Whose side are you on? You have to choose—Alex or Alix—even though you don’t know what the fight is about. Even if you don’t even know who these women are.If the words “What is up, daddy gang?” mean nothing to you, a brief primer: Alex Cooper is the host of the podcast Call Her Daddy; Alix Earle is a TikToker and the founder of a skin-care line. They may be the two most talked-about women on the internet right now, and they’re in an argument, and no one knows why. That has offered people the fun opportunity to compare two women and pick a favorite without having to consider any relevant facts. But watching this admittedly absurd conflict play out provides something even more interesting than that: a view into exactly how people react to female ambition. Only a few years ago, in the girlboss era, women were encouraged to openly seek power. Now a major segment of the internet seems to think that female hustle is embarrassing, if not offensive.Cooper is six years older than Earle, but the two women with long, blond hair look so similar that many people get them confused. In 2023, Cooper started a podcast network, Unwell, and one of her first talent grabs was Earle, her then-friend and protégé, who was going to start her own podcast, called Hot Mess. Eighteen months later, Earle was out, and people started speculating about what had gone wrong. In April, Cooper posted a video to her TikTok: “Alix Earle, hey girl, the passive aggressive reposts and the likes and the commenting on things—I gotta call you out here. You’re gonna need to get specific and just say what you’ve got to say about me. There’s no NDA. No one is stopping you. Stop hiding behind other people and just say it yourself. What’s the beef?”Earle promptly commented, “Okay on it!!”Months later, we still have no clue what happened—Saturday Night Live even spoofed the exchange in a “Weekend Update” sketch in which the women talk utter nonsense at each other. But one thing is clear: The internet is Team Earle, and it’s all because of the women’s differing approaches to fame and success.Cooper has been an unapologetic girlboss from the beginning. She got her start at Barstool Sports in 2018 and climbed the podcast ranks to sign a $60 million deal with Spotify and then a $125 million deal with SiriusXM, making her the highest-earning female podcaster by far. She has been described as “this generation’s Oprah Winfrey,” in part because she is blunt and open about her drive: “I can walk into any single room in business, and I can get the deal done,” she told Forbes. Cooper also speaks regularly about reproductive rights and abortion access, and in 2024, she had Kamala Harris on her podcast.Earle, meanwhile, treats her success as a happy accident. She describes herself as a “hot mess” and acts like the girl’s girl next door. “I don’t get very political online and that’s my choice,” she told Time for its recent issue devoted to the world’s top-100 “creators”; Earle was on the cover. “A lot of my reasoning for that is when I’ve been younger I think I’ve gone online and spoken before I actually knew what I was speaking about, and I think it’s really important for me to be educated on what I’m speaking on.” She makes $450,000 for each sponsored Instagram story she posts, and her skin-care company sold $1 million worth of products within its first five minutes.“All the girlies love Alix Earle,” Dave Portnoy, Cooper’s old boss and the founder of Barstool Sports, said in a TikTok video summarizing the dispute. “She’s a girly girl. They love her. Alex Cooper’s this ruthless businesswoman.”That does seem to be an accurate synopsis of how many people see Cooper. “I think she is a mean girl and she embraces being a mean girl,” the internet personality Brianna “Chickenfry” LaPaglia said on her podcast.“Alex-with-an-e Cooper took Alix-with-an-i Earle under her wing,” one TikTok creator said. “Alix-with-an-i Earle’s doing better in all aspects now. And Alex-with-an-e Cooper feels threatened and don’t like that.” Another said that Cooper has “had her time when we were way younger. The new generation is taking over and Alix Earle’s at the head of it.” Young people, she said, aren’t interested in yet another interview of “a middle-aged woman who went through a traumatic experience.” They want to “hear about what Alix Earle was partying on at Coachella.”Team Cooper exists, but its numbers are more limited: “I’m Team Alex Cooper. She is a self-made businesswoman,” oneTikTok user said. “And Alix Earle gives me MAGA vibes.”[Amanda Mull: The girlboss has left the building]For a moment, a decade ago, women could be praised for being cutthroat in pursuit of success. In 2013, Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In. Sophia Amoruso, the then-CEO of the fast-fashion brand Nasty Gal, published the business memoir #Girlboss in 2014. The girlboss’s days were already numbered by the time Taylor Swift released the feminist anthem “The Man”: “If I was a man, then I’d be the man.” (Admittedly, I have played this song before every job interview I have ever had.) It was an era of She believed she could, so she did tote bags, Boss Babe mugs, and “sheroes” in pink power suits, and in hindsight, it was deeply embarrassing.The girlboss era took a few blows—the big one being Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016—and was ultimately brought down by reality. The promise that women could work harder and harder and eventually have it all proved to be a lie. The fact that Sandberg was a successful woman didn’t make anyone feel better about the destruction her company had wrought on American democracy and society. When the coronavirus pandemic left many women out of work, they felt even more cynical about the redemptive possibilities of corporate power. Even Swift changed her tune: In her 2022 confessional song “Sweet Nothing,” she complains about the exhausting “voices that implore, ‘You should be doing more,’” and admits, “I’m just too soft for all of it.”But what’s come to replace the girlboss is far from encouraging. There’s a sense among Gen Z that women can be rich and successful, but they can’t be seen trying that hard. They must pretend that their achievements are a pleasant by-product of following their dreams and doing what they love. They should be an Earle, and not a Cooper.Caro Claire Burke is a co-host of the podcast Diabolical Lies and the author of the best-selling novel Yesteryear, about a tradwife influencer who wakes up one day in the 1850s. She’s been following the feud carefully. Earle, Burke told me, is “really, really savvy.” Not long ago, influencers were expected to take a stand on politics, but “that period is over, and I think Alex Earle understands that.” Gen Zers “don’t fall onto political lines the way that I think we’re used to.”The Earles of the world likely watched cultural influencers before them take hard-line political stances to gain audience support, only to be forced to walk back their statements when the climate had shifted. “As soon as you start to stand for things, you will be held to a totally different standard than if you just kind of are a canvas on which people can project a kind of bland positivity,” Burke said. Earle is playing the girl everyone feels is on their side, in a time of fatigue with hollow gestures of political support.But people’s sympathy for the aw-shucks act does tend to wear out. “We expect them to be kind of doe-eyed, like, Oh, I just fell into this TikTok success; I just fell into this Grammy nomination, and then once they do that a few times, people get sick of it,” Burke said. “The cycle is so consistent that after you play that game for a while, then you can step out and very carefully say, No, I'm in a little bit more control than I’ve led on.” Burke pointed out that Cooper is about eight years ahead of Earle, career-wise, so maybe Earle will age out of the relatable, grateful, vapid-girlie role soon enough. In the Time interview, Earle admitted, perhaps for the first time, that she is in fact working hard. She said that she was operating in “grind mode” and that she’d been “involved in every single detail” of her skin-care brand.[Helen Lewis: What going on ‘Call Her Daddy’ did for Kamala Harris]Obviously, there’s a difference between being an influencer and a CEO—even for Alix Earle. It sounds really nice to go to bed one day as a normal 20-something and wake up the next a globally renowned internet tycoon who still gets to live a feminine “soft life” because she’s paid to apply lipstick. In 2023, 57 percent of Gen Zers said they would like to be influencers. Older generations had different role models: the rom-com journalist of the early 2000s, the bossy business executive of the 2010s. Movies such as How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days idealized the life of a 20-something columnist in a way that made 7-year-old me say, “I want that job.” Influencers like Earle romanticize the life of a 20-something woman influencer in a way that makes a 28-year-old me say, “Wait, never mind, I want that life.” Although posting your day-to-day life in a way that’s visually appealing is definitely a form of work, the influencer’s goal is to sell a fantasy packaged as a possibility. It’s specifically not to glamorize the grind.All of this will soon, of course, be forgotten. “Our attention span and our memory for how we feel about women is that of a goldfish,” Burke said. One day we hate them; six months later, they might be our “favorite celebrity,” she said. Earle told Time that she will address the drama and finally say what she’s got to say about Cooper in the fall, when her Netflix reality show, Earle Meets World, goes on the air.But by then, everything will be different for Cooper too. She’s pregnant, and the baby is due later this year. Cooper, Burke said, can “flip this around.” She might still be a ruthless businesswoman, but she’ll also be a doting young mother. As many an influencer has learned, that identity bestows the transcendental rewards of unconditional love—and plenty of new branding opportunities. Maybe people will love the new iteration of Cooper. Six months later, maybe they’ll hate her again, for the old reasons, or for yet-to-be-invented ones. That’s life as a woman on the internet.