I came across this interview recently in Maclean’s with Leonard Sax on his new book, Girls on the Edge
Appearances suggest that girls are doing better than boys:
On paper, yes. In Canada, about 61 per cent of university undergraduates are women. 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.
Boys, although they may not be succeeding like woman, aren’t as anxious:
No, not like girls. When you actually sit down and talk to a girl, as I have done in many venues across Canada and the U.S., she will tell you she’s waking up at two in the morning upset about the pizza she ate for supper, and thinks she’s fat even though she’s not, and is frantic about whether she’s going to get into the university she wants to go to. Meanwhile her brother the goofball is enjoying life: eats a whole pizza for supper and doesn’t bat an eye, sleeps in late, and is perfectly content with his online games and pornography, hanging out with two other guys who are just like him. He’s happy! But his sister, who looks so good on paper, is not.
The anxiety girls feel can be connected to “self-objectification.” Girls as young as eight are being sexualized even though they have not yet reached puberty. They are loosing what psychologist call: “middle childhood, a time for [them] to develop a sense of who they are as people without worrying about whether they’re hot.”
Leonard makes an interesting observation about anorexia, describing it as a spiritual journey of sorts. “The girl who really does have anorexia has accomplished what all the other girls talk about but have never achieved. That becomes her defining sense of self: I’m a really skinny girl, that’s an accomplishment. It’s not a cry for help–in fact, they don’t want grown-ups to pay attention because they don’t want someone to take that achievement, that identity away from them.”
The article is worth checking out, a lot of interesting insights. I hope to pick up the book later and read through it.
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