Twenty years later, Mean Girls is back. The hit 2004 film has been rewritten as a musical comedy for a new generation, showing that popularity contests, cliques, fashion, gossip, and revenge are still as popular among teenage girls as they were twenty years ago.
A friend and former women’s fashion magazine editor told me about her recent encounter with high school girls. She had been invited to speak at a well-respected Catholic girls school about her experience of feminism and femininity after reverting to her Catholic faith several years ago. Unfortunately, she found herself in a Mean Girls plot of her own. “It’s quite amusing being literally laughed at while you’re speaking and wondering if you have lipstick on your teeth or spinach on your forehead,” she told me.
Perhaps more worrying than their lack of manners, though, was their lack of vision. My friend expected these girls from nice Catholic families to be pro-marriage and pro-children. It turned out they were primarily pro-pink Porsche.
There are many reasons to be worried about this generation of girls, and unfortunately, the desire for girly sports cars is probably the least of them.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has spent several years gathering data on what he calls “the anxious generation.” In his book of the same name, he details how young people today are more depressed, more risk-averse, lonelier, and less social than any previous generation on record. In the last few decades, childhood has migrated from the real world to the virtual world: it is now “more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development.”
Social media and its pornifying pressures are only one piece of the heartbreaking puzzle this generation of young women faces.
A 2023 Gallup study revealed that 51 percent of US teens spend 4.8 hours a day just on social media apps, with girls spending an hour more than boys—and that doesn’t include time spent watching TV or playing video games. This “Great Rewiring of Childhood,” as Haidt calls it, really took off (with data shaped “like a hockey stick”) in 2012: in 2009, Facebook first introduced the “like” button, turning the platform from a “social networking system” designed for connection to a digital platform cultivating performance. The advent of the iPhone 4 with a front-facing camera coupled with the 2010 release of a new social media platform, Instagram, only served to grow the existence of a “virtual world” in which to display all those selfies for more public adoration—or ridicule. By 2012, more than 100 million users were choosing to express themselves daily in 140 characters or fewer, fueling a virtual platform now known for its role in the rise of “cancel culture.”
Mean Girls premiered in 2004, showing that cancellation in the form of public humiliation and shunning is old news to teenage girls: but back then, they had no choice but to continue to see their cancelled, former friend every day in the lunchroom. Now? Girls can block anyone who doesn’t like their posts or shares an upsetting picture. Is it any wonder that IRL (“in real life”) friendships are so rare? It’s hard enough for teen girls to manage relationships without the pressure of constant performance and personal branding.
Teen girls are particularly susceptible to the pitfalls of social media because, as Louise Perry, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution notes, their “culture” is highly mimetic. As a result, they’re more likely to form cliques—as much a form of social defense as it is offense—and more likely to pass along social contagions. Girls on TikTok are now giving each other functional neurological disorders that imitate Tourettes; in the UK, the disproportionate rise in referrals to gender clinics for girls has led many parents to question whether rapid onset gender dysphoria is tied to peer groups and social media; and the pressure to exploit themselves sexually doesn’t just come from the boys.
Freya India, a Gen Z journalist who has begun to explore the many problems her generation faces, notes that the algorithms on social media act as conveyor belts, transporting girls to dark and extreme pornified places. Mean Girls may have shown the power of social pressure, but that pressure has now been digitalized and carefully crafted to target each individual girl in all her weakest places. She no longer takes sanctuary in the quiet of her own bedroom, away from the lunchroom humiliation—instead the humiliation follows her around in her pocket, exploiting her worst fears and assuring her that they can be dealt with for only a large sum of money (often gained through selling views of her body.)
Young women now spend thousands of dollars on cosmetic surgeries to become their “authentic selves,” one botox filler at a time, until they wake up one day and don’t even recognize the girl in the mirror. They’ve prioritized how they look in 2-D digital photos over how they look in real life, and because their lives have been lived online, they aren’t even sure who their “real selves” are. India even suggests that the rising number of girls who consider themselves asexual might be better off considering whether a lifetime on antidepressant SSRIs with known sexual side effects is taking a toll.
But social media and its pornifying pressures are only one piece of the heartbreaking puzzle this generation of young women faces. Abigail Shrier, author of Bad Therapy, notes that an unhealthy therapy culture has arisen and taken over childhood. Unlike good and helpful therapy for legitimate issues, bad therapy culture encourages kids to focus on every kind of possible emotional distress, from getting a bad grade to losing a pet. Kids are formed to have a kind of emotional hypochondria, feeling limited by all kinds of diagnoses. They then become college students who are afraid of free speech. And sadly, while there are many reasons to be worried about the boys, adolescent girls seem disproportionately affected by all of this, with higher rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm.
What are we offering girls? AI chatbots for therapy, a normalized lack of stable nuclear and extended family culture, and an erasure of the word that defines their adult lives: woman. In her series “The Word Is Woman,” journalist Milli Hill has been documenting the expurgation of the word woman and related terms in healthcare, maternity services, and even support organizations like La Leche League. “Breastfeeding” is now “bodyfeeding” or “chest feeding”; “breast milk” is now “human milk“; “pregnant woman” is now “gestational parent”; and “female bodies” are now “bodies with vaginas.” One scholarly journal published an article on “gender-inclusive language in midwifery and perinatal services,” suggesting that the phrase “woman-centered” should be replaced with “person-centered” or “individualized,” and because the word “gynae” means “woman” in Greek, the word “gynecologist” should be “reproductive health specialist.” Women have every right to be angry about the way their bodies are treated in this culture—and it’s no wonder girls are doing so poorly. Our culture doesn’t even want them to exist.
These girls deserve more. The good news? Mean Girls isn’t the final word on what it means to be a girl. The Church’s understanding of woman offers a robust vision in the face of a culture that flattens, fills, and tries to erase womanhood. “The Church represents the memory of what it means to be human in the face of a civilization of forgetfulness, which knows only itself and its own criteria,” said Pope Benedict XVI.
In future articles, I’ll continue exploring that robust vision and how it can be applied in our civilization of forgetfulness.