We no longer want to be "mature for our age"

This year, I turn 30. I've always felt mine - especially since I'm perceived as a working woman who has built a life away from home - the words of Mitski, who in "First Love / Late Spring" sings: "And I was so young when I behaved twenty-five, yet now I find I've grown into a tall child." Perhaps it's my status as the responsible older sister, or perhaps it's a shared condition of many girls worldwide, girls who grew up too quickly and abandoned their childish and adolescent aspirations early to find on the other side of the river, waiting for them, only a tough and bitter awareness of the difficulty of being a woman in the world and an uncontrollable flow of adult-oriented images and content bombarding them 19 hours a day.

The challenges of adolescence

Being a teenager is not easy for anyone; it never has been and probably never will be. These are crucial years that transition us from childhood to adulthood. Years in which our characters and bodies take shape, and we have to come to terms with them. Years in which important choices are made that will impact our future. Much of the baggage put together from ages 12 to 20 - made up of experiences, relationships, references, travels, adventures, and disappointments - is what shapes us in adulthood, for better or worse. For girls, this period of life is colored by additional challenges and emotions. It involves studying, academic and pre-professional choices, exams, and continuous trials within and outside the family. It involves boys, girls, and identity. First kisses and first sexual experiences are discussed. Consent, harassment, age gaps, appropriate or inappropriate behavior, learning to protect oneself, recognizing evil and reporting it. According to some statistics, 1 in 9 girls has experienced inappropriate sexual behavior before the age of 18. Of all victims under 18, 82% are girls. Lastly, girls aged 16 to 19 experience violence four times more than the rest of the population. Despite everything, one must look to the future, leap into the unknown, ask questions about one's past, origins, and family, and understand where to go. Today - also due to social networks and an increasingly fast-paced society that demands the ability to discern, understand, participate, manage, and metabolize more things than ever - being a girl is extremely complex. Not that it was easy before.

Teenage girls today

You know all those memes that compare how we were at 14 with the 14-year-olds we see vaping on TikTok, beautiful in their full faces of make-up, seeming to look twice their age? The truth is that society takes more and more time and space away from youth, in a hurry to replace it with adulthood, one "girls mature earlier!" or "you're so mature for your age!" at a time. Adolescence is snatched away from today's girls with claws, by those who want to sell them products, by those who create anxieties about their bodies for economic returns, by those who want to integrate them into the workforce at 16 and even 14, by those who want to sexualize them earlier, and, on the other hand, by increasingly desperate news about femicides and, in general, the small and large effects of patriarchy and misogyny. Given the way public debate evolves, in which new issues come to light, in which taboos are laboriously broken down, it is not surprising that today's girls are more enterprising and aware, more empathetic, and more ready to face the challenges of the world, to fight. The price? Their adolescence, stifled and without space, plagued by worries, suffocated by global issues, and, in the case of Gen Z, by the pandemic.

Nostalgia and Girlhood

And perhaps that's why, after years of internal and external struggle against a harsh world, after years of trying reluctantly and with head down to become tough, real women, we feel the need to want to be children again, to buy a stuffed animal and put bows in our hair, that we are obsessed with childhood. It's no coincidence that the trends of the second half of 2023 all went in this direction, between girlcore and inner child. We thirst for carefree moments, and the truth is that, despite everything, adolescence is not just pain. It can also be discovery, excitement, innocence, and mischief. The important thing, though, is that it be preserved. Lived safely, with peers, and then carefully preserved, to draw from it when needed. And if it's too late for us, we still have the adolescent girls of the future to protect.