Social media converts young women into marketable products
βThe argument of the book is that women are becoming something more like products rather than people. And so I think they're being encouraged to see their lives as the ultimate goal is to optimize yourself for the market. The ultimate goal is not to have a collection of human experiences. And I think this explains a lot of things. So it explains what young women value and what they don't value.β
Modern narratives devalue and discourage the role of motherhood
βI just really don't want to lose the other things and become just a mother. I still want to be me, and I will probably lose that. Yeah. I think it's a fear of vulnerability and Dependence. Yeah. I think this gets missed sometimes with the discussions on girl boss feminism and all young women just wanna be a girl boss and for sort of selfish reasons.β
βInstead, it is young women moving to the radical left that is widening the political gender gap among the under thirties. Yeah. And I would put that down to social media because, obviously, there's all different spheres of content on social media. And every trend, basically, you can get dragged toward the most deranged and extreme endpoint of that trend.β
Liberalism has eroded stable traditional cultural anchors
βAll 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.β
Young women feel more pessimistic than previous generations
βThey found that more privileged women felt even more pessimistic. And these are things that I've been trying to argue very carefully and I hope with some compassion, but I've had to put up with constant smears and backlash. They're not happy. Something is happening in their relationships. They don't they feel hopeless about the future.β
Pressure to be perfect encourages chronic singleness
βI think for the women I'm talking about, there's much more pressure to stay single, to stay unattached, to stay available. 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.β
Therapy language pathologizes normal human emotional distress
βIf young girls say they have an anxiety disorder, they have social anxiety, I think what they're really feeling is actual distress from the world that they're growing up in. And so they have had less practice. They have had less face to face interaction. And so they do have this outsized reaction to socializing, but it's not a disorder. The problem is you have a lot of young women who, typically, by their nature, will go inwards when they feel distressed.β
Self-love campaigns promote vanity through editing apps
βThe self love campaign was basically ways to sell things like editing apps. So Facetune was marketed as something that can help you feel confident and empowered. And I talk about these influencers in the book who are literally talking about how they don't have any insecurities anymore, and they've overcome it, and they finally reached a stage of self love while they're literally reshaping their jaw on FaceTune, teaching girls how to do it.β