The Girls Are Not Okay

What Is Happening With Young Women?

I’m still pondering this essay from Freya India in First Things. Ms. India is an influential voice regarding the experience and circumstances of young women, and she has recently, like a growing number of other writers/thinkers/public intellectuals, drifted toward and into Christianity. She is thoughtful, insightful, and sometimes quite shrewd in her understanding of culture. Her Substack offers valuable insights into what is going on in the world of young women.

Here’s a snippet from her recent piece in First Things:

I sat at a conference recently listening to an older man lecture about my generation’s neglect of our “moral duty” to have children. Rows of suited men nodded along. I kept thinking about the many young women I know who just don’t believe anyone will stick around, who are terrified to start families because theirs fell apart. Who is this meant to persuade? The people the message is supposedly for aren’t even in the room. Those who actually need help will not be reached by theological lectures on marriage or family. What they need right now is someone to give expression to the wound of growing up between two homes, someone who dares to talk about the pain.

A lot to chew on and ponder in this one from her. Not least the tension, which she implicitly engages, between sense and sensibility as the way for Christians to engage with unbelieving young women. I read Ms. India in this essay to be pleading for more sensibility.

While I continue to think about this, I had an experience two days ago that is entirely germane to Ms. India’s essay and which has made her thoughts land differently for me than perhaps they would have otherwise.

I was invited to speak and lead a discussion in a graduate level class at a Christian seminary. The class engages the relationship between Science and Theology. I was asked to lead a discussion with the graduate students on AI and transhumanism. I have written, and had published, some thoughts on these subjects, which the professor was familiar with. So he had invited me to be a kind of visiting resource. My fleeting performance as a seminary teacher was not unlike trotting out the dancing bear at the circus, one suspects: you aren't surprised the bear dances badly; you're surprised he dances at all.

But I digress.

Leading a discussion among graduate students is far afield from anything I normally do, which perhaps explains my startled reaction to what happened next, and why I find Ms. India’s post to be as painful as it is timely.

Because we were in a seminary class, the professor opened the class with a prayer, and prior to actually praying, he asked the students if they had anything they would like him to pray for. One of the students, a woman who teaches at the college level at a different school, asked the professor to pray for several of her female students. She went on to say that mental and emotional health crises are surprisingly widespread among her female students. This remark provoked another graduate student, who also works in education, to ask for the same prayer, because he also is seeing widespread emotional health challenges among the young women of his acquaintance. At this point, the professor himself volunteered that the phenomenon they were describing is actually something that has some prevalence even among female seminary students. 😳

I’ve been noodling over my reaction - both to Ms. India's essay and to the prayer requests from my brief appearance at seminary.

My earlier reference to “sense and sensibility” was a perhaps too subtle hat tip to Jane Austen’s reflection on the same issues that are implicated by Ms. India’s concerns. My decidedly firm intuition is that we are not helping young women if we confine ourselves to patronizing their feelings. In this, I am decidedly on team "Elinor", if you know anything about Jane Austen's story. But neither should we ignore the apparently widespread woundedness among modern young women. One suspects, as Ms. India’s observations imply, we may now be reaping the whirlwind of multiple generations of family dissolution.

When I read Ms. India’s essay, my mind wandered to a scene from the musical "Oklahoma", where Aunt Eller counsels Laurey as it looks like Laurey’s new husband may be accused of murder:

Laurey: I don't see why this had to happen, just when everything was so fine.

Aunt Eller: Don't let your mind run on it.

Laurey: I can't forget it, I tell you. I never will.

Aunt Eller: Don't try, honey. You got to get used to having all kinds of things happening to you. You got to look at all the good on one side and all the bad on the other side and say, "Well, all right, then" to both of them. Lots of things happen to a woman-- sickness or being poor and hungry, even, being left alone in your old age, being afeared to die-- and you can stand it. There's one way. You got to be hardy. You got to be.

Laurey: I wisht I was the way you are.

Aunt Eller: Aw, fiddlesticks! Scrawny and old? You couldn't hire me to be the way I am.

Laurey (laughing): What would I do without you? You're such a crazy.

Two things stand out to me about that dialog. Aunt Eller hands out some very grounded, unvarnished advice. She doesn’t pamper Laurey’s feelings. But the play’s prior events also make clear that Aunt Eller is speaking from a position of relational intimacy and longstanding concern for Laurey’s welfare.

It seems intuitively obvious that some of the young women in Ms. India’s orbit need to be encouraged to be more hardy - to accept that they need not be defined by the unhappy circumstances of their lives. The late singer "Nightbirde" comes to mind in this regard. She died very early in her life from cancer, shortly after bringing the house down one night on America's Got Talent. She was already dying, even as she performed. Yet she told the judges that night, "you can't wait until life isn't hard anymore to decide to be happy." She had apparently been listening to Aunt Eller.

Someone needs to be telling more young women such things, and without treating them like children.

But it would also almost certainly help these young women to have people so invested in their lives that it makes it easier for the young women to receive such unvarnished advice whenever it is given. Maybe that’s an application of Ms. India’s admonition that is at once unpatronizing and also more consistent with human nature. Maybe we should conclude, not that young women's feelings should be pampered, but that harsh medicine is more easily swallowed when lubricated by caring relationships.

Christians have a word for this kind of thing. It’s called "discipling".

There is a young woman of my acquaintance who, while in her early twenties, contracted breast cancer. She came from the kind of fractured home and damaged family called out by Ms. India. My wife, along with others, began investing in a relationship with this young woman. They drove her to her chemo appointments. They sat and talked with her over coffee during the interval of days between treatments. My wife and I picked her up each week and took her to church with us. Several women made her a part of their lives, devotedly coming alongside her during these difficult days.

I recall the day when so much of this young woman’s hair had fallen out from chemo that she needed to just shave off what was left. She recoiled at the idea of doing that in a public hair salon. So my wife invited her over to our house. This young woman sat in a chair in our home while my wife applied the electric trimmers to the wisps of remaining hair, as the two of them wept through the doing of it together.

It is not hard to agree that Ms. India’s troubled young women will be less likely to accept hard messages from conference speakers than from someone who has first made an investment in laughing with them, and sometimes weeping with them, over coffee. Someone who will listen to their pain. But wherever it originates, Ms. India’s modern young women need to be exposed to more than a smidgen of no-nonsense talk about the way the world works, perhaps especially regarding the need for them to eschew self-pity regarding their past, as well as self-absorption concerning their present. As Jordan Peterson has observed, “the shortest path to misery is to continually think about the way you feel.”

Alas, there are some young women, perhaps even very many of them, who do not have such relationships. In the absence of these kinds of beneficial resources, in order to succeed, these young women must still find a way to reorient themselves away from their inner wounding and embrace truth-seeking instead. They must come to grips with the mortal threat represented by any abiding temptation to marinate in self-pity.

As it happens, I have more than a passing familiarity with troubled young women. And one of the things I have learned - and this may seem strange to anyone without similar experience - is that people sometimes begin to love their own troubles. More, sometimes, than they love their own lives. Accordingly there are people who, to quote Os Guinness, “see God as the great interferer, the ultimate spoil sport they must fend off at all costs.”

All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful...Human nature is so faulty that it can resist any amount of grace and most of the time it does. - Flannery O’Connor

The way forward for young women from fractured families is to choose, even in the midst of their misfortune, to obsessively pursue the truth, wherever they can find it. Even if the truth is being offered to them in a bumbling, tone-deaf, incompetent way. Or by a suit-wearing conference speaker. But I repeat myself.

If all of that sounds unappealing, I’m sorry but there is simply no other way.