Calling the Aunty Army
Julia Roberts and niece Emma
The psychologist Steve Biddulph, author of the hugely popular Raising Boys, says that teenage girls are facing a ”catastrophe” of mental health problems unknown to previous generations.
He has called for an army of aunties to rise up and stand staunch beside their nieces as they face the onslaught of adolescence.
Biddulph believes teenage girls have never been more unhappy, stressed and anxious.
They are bombarded with media images that not only tell them that hotness is more important than cleverness, kindness or even coolness, but define for them exactly what hotness looks like.
Hotness looks like a $25 boulevard prostitute and takes many of its cues from porn culture.
Girls are sexualised early and subjected to greater scrutiny, thanks to the unrelenting panopticon of social media.
The kinds of things my generation would have consigned to their girlish diaries are now blurted out to a gallery of peers on Facebook, and those peers can be very cruel.
Just when a girl’s identity and her sense of self is at its most fragile, she is facing more potential rejection and judgment than the most robust of egos could handle.
”We have to love them better, make them stronger, and get the corporate world off their backs,” Biddulph advises. ”We have to stop the trashing of girlhood.”
This is where the aunty army can mobilise. Aunties, he believes, can fill some of the gaps that mothers cannot. Mothers provide unconditional love, stability, routine and regularity. But as anyone who has ever been within eye-rolling distance of a teenage girl knows, they can’t always be their daughters’ confidantes.
Biddulph believes that girls’ fathers set them up self-esteem-wise, and their relationship with their dad is a good predictor of how they will later relate to men romantically.
But good aunts are the key to girls becoming ”savvy and self-believing”, he says.
Aunts are the ones who, after their mothers, can be role models of self-reliance and self-acceptance; who can provide an example of how to live confidently without taking life too seriously.
Mothers juggling careers and multiple children need all the help they can get, and delayed motherhood means there are plenty of maiden aunts about, although in the post-Austen era they are more likely to be into kite-surfing or a Master of business administration than needlepoint.
Marketers have already picked up on this. As reported by Fairfax Media before Christmas, the new breed of aunt has even been given an acronym, PANK, which stands for Professional Aunt No Kids.
PANKs, say the American public relations people who dreamt them up, spend a lot of money on ”gifts and experiences” for their nieces and nephews, and hence are worth marketing to.
A report by these American marketers says that one in five American women is a PANK, with a median age of 36. They spent an average of $385 on each child in the past year and more than 75 per cent spent $500 per child.
The figures seem pretty accurate to me, but I dislike the idea of marketers getting their grubby hands on my aunty-hood. This is the same breed of people who hit on the lucrative ”tween” market and have been selling sexualised rubbish to girls ever since.
An aunt’s responsibilities are relatively modest – I’m pretty sure all we are contractually obliged to do is return the children in one piece – and consequently it is a relationship that can be entirely based on fun.
The aunty army should be concerned with providing experiences, adventure and escape. Aunts have not always been well portrayed in history. We’re spinsterish and frumpish, sometimes mad and often drunken. Maybe we’re still all those things, but maybe we can also help.
- Sydney Morning Herald
Related posts:
- Why Did He Stop Calling Out The Blue? What are some reasons that a guy will stop contacting...
- Question for my Antimen Sisters! What’s the best piece of advice you can give your...
- Dogs All men are dogs but as in the sense of...
- Facebook Breakups Cause Anxiety I was reading an interesting article about “Excessive Chatting on...
- Girls and women ‘hit the hardest’ by global recession Women and girls have been hit the hardest by the...
- FHM v Cosmo…. The Truth Exposed? Good Evening all, Tonight I have another question I thought...
“Biddulph believes teenage girls have never been more unhappy, stressed and anxious.”
Now, where did we hear this before. Oh yes, it was the claptrap studies made up by feminist that got used to syphon taxpayers money and then make most of disappear in their programs the last time.
@Muzolf
it seems you strongly disagree with the encouragement and moral support of females.
Nope, i am strongy disagreeing with fraud that uses emotional manipulation like this.
Because we have all seen it before, and thats how it was the last time. The whole “prebubescent gears face much anexity….” thing was not only proven to be made up entirely, but it was nothing more then a way to steal money, and then used in feminist anti-male campaigns.
Its is a fraud, and pseudoscience. Frenkly, i dont even care about the americans taxpayers money all that much. (And where i live, feminist programs are really just another exuse of our goverment to tax us to death, its not like they cannot find other exuses when another issue becomes trendy.) But i hate it when people like these, creationists, feminists, racists hijack science for their own political ends. They use the prestige of science all the same time tarnishing it, and pulling it down to the level of the con artists as the are.
Girls not gears, huh.
Muzolf – good grief, are you trying to win a gold medal for trolling?
zombifieds64 is correct.
P.S. Muzolf – “emotional manipulation” is the number one tactic used against women by…um… MEN. Go think on that at 3:00am instead of posting your usual garbage.
LOL, a women telling me that men are the number one users of emotional manipulation.
Men arent the ones to use tears so people feel sorry for them.
Men arent the ones who start malicious rumors if they want to undermine someone.
Men arent the ones who use violence by proxy if someone wronged them.
Go think on time zones before you try to talk down to me, dumbass.
Muzolf, I disagree and can prove you are wrong!
Men may not cry much, but I’ve seen more than one turn on the tears to get a woman to crumble and give him comfort. Especially when he is wrong and got caught doing something he shouldnt be doing!
Men DO start malicious rumors, my best friends husband does it to me right now, just to get at HER! He thinks it’s funny…so yeah, you’re wrong.
And men don’t HAVE to use violence by proxy, they are physically superior to us, so they beat the crap out of us using their own two hands.
And next time you want to sling mud via name calling, try to use something more creative than something so crass as DUMBASS.
“Moronic idiot that has not enough brains to saddle a flea” would be much more acceptable..at least it’s a true insult, instead of your childish attempts at defending your gender.
Bitterbitch signing out….And that’s MS Bitterbitch to you Muzolf
“Men may not cry much, but I’ve seen….”
“Men DO start malicious rumors…”
The point is that woman do it more.
“And men don’t HAVE to use violence by proxy, they are physically superior to us, so they beat the crap out of us using their own two hands.”
That is not violence by proxy. That is simply violence.
“And next time you want to sling mud via name calling…”
If i wanted to sling mud, without a basic understanding of what the point was, and dismissing the context too, then i would take lessons for you.