watch out snow white

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. 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…

Social comparison was found to be the main culprit of jealousy, the notion that the other person seems more desirable because they have the attention and adoration that you crave. It appears as a physical projection onto others manifested from your internal insecurities. That was when I made the obvious connection between the tale of Snow White and the pressures facing my own online community of young women.

According to Literature teacher and well-rounded Disney expert, Michelle Chalmers, we as women relate to The Evil Queen more now than ever… “The Queen is evil because of her jealousy - she is condemned for a response that she has been taught; that a woman’s worth rests in her appearance and comparison to others,” she said.

“She shouldn’t be villainised - she is our own and society’s construction to control appearance, beauty and jealousy of women, yet ironically if we show any of these jealous traits, we are evil.”

“We all have an interior monologue much like the evil queen…I realise it is a monologue that has been taught to girls and women about how we should see and judge others - especially other women.”

It is no revelation that Disney Princesses have long been criticised as ‘bad for girls’ due to the message that selfworth is defined by appearance. So why is it that these harmful messages are still displayed so vividly on social media, why are we constantly reminded that we aren’t enough? The answer…through our phones.

It became apparent that if we are Evil Queens on our social media, then our phones have become our subconscious, envy reflecting, looking glass onto our peers. Michelle further clarifies that our screens have become our personalised mirror in which we can “constantly assess, verify, validate and record our appearance - with the added dangers of filters and image alteration,” she said. Further expanding that on social media “we can be The Evil Queen, mirror and Snow White - we can be the victim, perpetrator and accomplice,” of girl-on-girl hate.

As I continued to scroll through the answers on Instagram, I came to realise that my emotions and message responses were almost identical in their structure. I started by telling every girl that they weren’t alone, that they were understood and that they were greater than the imaginary version of themselves that lived within the virtual whispers of others.

Our phones have become the gateway to a reality that always seems just out of reach, a reality which we will never physically live up to. But I don’t see why that is such a bad thing?

In the story, The Evil Queen becomes the author to her own downfall as she was fixated on something she could not achieve, she already had a lot, but she wanted more. The looking glass was symbolic in fuelling her fiery hate for Snow White but in truth, was only reflecting her true insecurities. If it wasn’t Snow White, it would’ve been someone else. Maybe she just wanted to know if she was enough in the eyes of others - if she had value aside from her appearance.

Maybe if she had stepped away from the looking glass or simply asked if she was enough for herself, she would have finally been the fairest woman in her own eyes.