Global Lioness Phenomenon: How a Predator Met Its Own PR Team—and Lost

The Lioness Roars, Mostly into a Void
A global dispatch on what happens when the world’s fiercest predator meets the planet’s most inventive PR department: humanity.

There is, apparently, a global shortage of lionesses these days. Not the tawny, four-legged kind—those are still being shot, poisoned, or trafficked at the brisk clip of one every twelve hours—but the two-legged variety: women who have decided that if the planet insists on burning, they may as well light the match with style. From Kabul to Kyiv, Lagos to La Paz, “lioness” has become the polite term for any female who refuses the traditional menu of victimhood, opting instead to maul the waiter and order the entire wine list.

The word first escaped the zoo in 2018, when a squad of Kurdish YPJ fighters nicknamed themselves “Duhok’s Lionesses” and live-tweeted the liberation of a Syrian hamlet that Google Maps still files under “maybe a field.” Western media swooned—finally, a war photo that could run without the usual trigger warning for testosterone. Within weeks, every NGO with a surplus of tote bags rebranded its gender programs: “Become a lioness—only €19.99 per month, tote included.”

Yet the brand went feral. In Brazil, favela collectives use “lioness” to describe teenage girls who map police killings on burner phones. In Tehran, it’s the quiet graffiti appearing overnight on morality-police vans: a crude cat face, whiskers sharpened into daggers. Meanwhile, on LinkedIn, Karen from Compliance has updated her headline to “Customer Success Lioness,” presumably because “Executive Assistant with Mild Roar” doesn’t pop in search results.

The international implications are predictably absurd. The UN held a panel—virtual, naturally—on “Lioness Leadership in the Decade of Delivery,” where ambassadors agreed that women should roar, softly, between 9 and 11 a.m. EST, before the U.S. delegate’s Zoom trial expired. France dispatched a delegation of “Lioness Entrepreneurs” to Niger, where they discovered that local women had already invented micro-credit but lacked a decent croissant; cultural exchange ensued. China, never one to miss a trend, trademarked “Lioness” for a new line of electric SUVs that automatically brake when they detect dissent.

Of course, the original lionesses—the actual Panthera leo—have opinions on this. Their population has declined 43 % since we started cheering human lionesses, which is either tragic coincidence or branding’s apex predator at work. Safari operators now offer “Lioness Tours”: $7,000 for a filtered Instagram of a real lioness yawning while a woman in a power-suit quotes Sheryl Sandberg to her cubs. The cubs look unimpressed, but then, unpaid internships are tough everywhere.

Beneath the marketing foam, something stubborn persists. In Sudan, the Mothers of Khartoum—lionesses by any other name—still march with megaphones made from oil cans, reminding generals that tear gas is merely a spice. In Bogotá, a collective of former FARC combatants run a tattoo parlor called “Felinas,” inking scars into roaring silhouettes, turning memory into warning. They do not accept tote bags.

The world, ever allergic to nuance, will continue flattening every complex rebellion into an emoji. Tomorrow’s lioness may be a banker rebranding her burnout, or a teenager lobbing a Molotov at a police drone. The danger lies in believing the two are equivalent; the comfort lies in knowing neither asked for permission.

So let the LinkedIn lionesses purr about synergy. Let the real ones sharpen their claws on whatever scraps of sovereignty remain. And when the last actual lioness breathes her final, climate-scorched breath, we can console ourselves with an NFT of her yawn—minted, naturally, by a customer-success manager in Dallas who once read a book on courage.

The jungle, after all, was always a venture-capital metaphor. The rest of us just live in the paperwork.