To every teenage girl out there: I’m sorry to break it to you, but they lied to you. Every last one of them.
Movies and TV shows often paint a picture of the “perfect” high school experience for girls, filled with glamorous events, flawless friendships and effortless achievements. However, this portrayal is far from the reality.
According to the Ruling our eXperiences survey conducted in late 2023, over 17,500 girls in 5th through 12th grades found the percentage of girls who report feeling confident has dropped in the last eight years from 68% to roughly 55%. The media makes it seem like high school is the best years of your life, a time of discovery and growth, an opportunity to find yourself. A time for you to look back on and reminisce about. For many teenage girls, it’s a battlefield where the pressure to fit in can overshadow everything else.
The struggle to find your place in high school is real and relentless; time waits for no one. From friendships to love to grievances, it’s a rollercoaster of experiences. Navigating grievances can be insanely challenging. Our lives are filled with intense emotions of significant changes, making navigating feelings of loss or disappointment difficult.
Whether it’s dealing with friendship issues, family conflicts or personal setbacks, each experience can feel overwhelming. It’s important to acknowledge these feelings.
Friends in high school are supposed to be our safe haven, but they can also be a source of immense pressure. The fear of being left out or not being “cool” enough can lead us to compromise our true selves. We watch so many shows like “Sex in the City” or “Insecure” that give us a false reality of what it’s really like. They show female friendships in a way that emphasizes drama, rivalry and superficiality.
In many popular narratives, we see girls portrayed as constantly fighting for attention, whether it’s over boys, social status or academic attention. This creates a stereotype that female friendships can only be rooted in jealousy and can only end in sabotage, which overshadows the genuine connection that many girls form in real life.
The friends that I have now are some of the most genuine girls I’ve ever met. They make me feel like the world isn’t going to crumble under my feet when something goes wrong. Whenever I’m with them, I feel at peace; it’s a weight lifted off of my shoulders. That’s what a true friendship is. It’s knowing that they’ll pick up the phone whenever you need them, or that they’ll be willing to lend a shoulder when you need one to cry on. It’s not filled with toxic behaviors and jealous rage.
The media also lied about love, or what we perceive as love, which adds another layer of complexity. The desire to be noticed, to be admired and to be loved can sometimes make us forget our worth. We might change our appearance, our behavior or even our values to attract someone’s attention. We mold ourselves to be the version that someone else wants us to be.
We watch countless movies where the ending is copied and pasted from the film before it. In the end, they all get their happy endings. Take “The Notebook” for example; it’s a beautiful story written about two people who overcome challenges like class division and miscommunication, but it sets an unrealistic standard. Not everyone has a love that can conquer all. Not everyone gets swept off their feet or finds their one true love when they’re 17. But what about the people who don’t get it? The girls who pour their hearts out just to get it broken in the end? Heartbreak sucks, but it’s real and it happens. Movies like this lead to girls feeling the pressure to have a boyfriend or be in a relationship. Not only do they feel the pressure to be in a relationship, but they also feel the pressure from movies and their peers to be in a flawless relationship: one with no ups and downs, one that looks just like the movies. Yet that’s unrealistic. We all think that a relationship has to be like the ones we see in movies to the point that we sometimes forget that’s not the case for everyone. We seem to forget that in the quest for love, the most important relationship we need to nurture is the one we have with ourselves.
The pressure that teenage girls face in high school at the influence of false media can affect who they try to be in the real world. They are fed a false reality of what the internet wants them to believe high school is like: full of flawless and drama-induced moments. High school should be a place where teenage girls find confidence, not where they lose it trying to be someone they are not.
