Great interview in Macleans on teenage girls:
For girls, I use this term “anorexia of the soul,” which I first read in a New York Times article. What I understand it to mean is that this girl is wasting away on the inside. She’s obsessed with surface—being the best student, or the fastest runner—but inside, her sense of self is undernourished, it’s starving. She doesn’t realize it because people keep praising her for being the top student or the fastest runner, and her sense of self gets tied up in that surface. I just don’t see that with boys. You will certainly find a lot of boys who are very comfortable, when you ask them to tell you about themselves, saying, “Well, I’m a really good gamer.” That’s also a pretty impoverished sense of self, but it doesn’t seem to bother the boys. And unfortunately, perhaps, they’re more robust and less prone to existential collapse than girls. That boy who’s a champion gamer is not going to fall apart if some other guy gets to level two in a game before he does. That’s okay, he still has status among other boys. Whereas the girl whose identity consists of being the “smart girl” or “Justin’s girlfriend” tends to crumble if she doesn’t get into the university of her choice or if Justin dumps her.
I think if we understood these realities a bit better, the whole abortion as empowerment idea would crumble, because it becomes clearer and clearer to me that a great many girls (and women) have an abortion because someone else told them too, or didn’t support them, or said or implied they wouldn’t love her anymore if she didn’t. Tragic.
by 
Choice is a myth! Have I said that before? There’s a great quote from Mary Astell in ‘A Serious Proposal to the Ladies’, “We go on in vice, not because we find any satisfaction in it, but because we are unacquainted with the joys of virtue.”
When you base your life on being Justin’s girlfriend, it’s difficult NOT to have an existential crisis.
I think of ‘woman’ is an undefined term. We’re told to be anything, or everything, but not really always given the clear expectations that men may have or even women in other cultures. So we start to define ourselves ‘in relation to’ those things that are defined rather than as a being in and of ourselves. I know virtually hundreds of women who are walking Zeligs, constantly changing appearance/mindset in order to be accepted or attractive to the largest group possible in order to define themselves or gather self-worth. It leads to a crisis of identity, a ‘who am I without this crowd?’. And ultimately…a shallow and fragile framework of personhood. It IS tragic.