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The Girls Are Not Okay
I’ve been pondering this essay from Freya India in First Things. Ms. India is an influential voice regarding the experience and circumstances of young women, and she has recently, like a growing number of other writers/thinkers/public intellectuals, drifted toward and into Christianity. She is thoughtful, insightful, and sometimes even quite shrewd in her assessment of culture. Her Substack offers valuable insights into what is going on in the world of young women. Here’s a snippet from her recent piece in First Things:
I sat at a conference recently listening to an older man lecture about my generation’s neglect of our “moral duty” to have children. Rows of suited men nodded along. I kept thinking about the many young women I know who just don’t believe anyone will stick around, who are terrified to start families because theirs fell apart. Who is this meant to persuade? The people the message is supposedly for aren’t even in the room. Those who actually need help will not be reached by theological lectures on marriage or family. What they need right now is someone to give expression to the wound of growing up between two homes, someone who dares to talk about the pain.
A lot to chew on and ponder in this one from her. Not least the tension, which she implicitly engages, between sense and sensibility as the way for Christians to engage with unbelieving young women.
I read Ms. India in this essay to be pleading for more sensibility.
While I continue to think about this, I had an experience two days ago that is entirely germane to Ms. India’s essay and which has made her thoughts land differently for me than perhaps they would have otherwise.
I was invited to speak and lead a discussion in a graduate-level class at a Christian seminary. The class engages the relationship between Science and Theology. I was asked to lead a discussion with the graduate students on AI and transhumanism. I have written, and had published, some thoughts on these subjects which the professor was familiar with. So he invited me to be a kind of visiting resource. One suspects my fleeting occupation as a seminary teacher was not unlike when the dancing bear trots out at the circus: you aren’t surprised the bear dances badly; you’re surprised he dances at all.
But I digress.
Leading a discussion among graduate students is far afield from anything I normally do, which perhaps explains my startled reaction to what happened next—and why I find Ms. India’s post to be as painful as it is timely.
Because we were in a seminary class, the professor opened the class with a prayer, and prior to actually praying, he asked the students if they had anything they would like him to pray for. One of the students, a woman who teaches at the college level for a different school, asked the professor to pray for several of her female students. She went on to say that mental and emotional health crises are surprisingly widespread among her female students. This remark provoked another graduate student, one who also works in education, to ask for the same prayer, because he also is seeing widespread emotional health challenges among the young women of his acquaintance. At this point, the professor himself volunteered that the phenomenon they were describing is actually something that has some prevalence even among female seminary students. 😳
I’ve been noodling over my reaction, both to Ms. India’s essay and to the prayer requests from my brief appearance at the seminary.
My earlier reference to “sense and sensibility” was a perhaps too subtle hat tip to Jane Austen’s reflection on the same issues that are implicated by Ms. India’s concerns. My decidedly firm intuition is that we are not helping young women if we confine ourselves to patronizing their feelings. In this, I am decidedly on team “Elinor”. But neither should we ignore the apparently widespread woundedness among modern young women. One suspects, as Ms. India’s observations imply, that we may now be reaping the whirlwind of multiple generations of family dissolution.
When I read Ms. India’s essay, my mind wandered to a scene from the musical “Oklahoma,” where Aunt Eller counsels Laurey when it looks like Laurey’s new husband may be accused of murder:
Laurey: I don’t see why this had to happen, just when everything was so fine.
Aunt Eller: Don’t let your mind run on it.
Laurey: I can’t forget it, I tell you. I never will.
Aunt Eller: Don’t try, honey. You got to get used to having all kinds of things happening to you. You got to look at all the good on one side and all the bad on the other side and say, “Well, all right, then” to both of them. Lots of things happen to a woman– sickness or being poor and hungry, even, being left alone in your old age, being afeared to die– and you can stand it. There’s one way. You got to be hardy. You got to be.
Laurey: I wisht I was the way you are.
Aunt Eller: Aw, fiddlesticks! Scrawny and old? You couldn’t hire me to be the way I am.
Laurey (laughing): What would I do without you? You’re such a crazy.
Two things stand out to me about that dialog. Aunt Eller hands out some very grounded, unvarnished advice. She doesn’t pamper Laurey’s feelings. But the play’s prior events also make clear that Aunt Eller is speaking from a position of relational intimacy and longstanding concern for Laurey’s welfare.
It seems intuitively obvious that some of the young women in Ms. India’s orbit need to be encouraged to be more hardy — to accept that they need not be defined by the unhappy circumstances of their lives. The late singer “Nightbirde” comes to mind in this regard. She died very early in her life from cancer, shortly after bringing the house down one night on America’s Got Talent. She was already dying, even as she performed. Yet she told the judges that night, “You can’t wait until life isn’t hard anymore to decide to be happy.” She had apparently been listening to Aunt Eller.
Someone needs to be telling more young women such things, and without treating them like children.
But it would also almost certainly help these young women to have people so invested in their lives that it makes it easier for them to receive such unvarnished advice when it is given. Maybe that’s an application of Ms. India’s admonition that is at once unpatronizing and also more consistent with human nature. Maybe we should conclude, not that young women’s feelings should be pampered, but that harsh medicine is more easily swallowed when lubricated by caring relationships.
Christians have a word for this kind of thing. It’s called “discipling”.
There was a young woman in my acquaintance who, in her early twenties, contracted breast cancer. She came from the kind of fractured home and damaged family described by Ms. India. My wife, along with others, began investing in a relationship with this young woman. They drove her to her chemo appointments. They sat and talked with her over coffee during the interval of days between her treatments. My wife and I picked her up each week and took her to church with us. Several women made her a part of their lives, coming alongside her during these difficult days.
I recall the day when so much of this young woman’s hair had fallen out from chemo that she needed to just shave off what was left. She recoiled at the idea of doing that in a public hair salon. So my wife invited her over to our house. This young woman sat in a chair in our home while my wife applied the electric trimmers to the wisps of remaining hair, as the two of them wept through the doing of it together.
It is not hard to agree that Ms. India’s troubled young women will be less likely to accept hard messages from conference speakers than from someone who has first made an investment in laughing with them, and sometimes weeping with them, over coffee. Someone who will listen to their pain. But wherever it originates, Ms. India’s modern young women need to be exposed to more than a smidgen of no-nonsense talk about the way the world works, perhaps especially regarding the need for them to eschew self-pity regarding their past, as well as self-absorption concerning their present. As Jordan Peterson has observed, “The shortest path to misery is to continually think about the way you feel.”
Alas, there are some young women, perhaps even very many of them, who do not have such relationships. To succeed in the absence of these kinds of beneficial resources, these young women must still find a way to reorient themselves away from their inner wounding and embrace truth-seeking instead. They must come to grips with the mortal threat represented by any abiding temptation to marinate in self-pity.
As it happens, I have more than a passing familiarity with troubled young women. And one of the things I have learned — and this may seem strange to anyone without similar experience — is that people sometimes begin to love their own troubles. More, sometimes, than they love their own lives. Accordingly, there are people who, to quote Os Guinness, “see God as the great interferer, the ultimate spoilsport they must fend off at all costs.”
All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful…Human nature is so faulty that it can resist any amount of grace and most of the time it does. – Flannery O’Connor
The way forward for young women from fractured families is to choose, even in the midst of their misfortune, to obsessively pursue the truth, wherever they can find it. Even if the truth is being offered to them in a bumbling, tone-deaf, incompetent way. Or by a suit-wearing conference speaker. But I repeat myself.
If that sounds unappealing, I’m sorry but there is simply no other way.
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As a counterpoint, and there are many examples publicly available, young women today have been indoctrinated in a lot of non-family-oriented ideas and attitudes. They might be afraid of being abandoned, but the reality is that women initiate family breakups and divorces far more than men. And if men do leave, it’s probably not just because of a burden or whatever. It’s more likely because she isn’t respectful to his efforts, etc. He may have even discovered that the children are not his. But it’s common for women to expect him to stay anyway. As if SHE would stay if HE expected HER to do the same.
You are addressing a different demographic than the one in Ms. India’s sights. The women in this post aren’t divorcing their husbands, they’re afraid even to marry one.
In some sense that’s true, but I suspect one of the main reasons they’re afraid to even marry one is because of what I described. And they could very well be afraid to get married while still carrying the ideas etc that would actually cause THEM, not the men, to break up the family. Although they would still call that “abandoned,” because that’s just female logic.
I remember from dating apps etc in the past, how many women would say they have to find someone who can “handle me,” can “deal with my sarcasm” etc. That’s not what men want in any relationship other than a casual fling, and certainly not in a marriage.
I was surprised to read that. Divorce is hard on kids, for sure, which is why, to my knowledge, the kids of the divorcing boomers have largely eschewed divorce for themselves:
I very much respect this current generation of child-bearing-age adults to be wary of and even avoid marriage and having children.
And it makes sense from the psychology of dysfunctional families. Divorce creates a kind of chaos for children, and children’s natural response to that is to be super responsible adults. That is a very common path for children who have grown up in dysfunctional and broken families.
There was a study done in the next town over of the high school students when my kids were in high school. The results were fascinating, and they took everyone by surprise. What did those students fear the most? Their parents’ getting divorced. Death came in second, which was why school committees were concerned about it. That is a tremendous amount of fear and anxiety these kids were living with. Even kids in stable homes were afraid, and I imagine that’s because they knew kids who were growing up in broken homes.
Having children is a momentous responsibility to assume, and our society makes it a very lonely, very expensive, very risky proposition. Until that changes somehow for young people, I don’t see much change. Kids who have very wealthy parents as backup will be forming families, and the very poor who aren’t thinking clearly will be too. But I imagine the vast middle class will need to see some change for them to have the confidence they need to marry and have children at the rate and pace of previous generations.
I hope things change. I have always told my kids, I don’t know if they had a happy childhood, but I had a wonderful motherhood. :) I am blessed with two grandsons, but the money and work it is taking my daughters and their husbands to accomplish what I did is staggering to me. I wish I could help more than I’m able to.
There is one other aspect of this issue that gets too little attention, I think. The mass media constantly assigns the blame for everyone’s problems to the parents. To some extent, that’s the truth. However, given the amount of media being consumed by the current young adult generation, it has to be scaring them that they might make a mistake or cause their children to suffer somehow. I say that because when my kids were little, I read a study in which researchers said that becoming a parent from the position of being a teacher was the hardest way to do it. Teachers put tremendous pressure on themselves to be perfect parents. That’s completely understandable. They see firsthand the results of parents’ mistakes and failures. But applying that research result to the larger society, the kids absorbing all of this media that focuses on parents’ failures is doing the same thing: it’s creating a tremendous amount of pressure on young people to be perfect.
When I had my first child, my sister-in-law, who was sixteen years older than I and who had four children, said to me, “Don’t worry so much. You’re there. That’s all that counts.” That did put my mind at ease. I didn’t have be perfect. I just had to be faithful.
There’s no one telling young parents that anymore. Instead, all of the professionals in their lives–from the teachers to the pediatricians–and all of the voices in the media they watch or read are looking for perfection. That is a lot of pressure.
They are also the cohort of children who have and are experiencing throughout their school years the not-parent adults around them doing all they can to diminish parental standing and authority and significance in children’s’ lives. Schools push children to identify a “safe adult” who is not their parent or family member. The schools should be doing all they can to support parents through whatever tough years a child has, and they all have one or more, not isolating them. In the decades before this girls (and buys too) have been told how useless (toxic) the boys and men are and how the girls have to have higher standards.
And most of that is targeted at the age groups most likely to be looking forward to making a family – the little girls playing with dolls and the girls showing off their girl stuff in high school to boys who just want to be connected and both are generally struggling with how to leave home.
And divorce exacerbates all of that and flattens kids.
Here you’re running into another pathology of the current culture. Who’s this someone going to be? American society — at least since the comet hit in the ’60’s — emphasizes individual autonomy to a pathological degree. The young lady with cancer in your experience, she has a church, a church that is motivated to reach out and support her through it. That’s not the general run of young ladies today, (and sad to say that’s not the general run of churches in my experience.)
Your young lady today is under pressure to make it on her own. To be self sufficient before asking for any help. Any advice from older generations is presumptively a check on that independence. Any work they might put in to maintaining such relationships is just one of those shackles of society they have to throw off, man.
Small wonder that women have grown neurotic when we’ve been isolating them and telling them that if they can’t do everything themselves and be perfectly happy doing it they’re letting the side down.
At the same time that it’s also harder to leave home and be on your own.
@keithlowery : “drifted…into Christianity”?
Haha – yes. It some cases may even be more like “meandering”. Slow and gradual peeling away of objections before final acceptance. Not unlike the way C.S. Lewis described his own conversion.
Good summary statement.
That’s a profound little gem of truth.
Thank you!
I followed the link to AGT (which I never watch). I shed a few tears … at 68 there are way too may personal and shared experiences to not be willing to cry.
I pray I get to meet her in heaven an eternal instant.
“American men, who weep in droves in movie houses, over the woes of lovestruck shop girls, hold that weeping in men is unmanly. I have found most men, in whom there was depth of experience, or capacity for compassion, singularly apt to tears. How can it be otherwise? One looks and sees, and it would be a kind of impotence to be incapable of, or to grudge, the comment of tears, even while you struggle against it.” (Whittaker Chambers, in a letter to William F. Buckley)
We can’t all have J. R. R. Tolkien working us over.
It’s probably safe as long as no women in their lives see it.
I’m very sorry you saw that, Felicia. Of course, I cannot permit witnesses. I would lose my man card.