive.org/details/femininitydomina00bart
The Second Shift — Arlie Hochschild: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Shift
📖 Myth, Culture & Narrative
“Barbie’s Body Politics”: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1998.00209.x
“She’s everything” (Barbie Movie): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2024.2381254
Eve (Genesis) — JWA: https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/eve-bible
🔮 Reimagining Gender & Futures
Feminism Is for Everybody — bell hooks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_hooks
Glitch Feminism — Legacy Russell: https://www.versobooks.com/products/460-glitch-feminism
Testo Junkie — Paul B. Preciado: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_B._Preciado