Girl Myths
Are girls today are more depressed, alienated, fearful, mean, and materialistic?
Are girls are more addicted, using alcohol, tobacco, and dangerous drugs at younger ages?
Are girls are suffering more body image problems, getting more cosmetic surgery, and taking greater risks with sex at younger ages?
Are girls are more violent and criminal today?
Are girls today are more in danger of violence, especially sexual violence, than previous generations?
Are younger women are more traditional and apathetic, reversing decades of feminist gains by older generations?
NO to all the above. What is it about teenage girls that terrifies Americans into gibbering lunacy?
And not just threatened male traditionalists or 1980s evangelical women organized against the Equal Rights Amendment, but modern academic authorities, liberals, even radical feminists. This analysis examines popular claims that modern American girls and young women are more troubled, mean, violent, criminal, narcissistic, addicted, materialistic, and otherwise disturbed, concluding that authors and other critics are scapegoating girls to avoid facing the implications of their own personal and older-generation crises.
Everyone concedes girls’ remarkable advances into larger society over the last generation, as indicated for education in Table 1. While, in their mothers’ generation and before, girls were more likely to drop out of school and fail to attend college than boys, the last 35 years has seen a dramatic reversal to the point that girls now dominate higher education. A majority of new lawyers and, within coming decades, a majority of physicians and other professionals will be women—can Congress and other seats of political power be far behind?
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Table 1. Young
women are taking over education, especially college |
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|
Percent age 16-24
who dropped out of high school* |
|
Percent age 18-24
in college |
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|
Year: |
Male |
Female |
|
Male |
Female |
|
1970 |
14.1% |
15.0% |
|
30.5% |
21.9% |
|
1980 |
14.7% |
12.8% |
|
25.2% |
25.1% |
|
1990 |
12.0% |
11.2% |
|
29.0% |
30.6% |
|
2000 |
11.8% |
9.1% |
|
31.0% |
37.6% |
|
2004 |
11.6% |
9.0% |
|
31.5% |
40.8% |
|
*Dropouts are 16- to
24-year-olds who are not enrolled in school and who have not
completed a high school program regardless of when they left school.
Source:
Digest
of Education Statistics, 2005, Tables 105, 172. |
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However, from left to right, feminist to traditionalist, fearful cries echo that the rapid advance of girls and young women in American education, employment, independence, and cultural influence has a “dark side.” Sure, the ascendance of young women is beneficial, critics briefly concede… before launching book- and video-long manifestos about how girls’ success combined with misogynist media imagery has also spawned rising violence, materialism, body image disorders, eating disorders, depression, suicide, “hooking up,” binge drinking, drug abuse, destructive competition, even gun violence. These culture critics—right-wing, moderate, and progressive alike—paint modern girls very much like that of fundamentalist preachers battling women’s suffrage a century ago: young females are flighty, shallow, and fragile, temperamentally unequipped to handle the stresses of liberation and vulgar influences, reversing decades of feminist progress.
The troubling reality is exactly the opposite: middle-aged women of 1960s and ‘70s vintage, more than any previous generation, are caught up in a wave of drug abuse, crime, family instability, obesity and other body image crises, wealth concentration and materialism, and moralistic, reactionary political attitudes, as we’ll see in measure after measure. In most of the above devolutions, middle-aged men are even worse. In fact, girls and young women face ferocious attack today to shield older generations from facing their own failings.
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Table 2. Young
women getting safer, middle-aged women now most at risk |
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|
Female violent
deaths/100,000 population |
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|
Age group |
1980 |
2004 |
|
Change, 2004 vs.
1980 |
|
10-14 |
10.9 |
7.2 |
|
- 34% |
|
15-19 |
36.4 |
27.5 |
|
- 25% |
|
20-24 |
39.3 |
27.5 |
|
- 30% |
|
25-29 |
34.2 |
25.3 |
|
- 26% |
|
30-39 |
30.8 |
28.7 |
|
-
7% |
|
40-49 |
33.5 |
38.7 |
|
+16% |
|
50-59 |
34.9 |
31.5 |
|
- 10% |
|
60-69 |
39.8 |
30.6 |
|
- 23% |
|
Sources:
WISQARS, |
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Am I unfair to call many of today’ authors and commentators girlphobes? Listen to their own descriptions of girls: “Confused,” “insecure,” “lashing out,” “totally obnoxious,” “moody,” “cruel,” “sneaky,” characterized by “competition with” and “judgment of each other,” ruled by “social hierarchies” that are “painfully reinforced,” “lying,” “mean,” “exclusive,” and “catty”—those are the words Rachel Wiseman (who claims to like girls) applies them in the first 15 pages of Girl Wars.
Mary Pipher is just as negative: girls are characterized by “eating disorders, school phobias, self-inflicted injuries… great unhappiness… anxiety… a total focus on looks.” They are “moody, demanding, and distant… elusive… easily offended… slow to trust… sullen and secretive… depressed… overwhelmed… symptomatic… anorexic… alcoholic… in a dangerous place… traumatized,” “bristle when touched,” “saplings in a hurricane”—and we’re not even halfway through the first chapter of Reviving Ophelia.
The “I’m disordered, you’re disordered” authors balloon individual troubles into generation-wide mass pathology. “The sheer volume of celebrity illegality, and the specifically female faces behind the mug shots, is indicative of the new normalcy of addiction for young women—of all classes, cultures, and locales—in this country,” Courtney Martin writes in Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters. The woes of a few pop stars, herself, and her acquaintances and some mangled, secondhand statistics form the evidence for her claims of “the dwindling state of young women's mental health” and that “we are more diseased and more addicted than any generation of young women that has come before… succumbing to dangerous emotional numbs—eating disorders, binge drinking, and even harder drugs.”
Authors repeatedly project their own miseries and dismal attitudes on those of all girls. “Many of us hated our adolescent years,” Pipher says of growing up in the 1960s, “yet for the most part we weren’t suicidal and we didn’t develop eating disorders, cut ourselves, or run away from home.” Like other authors, Pipher’s negative attitude toward girls stems from her own troubles: (a) she “hated” her own adolescence (which a large majority of girls don’t); (b) she doesn’t “remember” girls having big problems in her youth (actually, girls had far worse problems 35 years ago than today); and (c) the girls she “sees in her practice” are messed up (which is not true of girls who aren’t seeing psychologists). These authors seem to think their heads contain the sum of the universe.
Not only do girlphobes bury
real-life stresses affecting girls—led by severe poverty, violent and
abusive families, and coping with their parents’ rising drug abuse and
disarray—under an avalanche of yuppie frettings over fictional cultural
images, many play on stereotypes of girls that were never true. That some
girls (and women, though women are rarely mentioned) can be mean, violent,
catty, self-destructive, cliquish, and aggressive is not an invention of the
modern era, but has been the case throughout history. (“The girl of 14 is
the problem of today,” read a
Thank god for our culture’s future that girls as a generation in no way resemble the vicious, joyless cabal depicted by the Piphers, Wisemans, Martins, and other authors who misappropriate girls’ voices to their own dismal agendas. While these authors repeatedly invoke the editorial “we” (when claiming entitlement to speak for) and “they” (when claiming entitlement to characterize) all girls, they no more represent an entire gender and generation that a Kissinger or Chomsky could claim to speak for all Jews, or all men.
What, then, are authentic girls’ voices? To locate them, we have to move beyond the misery ideologues such as Pipher and Martin, as well as those who might be Pollyanna ideologues, such as me. Were I to base a book on my interviews and work with girls and young women as students, coworkers, and in programs, my positive experiences with them as generally happy, optimistic, responsible, and capable might lead to downplaying problems. Adult opinions of youth are notoriously suspect.
The best shot at understanding girls as a generation lies in combining the long-term, consistent surveys compiled by non-ideological sources with health outcome measures that reveal whether girls’ self-expressed attitudes are reflected in real-world behaviors. The gist of these measures shows that, yes, issues such as body image concerns, disorders, depression, violence, difficult relationships with men and each other, and other ills are problems, as they have been for eons. But, far from shattering a generation, today’s girls and young women are handling their problems better than past generations as they move into increasingly powerful and prominent roles. Contrary to the crusade against girls that has built to panicked levels in books and the press, there is little evidence that girls are any more criminal, materialistic, sick, mean, or threatened than they ever were—and a lot of evidence that they’re less so.
Worse than the
fragile-troubled-girl fretters are the violent-criminal-girl mythmakers.
“Today, more girls are entering the juvenile justice system because they
have committed a violent crime, and they are doing so at younger ages,”
announce
Any notion that the vast
majority of
Myth #1: Girls today are more depressed, alienated, fearful, mean, and materialistic.
Older generations’ self-flatteries and self-interests aside, how would we know whether girls are more pathological today? It’s hard to characterize what 20 million people are thinking. The best and long-term surveys of teens, Monitoring the Future and The American Freshman, have asked consistent questions of large samples of thousands of girls for several decades without ideological purpose. We can first see trends in what girls say about themselves, then compare their self reports to real-life measures of crime, violent deaths, and other measures to see if attitudes reflect behaviors. However flawed these measures might be, they are far superior to the biased memories, biased selections of girls to profile, and ideological appropriations of the girlphobe authors.
“Why are girls having more trouble now than my friends and I had when we were adolescents?” Pipher asks, claiming that girls of her generation were happier and more connected. But is this true? As Table 3 shows, teenaged girls in the first Monitoring the Future survey (1975) were slightly less happy with themselves and their lives, less satisfied with peers and parents, and less civic minded.
|
Table 3. But don’t
girls say they’re more depressed,
scared,
peer-tortured, alienated, and selfish today? NO! |
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Percentages of high
school senior females telling Monitoring the Future: |
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Question: |
1975-77 |
1980 |
1990 |
2000 |
2005 |
|
|
Happiness |
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|
I’m “very
happy” |
21% |
18% |
18% |
23% |
23% |
|
|
Satisfied
with life as a whole |
63% |
66% |
65% |
64% |
66% |
|
|
Having fun |
64% |
67% |
68% |
65% |
66% |
|
|
Enjoys fast
pace and changes of today’s world |
45% |
42% |
58% |
56% |
50% |
|
|
Daily
participation in active sports/excercising |
36% |
38% |
34% |
35% |
36% |
|
|
Are you satisfied
with (percent agreeing)… |
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|
Yourself? |
66% |
71% |
69% |
71% |
70% |
|
|
Your
friends? |
85% |
85% |
87% |
83% |
86% |
|
|
Your
parents? |
65% |
69% |
65% |
68% |
67% |
|
|
Your
material possessions? |
75% |
75% |
71% |
73% |
75% |
|
|
Your
personal safety? |
68% |
67% |
66% |
69% |
71% |
|
|
Your
education? |
56% |
64% |
64% |
64% |
70% |
|
|
Your job? |
56% |
54% |
60% |
56% |
60% |
|
|
Feels “I
can do things as well as most people” |
89% |
92% |
89% |
89% |
87% |
|
|
Values (percent
agreeing) |
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|
Important
to be a leader in my community |
19% |
20% |
33% |
40% |
46% |
|
|
Important
to make a contribution to society |
55% |
52% |
62% |
65% |
70% |
|
|
Important
to have latest music, etc. fashions |
77% |
78% |
70% |
59% |
51% |
|
|
Important
to have latest-style clothes |
42% |
47% |
57% |
42% |
39% |
|
|
Wants to
have lots of money |
35% |
41% |
63% |
57% |
59% |
|
|
Wants job
with status and prestige |
52% |
60% |
69% |
65% |
67% |
|
|
Wants job
which provides lots of money |
84% |
89% |
86% |
86% |
86% |
|
|
Wants job
with opportunity to help others |
92% |
91% |
92% |
88% |
90% |
|
|
Women
should have equal job opportunity |
82% |
88% |
96% |
97% |
95% |
|
|
Wants to
correct social/economic inequality |
37% |
35% |
44% |
39% |
39% |
|
|
Depression/pessimism |
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|
Dissatisfied with self |
12% |
10% |
13% |
10% |
12% |
|
|
Sometimes
thinks “I am no good at all” |
28% |
27% |
28% |
25% |
24% |
|
|
I’m “not
too happy” |
13% |
17% |
12% |
14% |
13% |
|
|
Feels I am
“not a person of worth” |
5% |
5% |
6% |
7% |
8% |
|
|
Often feels
“left out of things” |
33% |
34% |
36% |
34% |
29% |
|
|
Feels
there’s usually no one I can talk to |
6% |
5% |
6% |
6% |
5% |
|
|
Feels “I can’t
do anything right” |
10% |
11% |
12% |
14% |
14% |
|
|
Wishes “I
had more good friends” |
50% |
46% |
50% |
52% |
44% |
|
|
Not having
fun |
19% |
13% |
16% |
20% |
17% |
|
|
Can’t get
ahead because others stop me |
22% |
21% |
26% |
26% |
20% |
|
|
Thinks
“things change too quickly” today |
54% |
56% |
44% |
44% |
46% |
|
|
Thinks
“times ahead of me will be tougher” |
47% |
54% |
45% |
42% |
41% |
|
|
Feels
“people like me don’t have a chance” |
6% |
5% |
5% |
5% |
5% |
|
|
*Source:
Monitoring the
Future,1975-2005. |
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Compared to girls of past decades, girls today are somewhat happier, less likely to feel no good, less likely to feel left out or in need of more friends, happier with a fast-changing society, much happier with school and jobs, feeling safer, and more optimistic about the future. They are more likely to value leadership, being financially well off, and contributing positively to society. While the percentage of unhappy girls has stayed about the same when various measures are combined, those reporting more optimistic, healthier attitudes are reflected in the increasing numbers who graduate and go to college.
Here, the University of California, Los Angeles’s, Higher Education Research Institute has surveyed hundreds of thousands of first-year students for The American Freshman, finding girls’ rates of depression have fallen sharply and steadily from their peak 20 years ago (Table 4). However, the percentage “feeling overwhelmed by all I have to do” rose to the late 1990s and leveled off. Part of this may be due to the fact that college women are extending their education at the same time their student loan debts are rising and more are working while going to school—trends forced on them by declining public funding of higher education.
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Table 4. Percent of
first-year college women saying they feel: |
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|
Years |
Frequently
depressed |
Overwhelmed by all
I have to do |
|
1985-89 |
11.4% |
25.8% |
|
1990-94 |
11.0% |
30.9% |
|
1995-99 |
10.4% |
37.7% |
|
2000-04 |
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