A Compass Without a Needle: How Many Modern Women are Floundering

“Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.” ― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche

Countless ideas and feelings were swimming around in my mind and soul when I first sat down to write this publication, but the first thing that actively sprang from my mind onto the keyboard into the Google search bar was, “Why do so many young women have BPD?” 

Yes, really. And don’t jump me — just follow me for a sec.

I know innumerable women who suffer from this illness, both in real life and in online spaces. It seems to be more common than ever. BPD, or Borderline Personality Disorder, is defined as a “mental disorder that severely impacts a person’s ability to regulate their emotions,” and which “can increase impulsivity, affect how a person feels about themselves, and negatively impact their relationships with others” (Mayo Clinic). It seems to be most pervasive in young women – according to the New Directions for Women foundation, 1.4% suffer from BPD in the United States, and 75% of that number are women (New Directions). The factors associated with it are accompanying depression and/or anxiety-related issues or disorders, as well as hypersexuality and drug abuse. 

Sound familiar? 

From my vantage point, BPD diagnoses have seemingly taken the Western world by storm. Everyone and their mother has some level of personal experience with this illness, whether they themselves have it, they believe they have it, or someone in their inner circle has it. I’m typically not one to discount the medical advances and expertise of the modern era, even despite its flaws, but the fact that so many women nowadays suffer from this disease that just happens to be comingled with the hallmark, telltale signs of female brokenness, continues to stick with me. Why does it seem like women primarily suffer from this disease and from everything else that comes with it? Why does it not even seem like a shocking occurrence, especially nowadays?

Why are so many women so lost? 

Maybe it’s the constant exposure to social media. A pretty solid majority of my friends are all taking a step back from social media, from minor (going on Twitter once every few days, dialing back the group chat involvement, and perusing the r/NoSurf subreddit) to major ways (deleting all social media accounts and apps in their entirety, only going on their phone when absolutely necessary, and even ditching smartphones altogether in favor of a Razr flip), and we all cite the same reasons why – social media is too draining, too much of an energy vampire, too much of a possessive, time-sucking force of evil. Sounds kind of dramatic, yes, but when you think about it – what do people in general, but women especially, gain from being on these platforms?

Every time I open Tiktok, I am faced with the unfortunate reality that I, myself, am the product, and that my outrage, my irritation, and my insecurities are the currency which gives that cursed app sustenance. In just a few short flicks of my thumb, I – and many, if not most women n this platform – am not only bombarded with a barrage of things that reflect my preexisting insecurities, but also with snippets of stories or soundbytes which almost give the impression of wanting to imprint upon me new insecurities that I didn’t already have. I didn’t know that women were supposed to automatically assume that all men were snakes in the grass who are all holding up false masks of goodness. I didn’t know that we were supposed to obsess about “hip dips” and kneecaps and knuckles that are “too dark” with discoloration. I didn’t know that if a woman accepts a meetup for coffee as a first date with a man from a dating app, her self-esteem is clearly miles below the Earth’s core, and how in God’s name could you want something that’s so bare-minimum? I didn’t know that the only energy women were supposed to have was that of a “black cat,” and only men who emulated the aura of a “golden retriever” were worth acknowledging. I didn’t know that eating disorders were not only making a comeback but were also heavily encouraged; that as a woman, you should be dead before you ever consider being a “big back,” and how big breasts, a thigh gap, a nonexistent waist and stomach, and a perfect hourglass figure was the peak female form (isn’t it funny how a lot of this stuff seems to come back to what could be inside of a man’s [little] head?). 

Even for the girls I know who are unapologetically faithful in Jesus Christ, social media has become their God at one point or another – I am no exception. It twists us around, further away from our goals, our hopes, our dreams, our real selves, replacing our real personalities with neurosis and psychological ticks and triggers and performative hypersexuality – either exaggerated purity or overemphasized whoredom, two different sides of the same male identified coin. 

And while, as a woman who’s experienced and lived through most of these things firsthand, I truly do feel for the things we as women go through, I also believe that there are some ways in which we not only fail ourselves but also the women and girls who come after us. 

Countless women I know who fall in many if not all of the same categories I listed above all hail from very similar backgrounds in the sense that our mothers continually chipped away at our freedom and our independence until we were shells of ourselves, of the selves we could have been, until we solely resembled a vessel for our mothers’ lost hopes and dreams that could be realized once again through our bodies. We represent a spark of the restoration of the innocence they lost as little girls, stolen from bullet wounds and literal and figurative stabs to the heart and from between their legs. My mother has seen so much death that no one should be exposed to, especially not at my current age. By the time my mother was 24, she had lost multiple people in her immediate and extended family – including her aunt and her sister – at the hands of violent men. Only a small handful of these cases have ever been solved. Ever since then, she has committed herself to a cloistered life of safety, soft padding, isolation, and loneliness – because being surrounded by four walls of repetitive monotony is better than being dead. 

My mother passed this way of thinking to me as a hereditary gift, along with her complexion and hips. The only lessons of girlhood and budding womanhood I received from her was to fear life, to fear love, and to fear men. (Oh, and to keep my legs closed and to keep my books wide open.) As a result, I squandered and drove away almost every bit of male attention I ever received that wasn’t thwarted at her hands in one way or another. It felt evil, filthy, dirty, and wrong – not at all like the virginal, pure being I was supposed to be. Even so, I couldn’t help but be drawn to it, and to act out in ways that sure did give me attention, but not necessarily the kind that would actually be healing, rewarding, or beneficial in any way. 

If anything, it’s a reactionary force that directly counters the purity signaling that I and many other women received from their mothers, aunties, grandmas, and other elder women in their circles. But those messages didn’t start with the women – they started with the men, and with society at large. I think it’s why so many women (not all or even most, but many – enough to be noticeable) have turned to high-risk sexual encounters, “sex work,” and general promiscuity – there is no longer a “reward” for doing what was long thought to be the “right thing”, and honestly, there may not have been much of one to begin with. 

We’re all familiar with the Madonna/Whore Complex, a Freudian psychological concept in which males – largely heterosexual ones – split women into one of two categories, usually subconsciously: the idealized, pure mother figure of the Madonna, and the Whore, who is solely to be used and objectified with the purpose of sexual desire. This concept largely coincides with the patriarchal societal scripts that the men of today (as well as their forebearers) continually reenact. Specifically known as “sexual script theory” as popularized by sociologists William Simon and John Gagnon, this theory denotes that human sexuality is essentially performed within the confines of a script written by heterosexual males (Sexual Conduct; Modern Intimacy). Men are familiar with these scripts on a subliminal level, but women know them all too well. I frequently participated in school and community theater productions when I was younger. Each show and each director’s style in which I participated were different, yet the one thing that remained the same was this: while the director makes the casting choices and creates the foundation of unique stylistic and artistic choices that make the show distinctive, it is the actors themselves who are intimately acquainted with the intricacies of the production itself – the accuracy and quality of their performance determined the level of success in the production’s execution. The actors bear that burden. Yet who ultimately benefits in terms of profit, reception, and notoriety? The director. 

This dynamic is beautifully balanced in the world of theater and make-believe, but in the real world – where women have served as the actors tasked to perform lines from the male playbook – significant consequences have arisen as a result. These men aren’t Peter Brook or Anne Bogart; their scripts change like the wind blows, and they are fickle. The things that used to be a surefire strategy to snagging the attention and devotion of a man, even if superficial to varying degrees. Women were told from seemingly the beginning of time to be demure, pure in both body and soul (but mainly body), submissive, and to let our fathers do the bartering choosing for our “loves” and our lives. Women were told that academics, self-sufficiency, and a vocation of their own were unattainable, fantastical, and even sinful, and this was reflected in our society’s laws and political attitudes. As Victoria Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own, “The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.” The notion of women having liberty, freedom, and the right to enjoy the comforts and privileges of this life without restriction or pushback is fairly recent. 

With that liberty comes new interpretations from men of which traits within women are the most valued. Some of the old rules remain, but they come in addition to new ones that almost contradict the age-old script. 

“Be demure and meek and submissive and pure, but DON’T be a virgin.” 

“Don’t be a working woman, but if you are, you need to be out on the battlefields or the oil rigs with us – no one respects those stupid girl boss email jobs.” 

“Well, since you’re such a feminist, I should be allowed to hit you like I’d hit a man!” 

“Well, since you love sex, I should be allowed to choke you within an inch of your life – don’t you want to be sexy for me just like the girls in the porn I watch? But, you also better never be a used-up, Daddy-issues-having whore like them – then you’ll have no value.” 

See how the rules change but the same frustrations and anxieties remain the same? So much of it comes back to men. Not necessarily men in and of themselves, but this demented production we’re forced to participate in, which we call the patriarchy. Every woman, at one point or another – if they aren’t currently stuck there - has judged and evaluated herself or other women by the metrics of male standards and expectations. Who can forget that timeless and iconic quote from Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride? 

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”

It’s no surprise, then, to see just how much women have spiraled and floundered. We have women who try endlessly to placate the male ego through an exaggerated reenactment of what they think the perfect “trad wife” or “whore” consists of. We also have women who choose not to participate in relationships of any kind with men altogether, citing radical feminism and Dworkin as their motivating factors for doing so, yet somehow all of their fiery ire is seemingly reserved for women, the same group they claim to be fighting for. It seems as though the anti-choice crowd consists of two distinct groups, two definitive sides of the same coin, putting women into one of two oft-repeated categories. 

As I previously wrote (both in this publication and others), I can speak on this issue because I see it in myself. When I was young, I was constantly subjected to the lies of purity and shame, and how those values would be my salvation as a woman. I was taught to be ashamed of the very things that were supposed to be a God-given blessing. Getting on Twitter at a too-young age – where the court of public opinion concerning women changes as often as the wind blows – certainly didn’t help. Being surrounded by confusing messaging while the real world around me distorted things even further truly caused me to not understand what was real and what was fake. Add in the fact that during college, I pumped myself full of toxic, poisonous birth control pills that ultimately drove me to extreme and intense suicidal ideation – I was drowning in confusion, in desperation, and in misery. 

I came out of girlhood into the dawn of womanhood with more questions rather than answers. There is still so much about this womanhood status that is a mystery to me, that I am trying to see and conceptualize as a gift. But when the world has been trying to dominate and consume you even before you were born, no wonder there are many women nowadays cutting into their bodies or starving their bodies to be whole, selling their bodies or giving them away for free to be seen, acting like a distorted caricature of a woman, or trying to opt out of womanhood altogether, falsely calling themselves men or some other third thing. 

On the surface, we are our own worst enemy. But the games played with our lives before they’ve even truly begun have toppled even the strongest women and have forced them into submission – in more ways than one.