While it was meant to be light-hearted banter, it quickly became something much darker. “You girls today don’t know the struggle,” I told my 17-year-old daughter. “When I was your age, we had to rewind cassettes with pencils and wait for our favourite songs to play on the radio so we could record them.”
“That’s really cute, Mum, but we have real problems, like AI taking our dream careers, deep fakes, revenge porn and a dating pool influenced by Andrew freaking Tate,” she responded with considerable venom.
“Oh, and women’s reproductive rights are going backwards, and women in Australia keep being killed by their partners. How am I ever supposed to date when I know that, statistically, the guy I marry is the one most likely to murder me? But sure, tell me some more about tapes.” She could have gone on but it was clear that I had, to use her phrase, “been schooled”. The problem? This isn’t an education any mother really wants to receive.
There’s an idea that our girls should be having an easier time than ever. After all, they have more comforts, more rights, more female role models in positions of power and far more permission to reject the narrow gender roles that shaped generations before them.
Our girls have the language (and increasingly, the confidence), to talk about consent, sexism, identity and boundaries, and forget keeping pace with boys, they now surpass their male counterparts in academic and professional achievements.
In the United States, girls are so dominant in higher education that universities have begun practicing affirmative action for boys, with some admitting male applicants with lower academic credentials to boost numbers.
At surface level, it’s enough to make your heart soar, until you consider studies that show one in four Australian girls (26.3 per cent) have experienced online sexual solicitation by an adult before they turn 18, or surveys that report that 71 per cent of UK men aged 18 to 39 have “slapped”, “choked”, “gagged” or “spat on” their partner during consensual sex. (Apparently among 16- to 21-year-olds in the UK, 47 per cent now believe that girls “expect” sex to involve physical aggression like airway restriction.)
What should we make of the revelation that TikTok’s video recommendation algorithm suggests eating disorder and self-harm content to new teen accounts within minutes of activation? Or Facebook whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams’ testimony last year that the company tracked when teenage girls deleted selfies so they could serve beauty ads at that exact moment? That’s something the 26-year-old writer Freya India was thinking about when she wrote her book GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything, which came out earlier this year.
In it, she argues the issues girls are facing are amplified by tech, but they’re unfolding against a backdrop that is unbelievably normal.
“We were the first generation to learn to flirt on Instagram, to try to find teenage love by swiping,” she writes. “We were the first to have our faces and bodies ranked and reviewed on social media before we had even reached puberty, the first to document our adolescence for an online audience. Our problems were painfully familiar and, yes, agonisingly different. I realised that the same adults telling me this was nothing new had no advice to give. Our world was moving too fast for them to know where to begin.”
It’s true, I don’t understand the fury and despair of being left on “read”, why anyone would bother with Facetune, or what it means if your partner doesn’t post about you on Instagram. I try to understand but explaining it to me is like showing a german shepherd a card trick.
When I ask my daughters’ friends what worries them most, I expect body image and friendship dramas, but what I hear instead is “the rise of the far right”, “that I’ll never be able to afford a house” and “climate change and the death of our planet”.
Clinical psychologist Anissa Mouti is not surprised. She says girls are increasingly bringing to therapy the anxieties of an adult world, with only the emotional tools of adolescence. Some arrive with the anxiety of missing out on whatever their friends are up to, or AI already playing the role of confidant, while others are trapped in the comparison economy of social media.
“Some young girls tell me they know that … those filtered images and AI-generated images are fake but they still wish they looked like that, even though no-one actually does,” she explains. Then there is diagnosis-by-algorithm, she adds. “Long before I give my clinical opinion, I’ll ask ‘What did TikTok say you have?’ because it gives me a sense of what the young person is seeking and the void they’re trying to fill.”
Psychiatrist Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell sees the same pattern. In her new book about girls (there’s a trend here) Girlhood, Translated, she details how internet self-diagnosis culture and the rise of therapy speak is reshaping our girls’ identities in adolescence.
“Girls have learnt over time that society may not value them very much but it does value medical language, and while they may not be doing it intentionally, inherently, these things get attention and validation,” she says. “Of course, another thing self-labelling accomplishes is that it connects you with a group of people you feel you have something in common with.”
The issue is that our daughters have started leaning so far into blanket labels that they stop getting to know themselves as people.
The good news is that there’s change afoot. Recent data show young people are increasingly embracing “offline” lifestyles, with nearly a third of gen Zers in the UK deleting a social app in the past year, and 18 to 24s in the US driving a massive spike in the sales of dumb phones.
Gen Z girls are widely recognised as the most socially and politically conscious to date, with more than 50 per cent participating in protests and using their digital presence to speak up about climate action, racial and gender equality and mental health awareness. In my household, it’s not unusual to hear something like, “Why is it called FIFA Women’s World Cup but they don’t call it FIFA Men’s World Cup?” before a flurry of angry emails are sent off to the powers behind the “beautiful game”.
Unlike my own generation, they won’t just sit back and let it be. Mouti sees it too. “Girls today may be facing a lot of challenges, but they are also more independent, more neuro-affirming and far more likely to stand up for friends and strive for a sense of justice,” she confirms.
That doesn’t mean we should leave them out there on their own, and Mouti says the best way to offer support is open and honest communication at their level.
“Keep yourself educated on everything from the lingo they’re using to what [different] emojis mean and don’t tiptoe around tough conversations. If you need guidance, it’s OK to seek professional support.”
Garfinkle-Crowell says it’s vital to stay engaged and translate what your daughter is actually saying. “If she’s saying, ‘I have depression,’ it’s easy to panic, but she’s telling you she’s sad and maybe there’s loneliness and maybe there’s despair. Asking yourself what’s causing the sadness helps you show up in a calmer way in the face of this language.”
I’m still thinking about Garfinkle-Crowell’s words when my younger daughter comes home flushed with outrage. An “old man” on the train, she tells me, had licked his lips at her in a suggestive fashion.
“So I screamed, ‘I’m 13 you paedo!’ and, Mum, he had to run to another carriage because everyone was suddenly staring at him like they wanted to kill him.”
I can’t put my translation of the event into print, but I get the feeling that, despite all of the challenges our girls are facing, they’re actually going to be more than OK.
Girlhood, Translated by Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell, MD (Simon & Schuster, $36.99) and Girls®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything by Freya India (Allen & Unwin, $34.99) are both out now.
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