White Feminism, Valley Girls, and Why Progress Isn’t Linear (with Koa Beck)

April 6, 2026

This episode is for you if you’ve ever heard someone say “well, I’m not like those other white feminists” and wanted language for why that framing is itself the problem — or if you’re curious how a decades-old gender stereotype like “Valley girl” quietly encodes race and class.

Becky and Taina sit down with Koa Beck — author of White Feminism and writer of the newsletter Valley Girl — for a conversation about the real difference between being a feminist who is white and practicing white feminism as an ideology, why progress moves like a pendulum instead of a straight line, and how a flattened, decades-old stereotype about “Valley girls” reveals so much about how whiteness gets manufactured and sold.

About our guest

Koa Beck is the author of White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind, a book that’s shaped how a lot of people — Becky included — think and talk about the difference between feminism and white feminism as an ideology. She’s also the writer behind Valley Girl, a newsletter tracing the real history behind the “Valley girl” gender stereotype and what it reveals about race, class, and whiteness in America.

In This Episode, We Get Into:

• The real difference between being “a white feminist” and practicing white feminism as an ideology
• Why white feminism is about aspiring to white privilege, not just centering whiteness
• Adapting to existing systems vs. actually trying to change them
• What it took to research and publish White Feminism inside a mostly-white publishing industry
• How being racially “read” differently by different people shapes what others feel comfortable saying in front of you
• Why Koa doesn’t believe progress is linear — it’s a pendulum, not a checklist
• What talking to Gen Z students about white feminism reveals about where the conversation is headed
• The “Valley girl” stereotype: how a real, diverse, working-class community got flattened into a blonde bimbo caricature
• Moon Unit Zappa, the 1982 song “Valley Girl,” and how patriarchy and whiteness get baked into pop culture characters
• What fostering-to-adopt taught Koa about gender mythology, motherhood, and the family court system