Love Island-obsessed teenage girls are undermining Metoo cause, claims head

TEENAGE girls risk undermining the Metoo movement by focusing on “trivial” things like make-up, a leading headmistress has said.

It is hard for women to be taken seriously when they spend their time glorifying pursuits that are “insignificant at best”, according to Jane Lunnon, headmistress of £18,800-a-year Wimbledon High School.

“I am really interested in empowering women, to make sure that they have a voice,” she said.

Stressing the importance of Metoo, she added: “Can we be saying that this other trivial nonsense matters? I think there is a real question around that.”

Ms Lunnon said that many young women are overly concerned with aesthetic and superficial matter such as how they appear.

They spend “an awful lot of time” worrying about “what brand of false eyelashes” they should buy or “what kind of mascara” to wear, she added.

Ms Lunnon said: “The concern is around what a lot of young women are doing to their bodies. There is so much around ‘How do I look? How am I presenting myself?’ rather than ‘What are my views, what are my values, how am I helping to shape the world I live in?’”

The popular reality television show Love Island is a prime example of the kind of “trivial nonsense” that many teenage girls are obsessed with, she said. Love Island, which won a Bafta last month, is a dating reality show centred on a group of young men and women.

Such is the popularity of

Love Island that it has become ITV2’S most-watched show ever, attracting almost three million viewers for the opening night of its fourth series. This year, more people applied for the show than for Oxford and Cambridge combined.

The contestants’ objective is to make sure that they have secured a partner of the opposite sex by the end of each week. “Love Island is a really good microcosm,” Ms Lunnon said. “It is saying you deserve to be in a relationship if you look this way – you are basically ignoring the things that really make relationships work and make human beings rich, interesting, powerful people.”

She said there is still a “battle to be fought” for feminism and women may have to “decide which camp we are in”, between Love Island or Metoo.

“I really worry that we ask to be taken seriously but we are not taking ourselves seriously by glorifying things that are trivial and insignificant at best. I think we have a problem,” she said.

‘Women ask to be taken seriously, but we are not taking ourselves seriously’