The world teenage girls navigate today is vastly different to the one their mothers experienced. And that is a problem.
I often think some women in their 40s and 50s, who were teens in the 1980s and 1990s, don’t appreciate the magnitude of that difference, or don’t want to.
We like to think of society as progressing and becoming more equal, so it’s hard to acknowledge the reality of a modern world that can hurt our daughters as a matter of routine — casually, and on a daily basis.
The truth is quite brutal. I grew up in a world where boys at school shared libraries of nudes of underage girls on Google drives; a world of sex without dating, where the demand that we engage in unwanted sex acts felt like a pre-established fact.
It is a world in which young girls are put under enormous pressure to ‘perform hotness’ online for ‘likes’ from boys; where sexual assault is not rare, even at school, and where pornography is the backdrop of much of what they do.
