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Preying on Adolescent Girls
One of my sons was working as a youth pastor during the years before and after the introduction of the iPhone. He can tell interesting stories, as someone working on the front lines of youth culture, about how the iPhone’s introduction totally altered the group social dynamics of adolescents.
Over the next few years, as social media use began to really saturate the relationships and mind space of young people, observers began to notice some unsettling changes emerging within the adolescent community. Depression, self-hatred, and harm, along with other psychiatric pathologies, seemed to be ever more prevalent in the lives of young people.
For a while, though these pathologies correlated with the rise of social media use, people were cautious about concluding that social media itself was the actual cause of the uptick in psychiatric problems.
Now, Jonathan Haidt and his collaborators are making the case from the data that it has become painfully clear: social media is actually a major cause underlying the epidemic of mental health problems in adolescents, and this is most pronounced where adolescent females are concerned.
For at least two generations we have been conditioned not to speak of distinctions between males and females. We have been hectored and gaslighted against ever noticing that men and women are something other than interchangeable parts. We must not notice any social, emotional, or psychological differences, we are constantly warned. If we do notice them, above all things we must never openly acknowledge or comment on any differences we may have observed.
Now, at this very moment, we are under pressure to pretend that even differences between male and female biology do not exist. And to prove it, young women – especially but not exclusively – are being encouraged and enabled to quite literally carve their anatomical womanly distinctives away.
The reticence to speak openly of male/female differences, something that has been propagandized incessantly, has, in this horrible instance, contributed to adolescent girls being left unprotected and exposed. By denying obvious and easily observable characteristics of young females, we have blinded ourselves to their danger and been derelict in their time of need.
It isn’t that boys are not also negatively affected by social media use, but the data suggests a highly differentiated susceptibility. Boys, according to the data, are more resilient up to a point. Girls seem to have little resilience at all to social media exposure. Awkward, but that seems to be what the data shows.
For the safety of our daughters, we are going to have to recover the ability to speak openly and honestly about how the emotional/psychological sensibilities of girls varies from that of boys. We must openly acknowledge how those differences create elevated vulnerabilities for girls in certain contexts. Girls are on average more attuned and sensitive to social dynamics, more relational and observant in social contexts. We should stop leaving them unprotected and uncared for merely because acknowledging unique female vulnerabilities would be politically incorrect.
For Judeo-Christian believers, one would almost think that the origin story found in the Bible’s book of Genesis, had we pondered it more deeply or remembered what it said, might have provided insights into why such differences between males and females exist. It might have even pointed to the possibility of the sexes having unique and distinctive roles — different contributions to make as together they bear God’s image and exercise dominion in the world. Maybe the designer of the human race crafted men and women in ways that are suitable and unique to the purposes for which God created each respective sex. Maybe the sexes are both desperately needed in all their distinctive and separate affinities, but are not completely overlapping in orientation and sensibility. And, just maybe, that’s a very good thing.
Maybe the differences between men and women are deep and profound and *gasp* intentional. And maybe a petulant refusal to acknowledge all of this has contributed to devastating the lives of millions of young women. Maybe getting over any reticence to openly speak the truth about the differences between sexes, in our churches and schools and communities, is a helpful first step toward offering actual protection to young women at risk. And maybe silence on these differences amounts to moral cowardice.
Woke egalitarianism is harming young women because men and women are just not the same.
Social media is to emotional health as cigarettes are to physical health. Social media accounts should be made illegal for anyone under the age of 21. Write your congressman.
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“There’s no such thing as mental illness. There are only different ways of knowing.”
I’m not sure I follow what you’re saying here. Could you elaborate? Thanks.
That is utter BS.
How dare you.
How dare you act ad if mental illness is not real. What? My job is a joke? Then pai of my clients is made up?
Screw you and the horse you road in on. Peop.e like you are why suffering people don’t get help.
How do we know that the cause & effect doesn’t run the other way…ie, girls who are more disturbed use more social media?
I recommend you read Haidt’s post. There are experiments that have been done to verify causal direction.
Sarcasm alert.
Sarcasm?
Possibly. That’s why I was asking. I wasn’t tracking.
He or she (I can’t tell as who knows from people who hide behind akr names) will be taken at his or her word..
Perhaps misthiocracy reads alot of Dr. Szasz.
When ideology and reality don’t agree, it’s time to change reality.
How anybody could read this as other than bitter sarcastic mockery is beyond me.
I had a professor Ferenc Szasz. Who’s your guy?
Women are much more sensitive to society and social cues because they are vulnerable. More than half the population of the world, including the nerd that helps me pick out a printer at Staples, can kill me.
One of the reasons “super hero women” characters make me crazy on TV and in movies.
Related:
Whole article can be found here.
[Link has been updated]
I as an old person note that this is consistent with my observations from back before electronic “social media.” I am not a social scientist, and I have not researched the subject. But I have watched girls and boys interact for decades, including the people around my daughter and my son (who are now in their 30s, so were through high school before “smartphones” arrived.
Girls have always been more socially connected and socially dependent than boys. Girls decide as a group what activity they are going to do. Boys decide what activity they want to do, and befriend the other boys who happen to be doing that activity.
Boys have used that social connectedness and social dependency to manipulate girls to do things the girls might not be inclined to do: “Do this to increase your social standing.” Or, “If you don’t do this your social standing will be diminished.” (Obviously not in those exact words, but in principle.)
The business of “social media” companies depends on manipulating an audience to the maximum. So of course for social media companies, maximum business benefit is most likely by manipulating girls and their inherent desire to be socially connected.
Well, the poster has yet to confirm it is.
And, I have experienced, right here at Ricochet, people pretty hostile to the whole idea of mental illness as real and therapy is real.
And how did that make you feel?
OK, I read the entire paper. The longitudinal studies…correlating social media usage at one point in time with well-being at a later point in time…do show a ‘significant effect’, but he doesn’t put any numbers on how *large* the effect is. A very small difference can show up as ‘significant’, including significant at a very good p-value, if the same size is large enough.
OTOH, the study of high-speed wireless Internet introduction in British Columbia *does* cite a number for the impact on mental health diagnoses of girls, and an alarming number it is.
Especially vulnerable during pregnancy and with very young infants; even without attacks or malice on anyone’s part, social independence would be very difficult at those times.
Makes sense evolutionarily and historically, but the consequence is that women are almost certainly more likely to show conformist behavior even more than are men–which surely has implications as women have become more politically influential.
Thomas Szasz, author of The Myth of Mental Illness from about 50 years ago. He was a psychiatrist with a terrific accent (Hungarian?) who argued that illnesses have physical causes (e.g. pneumonia) so that “mental illness” is an oxymoron. His argument was bracing in that it seemed to return some of the agency and dignity to human beings that is removed by psychiatric determinism. I imagine libertarians liked him, too. I think it was he who made the trenchant observation that “Neurotics are people who screw up their own lives; psychotics are people who screw up everyone else’s.” But I am not sure he went so far as to deny that lunacy and derangement exist. I think his main focus was perfectly functioning middle class neurotics who were looking for excuses and also power tripping experts or greedy relatives. But don’t trust me on anything I read 50 years ago…or yesterday, for that matter.
Thomas
Link doesn’t work.
More related information.
Didn’t you read that and think “Duhh…”?
For some reason, it took an unconscionably long time to recognize that the brain is…you know…a physical structure in the body. That means it can get injured or ill, and then malfunction and/or cause pain in recognizable ways. E.g. bipolar disorder.
Since we can treat but not (so far, anyway) cure Bipolar disorder, the sufferer has to learn how to use and take care of her brain. As my mentally-ill loved one puts it, “I spent eighteen years learning how to live as a person who doesn’t have Bipolar. Then I had to learn how to live as a person with Bipolar.” Luckily, therapists exist to help her do that—which means she gets to have agency and dignity in spite of her illness.
Thank God for good therapists.
Updated now.
When I use the inspector to look at it more closely, this is what I find. It’s obviously a URL that’s not going to work.
I bet this will work, though: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2023/02/22/female-soldiers-twice-likely-be-diagnosed-mental-health-conditions-theater-males-study-finds.html
(I’m not sure if that’s the source you used, though, as the title isn’t an exact match of the one that you pasted in.)
Indeed