Watch out Snow White! How Social Media has Turned Young Women into Evil Queens Girl on Girl Hate - A tale of the modern-day Snow White and how our phones have become our own personalised looking glass. By Lilli Wyatt Sweat beaded on my forehead as I started to regret my short-lived career as a feature writer. Five seconds ago, it had posted and all I could do now was tear myself apart. Your lips look cracked. That pimple on your chin is huge. Your teeth are crooked. Yet there I was, posting a video on Instagram asking for other girls’ insecurities and online experiences of girl-on-girl hate - what a total hypocrite. But nonetheless, as expected, I soon became overwhelmed by the responses that started to flood in. The first response was an old friend from high school… “I compare my body to girls on Instagram even though I know they aren’t the realistic beauty standard,” she said. I could relate to her comparison, but with a 77.6% increase in the number of BBL’s performed globally, who wouldn’t? All it takes is $15,000 and the risk of losing your life, just so you can finally meet today’s standards. The second response was from a girl I sat with in class… “I feel anxious when I see the sent icon underneath my Instagram posts and I don’t know who it is,” she said. This made me curious as I scrolled through my own posts, why did my selfie have seven sends - were they making fun of me? Suddenly, I too became self-conscious. Lastly, a girl came clean about her grade’s current commotion… “They had a group chat where they would send in photos of their own friends, commenting about their weight, appearance and relationships with boys - there were screenshots sent around.” Was this the modern day burn book? All I could think was that somebody had stolen a page out of Regina George’s playbook, and they weren’t giving it back anytime soon.
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And yet somehow these responses hadn’t surprised me. In late 2020, a survey by news.com found that a shocking 65% of young women had been harassed on social media, which was 7% higher than the global average. Even more so, 40% of the harassment was from people at their school or work and further a confronting 29% was from their own friends. After collecting the statistics and scrolling through a substantial number of personal experiences I decided that I needed the opinion of a social media expert. According to Jennifer St George, University lecturer and social media expert, these comments are just the tip of the iceberg to a more pressing issue facing young girls who are active on social media. “I think girl-on-girl hate has increased significantly,” she says. “Young girls feel the need to be posting content about their ‘perfect lives and it’s rare that girls are going to admit that they are struggling mentally.” “I think it is hard for girls to step away from social media…that disengagement has gone, and I think it’s to the detriment of a lot of young girls’ mental health.” Psychologist and corresponding Author, Yvonne Kelly, confirmed Jennifer’s observations through a study in which she tested the effects of social media on young girls and boys. She found that Girl-on-girl hate on social media has become a prominent issue for the next generation of young women as it evidently affects younger girls’ and targets their mental health in comparison to boys respectively. Why is this? Well, it may be a more familiar story than you think. Psychologist, Mary. C. Lamia delves deeper into the minds of women and why jealousy may be able to tell us more than we once thought…
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