Today’s article on the front page of The Australian about the harmful effects of social media platform Instagram on the mental health of teenage girls is no surprise.
Facebook’s research, published by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, revealed that 32% of teen girls said Instagram made them feel bad about their bodies, and 13% of teenagers in Britain who reported suicidal thoughts linked those to their use of Instagram.
Todd Sampson’s recent Mirror, Mirror documentary which aired on Channel 10 last week, also laid bare the rise of social media and Snapchat body dysmorphia, hyper-sexualized modern beauty ideals and the commodification of insecurity fuelling ‘beauty’ company profits, and a mental health pandemic in the young women who are their target market.
This is something we know all too well at girledworld.
We have worked with 30,000 girls since 2017, and get to stand in their world view frequently. (I also have four daughters so I'm pretty much swamped in a daily sea of oestrogen, social feeds and teenage insouciance).
In 2019 we delivered a girledworld In Search Of Selfie Teenage Forum at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival - a youth-led discussion and open Q&A exploring the role of social media and selfie culture in teenage personal narrative and identity development.
We then decided to drill deeper on helping young women get a reality check on their online and offline selves, so we put out a campaign call across APAC to capture young women's sentiments for a social storytelling project we called You Are Not Your Face. We wanted to simply better understand what the world looked like from their vantage point.
But what we got back simply blew us away.
Thousands of teenage girls from India, Brazil, Pakistan, China, Australia, France, Germany, Korea and the USA contributed their raw truths, real stories and abundant wisdom to the girledworld You Are Not Your Face project, which has now turned into a powerful book written by girls for girls, that will be released on November 1, 2021.
The stories you’ll find across the pages are universal in their truths. They speak of acts of courage and strength, of bravery and love, of broken and enduring friendships, and of a brand new f**k-you feminism pushing up from the brink, built on an awakening power, and an urgency to set things right on our pale blue dot of a planet.
These are also stories about life in a digital, filtered world - the complexity and confusion of navigating life on and offline, of grappling with identity and growth, of self-worth and social media edited lives, of anxiety, depression and self-hard, and of times when the world turns unexpectedly and overwhelmingly dark.
It’s also a powerful snapshot of young women who have never known life without the internet and the fickle currencies of social media likes; who are growing up in a volatile, technology-fuelled and hyper-connected world on the edge of singularity.
These are young women who are trying to work out who the hell they are; picking up the tab for the planet to take action on climate change; righting the global reckonings catalysed by #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter movements; and shouldering the burden of finding future social solutions for a disproportionately ageing population.
These are young women who are trying to balance the tipped scales of a persistent global gender pay gap; recalibrating with the changing global economy and job market; and working out what real leadership looks like amidst a growing disengagement with modern-day democracy. (I don't blame them given recent windows in via MsRepresented and Strong Female Lead ....)
These are young women who are facing into all of that stuff, plus riding the everyday, dizzying, hormone-fuelled, identity-shifting, social media minefield of a rollercoaster that is simply being a teen. So it's no bloody wonder their worlds can get a little overwhelming sometimes,
And although they, nor we, know where all this is really going next, You Are Not Your Face simply serves to capture the voices of the next generation at this moment in time.
While some of these stories are hard to read, nearly every one of them has given us hope in where humanity is heading in the capable hands of the next generation of women.
Because despite the current dystopia, I do ultimately have hope.
Hope in humankind, in kindness itself, and in the rising power of this next generation of women to stand up, step up, start the engines of our future world and correct the darker forces in the digital world we all built and they were born into.
They can shape a world where young women can and will define the new age of equality, where more girls and women are elevated, celebrated, respected and taking up the spaces they long should have occupied so they can do the bold leadership work the world needs to get done.
Yes, they may be young, and unfurled — for now. But I do get the incredible privilege of living with, working with and learning from them every single day, and I ultimately do think we will be ok.
You Are Not Your Face brings up just some of the stories of girls we believe should be told.
I hope you will find in the words — and the spaces in between — inspiration, courage, challenge, rage, calls to action, hope, healing, truths — all the raw, unexamined and untrammelled stuff of life that also sits inside nearly all of our stories as humans on earth.
If anything, I hope you can just hear these words of girls.
They are our future leaders, inventors, CEOs, poets, coders, scientists, innovators, founders and game-changers.