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.
Liberation is the way to go
Don’t use Instagram or TikTok ✅👍
Enragebait is a well known consequence of using a profit-driven Algorithm, i.e. enshittification.
15-year-olds are not being specifically targeted so much as caught up in the phenomena occuring overall.
The thing is this isn’t a phenomena that’s recent. This type of shitty misogynism has been going on for decades/centuries. The only difference between then and now is that we have social apps that make it easier to spread.
I’m coming up on 70 yrs old and misogynism has always been the bane of my existence.
I’m not quite 70 years old, but I’ve been around for long enough to laugh at this line from the article: “Sexual equality has ceased to exist online”
Only a 15 year old could think that sexual equality ever existed online. It may be hard to believe, but it’s probably better now than it ever has been. Back in the early days online spaces were so male dominated that people had trouble believing that women were even online at all.
Indeed. Not saying that adult women don’t face sexist harassment and that that isn’t a problem to solve, but kids shouldn’t be on social media in the first place. Not to mention that social media is 90% bots anyway. The majority of the blame here falls on the parents.
NO ONE should be on social media in its current state.
Lemmy is social media, too.
The problem isn’t social media. The problem is profit-driven monopolies incentivized to promote high-emotion content. The problem, more generally, is monopolies that no one has hindered since 1974.
We here are not:-).
Well, I’m self aware enough to acknowledge the irony here, but I will say that I’d rather be on Lemmy than reddit.
Why should we police the victims instead of the perps???
Because it’s easier to monitor your children’s use of the internet than to remove dumb men, hateful men, and bots from the internet?
It isn’t really that easy to monitor or control one’s children’s use of the internet. They’re smart and can be good at figuring out ways to get what they want; more so as they get older. It’s better to stay aware of what they’re likely exposed to, and talk to them and prepare them to recognize harmful things and avoid them.
Now that you say that… I do agree. But at the same time, I wouldn’t want my daughter to be exposed to gross misoginy in the first place. That kind of thing affects someone deeply, especially teenagers, I think. I wouldn’t want my son to be exposed to it either. Not sure what to do. I’m relieved they are far from reaching that age, yet I’m aware that time will come.
Imagine if TikTok automatically tagged all content with #misogyny, #racism, #sexism and so on. And then published monthly reports on society trends. Like “In Feb 2026 racism went down 12%, misogyny went up 5%”. I think it would be incredibly insightful and helpful.
While article tries to promote social media ban for under 16s, I strongly believe its just a way to sweep the problem under the rug. I think much more reasonable approach is to recognize those trends and deal with them through education and better parenting.
The age verification debate misses the real point. These commercial algorithms are harmful for everybody.
The identity verification debate is the point and it is the only reason this article exists in the first place.
These commercial algorithms are harmful for everybody.
Also true.
It’s a business of outrage. Just say the most vile things you can think of, wait for some people to react to it, no matter how, and watch the algorithm do it’s work. Congratulation you are now an influencer.
From what I’m seeing, the messaging is “we want to protect children, thus age verification”.
To your point, it is identity verification they’re doing.
My point is, age verification isn’t even the right solution to the problem.
It’s not about age verification, it’s just an excuse for more censorship.
And yet some politicians say the solution is to ban 15 year olds from social media, rather than police the platforms, algorithms and users. Please contact your representative and ask them to police the platforms, not bring in creepy ID checks.
police the platforms
No thanks. The beauty of social media is the unrestrained assholery. People just need to learn to cope & quit being fragile: skill issue. Education & civic campaigns to promote social good are better approaches respecting our inherent liberties to piss people off.
Using social media has ruined my self-esteem and my relation to being a girl in this world, and nearly every day I feel hatred towards my gender, my appearance, or even teenage boys as a category. The misogyny I see from boys my age online, which is echoed in real life too, has made me grow resentful and bitter towards them, as much as I try to avoid it. As wrong as it is, I persistently find myself considering if there are truly any boys out there who are not misogynistic to some extent, and have even questioned whether I can find love in the future because of this. I understand that boys are victims of harmful content, as well as perpetrators of online misogyny – they’re growing up learning how to do this from the adults who post misogynistic videos first. But even so, I feel such a strong divide now between girls and boys in my generation, especially when the way they talk about us in real life mirrors the way they do on the internet.
That’s fucked up.
That level of misogyny is definitely learned, but it’s not just her age group. I’m floored by (for example) some comments my Dad makes, a “quiet, respectful, classy” type guy who’s never had a Facebook or Insta, who’d you’d never expect to hear insults from. And it’s definitely worse after he watches Fox News… that shit is like a drug.
My school “friends” dropped my jaw, sometimes. They got a lot from their parents, but social media (Faceboook back then) absolutely made it worse.
Even here on Lemmy, the disrespect or casual sexism from commenters sometimes makes me want to throw up. Not that I’m a particularly standup guy or anything, but the longer I live, the more I wonder “the fuck happened to my sex?” I certainly can’t critique this girl for wondering the same thing.
Yeah, I feel like a lot of the people here going “just don’t use social media then” are missing part of the point. Like, as she specifically mentioned, the misogynistic discourse happening online is also happening offline. Even if you yourself manage to avoid most online misogyny by not using social media, you’ll still be exposed to it through everyone else who is and all the people watching and reading stuff like Fox. It’s just kind of everywhere.
Exactly! Precisely. It’s affecting her real life, too.
That “just don’t use social media then” response in itself feels… misogynistic? This isn’t her choice; she can’t ignore the catastrophic effects.
“Stop using social media” is probably good advice for everyone, but as you say, its not the solution to the this problem unless literally everyone follows it and even then there is more to do since its not like the internet invented misogyny.
Yeah, it is great advice. But I’m under no illusion that’s happening anytime soon, not for most people.
The context matters. And in this instance “stop using social media” feels more like blaming the abused teenager while the rest of the world carries on, like its totally dismissive of what she’s saying.
It feels very reminiscent of “well don’t dress like that then”
Yup. And that’s bullshit. It’s way past the time we should be teaching boys how to NOT be misogynistic asswipes.
The thing is, teenage boys learn this behavior from social media. If we had told boys not to use it, they might have not turned out like that.
If misogyny has been around for centuries (and it has) who taught boys back in the 1600’s to be sexist assholes?
It didn’t originate from social media. It started with fathers teaching their sons that they were more important and special than girls were.
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
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.
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.
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
Shit is infuriating.
This isn’t social media, it’s social acid, dissolving and corroding everything.
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.
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.
They don’t want experienced, knowledgable, self-confident partners. They want naive young women they can gaslight and abuse.
They don’t want experienced, knowledgable, self-confident partners. They want naive young women
You’ve obviously never lived with the aftermath of dating worn out, bitter and combative women who have been traumatized by their numerous “experiences.” Men like inexperienced women precisely because they want to mold her and give her her first experiences. Also, “experienced” women are more likely to be single moms.
Your comment actually made me feel sick. Please go re-evaluate where this toxicity in your life has come from.
Hint: it’s not women
Your intolerant ad-hominem post offers no constructive rebuttal of a good-faith argument and should be deleted by the mods.
The audacity and hypocrisy required to accuse others of intolerance after writing such misogynistic claptrap is staggering
Your blithe refusal to engage my constructive rebuttal of your uneducated and intolerant opinion (linked here for your convenience) renders this pearl-clutching statement irrelevant.
My posts are almost always based on logic. I do not engage in insult posts, like you did.
Appeal to the high road. What a child.
Imagine posting this and thinking it sounded okay.
Boy, this thread is just loaded with reprehensible takes and dudes telling on themselves.
🤮🤮🤮
Experienced men are more likely to be dead beat dads. See how this works?
Let’s take a moment. I want you to understand that the opinion you offered is precisely what the OP article references. More than that, the opinion you offered is factually wrong.
I would like you to hear from me - an anonymous poster - the most likely outcome (of that opinion you offered) is a lonely, sad, and bitter existence for you.
Your preferences for certain kinds of women are yours, and yours alone. I wish you luck in finding a woman that fits your preference. However if you truly believe in that opinion, i strongly recommend seeking professional help.
Ew
Subheading:
Objectification, hate, rape threats: the politicians debating online abuse mean well, but to truly understand, they need to see what I see
No, they don’t.
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.
Wait, are you the 15 YO or is it someone else? I just woke up, maybe my brain isn’t focused yet.
This is an article written by an anonymous 15 yr old girl.
No, this is a propaganda article designed to push the narrative that the internet requires identity verification in order to “protect the children” and was written by an adult. Don’t be stupid.
