There are two hot topics that keep recurrently surfacing in our ‘Freshest Goss’ WhatsApp group chat between myself and friends, with not-to-besniffed-at Instagram followings who shall not be named. The first being ozempic injections, the miracle weight-loss drug that everyone is secretly using — I’ll save that for another time when I’ve got my head around the science — and the second is ‘nepobabies’. The latter is basically nepotism dressed up with a Tik Tok-friendly hashtag that’s recently made headlines. A quick search yields thousands of naming and shaming takedowns of examples of nepobabies in Hollywood, fashion and beyond. They — the nepobabies — have in turn begun their fightback with the likes of Lily Rose-Depp (daughter of Johnny) accusing the internet-fuelled criticism of sprigs with famous last names of being misogynistic. They also draw misguided comparison between doctors and their children, who train to become doctors, too, and offspring of actors, who she maintains also put in an equal amount of graft to get to a point of success.
Watching TikTok videos of Gen Z kids and their sassy probings that usually begin with ‘Did you know such-and-such is daughter/son of so-and-so?’ pointing out that said nepobaby shirks away from discussions of their gained privilege, I’ve had to admit that my generation has sadly given nepotism a free pass, After all, hasn’t it always been thus?
