If you’re anything like my parents, you probably wouldn’t even understand most of the content that floods my social media, no matter how hard I try to avoid it.
Here’s a recent example from Instagram: “Do y’all females ever tell ur homegirls ‘Sis chill you letting too many dudes hit?’” Essentially, that means: “Women – do you ever tell your girlfriends that they’re whores and need to stop letting so many guys fuck them?” The reel, posted by a 19-year-old man, appeared on my Instagram feed without me wanting to see it, or ever interacting with any other similar content. The comments that followed were pure misogyny. “Women see body count as a leaderboard and they try to outdo each other,” was one of them. Translation: all women are competitively promiscuous.
Consider the use of the word “female” in these posts. It is not a neutral term here, it is a term of abuse. It’s used by teenage boys to degrade us and equate us to animals. Boys are never described as “males”, but girls are always “females” – the equivalent of sows or calves, creatures that are less than human. We’re also “thots” (whores), “community pussy” and “bops”. “Bop” stands for “been over passed” and is a derogatory term used by boys to refer to a girl they’ve decided has been “passed around” or had too much sex. Sexual equality has ceased to exist online. It’s absolutely fine for boys to have sex, but when girls do, they are called worthless and referred to as objects. “When community pussy tries to insult me, I just want to beat that bitch up.” That’s a message I saw on TikTok.
I’m a 15-year-old schoolgirl and like most teenagers I spend a fair portion of my spare time on social media, often scrolling through short-form videos on apps such as Instagram or TikTok. All of my friends use those apps, and many spend multiple hours a day on them. I actively try to avoid online misogyny, but I am met with it incessantly whenever I open my mainstream social media apps. It only takes a few minutes before there’s subtle or overt misogyny, such as comment sections on a girl’s post filled with remarks about her body, videos made by men or boys captioned with a degrading joke, and even topics such as domestic violence or rape, trivialised and laughed about.
i suppose it shouldn’t be surprising but these comments sure are proving the articles point. i guess blaming the people being oppressed is a lot easier than blaming or even actually acknowledging the systemic oppression when you’re a brickheaded fascist, especially when you’re unaffected by/benefiting from it
As a father of two girls this makes me sad. However, I am a little bid sad to see so many, treading social media as this is the real life view to a lot of young people. Of cause there is plenty of people that gets sucked in, and their view of the world becomes whatever algorithm they follow online. But to most people this is just “shock effect content” not something they would ever follow. I certainly hope, that in your school, most people actually have a since of human left, and are still nice to eachother. As nice as teenagers can be ofc. That the people who actually has this kind of view of other people (especially girls) are the ones who get left out. What I am trying to say is, that I hope young people today leaves all the shit online, ONLINE, and gathers around the good friends IRL. Those are what matters most. Turn off social media ffs. It is meant to fucking poisen your brains. I did. And it feels phenominal. What real value does the swiping really give you, if all it does, is showing how bad you should feel, by being born a Woman? What do you and your friends use social media for today?
When I was teenager, we used social media to socialize online back in the day. Stayed in contact after school hours. Thats all it did for us. Today, I feel like it’s sole purpose has become intertainment/pure distraction rather than connectivity to real human beings. It’s all about scrolling and leaving bred crums to the big tech, that can be used to fill your “feed” with even more crap to keep your distracted every waking hour. It is the dog chasing it’s tail, and what you see won’t stop there.please tell me if I am wrong. But this is how I’ve seen social media develope over the past 2 decades of my life. It went from being the cool place, like a social place to interact with the people you like/love to a swipehell with no valuable interactions what so ever.
Getting glad I never tried out Instagram. I can see where these ‘ban social media’ people are coming from if these are the platforms they’re looking at, I’ve never seen anything nearly as bad on the platforms I use (and a most of the bad stuff I see is heavily downvoted and argued against anyways). I guess if I went to r/conservative or started watching Asmongold videos on Youtube or something I would probably see some pretty terrible stuff, but Reddit and Youtube both keep me pretty separated from their bad sides.
I was gonna say unpopular opinion, but maybe not…
disengage from social media. It is not reality. not only that, but it perpetuates itself, and the oligarchy that created it. Go out and meet people in the real world. This is comming from an autistic person with minimal patients for other people. Seriously, ditch social media; it’s poison, and when it dies (which it will if people like you leave) these toxic peope you encounter will have to face the real world.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…
To a first approximation, all boys suck.
I think this is some intergenerational religious byproduct. Agree, women/men can fuck about as much as they want and it shouldn’t be degrading. Enjoy your body/life. Yolo
I just don’t believe all of this is real anymore. It’s a fucking psyop! Men and women are different kinds of comments under posts. If a woman looks at the comments of Reel where a woman promotes the most depraved, objectifying a degrading things to do to guys with the sole purpose of making them suffer, they will only see comments of other women (rightfully) blasting OP in the comments. But when a guy opens the same comment section he will 99% see only comments of women encouraging other women to be the most evil things humanly possible.
It is not a conspiracy, it’s a really effective way to farm engagement for basically free. We are letting them take control over society with the most obvious divide-et-impera tactics ever applied in human history
Delete TikTok and Instagram for starters.
This is simple advice for an adult who isn’t mired in the drama of high school. For most teens, these apps are how they socialise, how they share information and learn what is cool or uncool. Deleting the apps means you have cut yourself off from the social system and have made yourself a social pariah.
An equivalent for the millennials and gen Xers would be not having Facebook as a teen. It meant not being invited to parties because Facebook was the only platform people used to plan events. No one was going to seek you out individually because it was assumed you were on Facebook and would see the updates.
I agree that social media is harming all of us, but telling teens to just not use it ignores what it was like to be a teenager.
As someone who was never fond of the concept of social media, and who never had a MySpace or Facebook account as a result when I was in my late teens/early twenties - this hits home for me.
I did it knowingly, but I sure missed out on a lot of stuff that I usually only found out months after.
For a while my friends nicknamed me “the untagable” 🤣, but I guess not having my entire dumb early adulthood saved for eternity is a win in the end.
I route my ig through matrix via https://beeper.com/ so I don’t have to open the app, so people can also still dm me.
I was a teen with social media. Not using it is totally valid advice. But simply saying “don’t use it” is like telling a smoker “don’t smoke”
I agree with this sentiment, but fuck do I feel old rn. Myspace was my generation’s Facebook. And it was so much cooler! Custom backgrounds/layouts, and music. Facebook just seems so sterilized in comparison, and it makes me sad.
And even MySpace had ‘Top Friends’ that dictated social hierarchy. For as long as there has been social media, teens have been socially required to interact with it.
I dont agree with it, and would prefer to see all social media burning to the ground, but I understand the situation that teenagers are in.
The situation is that whatever the cool kids are doing is cool. It might be looking at TikTok, it might be not looking at TikTok. It’s going to change depending on where you go and what the cool kids do at that school.
Who knows what’s cool these days. Best advice is to just do what you enjoy and hope for the best. I certainly wouldn’t want to be a teenager all over again. They’re ruthless for no reason. And I wasn’t any better. I’m not proud of it. But that’s why I can tell you, it matters little what you do, it’s all about who does it.
I got little cousins that are much younger than I. And from what I gathered. It’s not much different now.
Facebook didn’t exist when Gen X was in highschool, likely all of them had been through college.
Not sure why you were downvoted, but you’re correct - I’m a late Gen Xer, and Facebook launched several years after I finished grad school - and didn’t become mainstream for another few years.
MySpace was started only one year earlier than Facebook. So, basically, the social media online that I knew before then were forums (like car forums that still exist).
Sexual equality has ceased to exist online. It’s absolutely fine for boys to have sex, but when girls do, they are called worthless and referred to as objects.
This isn’t new. I’m a man in my mid 40s and the disparity between how promiscuous men are viewed as compared to promiscuous women has existed for as long as I’ve been sexually aware, and well before.
Obviously that doesn’t make it okay. I also have no idea what the solution might be. There have been a few cultural efforts to normalize the idea of women enjoying and seeking out sex but none of them seem to really reach the people that need to hear it.
I do find it oddly paradoxical that men who make it very clear that they are actively seeking sexual partners would disparage women for being sexually active.
Obviously this is true and it sucks, but I don’t really view it as a man vs woman issue. I think it’s a social media issue where these companies purposefully push outrage content to drive up engagement. It’s an unethical practice with little to no legislation protecting users exposed to it.
Many of these platforms don’t even have a way to opt out, forcing users to view it via “suggestions” in their main feed.
- Article violates Rule #1 §1. Why is it still here?
- This article looks like it’s has a sublimal message to justify ID uploading (just read the last paragraph).
Too easy saying not to use social media, when cutting off the fucking things – as in a total ban – completely might as well be more fair for everyone.
Because their billionaire creators can’t help themselves but expect PROFIT through engagement and validation.
I was then pulled so late into social media because playing an MMORPG required me to socialize off the game, and this includes having contacts on Facebook, which was then hosting funny little games.
I’m a whole cisgendered 30 year old male who games a bit too much, so I try to discourage misogynistic comments when they’re made by people in games.
I think there’s another layer to the misogyny where any form of “defending” women is seen as white-knighting or simping. You don’t even have to be directly referring to comments about a specific person, but you’ll still be labeled as a loser who likes women, for some reason.
Dont defend, it doesnt do shit. Clown the person talking about it. Its easy to get a dogpile going if you are obviously wittier than them and much more effective in getting them to knock it off
I was an early Facebook user. I had an account from 2007-2018. The early years it seemed fun and Fairly innocent. I kept up with friends and saw funny posts. I could curate my feed to be things I wanted to see. When I left Facebook in 2018 it seems like the app was targeting me. Showing me things to rile me up. First I quit the mobile app. I deleted it and used a browser. Then I left Facebook altogether. A year ago I did a similar thing with Instagram. It was no longer a place curated to my interests. It’s horrible. I barely touch it anymore. Even Reddit is not my usual collection of posts that interests me. It’s why I’m on here! Everything is just so polarizing now. I have been able to cut way back and do my own thing. But at 15 friends are your world. Everyone is using the app. Everyone is speaking the speak. It’s so hard for them to disconnect.
What’s interesting is that in the early online days, there was still a lot of misogyny. In the early days of Friendster / Myspace there were a lot more guys online than girls. By the time Facebook started to come around, being online was more of a normal thing, so there were more women and girls online. But, at least at the beginning, the feeds were smaller (mostly just posts from friends) and tended not to be algorithmic. It was a timeline, not a feed.
So, there was a bit of a golden period when all young people were starting to go online, so it wasn’t just a small, male-dominated space any more. There also weren’t algorithmic feeds yet, or influencers, and nowhere near the level of surveillance-based advertising. These days the big social media companies feel that their audience is locked in, and have nowhere to go, so they’re squeezing them, trying to extract as much value as possible.
If you’re a 15-year-old girl your options are really being ostracized by the other teens for not using the apps, or using the apps and dealing with all that shit. I don’t know if being a teen girl has ever been a wonderful experience. But, I sure wouldn’t want to be one right now.
By the time Facebook started to come around, being online was more of a normal thing, so there were more women and girls online.
Well, yes, that’s why Zuck started Facemash, to let him and his pals rate the faces of those people.
This community should be renamed to anything goes community.
Moderation team never actually moderate.
This is an opinion peace. Why is it posted here?
It seems like totally valid news to me. It’s a form of investigative journalism on the reality of being online as a teenage girl. While some of us know how bad it is, plenty of people don’t.
