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.
What if we stopped making it profitable to be a hateful guy on the internet by removing the monetization of drama and rage and stopped making contention a career?
Yea, fully agree with that.
But until then, don’t leave your children on their own.
The best success I had on a personal level was actually understanding and learning what the internet culture was like for young people and engaging with the children in my family on their level about the actual shit they were seeing, even friending them on their social media in case they ever wanted help.
Having casual and funny conversations about “the Redpill” and incels with my teenage nieces was massively helpful as the trend was rising, talking about the things they would encounter online and the things people say, and why they say it. Their parents had no idea what was going on with their internet lives, but I made a real effort to always be there and listen to their stories and give actual, actionable advice that wasn’t “Oh sweetie, the internet isn’t real, just turn it off when people act like that” like so many gen-X/millenial parents did, which made kids feel ashamed to talk about their emotional reactions to things they read and see online.
Of course they had problems with internet freaks, like all girls online, but they talked openly about it, they felt better about talking to an adult who understands the culture, and developed into very healthy adults with social lives (and tasers and pepper spray, each of 'em) but I really don’t know how to spread this as a “program” when so many parents lose track of youth culture because they’re too busy earning food and utility bills.
Thanks, I appreciate the tips.