This post was first published on FORBES, I put it up here for paid subscribers.
A growing barrage of reports is showing girls are suffering. A CDC report earlier this year found that a majority (57%) of female high school students reported sustained sadness and hopelessness and 30% said they had seriously considered suicide in the previous 12 months. This compares to 29% and 14% respectively for male students. Everyone is wringing their hands and desperately trying to understand why.
Blaming Social Media?
Some suggest it was the pandemic, and that girls suffered more mental and physical abuse by being locked up with their families. No doubt that contributed. But as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt points out, the worrying acceleration of girls’ mental health decline began a decade ago, in 2012, long before any bugs were to blame. He points an increasingly accusing finger at social media and its noxious impacts. The academics are fighting it out, trying to prove, beyond the correlations and the doubts, what’s wrong so they can fix it.
But look at the men leading the world and dominating the headlines. They are the ‘success’ models for a generation of boys hungry to prove themselves in a money-adulating world. The same boys that girls are looking to as future lovers, husbands and fathers for their children. And they are horrifying images of immature, unethical and uncaring toxic masculinity gone awry.
Now two of the most powerful men on the planet are flirting with settling their companies’ differences with a fight. In a cage.
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