Puberty: Gendered Mental Susceptibilities
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, another less-covered medical mystery arose: There was an explosion in Tourette’s diagnoses among young girls. More bizarrely, unusually high numbers of young women developed a large array of verbal tics, with some being very similar to each other (e.g., the word “beans” said in a British accent). While Tourette’s is uncommon, the form of Tourette’s with verbal tics is even less common, and for multiple people to exhibit the exact same unusual verbal tic at the same time is virtually impossible.
It turned out that posts about having Tourette’s had become popular as a category on TikTok and a top influencer in that category said the word “bean” as a tic.[[37]](#_ftn37) It looks like many young women were, knowingly or otherwise, simply copying this influencer. This would not be the first time a “mass psychogenic illness” arose in which young girls “caught” illnesses socially rather than as a physical impairment.[[38]](#_ftn38) An older iteration of this, for example, is Dissociative Identity Disorder, which rocketed from obscurity to thousands of cases following the release of a movie, an increase not seen in the U.K., where the movie was not released.[[39]](#_ftn39)
This phenomenon of young girls socially catching illnesses can be seen among a sub-faction of a growing community called “Spoonies”—see the footnote for a great article on this subject.[[40]](#_ftn40) The term Spoonies is derived from a way of describing what it is like to live with a crippling illness (often one that cannot be easily seen by others). In short, normal, healthy people have relatively unlimited energy, whereas those suffering from certain illnesses have to ration their highly limited energy in spoon-size measurements. A Spoonie might say, “I have five spoons a day; if I use one spoon to get out of bed, one spoon to shower, one to eat, and two to pick up groceries, I won’t have any left to write my blog post.”
Individuals usually first get involved in the Spoonie community after developing a real medical condition. Seeking comfort and solidarity, a sick person may begin to socialize online with other people who also suffer from infirmity. Upon entering communities of other ill people, it rapidly becomes apparent that community hierarchy is at least partially determined by how “sick” an individual is—which, of course it would be.
If the core differentiation between Spoonies and the rest of society is their infirmed state, it is natural that any given person’s status within the community would be influenced by their level of infirmity, just as a goth community member’s status would be modulated by how goth they are and the member of a tabletop gaming community’s status would depend on how much of their time is devoted to tabletop games. This dynamic leads to things like “pill porn,”[[41]](#_ftn41) in which individuals will post pictures of the pills they are taking—but furtively add in supplements they bought at a store to make themselves appear more ill than they really are.
As a result of this hierarchy structure, some individuals in the community (often those most active) develop a growing list of medical conditions that cannot be verified. The fact that doctors are unable to verify their illnesses causes community members to feel oppressed—to the extent that the community uses a zebra emoji to signify themselves in mockery of the common doctors saying, “When you hear hooves, look for horses and not zebras.” Essentially, it is a way of saying that they are special and unique in the types of illness they have and that is why doctors can’t determine what they are.
Note: We genuinely suspect that many Spoonies experience real pain and real symptoms. People vastly underestimate how susceptible our minds are to peer pressure. In addition, there is undoubtedly a large portion of this community that suffers from real, serious conditions. Even if you only hypothetically had a community that formed among actually sick teens, such a community would inevitably draw a large group of non-sick teens masquerading to fit in. That is just the way the teenage mind works.
In the age of social media, it is not terribly surprising that a dominance hierarchy determined by individuals’ infirmity would form and that a person could become an influencer by looking more ill than others. What is surprising is how overwhelmingly female the community skews and that most seem to get into it around puberty. What is going on here and how can we protect members of an intentionally crafted culture from succumbing to this community’s draw?
First, we must note that a female attraction to infirmity has been around for hundreds of years. In our youth, there was a whole category of goths dedicated to this look via the “psychic vampire” phenomenon (in which they believed they were chronically infirm and low energy, but that they could draw energy from other people to survive). Even novels penned during England’s Regency era (1795-1837) describe and make fun of female hypochondriacs, with Jane Austen’s novels presenting a panoply of examples.[[42]](#_ftn42) If there is something appealing about illness to women and especially adolescent girls—to the extent that they can begin to physically manifest signs of their imagined or subconsciously desired illness—what is the draw?
For men, puberty is fairly straightforward: It’s kind of like having a meth addiction forced upon you. All of a sudden, you desperately want something and would do insane, dangerous, and wildly out-of-character or immoral things to achieve said goal. This means young men are highly susceptible to cultural movements that tell them, “If you do X and Y, you will get sex” or “You aren’t getting sex because of [feminism/unfair bias/etc.].” While these cultures are dangerous, they are easy to predict and circumvent by giving young boys access to clear and honest relationship guidance (this is one reason we wrote The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships). Girls are dramatically more complicated.
For women, puberty often involves being suddenly blindsided by depression, self-hatred, and anxiety[[43]](#_ftn43)—well, that is what puberty feels like from the perspective of teenage girls, at least. We would argue the fundamental desires behind these feelings are astoundingly simple: In girls, puberty introduces an intense need to be treasured, desired, cared for, fussed over, pampered, protected, and accepted. While we use a lot of words to describe this need, it is a single, unified emotional mandate as simplistic as adolescent boys’ powerful drive to have sex (though just as some boys don’t suffer from insanely high adolescent sex drives, not all teenage girls experience an insatiable hunger to be desired and coveted, and some never experience that hunger at all).
The key difference between male and female adolescence from a culture-crafting perspective is that the adolescent male mandate to have sex is very recognizable and something external to their self-image (either you get sex or you don’t), whereas the adolescent female mandate is integral to their own self-image and harder to measure (am I desired enough?). This causes teen girls to focus inward on their own self-worth and mental state in a way teen boys don’t. Because, like in boys, the need is so voracious it can never be fully met, it causes many young girls to feel hopeless and build self-hatred (this may explain in part why 36% of young girls are diagnosed with depression when contrasted with 14% of boys).
A second-order effect of this loss of control in girls can manifest as an intense desire for order and control over some aspect of their environment, whether that be their food intake (eating disorders) or effort expenditure (spoonies).
I, Simone, never would have admitted that I wanted to be desired, treasured, cared for, fussed over, etc. as a teen—but as I reflect on my teenage feelings, drives, and behaviors as an adult, that motivation seems pretty obvious. I don’t think anyone wants to admit that the complex and heart-rending emotions they feel are the product of something so simple as a biological need to feel accepted and desired.
This unquenchable emotional need in young girls makes them very susceptible to being bled out by subcultures that lend members the impression that they have a unique, special identity or that they suffer in a singular way to which others cannot relate. Had I been aware of a community like Spoonies as a teenage girl, they—rather than anorexia (which I did have)—may have been my “poison,” so to speak. Both Spoonies and anorexics enjoy the comfort and control of deprivation, pain, and rationing while feeling simultaneously fragile and strong (hence “worthy” of fussing, pampering, etc.). Moreover, becoming a Spoonie would have given me excuses to get out of social interaction and enabled me to feel like a victim.
The subconscious allure of dangerous mental vortexes like anorexia and hypochondria in teenage girls causes an untold amount of suffering, cultural attrition, and increased likelihood of death.[[44]](#_ftn44) As a society, we assume that humans naturally run from emotions like suffering, helplessness, and hopelessness, but the truth is these emotions are highly addictive and far easier to indulge in (in a perversely satisfying way) than positive emotional subsets. Better yet, when you convince others of your helplessness, some people begin to regard you as a victim—someone to be adored and protected.
Given the damage caused by this adolescent drive, why have teenage girls evolved to experience it? In short, we were designed to struggle to survive, to live lives of constant insecurity and real suffering, to be afraid of our tribes being raided and then being killed or used as disposable sex slaves. In some ways, our lives of plenty have left us with self-preservation instincts that are now backfiring.
While boys can still feel a real, tangible struggle for sex, which makes their teenage struggles straightforward (after all, rates of sex are plummeting at present), most privileged teenage girls no longer need to struggle for protection and attention. This confounds their ability to act on instinctual impulses (and it is primarily privileged teenage girls who succumb to Spoonie-related hazards).
These days, most affluent girls in developed societies already are pampered, protected, and coveted—there is no need to fight for it. Girls nevertheless feel an inherent need to pursue these things, presumably because their ancestors who failed to do so also failed to survive long enough to reproduce. As such, mostly privileged teenage girls find themselves manufacturing hardship to fill the void when real adversity is absent. In other words, it looks like adolescent girls evolved a deep need to fight to position themselves to be desired, protected, coveted, etc.—and if they face no struggle for the privilege, they’ll make one for themselves.
The first line of defense against forces that prey on this female adolescent drive is to recognize that any victim class that anyone can plausibly join—especially if it cannot definitively be proven or tested—will draw in a certain portion of young girls (and sometimes even when a victim class can be tested, women will be compelled to pursue it—looking at you, Rachel Dolezal). These forms of victimhood are appealing because they enable even privileged people to claim the right to victim status.
Durable cultures must be suspicious of these types of communities and deride calls to “just trust our internal experience and don’t attempt to verify whether we are actually in pain, experiencing discrimination, facing real danger, etc.” What Spoonies, for example, want is for others: “To believe; Be understanding; Be patient; To educate yourself; Show compassion; Don’t question.”[[45]](#_ftn45) These are uniquely dangerous types of evanescent youth cultures as they are uniquely capable of maintaining members through adulthood (leading people to be permanently crippled by the form of victimhood to which the culture subscribes—or even live a life of constant pain they could have evaded had they never engaged with the community).
How will our House contend with these predatory subcultures? The answer is threefold:
- Focus on early education: Teach young kids to expect the emotional changes they are about to face and discuss how groups will manipulate those changes. We need to stop teaching young women to expect male puberty.
- Frame victimhood as a universal negative: Create a culture that never praises or privileges a person for being weak. While most modern cultures disproportionately redirect their resources to those who need them the most—the weak—we will frame our culture as one that redirects its resources to those who will make the most of them: Industrious people who yield a high return on investment. This might sound cruel, but it will produce more output per resource spent while also lowering aggregate suffering by lessening the desirability of weakness and dissuading members from indulging in despair and suffering. While we don’t see suffering as something worth avoiding, we only see suffering as acceptable if it is in service of something meaningful and important—we don’t abide by suffering for suffering’s sake or suffering in an effort to gain attention or status.
- Frame all emotional indulgence as an intrinsic evil: Modern society teaches the objective lie that indulging in negative emotional states “gets them out of your system” when in reality, indulging in negative emotional states reinforces and amplifies them.[[46]](#_ftn46) While our culture will not pressure adherents to suppress or sublimate their emotions, it will teach members to recognize them as neutral signals rather than guiding forces.
Bonus Idea: Female Incels
Most of this book’s readers will be familiar with radical incels (involuntary celibates): Sexually frustrated men who think it is a human right to have their puberty-induced needs met—and for men, that need is sex. The most radical incels even hold that the government should pay for prostitutes to fulfill this “need” of theirs.
What, then, is the female equivalent of a super-radical incel? Contrary to immediate intuition, it’s not just a female incel; after all, the average young woman doesn’t become a sex-starved nymphomaniac upon reaching adolescence.
If the “need” that awakens in women during puberty is not primarily to have sex but rather to be desired and treasured, then the female version of someone who categorizes fulfillment of their puberty-awoken need as a human right would be someone who argues it is immoral for people to find specific women unattractive—someone who works to create social norms that disallow such reactions.
“Hah, right,” you might be thinking, “but it’s impossible to shame people for what they do and do not find attractive.”
Really? Tell that to the radical end of the Fat Acceptance movement where women claim that men must learn to find fat women attractive and that not finding fat women attractive is a form of bigotry. Evidence that this is just female incelism can be seen in how rarely the movement advocates for finding fat males attractive.
We wish it were self-evident to everyone that, whether you are a male or female, trying to control the bodies and personally held opinions of other people is both futile and toxic. Thankfully, to most people, it is—which is why the majority of both the incel and fat acceptance movements do not hold these positions and instead call out obviously unfair things in society (and how much unfairness should matter to you is a cultural question).