What today’s young women are going through is quite new and demands new ways to respond.
ack in the 1980s there was at least one positive cultural message for young women: “Girls just want to have fun!” Sadly, in the decades to follow, girls have mostly had the opposite of fun. By most measurements, girls and women today are sadder, more anxious, and lonelier than they have ever been. Despite the trumpeted achievements of Second and Third wave feminism (namely, boosting birth control and white-collar work), women continue to labor under unceasing social pressures and overwhelming emotional burdens.
This situation has deteriorated further in the last decade during the full bloom of the Internet Age, with women paradoxically reaching new heights in the culture and economy only to feel ever more powerless, unappealing, and unvalidated. They broke so many glass ceilings, but this has only left the ground covered with proverbial shards. Worse still is that the strategy for dealing with those shards relies on doubling down on senseless feminist messaging, ongoing grievances, and attacking masculinity.