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.
Guys have always talked dirty about girls, between guys. It’s nothing new. The difference now is that they do it online, in front of them and it’s double wrong.
i take issue with this. ive never said things like i read in that article.
boys do not say things like “hope they didnt talk this much when it happened” or “at least they got some” ABOUT A RAPE!?!?!?
no, this is not normal, and actual boys do not talk like that behind closed doors unless they are indeed sick in the head.
Girls do this shit too, and it’s not new.
The general message to ‘be good to each other’ is very old, and has to be told often. The internet provides for a lot of anonymity and seperation from consequence, so allows for people to say shitty things without the moderation that’s more common in public and personal spaces.
It’s not surprising at all that there is tons of men or women online talking shit about each other. What is surprising is that the platforms it happens on don’t just delete that crap as a rule. Many will let it fester and negatively effect the community because people interact with it, and interaction means ad hits.
We need laws that make monetizing such content illegal, to encourage it’s quick removal.
Just bitching about having to see it isn’t good enough.