What Happened to the Girls?

Some three score years  ago Betty Friedan launched the modern version of feminism by declaring that women were suffering from a problem that had no name. She proposed that feminism, the kind that freed women from societal expectations, would solve this problem. They would no longer suffer the indignity of being wives and mothers, but would march forth into the business world, to make their marks. And that meant, modern liberated women would not be suffering from this modern version of neurosis. They would no longer depend on men and would no longer seek to be protected by male family members.

So, today’s women, and especially today’s girls, repugn the notion that they will grow up to become wives and mothers. They want to have careers. They want to be equal to their men. They often do not even want to deal with men. They are sexually liberated, seeking and finding pleasure where they will.

I think it fair to ask whether this new way of life, a way of life prescribed by feminism, has produced an outburst of mental health. Has it solved the problem that has no name?

Within this context we examine a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control. The report tells us that things are decidedly not alright with America’s teenagers, especially America’s teenage girls.

And yet, when Derek Thompson outlines the findings in an Atlantic newsletter, not once does he mention feminism. Children are suffering from the internet, from social media, from global warming-- but not a word about feminism or even about broken homes. If I recall correctly, America leads the world in broken homes, in familial dysfunction.

Thompson reports the statistics:

The Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which is published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is the gold standard for measuring the state of teen behavior and mental health. From 2011 to 2021, the survey found, the share of teenage girls who say they experience “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” increased from 36 to 57 percent, with the highest jump coming during the coronavirus pandemic. The share of girls who said they’ve contemplated suicide increased 50 percent in the decade. (For teenage boys, the increase was smaller.)

You might imagine that all of the feminist talk about careers, the talk about sexual liberation, the effort to ensure that women were thoroughly equal to men-- improved women’s lives, because it made them feel like persons.

And yet, since girls can no longer define themselves socially by an aspiration toward wifedom and motherhood, they are effectively lost. They are going for the sexual gusto, indiscriminately, and cannot understand why men do not respect them in the morning. The reason might be that they are acting as though they do not respect themselves, but that is perhaps for another day.

Among the horrors in the CDC report is this: more and more young women are being forced to have sex when they do not want to do so. So much for #MeToo. So much for the daffy nation that enhanced awareness of sexual harassment was going to produce less sexual harassment. In the end, it produces more.

Of course, America has currently decided that it ought to display sex on the public square. It has accepted that everyone advertises his sex life, either on social media or in front of a class of six-year-olds.

How is that one working out? Apparently, not very well:

Life is worse for LGBQ teenagers in almost every respect measured by the survey. (The YRBS did not ask about trans identity.) Compared with heterosexual teens, they are more likely to experience poor mental health; more likely to experience unstable housing or homelessness; more likely to be threatened or injured by a weapon in school; more likely to miss school for safety reasons; less likely to feel close to people at school; more likely to be raped; twice as likely to be bullied; almost three times more likely to have recently misused prescription opioids; three times more likely to have considered suicide, made a suicide plan, or attempted suicide; and seven times more likely to be injured in a suicide attempt.

The situation is probably worse for trans children. One does not, in the current national conversation, understand that many trans children are rejected by their parents and friends, and that this is all the more tragic when they have been induced to think of themselves as trans by teachers and counselors.

Does this all not tell us that the old fashioned effort to retain a barrier between public and private, not to advertise one’s sexuality but to husband it, might have had a rationale. And does it not tell us that when you remove women’s social moorings, they are not just lost-- they become prey.

We all thrill to the notion that women no longer define themselves by roles within the family. Heck, they often do not even define themselves by their sex. And yet, being totally individuated means being alone, separated from the herd, outside of the protection that males have traditionally accorded to females.