It’s never been easy, as Britney Spears sang, to be “not a girl, not yet a woman”. But a new survey carried out for Girlguiding shows that young women are less hopeful than ever of emerging on the other side, with the happiness of seven- to 21-year-olds plummeting to its lowest level since 2009.
At 32 years old, I am profoundly grateful not to be a girl today – or even much younger than I am now. When I was a teenager, through the mid-2000s, there were the time-honoured troubles of growing girls: depression, anxiety, bullying, body image issues, disordered eating, problematic interactions with the opposite sex. But – without minimising those struggles, or being blithely superior about “my day” – there were some limits in place that served as checks against external harm and the adolescent impulse towards self-destruction.
One straightforward example: my only access to the internet was on the family PC, for as long as my parents were willing to tolerate being unable to make or receive phone calls. My “social media” was confined to messaging on MSN or trading Bebo wall posts with people from school, or anonymous posting in public forums aligned around common interests: a damning part of my youth was spent on the message boards of a guitar tab website. Even my forays into more risque online spaces, such as Chatroulette or “shock sites”, seem crude and banal today.
With my life very clearly delineated between online and offline, home could still be a sanctuary from school, offering respite from the social politics and anxiety. Now every young person with a phone is able to have a secretive and unceasing online life, while the bars for self-comparison – in terms of beauty standards, or body image – have come untethered from reality.
The idols of my youth were Hollywood celebrities, so untouchable as to not quite be plausible as sharing my plane of existence. In contrast, young women today are coming of age in a media environment where even girls from a nearby school can present themselves on Instagram with a flawless celebrity sheen; where photo-editing software is free and widely used, and the scrutiny – of oneself and others – is unrelenting. With so much of their private lives put selectively on show, the evergreen sense of adolescence as a competition – to be the most popular, or prettiest, or thinnest – has been put on steroids.
What’s more, it is carried out relatively publicly, with adolescent experimentation and errors in judgment running the risk of being widely documented online. By comparison, my own exploration took place in a closed network. When, aged 15 or so, I snuck away my parents’ mobile phone to send a “sexy pic” to my then boyfriend, the picture quality was so poor it was barely discernible as a person. It wasn’t yet the norm to share pictures, let alone livestream, and private messaging, group chats, screenshots and even forwarding – the technology that makes surveillance and “receipts culture” possible – was still in its infancy.
The tightrope that young women must learn to walk today, in navigating their self-identity and social worlds, may seem perilously high – while threats from the world at large are harder than ever to shut out. Where I was free to grow up only dimly aware of “global warming” as a bad thing, the Girlguiding survey highlights that the spectre of the climate emergency weighs heavily on children not even past puberty yet.
Among many of the twentysomethings I speak to, there’s a palpable and persistent anxiety that they themselves are not doing enough to address it. It’s as though they have internalised the media’s messaging – stemming from Greta Thunberg and her school strike for the climate movement – that children are not only “our future” but responsible for securing it for the rest of us. Coupled with current economic decline and political failures, the period in which children may remain blissfully ignorant of adult concerns is increasingly short.
Indeed, what we might think of as “youth culture” is highly literate and informed in a way that can only encourage fatalism. Social media has done much to spread feminist understanding of sexual politics and rape culture to the mainstream; on TikTok, I often come across concepts and analysis at a level I only encountered for the first time in a gender studies paper in my second year of university. But gaining the language with which to make sense of your experience can be a double-edged sword, making you aware of the ways in which you are vulnerable and disadvantaged.
Nowhere is this more evident in the vast volume of dating advice for young women on TikTok, where lists of hyper-specific “dating red flags” and ways to identify love-bombers, narcissists, abusers and other “toxic” men proliferate. Coupled with the undeniable statistics of the prevalence of sexual assault (not to mention, for many, the lived experience), it is no wonder that teenage girls feel there is so much at stake – and so little chance of emerging unscathed.
From a young age they are burdened by awareness, compounding the anxieties of adolescence. Young women today have just cause to be concerned – but our culture reflects it back at them at every turn, magnified. Even their pop music – through to the 21st century, an expression of youthful exuberance and escape, a means of connection and collective euphoria – is slower, sadder and more siloed, their stars world-weary before their years and often openly agonised. Olivia Rodrigo, 20, sings about paralysing self-comparison and not being “pretty enough”; the 21-year-old Billie Eilish’s songs have dealt with climate anxiety, death and her experiences of sexual abuse within the music industry.
Now, when I talk to women younger than me about their fears of the future, their worries about work and dating and social media, it’s the words of my peer, the 33-year-old Taylor Swift, that come to mind: give them back their girlhoods – it was theirs first.
Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist
In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support for rape and sexual abuse on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
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