How SSRIs Became the Female Fedora

In the 2010s, "fedora" conjured up a particular type of man. Today, "SSRI" does the same for a particular type of woman.

Photo by Christina Victoria Craft on Unsplash

All day long, I’ve been telling my husband I can’t wait to finally finish the “SSRI fedora” article. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t responded once, because he thinks this is a well-known phenomenon of which he should be aware but isn’t. Thankfully for him, this is just one of those thoughts that keeps popping into my mind when I’m trying to sleep. So I’m going to share it with all of you.

Many years ago in the 2010s, back when people were scandalized over Miley Cyrus “appropriating” twerking, when women unironically wore “This is What a Feminist Looks Like” T-shirts, and when it was a moneymaker to feature pansexual conjoined twins as the spokesmodels for trendy skincare brands, the Internet was rife with depictions of the neckbeard: a slovenly, arrogant, and misogynistic man who was a convenient catch-all for male behavior you found distasteful. Some neckbeards were faux-chivalrous and corny but not antagonistic (commonly referred to as “nice guys” who sulked that their basic manners hadn’t earned them hot girlfriends,) and others were openly bigoted and aggressive. There was also the brief “Reddit atheist” archetype of the antagonistic edgy atheist whose disrespect for women was rivaled only by his loathing of “fundies.” But they all had one thing in common: a fedora.

Not to split hairs here, but really, it was a trilby, not a fedora. But the “fedora” became shorthand for an obnoxious man (typically a nerdy but arrogant white man, but there were variations.) “Fedora” became such an easy insult that it even inspired countless Facebook groups that existed only to tag in order to dunk on fedora-coded people, such as “sounds like something a sentient fedora would say.” A common retort to neckbeardish behavior was that the person had bypassed the neckbeard stereotype entirely and evolved into a “fedora with arms.”

While the neckbeard/fedora stuff probably got a bit out of hand (a lot of normal guys who just liked fedoras, or were harmlessly nerdy, caught strays) the term “fedora” worked as very effective shorthand to conjure up a specific type of person and immediately shut someone down, with their only option for a response being the embarrassing, “Hey, I don’t even wear a fedora!” And, well, the fedora meme may have gone out of style just as much as fedoras themselves, but something else has emerged in its place: the use of the antidepressant class off “SSRIs” to malign a particular type of woman—a white woman over thirty (typically a liberal) whose bitter distaste for men comes from her own failure to find a husband.