A thirty-five-year-old systems administrator sat across from financial advisor Caleb Hammer, her marriage on the brink of collapse. She earned $88,000 annually. Her household brought in $9,200 per month. Last month, they spent $22,000. And in that single month, she'd spent $700 on Labubu—fuzzy plush monsters sold in sealed boxes where you don't know which one you're getting until you open it.
Her husband had threatened divorce. Their two-year-old son sat in the middle of financial chaos that would likely split his household. And still, she couldn't stop buying the boxes.
"I didn't have these things as a child," she explained, defending purchases that were destroying her family.
This pattern appears constantly on Financial Audit. Women earning solid incomes, drowning in consumer debt, justify their spending with childhood deprivation. They infantilize themselves—calling themselves "still a kid" in their late twenties, insisting on being addressed as younger than their actual age even when they're parents of teenagers. When confronted with basic financial math available through a simple Google search, they claim they were "never taught financial literacy"—an excuse Hammer consistently dismantles by pointing out that almost no one in America receives formal financial education, yet most adults manage not to spend double their income on collectibles.
But that same week I watched those Financial Audit episodes, I observed something else: a podcast host with a massive platform wishing death upon political opponents, using identity-based slurs against people she claimed to protect, and being celebrated by her audience as "fierce," "the future," and "exactly what we need."
Different contexts. Same mechanism.
The Pattern Nobody Names
We've spent decades identifying and creating social consequences for toxic masculinity. We defined it: aggression, domination, emotional suppression, using physical power to control others. We taught boys that these behaviors are unacceptable. We created real social costs for men who engage in overt aggression or domination.
But female toxicity? It gets celebrated. Called empowerment. Framed as women finally being "fierce" and "not taking shit anymore." The relational aggression, the reputation destruction, the moral policing, the competitive cruelty—all of it gets repackaged as strength.
Research on Relational Aggression defines it as "inflicting harm through the manipulation of social relationships, such as social exclusion, reputation damage, and malicious gossip." This behavior persists from adolescence into adulthood, "driven by fragile self-esteem and the overwhelming need for peer approval and conformity." Those who accept relational aggression as normative behavior use it regularly.
The mechanism is well-documented in psychological literature. What's not documented is why we celebrate it when women do it at scale.
Consumer Crazes as Training Ground
When Pop Mart released Labubus—cute monsters with sharp teeth sold in blind boxes—they engineered something sophisticated. You don't buy a specific Labubu. You buy a sealed box and gamble on which one you get. Each series contains regular designs and one "secret edition." The probability of getting that secret? One in seventy-two.
At $28 per blind box, you'd need to spend an average of $2,016 to obtain the secret edition through random chance. This is variable ratio reinforcement—the same mechanism that makes slot machines addictive. Gaming companies faced regulatory scrutiny for using identical mechanics in loot boxes, with some countries classifying them as gambling and restricting sale to minors. But physical blind boxes escape regulation entirely.
The result? Videos of hundreds of people rushing Pop Mart stores before dawn, police called to manage chaos, reports of people breaking into cars to steal Labubus. Women fighting over plush toys. Collectors gatekeeping who's a "real fan" and who just wants to flip for profit.
And everywhere, the same justification: "I didn't have these things as a child."
This refrain appears in virtually every Financial Audit episode featuring compulsive consumer spending. Women in their twenties, thirties, even forties, justify financial destruction by invoking childhood deprivation. One woman insisted on first-class flights to Hawaii for her sister's vow renewal—costing $6,000 on top of the $700 spent on Labubus that month—because "I never went on trips as a kid." Her husband was threatening to leave. Her response: "I deserve this."
The infantilization is systematic. Financial Audit guests routinely describe themselves as "still learning" or "still a kid" well into adulthood, sometimes while parenting their own children. One mother of a seventeen-year-old insisted on being called twenty-nine when she was older. When Hammer points out that Google exists and financial literacy is available to anyone willing to learn, the excuse shifts: everyone else is doing it, these things make me happy, I work hard and deserve treats.
The pattern underneath these justifications is described in research on cognitive dissonance: "the mental stress experienced when an individual simultaneously holds two contradictory beliefs." When the contradiction involves moral beliefs about oneself—"I am a responsible adult" versus "I am spending my family into bankruptcy over plush toys"—it creates intense psychological pressure. Rather than change behavior, people construct elaborate justifications that allow them to maintain their self-image as a good person while continuing destructive actions.
The consumer craze provides perfect cover. You're not being irresponsible—you're a passionate collector. You're not being selfish—you're healing your inner child. You're not being cruel to other collectors or your family—you're just protecting your community from scalpers and fakes.
This is practice. Training wheels for larger-scale tribal behavior where the justifications get more sophisticated and the consequences get more severe.
When the Craze Goes Political
Modern political movements demonstrate how these same mechanisms scale. Research documents how "call-out culture" functions as "institutionalized relational aggression," utilizing "highly peer-dependent status systems to enforce group norms and purity" through "social exclusion and public shaming of ideological deviants."
The enforcement mechanism is identical to adolescent mean girl behavior, just with more sophisticated vocabulary. Instead of "you can't sit with us," it's "you're canceled." Instead of spreading rumors, it's "signal-boosting" someone's past mistakes. Instead of excluding someone from the group, it's declaring them "problematic" and demanding others shun them.
But unlike adolescent aggression, which faces social consequences, adult political aggression gets celebrated as moral courage.
I watched a podcast host—a former reality TV star who transitioned to political commentary—spend multiple episodes engaged in pure relational aggression. She called opponents slurs based on identities she publicly claims to protect. She openly wished death upon people she disagreed with. She threatened other members of her own political coalition, warning that if they don't support her level of aggression, "we're coming after you in the same way we come after" opponents.
Her audience's response? Celebration. Calling her "the future." Comparing her to successful media figures. Praising her "fierceness."
When someone pointed out that she was using identity-based slurs as insults, the cognitive dissonance was visible. She'd just spent ten minutes explaining why those identities deserved protection and respect, then immediately deployed them as weapons against political opponents. The contradiction didn't register because the moral licensing was complete: she'd established herself as fighting for the right cause, which gave her psychological permission to use any tactics.
Research on moral licensing demonstrates this pattern: "publicly supporting a cause gives psychological permission to act contrary to those values." Once you've established your moral credentials through sufficient public signaling, you can engage in behavior that contradicts those stated values while maintaining your self-image as virtuous.
This is why the hypocrisy is so persistent and unshakeable. It's not stupidity or lack of awareness. It's "an active, necessary psychological defense strategy against the potential debilitating effects of cognitive dissonance." The performative signaling exists specifically to create a shield that allows strategic inconsistency elsewhere.
The Economics of Moral Status
But why does this behavior get rewarded rather than sanctioned?
Research on social movements identifies a pattern where mass-based mobilization gets captured by what sociologists call the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC)—educated elites "often exposed less to the negative socioeconomic externalities of certain policies because their occupations predominantly serve the middle or upper classes."
Within this structure emerge "Luxury Beliefs"—defined as "ideas held predominantly by the privileged which confer status on the upper class at little cost to them, while often inflicting significant material or social costs on the lower classes." The examples given include advocating to "defund the police" while living in gated communities, or proclaiming "monogamy is outdated" while maintaining stable partnerships and family structures.
The adoption of luxury beliefs by movement leadership functions as class signaling: "High status in a modern elite environment is often achieved by demonstrating distance from immediate material concerns." When you're economically secure enough that policy consequences don't affect you directly, you can afford to hold beliefs that would be materially costly for less privileged people to live by.
This creates a fatal dynamic where movements get "captured by the PMC," and "the status needs of the intellectual leadership mandate setting symbolic boundaries through luxury beliefs." Energy diverts from achieving material change to "enforcing symbolic boundary-setting," resulting in "long-term decline stemming from loss of authenticity and political efficacy."
The parallel to consumer crazes is exact. Research demonstrates that manufactured scarcity in collectibles creates "accessible luxury proxies"—a $45 Stanley cup reselling for $200 provides status signal for people who can't afford a Hermès Birkin, but were "determined enough, fast enough, and connected enough to get the impossible-to-find" limited edition. The barrier isn't money; it's "intense psychological effort, platform engagement, and anxiety."
Luxury beliefs work identically. You can't afford to attend elite universities or live in exclusive neighborhoods, but you can adopt the moral frameworks of the elite class and use them to signal your sophistication and distance from the "backwards" masses. The cost isn't financial—it's the psychological effort of maintaining cognitive dissonance between stated beliefs and lived reality.
And just like with Labubus, the status competition becomes vicious.
Competitive Victimhood and Concept Creep
Research identifies victimhood as "a profoundly powerful force" in modern political culture, "often functioning as a form of social currency." A victim is defined as "someone harmed without justification," and "occupies the highest moral position, granting significant social power."
This creates a zero-sum competition: if victimhood confers status, everyone has incentive to claim maximum victimization. The mechanism that enables this is called "concept creep"—"the expansion of definitions related to harm, such as 'bullying,' 'abuse,' and 'trauma' over time."
The expansion occurs "vertically (definitions become less stringent, e.g., bullying extending beyond physical acts) and horizontally (new phenomena are categorized under the concept, e.g., the inclusion of the silent treatment)." Research documents that this paradoxically occurs as society becomes objectively safer: "Concept creep is driven by reduced prevalence of obvious physical threats, as society is objectively safer than in previous eras."
The evolutionary explanation: "The brain remains evolutionarily motivated to detect threats and immorality." When actual physical danger declines, "the expansion of harm definitions serves to ensure a perpetual demand for moral conflict, redefining objectively less damaging acts as immoral to maintain the necessary ecosystem where victimhood is the highest form of moral capital."
This creates perpetual supply of grievances to compete over. And the competition is fierce because the stakes are high: victimhood status grants "social power" that translates to real influence, platform, resources, and protection from criticism.
Watch how this plays out in consumer crazes: people who got up at 4am to wait in line for Labubus claim moral injury from "scalpers" who bought multiple boxes. People who spent thousands chasing the secret edition claim they're victims of exploitative corporate practices—even though they could simply stop buying. The victimhood framing serves to justify aggression toward others: you're not being cruel to that reseller, you're defending the community from exploitation.
The political version is identical but higher stakes. Research documents how "preemptive public signaling (virtue signaling) and immediate, conspicuous shaming of others" functions to "secure moral license and long-term identity insulation from criticism, enabling strategic inconsistencies elsewhere."
The performance isn't superficial—it's strategic. By aggressively demonstrating moral vigilance and victimhood status, you create a shield that makes you effectively immune to the same standards you enforce on others.
The Craze Lifecycle: When Mom Joins
Research on consumer crazes demonstrates a predictable pattern. Youth innovation gets amplified by algorithms, reaches peak scarcity and status value, then dies when mainstream adoption kills authenticity. "When everyone can get it, the social currency evaporates overnight."
The comparison to historical fads is stark: Beanie Babies took approximately 60 months to reach peak speculation in the 1990s, relying on "traditional media coverage and word-of-mouth through physical retail locations." The Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection went from launch to peak value in 12 months in 2021-2022. That's a 5x acceleration in cycle velocity.
And Labubus? Initial release in 2015, partnership with Pop Mart in 2019, viral explosion after celebrity endorsement in April 2024, and by November 2025—just 18 months after ignition—readily available on Pop Mart's website with no waitlist, no "members only" restrictions I could verify, multiple colors in stock.
When I can buy them easily, they're already over. The entire value was scarcity. Availability kills demand.
Social movements follow the same pattern. Research documents how movements experience "bureaucratization and eventual decline" when "captured by the PMC," leading to "inauthenticity" and "inability to attract broad coalition," ultimately resulting in "loss of broad public credibility and political efficacy."
The tell is when your parents join. When suburban wine moms and middle-aged former reality stars become the face of a movement that started with youth rebellion, the credibility is gone. Research shows this pattern repeatedly: "youth movements co-opted by older generations" lose their authentic energy because "generational identity and authenticity" are core to social movements, and "young people abandon causes their parents adopt."
I watched this happen. The podcast host I described is in her forties, clearly had cosmetic work done, speaks with the affected cadence of someone performing outrage rather than feeling it organically. She's literally a former reality TV star who transitioned to politics when that became the available platform. Her entire aesthetic is "wine mom discovers she can get attention by being mean on camera."
And she's being celebrated as the future. As the new leader. As exactly what the movement needs.
This is the death rattle. When the aesthetic is middle-aged women performing aggression for attention, when the tactics are relational aggression disguised as moral courage, when the justifications require elaborate cognitive gymnastics to maintain—the movement is in its bureaucratic decline phase, "trading political change for status maintenance."
Why Society Can't Function Like This
Research is clear on what happens to movements dominated by status competition over substantive goals. The outcome is "increasing internal instability," "internal schisms," and "resource exhaustion (burnout)." The movement either "completely fails to attract a necessary mass base" or achieves "full bureaucratization and co-option by established institutions." In both cases, "the movement's transformative potential is neutralized."
This isn't abstract. Consumer crazes demonstrate this at small scale: the Labubu collectors who spent thousands, damaged their finances, fought with partners over spending, and one year later have boxes of plush toys worth nothing. The women on Financial Audit who chose Stanley cups or Labubus over marriage stability, chose first-class flights to Hawaii over their child's stable home environment, chose the dopamine hit of unboxing over their own financial security.
At political scale, the stakes are higher. When movements optimize for status competition through "competitive victimhood and relational aggression," they become "increasingly internally unstable." When "call-out culture" functions as "institutionalized relational aggression" and "enforcement of purity standards," the result is "chilling effect" and "ideological rigidity" that "compromises movement efficacy and longevity."
The tactical problem: if your primary mechanism for maintaining coalition discipline is threatening to destroy people's reputations and socially exclude them for deviations from purity, you can never build the broad coalition required for actual political change. You're constantly purging the insufficiently pure, which shrinks your base while intensifying commitment among remaining members. This creates a "purity spiral" where "internal status competition replaces external effectiveness."
The strategic problem: when the wider public watches this behavior—the cruelty, the hypocrisy, the moral licensing that allows stated values to contradict actual behavior—they don't see moral courage. They see mean girls who never grew up, now wielding political vocabulary instead of high school social hierarchies.
Trust collapses. Credibility evaporates. And the movement that could have achieved material change instead achieved... a lot of podcast episodes featuring performative outrage.
The Asymmetry We Don't Acknowledge
We spent decades creating real social consequences for toxic masculinity. Physical aggression, overt domination, emotional suppression—we named these behaviors, explained why they're harmful, and built systems that discourage them. Men who engage in overtly aggressive behavior face professional consequences, social sanctions, and cultural opprobrium.
This wasn't automatic or easy. It required sustained effort to change norms and create accountability structures. But we did it because we recognized that society can't function when one group's preferred mode of aggression goes unchecked.
But relational aggression? The reputation destruction, the social exclusion, the moral policing, the weaponization of victimhood status? Not only does it face no consequences—it gets celebrated. Called fierce. Framed as empowerment. Packaged as political courage.
Research demonstrates this is a documented, persistent pattern of behavior: "Relational aggression involves inflicting harm through manipulation of social relationships." It persists into adulthood "driven by fragile self-esteem and overwhelming need for peer approval." Those who "accept relational aggression as normative behavior use it regularly."
The question is: why is one form of aggression named, sanctioned, and discouraged while the other is celebrated and rewarded?
The answer appears to be that we've convinced ourselves relational aggression isn't real aggression. Because it doesn't leave physical marks, because it operates through social systems rather than physical force, because it can be wrapped in moral justification—we treat it as somehow less harmful than overt physical aggression.
But research on movement decline demonstrates the collective harm is severe. When "status needs mandate symbolic boundary enforcement" over "achieving material change," when "internal status competition" replaces "external effectiveness," when movements "trade political change for status maintenance"—the damage isn't just to the movement. It's to our collective capacity for democratic deliberation, coalition-building, and actual problem-solving.
The Agency Question
Understanding the mechanisms that reward toxic behavior doesn't remove responsibility for engaging in it.
Yes, algorithms reward outrage. Yes, moral licensing gives psychological permission for hypocrisy. Yes, competitive victimhood creates status incentives for claiming maximum harm. Yes, luxury beliefs allow class signaling through ideology. Yes, cognitive dissonance makes people defend contradictions rather than resolve them.
None of this removes agency.
The women on Financial Audit understand intellectually that spending $700 per month on plush toys while their marriage collapses is irrational. They can articulate the childhood trauma driving the behavior. They know their household income and their spending totals. The information is available. The choice remains theirs.
The podcast host understands that using identity-based slurs contradicts her stated values. The cognitive dissonance is visible in real-time when she proclaims protection for specific identities then immediately deploys those same identities as weapons. The contradiction is obvious. The choice to maintain it is hers.
Research on cognitive dissonance explains the mechanism: people are "highly motivated to reduce stress" from contradictory beliefs, "often by rejecting contradictory evidence regarding their personal self-view as a 'good person.'" But understanding the psychological mechanism doesn't make it involuntary. It's still a choice to construct elaborate justifications rather than change behavior.
Boys are taught to control physical aggression despite biological impulses toward it. They face real consequences when they fail. The fact that testosterone drives aggressive impulses doesn't excuse acting on them. "I was biologically driven to punch him" is not an acceptable defense.
Why should "I was psychologically driven to destroy her reputation because she threatened my status" be acceptable?
If we can teach boys that physical impulses don't excuse aggressive behavior, we can teach girls—and grown women—that status competition doesn't excuse relational cruelty. If we can create social consequences for overt physical aggression, we can create social consequences for reputational destruction and moral policing.
But first we have to name it.
Naming the Pattern
Toxic femininity exists. It's real, documented, persistent, and currently celebrated as empowerment.
It manifests as:
- Relational aggression disguised as moral courage
- Competitive victimhood for status accumulation
- Moral licensing that allows hypocrisy while maintaining virtuous self-image
- Using luxury beliefs for class signaling while harming lower-status groups
- Infantilization to avoid adult responsibility
- Weaponizing identity for personal benefit while claiming to protect those identities
- Purity spirals that prioritize status competition over collective effectiveness
The mechanisms are well-documented in research. What's missing is the willingness to name the pattern when women do it.
We correctly identified that toxic masculinity harms both men and women, that it limits men's emotional range and uses physical dominance to harm others. We understood that calling it out wasn't anti-man—it was pro-functional-society.
The same logic applies. Toxic femininity harms everyone. It damages women by trapping them in status competition that exhausts resources and prevents genuine connection. It damages men by subjecting them to arbitrary moral policing and reputational destruction. It damages movements by replacing effectiveness with purity enforcement. It damages society by making trust-based cooperation impossible.
Naming it isn't anti-woman. It's pro-functional-society.
The Labubu craze is instructive precisely because it's so obviously absurd: watching grown women fight over plush toys, destroy their finances over blind boxes, justify it with childhood trauma while their actual children watch their parents' marriage collapse. The absurdity makes the pattern visible.
But the pattern scales. The woman spending $700 per month on fuzzy monsters is using the same psychological mechanisms, the same justifications, the same aggressive tactics as the political activist destroying careers through call-out culture. Both are engaging in behavior that's individually rational in the short term (it feels good, it provides status, it's psychologically rewarding) while creating collective dysfunction in the long term.
Both need to be named and discouraged if we want society to function.
Research on movement decline demonstrates what happens when we don't: "internal instability," "resource exhaustion," "loss of authenticity," "inability to attract broad coalition," and ultimate "neutralization of transformative potential." The movement that could have achieved material change instead achieves nothing except a lot of performed outrage and damaged relationships.
The consumer craze demonstrates the same pattern compressed into shorter timelines: initial authentic enthusiasm, algorithm amplification, status competition, mainstream adoption, then collapse when everyone realizes they spent thousands on plush toys that are now worthless.
The lifecycle is predictable. The question is whether we can recognize the pattern before we've wasted years of political energy and social capital on performances that feel righteous in the moment but achieve nothing substantive.
The Path Forward
I don't have a policy prescription. I'm not advocating for specific interventions or regulations. I'm making an observation: the behaviors we celebrate as fierce and empowered are identical to behaviors we correctly identified as toxic when men do them. Just because the aggression is relational rather than physical doesn't make it less harmful. Just because it's wrapped in moral justification doesn't make it less cruel.
Understanding why these patterns exist—the algorithms that reward outrage, the status games that reward victimhood, the cognitive mechanisms that enable hypocrisy—is necessary. But understanding doesn't excuse.
We managed to create social consequences for toxic masculinity. It required naming the pattern, explaining the harm, and building cultural consensus that physical aggression and emotional suppression are unacceptable regardless of biological impulses toward them.
We can do the same with toxic femininity. Name the pattern: relational aggression, competitive victimhood, moral licensing, purity spirals, luxury belief signaling, weaponized identity. Explain the harm: movement decay, relationship destruction, coalition fracture, trust collapse. Build consensus that status competition through cruelty is unacceptable regardless of psychological drives toward it.
The alternative is watching the same pattern repeat: authentic movements get captured by status-seeking elites, relational aggression replaces substantive organizing, purity spirals consume energy, mainstream adoption kills credibility, and nothing material changes except a lot of people spent a lot of time being cruel to each other for temporary status gains.
Or we keep buying the plush toys until we realize we've spent thousands on worthless objects while our actual relationships collapsed around us.
Either way, the pattern is visible. The choice is whether we name it.
References
[1] "Cognitive Dissonance," Ethics Unwrapped, University of Texas at Austin, accessed November 2, 2025.
[2] "Political hypocrisy: The mask of power, from Hobbes to Orwell and beyond," ResearchGate, accessed November 2, 2025.
[3] "Social Movements," Della Porta and Mario Diani, accessed November 2, 2025.
[4] "Luxury belief," Wikipedia, accessed November 2, 2025.
[5] "'Luxury beliefs' are not real," Culture: An Owner's Manual, accessed November 2, 2025.
[6] "Victimhood: The Most Powerful Force in Morality and Politics," ResearchGate, accessed November 2, 2025.
[7] "The Power of Victimhood," Kurt Gray and Emily Kubin, accessed November 2, 2025.
[8] "College-age Women and Relational Aggression: Prevalence and Impact," Alverno College, accessed November 2, 2025.
[9] "This $30 Labubu doll became an international status symbol," CNBC, July 14, 2025.
[10] Financial Audit, Caleb Hammer, YouTube, various episodes 2024-2025.
[11] "Conspicuous Scarcity: Modeling the Accelerated Cycles and Weaponized Exclusivity of Modern Consumer Crazes," research compilation, 2025.
[12] "The Bifurcation of Systemic Incentives: A Quadrant Analysis of AI Infrastructure Finance and Moral Capital Accumulation," research document, November 2, 2025.