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.
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.