Ethel Cain Will Never Be Lana Del Rey

For more than a decade, Lana Del Rey has built a mythos around femininity that is both romantic and subversive. Her music captures longing, beauty, vulnerability, and power, weaving American iconography with personal mythos in a way that critics have never fully known how to process.

They called her anti-feminist for singing about romance and heartbreak and claimed she glamorized abuse and toxic masculinity. But what they missed is that Lana was never promoting weakness or dysfunction. She was revealing that raw, honest femininity, in all its complexity, makes for hauntingly beautiful art.

The Feud and the Shadow

Enter Ethel Cain, or rather, Hayden Anhedönia, a man who identifies as a woman and built his breakout album, Preacher’s Daughter, on many of the same motifs Lana mastered: religious symbolism, rural Americana, female trauma, faded glamour. Critics called Cain "the goth Lana." Cain rejected the comparison, despite admitting Born to Die was the first CD he ever bought. In interviews, he bristled at the idea of being likened to Lana, calling it "lazy writing."

That irritation eventually curdled into something uglier. Cain scrubbed Lana from his Wikipedia page, allegedly posted mocking side-by-sides comparing her to cartoon creatures, and captioned a photo with her ex, Jack Donoghue, with a taunt: "ok wait my turn."

In a recent Instagram post, Lana responded in a lyric: "Ethel Cain hated my Instagram post / Think it’s cute reenacting my Chicago pose / The most famous girl at the Waffle House," a reference to Cain’s 2022 New York Times profile and possibly her own Waffle House cameo a year later. Cain then shared on Instagram that Lana had blocked him.

Cain's fans framed it as a petty feud or "transphobia," but Lana clarified the real issue: his cruelty. In an Instagram comment, she wrote that Cain had been posting disturbing, unflattering edits of her, mocking her weight and looks long before they had ever interacted. "Then when I heard what she was saying behind closed doors from mutual friends and started inserting herself into my personal life I was definitely disturbed."

Regardless of which artist you prefer, this conflict goes beyond simple internet drama. It's about a man inserting himself into a woman’s legacy and then claiming to be a victim when she makes a boundary. That entitlement is part of a larger cultural pattern, and it reveals more than Cain likely intended.

The Rot Beneath the Aesthetic

And it gets much worse. Resurfaced posts from Cain's earlier online presence reveal a long history of disturbing behavior. In 2017–2018, Cain joked about rape, used racial slurs, mocked disabled people, and wore a T-shirt that read "Legalise Incest." He's also allegedly drawn pedophilic art, which he defended as depicting 18-year-olds, and has been criticized for selling merchandise using missing-person posters of women and girls.

In one tweet, he ranted: "dumb bitches on this website will go so far to prove that trans women are actually men, they literally will reduce ‘women’ to being small breedable 12 year old anime girls floating in a glass jar of formaldehyde waiting for some old man to come along and fuck them and tell them they are so teeeeeeeny tiny and worth it. um, bitch, u have coarse hair on ur pussy and asshole. u are not delicate, you are a BEAST. u are a nasty little slug too and having a vachina does not absolve u of that. what’s with the beef. stop trying to punch down, he’s still not gonna fuck u.”

That sounds an awful lot like something a porn-addicted autogynephile might say. Indeed, Cain’s obsession with playing out sexualized suffering through a female persona seems to fit perfectly into autogynephilia, a term coined by sexologist Ray Blanchard to describe a man’s erotic fixation on imagining himself as a woman. It's a fetish that revolves around occupying the role of the victim, the object, the aestheticized woman in pain. In Cain’s case, that fantasy has been dressed up as art, but at its core, it’s still a man exploiting femininity for personal gratification and cultural clout.

His rants also don't sound very feminist or feminine, and are instead more like a grotesque parody of womanhood, always filtered through a disturbed male gaze. His defenders insist it's all either innocent or deliberate, with some claiming that he was just young and edgy and didn't mean what he posted, while others suggest that he's such a sophisticated satirist.

Regardless, the consistent theme running through his work is an obsessive replay of female suffering at the hands of men. If you wave away all the smoke and take away the mirrors, all you're left with is a man performing a version of femininity that fixates on incest and abuse. There is no journey, no arc, no insight, just stylized abuse, recycled pain, and a demand to be praised. Meanwhile, real women don’t get applause for surviving. They get trauma, silence, and shame.

The Real Subversion

Which raises the question: why is Cain celebrated by feminists and Lana scrutinized? The answer is simple. It’s not the aesthetic people hate. It’s the messenger. Lana represents the kind of woman modern culture has taught us to hate: unapologetically beautiful, romantic, sometimes strong, sometimes fragile, and uninterested in performative empowerment. Her mere existence challenges a feminism more interested in aesthetics than substance. And that makes her "dangerous," according to our culture's current social programming.

Lana’s critics often forget that she was asking sharp questions about the culture long before it became fashionable to do so. In 2020, she wrote a viral Instagram note defending her work against double standards in the music industry, pointing out that artists like Doja Cat, Ariana Grande, and Cardi B were praised for being sexually explicit, while she was still being criticized for singing about being in love.

"Now that Doja Cat, Ariana, Camila [Cabello], Cardi B, Kehlani and Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé have had number ones with songs about being sexy, wearing no clothes, fucking, cheating etc - can I please go back to singing about being embodied, feeling beautiful by being in love even if the relationship is not perfect, or dancing for money - or whatever I want - without being crucified or saying I’m glamorizing abuse??????” she wrote.

"“I’m fed up with female writers and alt singers saying that I glamorize abuse when in reality I'm just a glamorous person singing about the realities of what we are all now seeing are very prevalent emotionally abusive relationships all around the world,” Lana continued. “With all of the topics women are finally allowed to explore I just want to say over the last ten years I think it’s pathetic that my minor lyrical exploration detailing my sometimes submissive or passive roles in my relationships has often made people say I’ve set women back hundreds of years.”

"There has to be a place in feminism for women who look and act like me,” she added, aptly pointing out that women weren't welcome in the so-called movement unless they hyper-sexualized or masculinized their femininity.

Lana didn’t become iconic by rejecting femininity. She embraced it. She kept the things women were told to abandon, like beauty and a deep longing for real love, and made them poetic. She made art out of softness. That’s the kind of femininity modern feminism has no vocabulary for, and why so many of its adherents declare her dangerous while running cover for a man who loves to revel in female pain.

Cain plays at femininity the way an outsider would: like it’s a horror movie. It’s an appropriation, not an embodiment. He's not redefining or expanding what it means to be a woman; he's simply hollowing it out for his own twisted purposes.

When feminism can’t tell the difference between a woman who is feminine and a man who literally fetishizes femininity, we are in trouble.

But thankfully, Ethel Cain will never be Lana Del Rey or even come close. And that’s a very good thing.