If people found out you didn't shave off your pubic hair, you were both disgusting and a lesbian. If you got a boyfriend, you were a slut; if you had a boyfriend but didn't sleep with him, you were frigid, and if you didn't ever have a boyfriend, you were a freak. When you went on vacation, you had to take a whole Facebook album's worth of photos of you looking as thin as possible. Your group of friends start only eating soup or an apple for lunch. You start eating an apple for lunch. The thought of ever having to be a teenage girl again is enough to make me feel like I've got a hand physically around my throat.
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Nothing surprises me about the new study from Girlguiding. Its poll of 1,627 girls and young women showed that confidence rapidly drops away from girls at the age of ten. Ninety percent of nine- and ten-year-old girls felt they would have the same chance as boys at succeeding in their chosen jobs, but this dropped to 54 percent among 11- to 16-year-olds and to 35 percent among 17- to 21-year-olds. Only a quarter of the older group said they felt "powerful," compared to a third of 11- to 16-year-old girls.Anxiety is a multi-causal illness, but the fact that women feel worse by the time they're an adult than they do when they're a teenager is a troubling tell-tale sign of time spent lacking in confidence and feeling powerless. Women are nearly twice as likely to have anxiety than men. To find out more about these sad stats, I asked girls and young women about the first moment they felt like they'd lost their power and what to do to ensure this stops happening to the next generation of women.It was at the beginning of school when people started making fun of me for being smart. I started worrying about why they weren't saying it to guys, so I began hiding being clever. I felt I wasn't being what a girl was supposed to be like. I was even told by a family friend that girls being clever intimidated guys. Not being honest with myself or standing up for myself made me feel so powerless.It got worse when I was 13 or 14, as you worry more about what people are saying about your looks. One time after a chemistry test where I got a high score, this boy from my class came up to me and said, "Were you the one who got 100 percent?" I nodded, and he said, "Why do you always do that? It's so unfair." A guy in my class also got 100 percent, but he said nothing to him about it, only me. I felt like I'd done something I should be ashamed of as I'd made a boy feel bad. Now I see it doesn't matter how I make men feel.
Jennifer, 19, London
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If we want to help girls, there needs to be a real focus on personal, social, health, and economic education as well as sex and relationship education—which should definitely be informative and mandatory—to teach girls about their own value and how to treat themselves.It was when I first went to high school. Suddenly, you're expected to not look like a kid anymore, and you have to be an attractive woman. It's makeup, shaving, waxing, and everything. It all comes at once. If you can't keep up with that it can be a big problem for you. The people who were considered popular did it first, and then there's the pressure to follow them and do whatever they're doing to get by. That's when your insecurities come in: You notice the differences between you and other people—how you present yourself, how you look, and your relationships. As you get older, it gets worse. Your self awareness grows and you have the added pressure of being an adult on top, but you're still carrying those pressures that started when you were 12 or 13.It's difficult to fix because the media has a lot to do with it, and no one can control that. But inside school environments, it's about educating people on those topics rather than ignoring them. I don't remember ever being told about confidence or gender imbalance at school. If there was a talk as a class, it was always about drugs or alcohol or maybe safe sex, but never about mental issues. Now when kids are that age, they don't just have Facebook either; they have Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and we see celebrities and people older than us, and we want to live that life and hold ourselves to those standards, even though we're kids. Social media definitely makes this worse, but how can you regulate how much time people are on it? It's hard.
Carissa, 18, South London
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Alice, 13, Norwich
Amena, 21, Birmingham
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I'd say if young girls deleted celebrities and people who don't make them feel good about themselves on social media, that'd help. Now I only follow people who inspire me. People who do really cool art or makeup, for example. Workshops on how to deal with your body differing from other women's, and how you should fight to be equal to men in the workplace should be mandatory. Teachers are too scared to waver from the curriculum. School is the biggest part of socialization, so they should be allowed and encouraged to talk with kids about what goes on outside the classroom.If a boy wanted to be a musician, he is judged on how well he can play the saxophone. But I feel like if me or one of my friends wanted to be a saxophonist, first people would look at me, and if they liked what they saw, they would then listen to my music. Knowing that makes me feel powerless.I have no idea what could be done to make girls have more confidence. When you find out, let me know. There should probably be more realistic portrayals of adolescence in mainstream media. It doesn't help my self-confidence to look at Olivia Newton-John in Grease and think that's what 17-year-olds are supposed to look like, when in reality she was like 28 when it was filmed. I want to see teens actually in their formative years, blemishes and all. There should also be more advice from school, too. We have well-being lessons on gender identity and fluidity that have been surprisingly progressive, but as for power and confidence, we've never heard anything about that. Even if we did, it would almost definitely be altogether as opposed to separate by gender and too broad to be helpful.
Esme, 15, London
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