Shrews and Cougars Give Bad Advice

Sons of Anarchy is hardly known as a chick show, but strangely enough, the operatic show about an outlaw motorcycle club had some pretty raw moments of psychological truth when it came to women.

The primary female in SoA was Dr. Tara Knowles, a gifted surgeon who returned to Charming and fell back into a relationship with Jackson “Jax” Teller, the club’s vice president and eventual president. Tara was smart, ambitious, and increasingly aware that her love for Jax was pulling her into a life that would eventually consume her. She knew this. She stayed anyway. The show never pretended that was simple.

At the hospital where she worked, Tara’s boss was Margaret Murphy, a prim, stuck-up administrator played by McNally Sagal. Immediately, Margaret is set up as an antagonist. The audience cheers when Gemma Morrow threatens her with physical harm in an elevator). She’s the worst kind of HR harpie, so we don’t feel bad for Margaret. We certainly don’t think her obvious disdain for Tara’s involvement with the club should be taken seriously. Tara tolerated her the way most young women tolerate older women who disapprove of their choices: she ignored everything Margaret said and privately categorized her as a jealous, dried-up shrew who couldn’t possibly understand the pull of a man like Jax Teller.

But in the ninth episode of Season 3, we all got smacked with reality.

Hector, a disgraced former gang member with a vendetta against the Sons, kidnapped both Tara and Margaret at gunpoint. When Tara insisted her boss had no connection to the motorcycle world, Salazar lifted Margaret’s shirt and found a massive tattoo covering her entire back. Faded, old, but an unmistakable sign that Margaret was in that life. She wasn’t just some prissy office Karen.

Later, when they’re tied up together, Tara asks about the ink, a look of shock and confusion on her face. Margaret reveals that, as a young woman, she had run with a biker gang. She had been in love with the club’s president, and it was the real thing, consuming and total. On Christmas Eve, 1989, the two of them overdosed on fentanyl-laced heroin. He died. She spent months in a coma. When she finally woke up, she rebuilt herself from scratch, carved out a respectable career in hospital administration, and kept the tattoo as a permanent reminder of the woman she used to be.

Every cold look Margaret had given Tara, every attempt to intervene in her relationship with Jax, every act of bureaucratic obstruction that Tara had interpreted as petty hostility was suddenly recontextualized. It never occurred to Tara (or the audience) that Margaret might know something about life, that she herself had once been young and sexy and wild. All we saw was the suit, the glasses, the lines of pinch-mouthed disapproval etched into her face, and we wrote her off. She wasn’t willing to watch Tara, a talented surgeon, walk the exact road that nearly killed her, and the antagonism Tara resented so deeply was actually the most desperate form of mentorship Margaret knew how to deliver.

Tara had decided, as young women so often do, that the older woman in her life had nothing of value to offer. That Margaret’s disapproval was rooted in bitterness or envy or sheer small-mindedness rather than hard experience.

The episode aired in 2010, but this generational antagonism has only deepened in the years since. The mentorship pipeline between older women and younger women in America has collapsed. It has been poisoned from both directions, by younger women who refuse to listen and by older women who have forfeited the moral authority required to be heard. And the wreckage of that collapse is now so total that when a magazine recently tried to offer young wives basic guidance on sex within marriage, the loudest criticism from both the religious right and the feminist left was the same: Why aren’t these girls just asking older women?

The answer to that question is the subject of this essay. And the answer is ugly.

Sex is Everywhere… Except in the Marriage Bed

In February 2026, Evie Magazine announced its spring print edition: “The Sex Issue.” If you’re not familiar with Evie, it positions itself as a conservative alternative to Cosmopolitan, the kind of women’s magazine that features sundresses and skincare routines alongside articles questioning hormonal birth control and hookup culture. Its Instagram gets a hundred million views a month. Whether you love it or find it insufferable, it has clearly identified a gap in the market and planted a flag in it.

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