In a disturbing but monumentally important article for Macleans, "Inside the Dangerously Empty Lives of Teenage Girls," Kate Fillion interviews Dr. Leonard Sax, family physician, founder of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, and author Girls on the Edge.Be careful, there's earthy language and a bit of sexual description but the issues covered are of great significance, especially to parents.
A couple of excerpts:
If you look just at test scores and grades, you get the notion that girls are doing great and boys are struggling. But if you look at the literature, you see that more than one in five girls is cutting herself and/or burning herself with matches. More than one in four high-school girls is binge drinking. Today, one in eight females in the U.S. takes anti-depressants. There’s been an enormous escalation in anxiety and depression among girls and young women...
Q: You believe girls’ anxiety is connected to new issues, one of which is “self-objectification.” What do you mean by that?
A: Forty years ago, if you went into a department store and looked at clothes for seven-year-olds, they’d be quite different than the clothes on sale for 17-year-olds. Today there’s no longer any distinction; the same short skirts are sold to girls in Grade 2 and girls in Grade 12. T-shirts that say, “Yes, but not with you” are now sold to eight-year-olds.
Girls understand what these T-shirts are about: pretending to be sexually aware. We have girls who are now putting on a pretense of adult sexuality that they couldn’t possibly feel, and the danger of putting on a show is that you lose touch with your own sexuality. You’re wearing a mask, and when you take off the mask, there’s not a face there...
Q: If girls view sex as a commodity, are they frequently the ones pushing it?
A: Yes, they are. A boy in California sent me a letter saying it’s girls who are cornering the boys, and giving them [sexual favors]. If it were just one boy, of course, I wouldn’t pay any attention, but you hear this from many, many young people across North America. So why does a girl corner a boy? Because if he’s popular and doesn’t have a girlfriend, it raises your status in the eyes of the other girls. I find it troubling that so many girls are using their sexuality in an instrumental way, in order to accomplish some other end such as raising their social status, but not as an expression of their own [feelings and desires].
Q: What are parents doing wrong?
A: Parents have this 1980s mindset that you should give your child autonomy and independence, let your children make their own mistakes. One father said to me, “I don’t think it’s any of my business what my daughter’s doing on her Facebook page.” That ’80s mindset is wildly inappropriate in the 21st century. Parents need to understand it’s a dangerous world these teenagers have created. The story of Phoebe Prince, the girl in Massachusetts who recently committed suicide after cyberbullying, is just one more particularly dramatic illustration that 15-year-olds are not adults, they’re not competent to police themselves, and that’s why they need adults to be engaged in their world...
