Engulfed
It’s no picnic being a girl, and it’s apparently getting worse.
Teen girls across the United States are “engulfed in a growing wave of violence and trauma,” according to federal researchers who released data Monday showing increases in rape and sexual violence, as well as record levels of feeling sad or hopeless.
Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls reported in 2021 that they seriously considered suicide — up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago — according to new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Almost 15 percent of teen girls said they were forced to have sex, an increase of 27 percent over two years and the first increase since the CDC began tracking it.
Never mind that; let’s bemoan the plight of trans girls instead. Paying attention to the problems of female people is so last millennium; the cool kids are all about male people who idennnify as female.
Almost 3 in 5 teenage girls reported feeling so persistently sad or hopeless almost every day for at least two weeks in a row during the previous year that they stopped regular activities — a figure that was double the share of boys and the highest in a decade, CDC data showed.
Girls fared worse on other measures, too, with higher rates of alcohol and drug use than boys and higher levels of being electronically bullied, according to the 89-page report. Thirteen percent had attempted suicide during the past year, compared with 7 percent of boys.
I seriously wonder if one reason for that could be that feminism has abandoned them in favor of cooing over males who pretend to be female. I do. Feminism isn’t there for them any more, it’s there for male people who claim to have gender issues.
Richard Weissbourd, a psychologist and senior lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, said there is probably not a single cause to explain the data but rather interacting causes that vary by race, ethnicity, class, culture and access to mental health resources.
Even so, he said, “girls are more likely to respond to pain in the world by internalizing conflict and stress and fear, and boys are more likely to translate those feelings into anger and aggression,” he said.
And guess who gets to be the target of that aggression.
Maybe, like, the last twenty years of the last millennium.
Oh, thanks, I was thinking it was the whole thousand years. Ever heard of figurative speech? Metaphor? Hyperbole? Slang?
A “feminism” that emphasizes males is no feminism at all. It irks me when these pretenders try to claim they’re feminists. No dude, you’re not.
And then people wonder why more and more of those girls want to become boys. Poor kids.
If I was to draw a connection between the increase in violence against girls, the increased desperation and depression in girls, and the increase in trans identification and ideology, I think I’d look at what’s apparently happening with pornography. Children and adolescents are exposed to it at earlier ages, and it’s increasingly violent, degrading, and misogynistic. It’s probably a factor in both the deteriorating mental health of young girls, as well as both sexes identifying out of their sex.
I had my first kiss at fifteen. Most of my friends were similar, all of us nervously discussing what it would be like for several years before we figured it would happen. We had teenage romances and comic books to go by. We didn’t personally know anyone who went “all the way” but thought that maybe 18 would be right. It never occurred to us that boys who wanted more wouldn’t back down with a “no” if they were the nice kind we planned on dating. This was the 70’s. We were naive as hell. But there’s a kind of emotional safety in being able be that naive, and in thinking we were normal.
Today, you have to describe that as a sexual orientation.
Helen Joyce has often made the point that, ironically, the differences between males and females are never put into sharper focus than when they start claiming to be the other sex. TIMs (at least the AGP kind) want to identify into womanhood, to become their own pornified jerk-off fantasies, to live out every baser impulse at women’s expense and destroy anyone who gets in their way. And if that means taking a sledgehammer to women’s rights and protections, so fucking what?! That’s their problem! And this is where all this obligatory talk of traditional “gender stereotypes” and sensitive “girly” boys (likely to grow up gay) who likes dolls and dresses runs the risk of obfuscating the issue. There are such boys, of course, but they are not the problem*. As I like to say, the last thing AGPs can be accused of is displaying too little toxic masculinity, too little raging entitlement, not enough aggression, insufficient need for dominance, or, for that matter, being too nurturing, caring, modest, selfless etc. If the phrase “toxic masculinity” applies to anyone, then surely it applies to these guys!
To TIFs it’s often less about identifying into manhood than identifying out of womanhood. As Abigail Shrier puts it:
And how could anyone expect otherwise? In a world where pussygrabbers and rapists become presidents and supreme court justices, and violent misogynists on YouTube become superstars, in a world where the one project that unites Left and Right (besides frying the planet, of course, that part goes without saying!) is obliterating women’s rights and protections, in a world where the objectification and commodification of women’s bodies is not only rampant, but actively celebrated as a good thing, “progressive”, “empowering” to women, even “feminist”, in a world where the Police are no less likely to be rapists than the men they’re supposed to protect you against, in a world where – the moment a campaign like #MeToo gains any traction – the “Karen”** meme comes along to undo all the progress and then some, the only surprising thing about girls fleeing womanhood like a house of fire is how anyone can find it surprising. In fact, I don’t buy it. As someone (it might even have been Ophelia) put it after the Weinstein scandal broke (from memory): “I’m not shocked. You’re not shocked. Can everybody stop pretending to be shocked?”
I’m a man myself, and if I were a woman I would feel no more safe alone in the company of a man than I would in the company of a wild bear or tiger***. Feminists didn’t make me think like this, men did! I have heard too many men – many of them with girlfriends, wives, and daughters – shamelessly brag about their predatory attitudes to buy into the idea that this is “fringe”, a rare “exception”, that the problem is limited to a few “rotten apples” etc. In my experience these men always seem to take for granted that other males are going to be on their side and find what they’re saying totally awesome, which I take as a sign that they probably haven’t met much pushback (or anything other than roaring applause) from other men in the past.
* A strong case can be made – and has been made! – that they are among the main victims of gender ideology.
** As well as the “TERF” meme, the “SWERF” meme, the “White Feminist” meme etc.
*** My apologies in advance to any members of the bear or tiger community offended by the analogy.
* sensitive “girly” boys (likely to grow up gay) who like dolls and dresses
(*sigh*)
Sastra @5,
No doubt that today’s teenagers have more access to sexually explicit content, but it does not seem to be causing them to have more sex themselves. My understanding is that statistical surveys show that at least in the U.S., teenagers are waiting longer to have sex on average than they did a couple of decades ago. (They drink less, too. I’m curious how much of that is being replaced by increased marijuana use.)
Screechy, they smoke less, too (at least tobacco; I haven’t asked my students about marijuana). When I started teaching, if I asked my students who smoked, several hands went up. Now in the same size class, I rarely get even one. That makes it harder to make my points about calculated risk, but I figured I would just move to driving. They still do that.
Although they do less driving, too, I think! More teenagers are waiting longer to get their licenses, though some of that may be due to legal changes — more states have adopted “graduated licensing” programs where teenage drivers are rather limited in what they can do, which no doubt reduces the appeal/utility of getting a license.
Not in Nebraska…my students often drive more than an hour just to get to class. I think overall they are, but in certain areas, not so much. I certainly have no problem using that as an example.