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.

  • Ascendor@discuss.tchncs.de
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    21 minutes ago

    I am really sorry that you have to live through this. I (middle-aged, white, cishet, more or less wealthy male) know that I’m super priviledged - yet reading posts like that show me that I will never be able to fully feel what you girls/women have to live through. I promise that I will fight against misogyny whereever I can.

    And thank you for your post, there are really phrases that I wouldn’t have understood.

  • peacefulpixel@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    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

  • Bullerfar@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    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.

  • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    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.

  • Petr Janda@gonzo.markets
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    56 minutes ago

    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.

  • Tarkcanis@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    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.

  • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
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    4 hours ago

    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

  • Floon@lemmy.ml
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    4 hours ago

    Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

    To a first approximation, all boys suck.

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    8 hours ago

    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

  • vithigar@lemmy.ca
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    9 hours ago

    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.

  • null@lemmy.org
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    8 hours ago

    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.

  • BananaIsABerry@lemmy.zip
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    12 hours ago

    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.

    • cozzy@futurology.today
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      8 hours ago

      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

      • Walk_blesseD@piefed.blahaj.zone
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        2 hours ago

        Unironically this. Yesterday I told a skinhead I didn’t wanna see his “white lives matter” shirt again, and when he asked why not in the most shitlordy tone imaginable, my blunt reply of “it’s loser shit” put him in his place way better than any drawn out debate about the history and semantics of race ever would have done. These dweebs rely not on any sort of moral truth but on the aesthetic of strength, which is why it’s always important to deny them that and hammer home just how much reactionaries are in reality just pathetic (often overgrown) boys whom everybody knows to be insufferable.

  • lechekaflan@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    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.

  • carrylex@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago
    1. Article violates Rule #1 §1. Why is it still here?
    2. This article looks like it’s has a sublimal message to justify ID uploading (just read the last paragraph).