Lost in cyberspace: Girls, boys, and The Anxious Generation

Photo by Elijah Hiett on Unsplash

Reflecting on boys, girls, problematic Internet use, and gender for Genspect:

In his recent book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Jonathan Haidt pinpoints four key factors that may help us understand why girls are so susceptible to harm when it comes to social media:

• socially-prescribed perfectionism

• cyberbullying

• online predation

• emotional contagion, with negative emotions proving especially contagious

Socially-prescribed perfectionism kicks in when girls feel they must live up to impossible—and often contradictory—expectations. They suffer from social comparison, which “takes place outside awareness and affects explicit self-evaluation.” Haidt notes that “[t]his means that the frequent reminders girls give each other that social media is not reality are likely to have only a limited effect, because the part of the brain that is doing the comparisons is not governed by the part of the brain that knows, consciously, that they are seeing only edited highlight reels.” Meanwhile, social media influencers offer compelling prototypes that girls latch onto as they seek to navigate developmental conflicts and challenges. Sometimes, these examples are positive and empowering. But influencers may also model dysfunction—providing girls with specific ways to express and act out the (real) distress they feel, often magnifying that distress in the process.

Haidt concludes that “social media harms girls more than boys. Correlational studies show that heavy users of social media have higher rates of depression and other disorders than light users or nonusers. The correlation is largest and clearest for girls: Heavy users are three times as likely to be depressed as nonusers.” What’s more, “[e]xperimental studies show that social media use is a cause, not just a correlate, of anxiety and depression.” 

Trans-identified girls are not exceptions to the negative trends besetting their female peers. They’re exemplars, the most obvious and extreme cases of a much broader phenomenon.

The same goes for boys who identify as trans. Problematic Internet use looks different for boys than it does for girls, and trans-identified boys look an awful lot like their male peers who find themselves sucked into virtual worlds, albeit with a higher rate of cat-ear headbands per capita.

Haidt identifies a range of “push and pull” factors acting on boys and young men: “The digital world brought more ways for boys to do the agency-building activities they craved, such as exploring, competing, playing at war, mastering skills, and watching increasingly hardcore pornography.” At the same time, “the real world changed […] in ways that have made it less hospitable to boys and young men—leading many to feel more purposeless, useless, and adrift.”

The result is that boys are withdrawing from the real world, seeking virtual surrogates for everything their offline lives lack. Boys plunge into immersive online simulations. They disappear behind endlessly customizable avatars that ‘embody’ everything they aspire to but cannot realize in their ‘real’ lives. No wonder many come to identify with their avatars—for whom ‘sex change’ is just a click of a button—when their avatars do all the things their physical bodies don’t: go outside, socialize, seduce, achieve.

Haidt dwells on the strange plight of the hikikomori—also known as “NEETs,” which is short for Not in Education, Employment or Training. These are primarily young men who “calm their anxieties by staying inside, but the longer they stay in, the less competent they become in the outside world, fueling their anxiety about the outside world. They are trapped.” 

Boys who incubate trans identities online become dangerously detached from reality, and—if they ever aspire to reenter the offline world—their new identities ensure that they will meet with awkwardness, discomfort, and rejection.

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