Rosalind Gill is a 60-year-old British sociologist who has written a book called Perfect: Feeling Judged on Social Media. As we are busy midlife women with work and family responsibilities, we agree to do this interview over Zoom, from one side of London to another. By the end of an hour-long conversation, we are soul sisters.
Both mothers of 23-year-old daughters, we unite in concern and sadness for young women today as they struggle to cope with the anxiety-laden, zig-zag emotions that their social media-led lives create. If we had been in the same room, I think we would have hugged each other before we said goodbye.
Gill, professor of social and cultural analysis at City University, part of the University of London, did not set out to write this book. She’d planned to write one focusing on how young people interacted with online mental health apps during Covid lockdowns. “But when I started talking with these young women, that wasn’t what they wanted to talk about. They just wanted to talk about their social media.”
And what did she hear? “That they really, really struggle. It almost surprised them. It wasn’t until they put down their phone and sat talking with a much older, empathetic person that they really realised how hard they were finding it.”
Depression, loneliness, fear of judgment, hyper-vigilance, hyper-self-criticism, fear of being excluded, feelings of addiction, isolation, fear of getting it wrong, fear of missing out, fear of looking unpopular, sexual harassment by strangers, feeling not good enough, fear of looking fake, feeling you will never, ever match up to the perfect people you see on the phone that is almost never out of your hand.
These are the thoughts that came tumbling out of the 220 individuals, aged 18-28 and living in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, Gill surveyed for her book. She also conducted lengthy video interviews with 30 of them. They came from a wide spread of ethnic, religious, socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. As well as many students, she spoke to a nail technician, a construction worker, a fashion assistant, a primary school teacher and everything in between. Yet the answers were strikingly similar.
On Instagram, they almost all follow celebrities such as the Kardashians, the Jenners and the Hadids, but also influencers, bloggers, activists and reality TV stars from shows such as Love Island, RuPaul’s Drag Race and Made in Chelsea. They absorb the message that women’s appearance is key to success but at the same time are well versed in feminist and other campaigning slogans. They also know that when they move from watching Instagram to posting on it, they need to be absolute perfectionists because their friends and frenemies are watching, and judging, their every move.
We are both shocked by how much of the pressure for perfection comes from within friendship groups. As Gill tells me, “One might have expected or at least hoped that they would feel safe, but in fact they almost all talked about the rivalry and high levels of judgment among other women friends. Under the guise of ‘concern’, a friend might say, ‘I can’t believe you posted that!’ about hair, makeup, clothes or venue, or because the picture could be construed as looking slutty or sad or something else they didn’t want to appear as.”
As Gill put it, rather more academically, in Perfect, “They feel enmeshed in a kind of surveillant sisterhood that is characterised simultaneously by affection and by normative cruelties. There are relations of friendly, supportive advice, but there is also – sometimes in the same moment – competitiveness, mutual policing and a kind of warmly couched hostility … This forensic surveillance and judgment highlights both the ubiquity and intensity of their experience of being watched, and the complicated and ambiguous circuits of cruelty and care in which they feel entangled, even among their close friends.”
Radical beginnings
Gill compares it with the experience of women our age, who were teens and young adults in the 1970s and 1980s. Whereas I was a magazine-reading young woman whose mother took her shopping for Mary Quant makeup on her 16th birthday at Smith and Caughey’s in Auckland, Gill came from a more radical background. “My mum was a feminist who didn’t wear makeup and strongly advised me to try to resist the beauty-industrial complex. Of course, I couldn’t resist makeup and fashion, but it didn’t seem to loom as large as it does for the young women that I talked with. And I was just so busy trying to change the world – anti-nuclear arms, anti-apartheid, abortion marches – that’s what I spent time doing when I was their age.”
We agree that wanting to look fashionable and pretty has always been many a young woman’s aim, but at this level? Neither of us can relate to the effort, the expense and the time it would all take. “But for their generation, according to my research, it’s so much more intense. Are my eyebrows looking right? Are my false eyelashes on properly? Have I edited my face in exactly the right way? Should I get Botox? Or lip-fillers? Is my hair thick enough, shiny enough, perfect enough?
“The forensic detail with which they examine their images and make judgment is just astonishing. To my eye, they all look absolutely lovely young people. But they have this incredibly self-critical gaze on themselves, and on others.
“Bianca, an 18-year-old black woman, said, ‘You might not see it, but they will.’ And it sent a chill through me, actually, to hear that sense of vigilance. And that goes not only for their bodies, but also for the settings that they’re in. So, they are very, very careful taking a selfie in their bedroom. Does it look exactly right? Have you got the right posters? Is your duvet colour the colour of the season? I mean, really intense checking and self-surveillance.”
The beauty industry has a huge part to play, too. Instagram and TikTok continue to deliver to users content the apps’ algorithms know intrigues them. Many of them tell Gill their interest in beauty started during the lockdown periods when they opted to fill their time with self-improvement. Watching YouTube beauty tutorials activated more direct advertising for skincare, makeup and nonsurgical cosmetic procedures, such as Botox and fillers.
Their relative youth is no barrier to such work. “Many of the young women I spoke to are having ‘tweakments’. Many are doing lip fillers, because they simply want to have bigger lips. They felt that it was such a look of the moment and they wanted to be part of that.”
I ask if any part of that pressure was from their friends, or the desire to attract men. “Both of those reasons come into it, but some of them felt they would be left behind if they didn’t do it, too. And they felt that thin lips were utterly disparaged right now.”
Expressing the truth
With the clothes, the makeup, the hair, the background, the lighting all as good as you can get them, there is still a way in which these women feel they can totally get it wrong. That is to show their vulnerability. Strength and positivity are the order of the day on Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, wherever they appear.
Really? In the mental-health-conscious world of the 2020s, aren’t we all supposed to be honest and vulnerable about how we feel? Don’t the younger generation believe in expressing their feelings honestly and expecting some empathy from friends and supporters if they are low?
“There’s a lot of talk about how we’re being encouraged to be more vulnerable. But the young women I spoke with said no, that’s for celebrities only; they’re allowed to be vulnerable once they’ve succeeded – it’s almost compulsory for them to show their vulnerability. But for us, we must present as strong, confident, invulnerable, almost unemotional, or just positive and happy.
“And they said if they posted something where they said, ‘I’m struggling’, or ‘I had a bad night last night’, or ‘I had a fight with my boyfriend’, or something like that, they would immediately be condemned for being ‘attention seeking’. And it made them so lonely because they couldn’t be real, they couldn’t talk about real struggles, they had to keep on pretending to be happy to remain popular.”
As the founder of a mental health platform, I have seen how showing vulnerability and struggle has become de rigueur for authors and celebrities in the past 10 years. But I hadn’t appreciated that for young people, talking about low points on social media was so looked down upon. As Gill said, “It was so, so shocking to me.”
Another potential pitfall is the frequency of posting. You might be on your socials for hours and hours a day (many of the respondents, of whom half were under 22, were), but posting was a finely tuned process and often fraught with anxiety over what might befall you.
“I was surprised by the array of ways they could get it wrong. So they felt that if they posted too much, then that would be a kind of fail, because they didn’t want to appear up in people’s grills or spam them too often. So they had to carefully regulate how often they posted. If they posted too little, that was another kind of fail. Because people might think they had had a nervous breakdown or they just weren’t doing anything interesting.
“All the pictures and words are edited to within an inch of their lives. Filters are now seen as a little bit passé. Instead, they’re upping the saturation or changing the balance. They sounded like professional photographers talking about the processes they have learnt. It was extraordinary. I would just think, ‘Wow!’”
Gill had not originally planned to include sexual harassment in this research, and the topic was not included in the interview guide. “But it was brought up spontaneously in almost all the interviews as young women told of regularly receiving lewd comments in response to photos they had posted, as well as experiencing routine street harassment.” The majority found it “unremarkable – indeed, almost expected”.
Interestingly, few of the young women mentioned the power of the big tech companies, such as Meta or TikTok, behind social media. “It’s as if the companies don’t exist for the vast majority. But they do say a lot about the addictive properties. For example, they promise themselves they’re going to go on for five minutes before bed.
And then they just get pulled in, particularly to TikTok, and then they’re just watching hours and hours and hours, as the algorithm knows them intimately, and sends them exactly the right stuff. Many of them find it really difficult to actually just put the phone down.
“One young woman said she really appreciated that her parents were much stricter than the other parents in the sample. They would say, ‘You must, must put your phone down and you cannot have your phone when we’re having a meal.’”
Parents matter
The role of parents may not be obvious when we are talking about individuals over the age of 18, but then theories about extended adolescence have meant that young people are now not considered fully mature until their mid-20s. Gill hopes that parents can be encouraged to understand their daughters’ (and sons’) use of social media and talk to them about it.
What should parents do? Perfect is written by an academic but it is not a hugely academic tome; it’s short, and the voices of the young women are gripping, if sometimes depressing.
If you are anything like me, you will want to start a conversation with your own daughter about her social media after reading it. There may be many ways to get that wrong, too, but it could be worth the effort to know exactly what they are seeing and doing on their phones for hours and hours every day and how that is making them feel.
“Everybody is talking about the rise in anxiety among young people,” says Gill. “And while we may not yet have robust proof, social media is the single-biggest change in their lives really, isn’t it? Their parents – people like you and me – haven’t experienced anything similar. And so they’re growing up with little support, and no one to talk to about it. And they feel incredibly alone with it.”
As a sociologist with a psychology degree who has now moved into the media and communications field, Gill feels she has been given a special lens to look at this whole question. “In the communications world, there’s such a kind of positive, upbeat spin often given to the digital natives. There is a feeling that we shouldn’t have a moral panic; we shouldn’t worry. And I sometimes feel as if that ignores any sense of the pain or the struggle. I feel that we have an ethical responsibility to hear about that as well, and to take it seriously.”
Perfect: Feeling Judged on Social Media, by Rosalind Gill, is available in New Zealand as an e-book, and in paperback from December 11.