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"These expressions of inner crisis are just a glint of the startling data reported by federal researchers this week. Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls said they had considered suicide, a 60 percent rise in the past decade. Nearly 15 percent had been forced to have sex. About 6 in 10 girls were so persistently sad or hopeless they stopped regular activities.
The new report represents nothing short of a crisis in American girlhood. The findings have ramifications for a generation of young women who have endured an extraordinary level of sadness and sexual violence — and present uncharted territory for the health advocates, teachers, counselors and parents who are trying to help them.
The data comes from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from a nationally representative sample of students in public and private high schools. “America’s teen girls are engulfed in a growing wave of sadness, violence and trauma,” the CDC said.
“It’s alarming,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said Thursday of the report. “But as a father of a 16-year-old and 19-year-old, I hear about it. It’s real. I think students know what’s going on. I think sometimes the adults are just now realizing how serious it is.
Some of the most alarming data collected by the CDC involved the rise in suicidal thoughts among teen girls — 24 percent of teen girls have made a plan for suicide while 13 percent have attempted it, almost twice the rate for boys."
Of course this is mainstream media so the entire article tap-dances around the fact that it is overwhelmingly men and boys--often inspired or emboldened by a constant stream of aggressive pornography--perpetuating this trauma on girls...but I think we might be getting somewhere by at least acknowledging current culture is deeply misogynistic and hostile to women and girls' sense of self and safety.
If you or someone you know needs help, visit 988lifeline.org or call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.
Well you know my state has a brain drain and also is now considering a six-week abortion ban (which is basically a total abortion ban, let's be real). And adding that to everything else going on and they're stumped as to why teen girls and young women in general (myself included) despise everything?
With little twats like Andrew Tate and his clones shoving their ideology on young boys and men and guess who bears the brunt of that?
Here's how I feel about "the crisis of men" and society at large:
This is a symptom of the effect of social media on young girls and young women. It's gone from a peer group of your highschool class or your after school club or church youth group to thousands of Instagram influencers who make their money pretending to be younger than they are or the Cinderella story of a dancing tiktoker going viral.
I feel like one thing that contributed to this in my case was watching movies that glamourized the "troubled girl/cool girl" trope. I think those are almost more damaging than the romcoms everyone's always on about. I would watch these cool girls and fantasize about a nice man swooping in to save me from myself. Gross.
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/02/the-tragic-mystery-of-teenage-anxiety/673076/