The joy of girlhood; the anguish of teen girls

In 2023, it felt as though the world was glorifying girlhood more than ever before. But how does that square with the reality of real girls?

Dec 31, 2023

You’re reading Wait, Really?, a newsletter unpacking what's in the culture, with a feminist spin. Want it in your inbox? Sign up below.

If you spend any time on TikTok, you’ve probably noticed — the world seems to have been girlified. And look, I’ll admit it. When I learned of hot girl walks, I tried it: Go on a walk, think about how hot you are, do not talk (or think) about men.

I thought girl dinner was pretty funny, too. Adult woman dinner meant preparing dinner for others. But a girl dinner? It was just delicious morsels tossed on a plate to please you and you alone. No prep, no cleanup, just me and my wedge of cheese and a handful of stale almonds, toppling the patriarchy with snacks.

But then, it seemed, there was suddenly a special girl version for everything: Weird girls. Clean girls. Snail girls. Rat girls.

Offline, girlhood seemed to be everywhere, too: In Taylor Swift, whose Eras Tour became the highest-grossing music tour in history and whose fans seemed to have blanketed America in friendship bracelets and sparkles. In Beyoncé, who became the most decorated Grammy artist of all time, and has been performing with her 11-year-old daughter. In Barbie, which broke studio records — and led to a shortage of pink paint — somehow taking feminism’s most controversial pinup and making her subversive. Girlhood was in the flash mobs as little girls mimicked the high school dance sequence in “Wednesday.” Girlhood literally boosted the economy.

All of these things were celebrated, and rightly so. What wasn’t to like about girls getting together, going on walks, nibbling on girl dinners, then screaming their lungs out to songs about their lives? The world is pretty bleak; As the writer Peggy Orenstein, who has chronicled girls’ lives for three decades, suggested when we spoke, maybe all this girly euphoria was a necessary “release valve” from the pressure.

And yet I still found myself mistrusting something about all of this. In 2023, it felt as though the world was glorifying girlhood, or an exaggerated version of it, more loudly than at any time I could remember. Was it just coincidence that this embrace came at a time when girls themselves seemed so very miserable?

I spent many months of this past year shadowing real teenage girls, in part because of what the research was telling us about them — which was that they were more anxious, sadder and more depressed than ever. So, what gives?

I wrote about this phenomenon in column in the New York Times this week, which you can read (no subscription necessary!) here.

One of the people I interviewed for that story was Freya India, a 24-year-old writer in London whose Substack, “GIRLS,” I’ve been admiring from afar. Freya writes about girls’ lives and mental health, and how they intersect with technology — for instance, what it means to have to compete with AI girlfriends to the tyranny of online therapy, which seems to send the message that everybody needs therapy at all times for every single problem.

We had a fascinating conversation about the impact of social media on girls lives and well-being, as well as her own girlhood. I could only use a small snippet of our conversation, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it — so I’m bringing you an edited version of it here. Enjoy, and happy new year! — Jessica

So Freya, as you know I’ve been thinking about this strange (but maybe not strange?) embrace of all things girly — from dinners to fashion to Barbie — at a time when girls themselves are more miserable than ever. What do you make of it?

I agree about that contradiction between the kind of carefree, lighthearted celebration of girlhood we are seeing and the actual reality of how girls are feeling. And I think a lot of what girls are celebrating the loudest tend to be the things that we're actually really struggling with. So, if you look at body positivity and self-love and confidence, there's so much promotion of that and celebration of that, particularly online. But if you dig down, we're seeing record rates of eating disorders, body dysmorphia, girls are getting cosmetic surgery at younger and younger ages. So I don’t know if it's almost like a front that we are putting on to try and seem that we're happy and we're okay.

So performing girlhood, in a way.

It’s interesting because part of the narrative online now is that it's okay not to be okay — you know, open up about how you feel. But I actually think people are doing that a lot less, and that there’s this sense that a lot of girls and young women feel like they need to put on this show of strength that they might not actually be feeling inside. I think some of my friends would say they feel pressured to appear that they have everything under control and that nothing fazes them. And then I think if you are struggling, there's become a performative aspect to that, in that you've got to showcase that struggle in a way that's acceptable to other people.

When it comes to the girl-stuff online, on the one hand I don’t want to be too serious about it. These are playful things. They’re fun. But there's still a but — which is that there’s something that feels infantilizing about it to me.

I think a big part of girls’ mental health problems today come down to what you would call “the commodification of the self.” You know, you're making yourself into a product all the time and selling yourself. So whether that's marketing your personal life on Instagram or advertising yourself on a dating app, or building a personal brand, or labeling yourself an “Autumn girl,” it’s constant, and it’s a huge part of girls’ lives. And I think this labeling phenomenon speaks to that, because it’s like, “Which category of product am I putting myself in, and how can I brand and market my life at the moment?” It kind of funnels girls into categories of personality. I think it speaks to how crazy consumer culture has gotten, where we now view ourselves as the product. I wrote a piece about therapy recently, and I saw an online therapy company advertising, “Do you have Sad Girl Depression?” So even that has become cheapened and commodified.

I had a food delivery app upsell me on an item to complete my “girl dinner,” but therapy companies marketing “Sad Girl Depression” is particularly disturbing.

There’s so many companies who I think who have a stake in us feeling worse, basically, and who are making a lot of money off the mental health crisis. I think in the same way the beauty industry has highlighted problems and then sold solutions back to women forever, the mental health industry — which includes pharmaceutical companies, online therapy companies and more — is exacerbating normal issues that girls struggle with, whether it's insecurity or anxiety, so that they can sell us solutions. Which a lot of the time just leave us feeling worse. And it's constant. It’s all the time on girls’ phones and it’s personalized to their unique fears and insecurities and they can't get away from it.

Your Substack is called “Girls,” which I find interesting since you are very much a young woman. Obviously “girl” been a fraught word forever, but why do you use it?

The reason I use “girls” is because I'm trying to emphasize the innocence of girlhood. What I think is tragic about it is there's that kind of short window of time when you're young, where you're carefree and you are authentically yourself and you're not insecure yet. And then all of the anxiety and insecurity kicks in during puberty. And what I think is happening now is that those anxieties are starting way earlier, and girls in particular aren't getting that time to just enjoy being a girl. Like if you are a girl on TikTok who's categorizing herself and having a “sad girl summer,” that's not a childhood to me. You are branding and marketing yourself before you've even had time to just not be self-conscious. So I use the word “girlhood” because I think that's a really important time for young women and we don’t yet know the consequences of skipping it.

That is such a fascinating answer. What was your own girlhood like?

I think a lot of women my age are kind of now looking back at their childhoods thinking, “Whoa, that was really weird.” Like, the fact I was on Instagram at 12, caring so much about how I looked, and using editing apps like FaceTune at 13. I just remember going to sleepovers or on holidays, and the thought was getting “content” for Instagram. I just think that's such a waste of my childhood. I wasn’t even that into social media, but I was still comparing the likes I was getting to other girls my age, and everyone was just so caught up in it. And I just about escaped the worst of it, because I was at an age where it was just starting.

You’re not on social media now. What made you get off?

I graduated from university in 2020, and I was very sensitive to being at that age where everyone’s comparing where everyone else is in their lives. And I was just thinking, in order for me to just, like, see what I want to do in life, I cannot keep comparing myself. So that was the limit for me to switch it off. Even now, I don’t have these apps on my phone. But when I'm researching things, for my writing, it starts to affect me. Like I was going through mental health TikTok to see what’s on there, and it’s just being bombarded with short-form content over and over. It was making me doubt myself, even just being on it for 20 minutes. And there are girls who are looking at it for hours a day.

It’s amazing to realize how little we are even conscious of what we’re ingesting as we scroll.

I did a piece recently about algorithms, kind of saying, young people get hitched to the algorithm and it pulls them in different directions. And a common response to that argument is well, they have agency, it's up to them what they watch. But it’s like, this is a 12-year-old's mind, their brain is not fully formed. Like every decision they make is based off of emotion. How can you say it’s up to them to try and beat this machine that's literally designed to be maximally addictive?

One of my students is working on a story about “divine algorithms” — the idea that people think their algorithms know them better than they know themselves, and give them an almost divine-like power.

Well, that's the thing. It's another contradiction of like, there's all this talk of being your authentic self and confident with who you are, but at the same time, more than ever before, we are letting algorithms decide our personality. Sometimes I will have the realization that, like, I'll have picked out some clothes and then suddenly think, “Wait, why am I picking this? Is it because of what the ads or the algorithm told me, or do I actually like it?” I just think if you are on social media for five hours a day, which so many of us are, what you see will become you in some way. You're feeding each other. And so you can think you are unique in your personality, and then you will meet someone who’s getting served the same stuff, and you have the same jokes, like it's a homogenizing force. So at the same time we are thinking we are more unique and free than ever before, this is the most oppressive thing you could imagine — and it’s dictating our lives. It's so depressing. Sorry.

OK let’s talk about something you’re hopeful about. Did you go see Taylor in Beyoncé in concert this year?

I was actually working in the cinema when the Taylor Swift movie came out, and it was the first time I had seen groups of pre-teen girls not on their phones in a long time. They were all there together, or with their families, and they were up dancing, holding hands, it was just pure, innocent joy on their faces. And it was such a moment of happiness, because I thought, it's been so long since I've seen this. And I think that's what we've lost, is kind of the innocent fun.

I think unfortunately for girls now, they are caught up in the absolute whirlwind of social media. And I think it’ll take a little while to swing back. But when I talk to women my age, all of us are united in, like, “If I have a daughter, I'm not letting her on social media. I'm not allowing her to obsess over how she looks at this age.” Of course I recognize that there are good parts of being online too. But I think my generation are kind of waking up and talking about it — and hopefully we will say, okay, all of us are going to refuse some of this stuff together.