The Extreme Crisis of Young Women - Freya India - #1090

“I think women do have unmet needs. I think the reason that more privileged women were more pessimistic in that piece was that they have everything they want and basically nothing they need. So all of the foundations and anchors that help women and people in general feel stable have basically been eroded. And that's the argument in my book that we have had our families break down. We've we don't know our neighbors. We don't have communities. We are less religious.”

“all of the foundations and anchors that help women and people in general feel stable have basically been eroded. And that's the argument in my book that we have had our families break down. We've we don't know our neighbors. We don't have communities. We are less religious. We're less religious than young men even. So we don't have any of these anchors. And that is why I think when the social media platforms came in, they really destroyed young women because they offered substitutes and simulations of these things that we didn't have in the first place.”

“So the problem is you have a lot of young women who, typically, by their nature, will go inwards when they feel distressed. But you have industries encouraging them and telling them the problem is you. Yeah. They're not making it up, but they are being manipulated. Yeah. Yeah. And and and the point of the book is basically there's nothing wrong with you. Your reactions are human reactions to the world and and to a world that's trying to turn you into a product, the fact that you feel unhappy.”

“So for example, not having children, having more of an aversion to having children someday than young men. I think that's because they think of themselves as a product, not as a human. And so people say things like, oh, that's the most human experience. Why would you not want to do that? But if your goal is to be a perfect, pristine product, then why would you take the risk of motherhood when it could destroy your body? It's unpredictable. It's dangerous. It's scary. It's not really something you can display quickly.”

“I think for the women I'm talking about, there's much more pressure to stay single, to stay unattached, to stay available. And I think what Emma is really describing when she talks about the rush and the hurry is she feels pressure to cram in all her self actualization before she meets someone. So in the podcast, she's talking about healing herself and fixing her mental health and becoming the best version of herself and becoming whole and healed and enlightened. And I think that's a core message that young women are growing up with.”

“The only thing I can think is that it becomes, again, another form of signaling you are a good person. Look at how much I care? Yeah. And these will be the same women who've, again, grown up with believing that what counts as being a good person is what they post. And Well, also empathy, you know, to steel man that, this person is if that's the truth, this person really cares about what's going on in The Middle East and is genuinely pained by it. And that that's a kind of investment that's really impressive.”

“FaceTune is, like, one of the most popular apps where girls would edit themselves to then post on Instagram. Like filters? No. Going in and editing each part of your face. So you can slim your jaw. You can enlarge your eyes. You can change your waist. You can tan your skin. You can whiten your teeth. It's everything. But that is what girls were using as teenagers all throughout their all throughout growing up. And then they've reached their twenties and people say, oh, why are they unhappy with the way they look?”

“So from the twenty tens, it was young women who lurched dramatically to the left. It wasn't that young men lurched to the right. Young men pretty much stayed where they were. It was women. Yeah. The new statesman said, the prevailing narrative is that young men under the influence of the Manosphere and Andrew Tate are being politically radicalized faster and in greater numbers than young women. The result is a gulf in political sensibility between British women and men who are now dramatically inclined to the populist right.”