To hate the vacuousness of some young girls nowadays?

Your blame is in the wrong place. Blame the international companies who are targeting kids and making them think they need all this shit. These companies are nurturing these girls as long term consumers by making them obsessed with perfect, non ageing skin before they are even adults.
Blame us as parents for not standing up to our kids’ demands for smartphones. If we collectively blocked their access to social media, they couldn’t be manipulated by it.

Blame us as adults for failing to give girls strong feminist messages, or even critical thinking skills. to help them withstand this onslaught on their appearance.

Don’t blame the kids for believing what the adults have told them or let them see and hear.

I really feel for this girls. Ageing is tough, and these poor girls will have had decades of indoctrination that they must not age and can stop it if they spend enough money. God help them when they reach middle age and they do age. It’s going to hit them really hard.

To be fair, men do get a fair old pasting on most other threads. We can spare one for the girls.

Did I honestly just read that? Are you female? You know that women get raped regardless of what they wear, right? Your risk of rape doesn’t increase or decrease depending upon whether you’re in hotpants or jeans.

FFS, I hope you don’t have daughters.

It's ridiculous, these are families on what I'd consider normal/average incomes like myself, so no idea, but the kids all seem to feel this pressure to keep up, a lot of the products they want/use, are too harsh for their young skin too in my opinion, my dd has bought herself a sol de janeiro body spray and body cream which she used her birthday money for, it just seems a bit boring, but she wont be told

Brilliant 😂😂

You forgot Charlie Red perfume and dowsing ourselves in impulse after PE 😂

I would say that this has always happened. There were always the ‘popular’ girls at school who used to wear makeup and branded clothing and would always bleach their hair blonde to look like Pamela Anderson or have their hair styled like the spice girls and whoever else was their idols when I was a kid in the 1990s. I do feel that things have got much worse since social media though. So many of the ‘influencer’ types plastered all over Instagram and girls trying to copy them. So much more choice of makeup than there was 20-30 years ago and so many videos now accessible online with makeup tutorials or Instagram girls making reels with weird makeup application tactics. And so many more influencers posting pictures of themselves in skimpy outfits. I do however feel that if we had access to this type of content 20-30 years ago then girls back then would have been exactly the same as this generation. I feel there is also so much more pressure to ‘fit in’ nowadays. It’s not just with girls, it’s boys too - pressure to have the latest gadgets and technology.

I think the heart of the problem is that when you were 12, you were not being relentlessly bombarded with social media and influencers, and advertisements targetting you and your friends every waking moment. That's what 12 year olds are facing today. The reason that no-one, you or your friends were trying to fit in, was that you were all already in a like minded group. Children are going through a lot more pressure than I did when I was a kid. Even if things like like K-Pop or about K-Beauty existed back then, we wouldn't know about it unless it was in a magazine. But kids these days know instantly, thanks to technology. The onus is mostly on parents to take control of the situation, because no one else is going to.

All of this. I'm 58. I was 12 in 1977. We were all obsessed with boys and clothes and eyeshadow ( blue or green) and getting the perfect 'flick' at the front of our hair .I wasn't allowed teen magazines so I read other people's. We did the dance moves we saw on Top of the Pops. If social media had been around then I would have been banned from all of it at 12. I would have desperately wanted to see what friends with older sisters were able to see. Young teens have always experimented with clothes, with playing at being older and sophisticated. When my mother was 16 ( now 85) female film stars and Princess Margaret all smoked and used cigarette holders. Mum tried it because she wanted to be like them. Smoking made her sick. Nothing has changed . We are all influenced by images around us. There are just many, many more of them these days.

I own that as a young teen in the 70s I was susceptible to adverts in Jackie magazine for Anne French cleansing milk, various soaps, shampoos and temporary hair colours. But having access to social media influencers flogging high end products just seems a whole different ballgame to me.

TikTok is the vehicle of the problems, not the problem itself. The US aren’t trying to ban it to protect kids, they’re just pissed that it is Chinese influenced instead of being under Uncle Sam’s thumb like Meta is (and kids are moving away from Insta and FB, they don’t want to use their parents social media). If TikTok is banned, something else will just rise in its place.

I actually quite like this era of youth culture, it’s much better than the early 2000s with the toxic obsession with being stick thin, no celebration of non-white beauty and the clothing trends. Focusing on skin and gym is much healthier imo than what Americas Next Top Model taught girls.

Same. At 12 I was just starting to notice things like fashion, I wasn’t already fully ensconced in it like girls are now. And my parents would’ve laughed me out of the house if I demanded £100 trainers. Fashion was cheaper, a bit more playful (so much black and beige 🤦🏼‍♀️) and didn’t need as much money spending on it (hello Natural Collection and Matalan).

I agree but there’s a world of difference between being interested in fashion and wanting to fit in, and the fashion being £50 water bottles, damaging beauty ‘treatments’ and expecting your parents to go into their overdraft for a moisturiser. I would say vaping is also part of the ‘look’ - all the teen girls here are constantly sucking on their vapes as they walk to and from school, yet they’ve just been shown to impair girls fertility and mess with their hormones. Plus TikTok and YouTube mean you can obsess over trends to a degree you couldn’t when all there was was Shout magazine once a fortnight.

In a similar vein we have always had misogynistic teen boys but they didn’t use to have access to hardcore porn and Andrew Tate. It’s all ramped up a notch, and is reflected in their poor mental health.

I think 12 year old girls being obsessed with something or other is quite normal.
I do think the amount of money they spend/want to spend on said obsession has maybe got a bit out of hand.
As pp said though, it's not just teenage girls who get obsessed with stuff!

I beg to differ @Branster but then I’m 25 years older than you. At 12 years old I wasn’t trying to “fit in” the way you describe at all, nor were any of my friends. We went to school, Guides, round our friends’ houses etc and that’s was mainly it. We didn’t wear make up or hitch our skirts up or even follow fashion. We were still effectively children.

@Chickychoccyegg , £50 on one product, at 12? Where do they get the money?

I thought they had launched that product but had to truncate the name to accommodate the discerning customers - Brut or Lynx. Tagline: 'nobody will guess you haven't been near the wash basin in a fortnight'.

I think it's also unbelievable and more worrying what so many teenage girls put up with from boys. It's almost a competition between them, to show how 'happy' they can make him. (By being a complete doormat)
All these influencers that glamorise the 'Wifey' role. It's 2024 FGS....

@LalalaToYou

Around 1815?

Who knows. Jane Austen was one of the earlier writers from a woman's perspective. Could have been happening before but men didn't write about teenage girls.

I bloody hope. So.
This is the source of all this brain washing, advertising, obsessions.
12 year olds will be 12 year olds and would want to fit in with what they believe other 12 year olds are doing. Nothing new.
The only issue nowadays is social media. Too much of it, not tailored to their age and the power of influencing.

I'm 37 and some girls were like that when I was a teen, it's not a new thing.

I understand the point you make but growing up female is what we have special experience of.

Agree, but not only that @AprilMayJuniperBerry they are doing it at such a young age. But it’s so widespread now it’s become unremarkable.

There’s a difference between schoolgirls rolling their skirts up a little bit (like a lot of us did when we were their age) to showing their arse cheeks off to the world as they tend do today. What makes it worse is the fact that they’re more streetwise. They know there’s rapists, perverts and paedophiles around yet they still parade around with their arse cheeks on show.

I think things started to change around that time, if not before. Current mores are just a continuum of that, just more widespread and exaggerated now.