Modern culture has ripped away girls’ childhood, taking their joy with it
It’s never been easy, as Britney Spears sang, to be “not a girl, not yet a woman”. But a new survey carried out for Girlguiding shows that young women are less hopeful than ever of emerging on the other side, with the happiness of seven- to 21-year-olds plummeting to its lowest level since 2009.
At 32 years old, I am profoundly grateful not to be a girl today – or even much younger than I am now. When I was a teenager, through the mid-2000s, there were the time-honoured troubles of growing girls: depression, anxiety, bullying, body image issues, disordered eating, problematic interactions with the opposite sex. But – without minimising those struggles, or being blithely superior about “my day” – there were some limits in place that served as checks against external harm and the adolescent impulse towards selfdestruction.
One straightforward example: my only access to the internet was on the family PC, for as long as my parents were willing to tolerate being unable to make or receive phone calls. My “social media” was confined to messaging on MSN or trading Bebo wall posts with people from school, or anonymous posting in public forums aligned around common interests: a damning part of my youth was spent on the message boards of a guitar tab website. Even my forays into more risque online spaces, such as Chatroulette or “shock sites”, seem crude and banal today.
With my life very clearly delineated between online and offline, home could still be a sanctuary from school, offering respite from the social politics and anxiety. Now every young person with a phone is able to have a secretive and unceasing online life, while the bars for self-comparison – in terms of beauty standards, or body image – have come untethered from reality.
The idols of my youth were Hollywood celebrities, so untouchable as to not quite be plausible as sharing my plane of existence. In contrast, young women today are coming of age in a media environment where even girls from a nearby school can present themselves on Instagram with a flawless celebrity sheen; where photo-editing software is free and widely used, and the scrutiny – of oneself and others –
is unrelenting. With so much of their private lives put selectively on show, the evergreen sense of adolescence as a competition – to be the most popular, or prettiest, or thinnest – has been put on steroids.
What’s more, it is carried out relatively publicly, with adolescent experimentation and errors in judgment running the risk of being widely documented online. By comparison, my own exploration took place in a closed network. When, aged 15 or so, I snuck away my parents’ mobile phone to send a “sexy pic” to my then boyfriend, the picture quality was so poor it was barely discernible as a person. It wasn’t yet the norm to share pictures, let alone livestream, and private messaging, group chats, screenshots and even forwarding – the technology that makes surveillance and “receipts culture” possible – was still in its infancy.
The tightrope that young women must learn to walk today, in navigating their self-identity and social worlds, may seem perilously high – while threats from the world at large are harder than ever to shut out. Where I was free to grow up only dimly aware of “global warming” as a bad thing, the Girlguiding survey highlights that the spectre of the climate emergency weighs heavily on children not even past puberty yet.
Among many of the twentysomethings I speak to, there’s a palpable and persistent anxiety that they themselves are not doing enough to address it. It’s as though they have internalised the media’s messaging – stemming from Greta Thunberg and her school strike for the climate movement – that children are not only “our future” but responsible for securing it for the rest of us. Coupled with current economic decline and political failures, the period in which children may remain blissfully ignorant of adult concerns is increasingly short.
Indeed, what we might think of as “youth culture” is highly literate and informed in a way that can only encourage fatalism. Social media has done much to spread feminist understanding of sexual politics and rape culture to the mainstream; on TikTok, I often come across concepts and analysis at a level I only encountered for the first time in a gender studies paper in my second year of university. But gaining the language with which to make sense of your experience can be a double-edged sword, making you aware of the ways in which you are vulnerable and disadvantaged.
Nowhere is this more evident in the vast volume of dating advice for young women on TikTok, where lists of hyperspecific “dating red flags” and ways to identify love-bombers, narcissists, abusers and other “toxic” men proliferate. Coupled with the undeniable statistics of the prevalence of sexual assault (not to mention, for many, the lived experience), it is no wonder that teenage girls feel there is so much at stake – and so little chance of emerging unscathed.
From a young age they are burdened by awareness, compounding the anxieties of adolescence. Young women today have just cause to be concerned – but our culture reflects it back at them at every turn, magnified. Even their pop music – through to the 21st century, an expression of youthful exuberance and escape, a means of connection and collective euphoria – is slower, sadder and more siloed, their stars world-weary before their years and often openly agonised. Olivia Rodrigo, 20, sings about paralysing self-comparison and not being “pretty enough”; the 21-year-old Billie Eilish’s songs have dealt with climate anxiety, death and her experiences of sexual abuse within the music industry.
Now, when I talk to women younger than me about their fears of the future, their worries about work and dating and social media, it’s the words of my peer, the 33-year-old Taylor Swift, that come to mind: give them back their girlhoods – it was theirs first.
Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist
In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support for rape and sexual abuse on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/ internl.html
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on building the competitive strength of certain sectors. On the other side of the aisle, Keir Starmer is framing Labour as “economically responsible”, with a focus on growth rather than “big spending”, and is scaling back or delaying previous commitments, including a green prosperity fund. While Sunak’s plans show a lack of confidence in the state’s role in the economy, Starmer’s are falling victim to a false dichotomy between spending and growth.
By taking a forward-looking, ambitious approach to how they spend and invest, governments have significant power to foster and direct growth to be innovation-driven, inclusive and sustainable. Setting bold objectives that require public-private collaboration can work to expand private sector investment, stimulating jobs, training and productivity growth. These benefits are a byproduct of this mission-oriented investment; they are not the core objective. Done well, this approach can bring economic, social and environmental priorities into alignment.
For example, in addition to contributing to better health, education and economic outcomes for young people, well-structured investments in healthy and sustainable school meals can create a massive market opportunity for UK agriculture and food industries. This potential to leverage school meal procurement to transform food supply chains has already been recognised in Sweden. In the UK, Starmer has so far avoided committing to free school meals for all primary schoolchildren, citing spending constraints and a focus on fixing a broken economy. Not only has Sunak ignored calls for free school meals, he is also battling claims that underinvestment in infrastructure has led to schools that are crumbling.
Instead of seeing spending on education, school meals and other priorities – such as tackling the climate emergency, health crises or the digital divide – as an expense, it should be recognised as an investment. And one that can drive innovation.
In my 2013 book, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public Vs Private Sector Myths, I made the case for governments to invest (rather than cut) their way to growth – and to do so in an entrepreneurial way that embraces the collective risk-taking needed. But, as I warned, it is vital to ensure that both risks and rewards are socialised.What was the point of government investing in the technologies that make our smartphones smart (yes, the internet, GPS, touchscreen and Siri are all fruits of government investment) if we don’t ensure that the resulting wealth is distributed rather than absorbed into massive excess profits in the private sector? A decade later, governments around the world are advancing industrial strategies, notably in the US, where the government has compared the scale of its ambitions to that of the Apollo space programme and is investing $2tn into its economy through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Chips and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act. But most still shy away from maximising the potential of these investments by bringing social and environmental objectives into alignment with industrial strategy goals. Realising this potential requires four shifts in thinking.
First, it requires setting a clear direction. Governments can orient industrial strategy investments around bold goals – such as healthy, sustainable and tasty school meals for all children – to shape economies that not only grow, but grow in ways that are designed to benefit people and the planet.
Second, governments should approach the relationship between government, business and labour in such a way that risks and rewards are equitably shared. This is about establishing a new social contract. While public-private partnerships can and should create private value, the government’s role is to maximise public value. This requires setting conditions on any benefit granted to the private sector – through grants, loans, procurement deals, tax incentives or other means – to, for example, ensure affordable prices (as with the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine during the pandemic), share profits or IP rights, require fair labour practices and carbon emissions reductions, or limit shareholder buybacks (as was done with the US Chips and Science Act) and require reinvestment in research and development or worker training.
Third, it requires citizen engagement. At a time when public disenchantment with government leadership is rife, it is all the more vital for economic strategies to benefit and resonate with the people they are ultimately for. As politicians closely watch the polls and refine their policy agendas, they should be looking for ways to meaningfully engage in a ground-up conversation with the people of Britain and really listen to them.
Finally, directing and shaping growth requires investments in dynamic public sector capabilities, tools and institutions – to build back the state’s entrepreneurial capacity. Conversely, it means avoiding the pitfalls of over-reliance on consulting firms, a tendency that the UK has repeatedly fallen victim to and is the subject of my new book, The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies. The language of cost-saving and fiscal responsibility can lead to downsizing and gutting the capacity of governments to advance ambitious strategies. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: when governments outsource critical functions, they do not develop the internal skills and knowledge to manage these functions.
The importance of taking an active hand in the UK economy is not about big v small government; rather, it is about advocating for smart, capable governments that understand their role in directing growth. Unless this direction is aligned with sustainability, health and inclusion goals, a thriving, resilient economy will remain elusive.
Mariana Mazzucato is author of The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths. The 10th anniversary edition, updated with a new preface, is out now