The Anthropology of “Young Hoes”
An X post claimed that “young hoes cook everything on high,” and managed to trigger a hilarious wave of cultural analysis.
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It was a direct attack. The first time I came across @Bean_____1’s now-viral tweet, which succinctly observed how “Young hoes cook everything on high,” I really Carrie Bradshaw–style couldn’t help but wonder if I was one of said young hoes? I’m an employed Gen Z woman in my 20s living paycheck to paycheck in modern America, with people to see and places to go! Of course, I don’t have the time to sauté the onions for my mushroom bolognese on low for 10 minutes—or whatever the hell the recipe suggests.
I was not the only person who took the statement as a direct hit. Plenty of other young women read it as a hilarious, astute (if not slightly vulgar) assessment of busy Gen Z women’s waning penchant for domesticity. One user even offered a historical tie to the conversation—citing how the “puttanesca” dish (which loosely translates to, excuse my language, “whore’s pasta”) earned its name because the quick and easy recipe was allegedly developed in a 20th-century Italian brothel.
So, like the iconic “f*cking the text man for texts” tweet before it (see here if you’re unfamiliar), “Young hoes cook everything on high” has become one of those brief, chilling, oft-cited anthropological analyses that everyday users drop on X and casually reshape people’s worldviews with. And now, this observation has become the choice format for marking the behaviors of not-so-domestic Gen Z women.
Is the claim misogynistic? The use of “hoes” instead of women suggests that @Bean_____1 probably wasn’t operating out of Gloria Steinem’s school of thought when he shared his take. But in the two months since his post was made, the phrasing has been co-opted by many young women who want to share their own hilariously accurate assessments about their demo. As a result, it’s hard to read the current influx of “young hoes” jokes, coming from self-appointed “young hoes,” as anything but classic social media jest. In the past week alone, I’ve seen women joke that young hoes don’t separate their laundry, that their fridges never have anything besides condiments, and that they hate ironing their clothes. (All lifestyle choices that I unfortunately relate to.)
The “young hoes” posts feel like a natural evolution of a popular late-2010s meme format: “All females born after 1993 can’t cook…all they know is McDonald's, eat hot chips, be bisexual and lie.”
Like this predecessor, “young hoes” posts are sweeping generalizations. And they’re vulgar. And the widely shared screenshots usually undergo the deep-fried editing treatment, rendering them almost illegible by the time they appear on your Instagram Explore page. But I’d go as far as to say that they’re the modern iteration of Jane Austen’s 18th-century commentary on young women. They serve as easily digestible and lighthearted behavioral analyses that inspire reflection, incite a bit of healthy debate, and take a bit of the shame away from the referenced behaviors by hedging them with the idea that they’re a symptom of your demographic, not an individual character flaw. But that’s not to say some aren’t taking the posts as a signal to make some lifestyle changes. This content is imported from TikTok. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information on their website.
The throughline of most of the recent “young hoe” observations is that, as a collective, we lack patience. We don’t want to wait for our food to warm up, or to wash our clothes on anything but the quickest cycle. I see that as a direct result of a digital upbringing, in which information and satisfaction have always been made readily available to us young hoes. We’re a dopamine-driven set. And yes, young men grew up the same way. But what makes “young hoe” behaviors notable in women is how they mark a departure from the days when women’s main goals were marriage and children, and when they were only valued for how well they could run a household. The significant number of young women who couldn’t care less about cooking a meal properly, or ironing clothes the right way, signals progress. They have jobs, and friendships, and big dreams to attend to. Maybe young hoes cooking everything on high is a cultural advancement worth celebrating.