Hell is a Teenage Girl, and Teenage Girls are Fixing It
The role of teenage girls and young women in simultaneously navigating and fixing the problems of, you guessed it, teenage girls and young women.
Tuesday 17th January 2023
Cover photo credit: Sophia Kelly.
Or more appropriately, hell is being a teenage girl. It’s confusing, painful, full of discoveries both personal and otherwise, often with nobody better to bounce this confusion off of other than the girls you’re surrounded by, who are in the eye of the exact same storm with none of the answers that will satisfy you. As we navigate that middle ground between girlhood and womanhood, we’re met with a blend of blissful unawareness, invaded by the inevitability of what’s to come.
I spent a good portion of my teenagehood becoming acquainted with the world of YouTube and ‘beauty gurus’, completely enamoured by them in the way a younger sister may turn to an older one. These girls were barely five years older than me and had we been from the same area, I would have passed them in the school yard, but to me they held the knowledge of a thousand lives lived. Whilst it started with makeup recommendations and jokes pertaining to TV shows that I desperately wanted to be in on, my internet bubble quickly became a place of community and solace. For myself and many other women, that was the beginning of a connection that I felt to the girls that I met - but didn’t - online.
This period of time is also enveloped with an overarching sense of not knowing, both because I was thirteen and truly did not know anything but also because social media was incredibly new as a means for communication between young people. Before the term ‘globalisation’ became an answer to everything, the prospect of being able to reach somebody across the globe and have them actually respond was exciting, and every warning of ‘stranger danger’ flew right out the window. I had no idea who I was taking advice from, but I knew I needed to hear it before solidifying my opinion on anything.
I say all of that first because I think it’s important to realise the landscape upon which we have grown our trust in complete strangers over the past decade. We’ll take advice from anyone as long as they say it firmly and it provides some peace, some answers. This has become increasingly prevalent in the mental health crisis that has been worsening amongst young people as of late. Specifically in the UK, there are 420,314 young people currently utilising NHS services for mental health issues, with an additional 1.1 million waiting for that treatment, not to mention those unable to seek help in the first place. That is a crisis. In every sense of the word. And it spans worldwide; it’s warped and evolving but wherever you find it, the core of it looks the same. With strained resources and underfunded institutions, one of the only common denominators amongst these young people is their ability to access the internet and social media. Now, this obviously isn’t a crisis exclusive to young girls; it affects everybody regardless of gender or age, however the communities developed online over the past decade are overwhelmingly female-led as a means to offer some relief from the shared experience. Creators have risen to incredible levels of fame off of the back of this, and their success is more often than not attributed to their relatability. Conversations which have long been drenched in taboo, exchanging accounts of struggles and being met with the same level of understanding is something that real life perhaps cannot always provide, and so that responsibility falls upon the people who do so in the public arena unable to take it back.
Their ‘relatability’ is inevitably an openness surrounding their mental health struggles, both offering a shoulder to cry on and asking for yours in return.
In many ways, the forms in which we have produced and consumed media since the turn of this new decade has evolved. Podcasts, despite having existed for years prior, have had a significant uptick in both the number of people creating them, and the vast size of audiences which they attract. Having only ventured into the world of podcasts three years ago, the landscape that has developed around them has noticeably veered in the direction which places itself at the epicentre of the confusion of a young woman. The self-help genre has been undoubtedly hijacked by girls fresh out of college, but it depicts the state of social media as a means for asking questions and desperately hoping that somebody has the answer, incredibly accurately.
The question here is not “what gives these girls and women the authority to be spokespeople for these issues?”, but rather; “what is missing from our support systems that is forcing young girls and women to seek answers from others, barely older than them (sometimes younger)?”. There is rarely a breadth of life experience afforded to a 22 year old which provides them with an omniscience above their peers, or a depth to which these experiences are understood. Our only commonality is that we’re all sure of being the first person to ever feel the way that we do, and we’re all subtly trying to admit that this isn't the case and we need somebody else to tell us that it gets better. The lack of support provided to young women from legitimate institutions is stark, and it’s dangerous. It forces us to find corners of the internet where there is - there must be - at least one other person who can give us the answers. With this in mind, the rapid rise in podcasts being dominated by young women is seriously unsurprising. It’s a form of free therapy at a time where waiting lists are long, and cries for help aren’t being taken seriously. It demonstrates strength in the sense of community online which often proves an undeniable ability for girls and women to find each other and create a space to harbour that support.
Another element of this is what we consume without directly searching for and clicking it. We know the marketing that has accompanied material trends over the years, and the typical mould from which social media campaigns are solidified. In an apparent attempt to focus our searches for satisfaction inward, trend cycles now are no longer solely material based, they’re lifestyles and rituals, morning routines partnered with nighttime practices.
To be led into false ownership over a specific lifestyle is a strange consequence of this new internet culture surrounding health and wellness. Grasping at some sort of understanding of who we are, what we like, and where we are situated amongst our friends - and now the wider pool of ‘whoever we see on the internet’ - opens the gap for these idealistic, hyper-concentrated lifestyles to sneak through and become something that quickly provides some sense of identity. Being consistently exposed to all of the men, women, and people who are ten steps ahead from where you find yourself sat, living the life that you are relentlessly trying to squeeze yourself into, can be incredibly deflating. The age of peak success appears to be shrinking and there are children forfeiting school for the ability to post online and support their family financially for generations. These are the people pushed to the forefront of what we see and it’s easy to begin believing that that is the norm, and being exposed to this in the years akin to an intensely vulnerable, transitional period is hard. The sinking feeling in your gut feels accelerated. Strangely, my early twenties so far have felt reminiscent of my preteen years. I’d passed the ‘double digits’ milestone (which felt huge at the time), and was entering high school unsure of how I wanted to shape the years and the identity that lay ahead of me. Only now, the internet has provided me with a front row seat to every life path that I could have taken, and you want to believe that the action of posting a video or photo, or following the constraints of an aestheticised lifestyle could catapult you directly into that sense of identity.
The truth here is that we cannot be expected to gain any clarity from these quick-fix lifestyles. Becoming ‘that girl’ may offer some familiarity with the girls that grace your timeline, but you’ll always want for more. And they will always give you more to want. Constantly trying to keep up will have you exhausted, trailing behind as the people that you are following are following somebody else slightly out of your view, who themselves are chasing something permanently ten feet ahead.
We should no longer have to ask ourselves why the answers to the problems are often provided by the people asking the questions. It is because nobody else is doing it. Too often, young women feel betrayed by the institutions by which they have been raised. The school from which they gained their educational freedom was more concerned with their appearance than their academic prowess, the politician in which they put their trust - and vote - neglects to attend debates surrounding their basic rights (but don’t worry, you’ll no doubt see them next week when their pay is being threatened), and there is an air of confusion and frustration which they cannot shake, no matter how far they try to stray from what they consider the core of the issue. Gaining a scrap of agency over the direction that your life is heading in is not a vicious byproduct of internet culture, its falsehood is. Whilst the process feels overwhelming and relentless, the trend cycles of lifestyles and the clinging to routine that we have become acquainted with should be viewed through the lens of knowing that we are a judgmental audience. We will tear women down and snatch away their right to complain, so who can blame the scramble for control and routine?
By Amelia Defeo.
