FROM ESTABLISHED AUTHORS TO INFLUENCERS ON TIKTOK, THE BUSINESS OF GIVING ADVICE IS BOOMING. BUT AS THE AGONY AUNT’S POPULARITY SPIKES DURING A MENTAL-HEALTH CRISIS, LAURACRAIKASKS: WHO IS QUALIFIED TO OFFER GUIDANCE?
NO TEENAGER IS IN A HURRY TO TALK ABOUT SEX with their mother. But, there being no Google to advise my 16-year-old self in the Eighties, my mother it had to be. All my friends were as clueless as I was and, since my mother had given birth to me, I deduced that she must have – gross – at least done the deed at some point.
Pre-internet, if you wanted advice on boyfriends, girlfriends, acne or period pains, you had two options: asking your mum (cringe) or your peer group (cringe, and also fairly useless). Or, you could write to an agony aunt, who might eventually sift through her bloated postbag and answer your query within the pages of whichever esteemed oracle you read. For me, it was Jackie magazine, and while its agony aunts, Cathy and Claire, never did respond to my question ‘Why is one breast bigger than the other and how can I ever let a boy see me naked?’, they did respond to myriad other problems submitted by nameless girls whose issues, I soon deduced, were uniformly similar to mine.
Many years later, I’d discover that Cathy and Claire weren’t real, a betrayal akin to finding out the truth about Santa. ‘They’ were Gayle Anderson – a woman, yes, but not an agony aunt by trade, a fact that did nothing to stem the steady stream of 500 letters a week she received, alongside the occasional scab or urine sample. Then again, what is an ‘agony aunt’? The current surge in their popularity seems an apt time to ask. No longer confined to the pages of a newspaper or magazine, today’s iterations are as likely to be found on TikTok or Instagram, the most social-media-savvy of whom are using their platforms to carve out not just a niche but an entire career – and, in some cases, an empire.
Take Tinx, the 33-year-old American Tik-Tok sensation (real name: Christina Najjar) with 1.5million followers, whose videos have been liked over 90 million times, and who Forbes lists as the 26th highest-earning creator of 2023, amassing £6million last year.
Or Call Her Daddy, a TikTok account with 2.9million followers, whose co-creator Alexandra Cooper, 29, spun her success into a £47million podcast deal with Spotify.
Huge and loyal followings this new breed of agony aunt may have, but what they don’t possess is any formal qualifications. Nor, in many cases, have they acquired the wisdom that decades of lived experience brings. Sophia Rundle and Mia Sugimoto were 17 when they started the advice site Girlhood, inspired by the Barbie film. They launched in August last year: three weeks later, they’d had 20,000 requests for advice and 8 million views.
Their fans would argue that their age and relatability is a positive,
