Picking at digital daisies: Wattpad, teenage girls and stories

Bouquet of numbers

'Reading is a great pastime, why should we worry if some girls are doing it?' you could be thinking. Remember what we talked about before in that introductory author's note? Emotions (and feelings) are culturally constructed. So, let's do the maths:

Teenage girls are interested in romantic heterosexual love.

Teenage girls read stories about romantic heterosexual love.

Now, if we solve for x we get that:

Teenage girls learn what romantic heterosexual love is supposed to be like through these stories.

Is this more worrisome than them learning what romantic heterosexual love is from any other way? In some ways, no. In many ways, yes, and that's mostly because of the platform they are using.

Wattpad is aToronto-based website (AN: The same one you are reading this story in). The popularity of Wattpad is outstanding, with 94 million users as of 2022 (Smith, 2024) which is now what the platform claims as their monthly active user base (WattPad | WattPad HQ, 2024).

As we know teenage girls are passionate and most things they consume they devour. They are filled with love and fire and a longing to learn more about the world. So, when they are into something, they get really into it. If they read on Wattpad, they really read Wattpad.

According to my own survey, (that 22 people were gracious enough to answer, because unsurprisingly there's little to no information about the user base), when asked how much they read stories on the site when they were most active, 14 (63.6%) answered that they read almost every day if not every day for hours at a time.

20 participants were most active at 14 and 15. 10 of them were active when they were 12, 2 also being very active at the age of 11.

It is no surprise, then, that most of them were very impacted by these stories (when asked about how impactful these stories were in their teenage years, on a scale to 0 to 5, 18 answered 3 or higher).

So, what makes these stories different from traditionally published ones?

Wattpad stories, most of the time, aren't the most nutritious brain food. Think of it as the fastest of fast food. They can be poorly written, for a start, filled with grammatical errors. They, most of the time, have unoriginal plotlines and characters that feel too one-dimensional. But they are oh, so easily accessible. To anyone, be it reader or writer. You are just an internet connection away from as many stories as you could imagine. 

On the flipside, think of 'standard' books as a more gourmet experience. As a reader, you have to get the book (legal or illegally). As a writer, the process gets trickier. When a book gets traditionally published, it passes through a lot of people with tons of experience. More often than not, the people in charge of reading, editing and publishing the book have a tertiary education, if not years under their belt in that specific area. There are many points in the process where ideas that might be problematic could get erased from the narrative, or even left in because most of the time the audience has the critical thinking skills necessary to be able to distinguish problematic narratives that are perpetuated by society.

This is not the case with young girls. They are at a point in their life when everything is absorbed, almost without critical thought. This is not to say that they are not able to think for themselves, they are very much capable, their critical thinking skills just aren't as trained yet. It is hard for a lot of adults to think critically, we should not expect a lot better from 14-year-olds.

The combination of the easy accessibility to these stories and the lack of critical thought behind these stories make Wattpad a dangerous place in my opinion. Societal norms and expectations get regurgitated by people that most of the time have never experienced them first hand, creating a false narrative that will leave an impression in its young readers.