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.
I mean, old forums were pretty messed up.
Your point stands though. The old internet isn’t what the average person experiences, anymore.
In real life, we call this school!
It can definitely be done. It’s not difficult, it’s just that the world is not heading in that direction.
School is not about socialization. Socialization absolutely happens there, but it’s not the primary purpose, and it does not exclude predatory adults. See: the rampant rates of bullying and violence that occur, and get further enabled by faculty who either ignore complaints or both-sides it into victim-blaming.
Kids are not just naturally nice to one-another.Lord of the Flies is still taught in schools for a reason.
No, but it’s still a more isolated environment. There aren’t bunch of ads or grifters or whatever on campus because it at least tries to insulate kids from the outside world profiting off them, and to curate what they experience.
That’s what they need on their phones, too. Lord of the Flies is better than Big Brother.
I guess the difficult part would be to blunt the outside from flooding in, like kids mass reposting Andrew Tate. But at least there would be some control/fairness with exposure, instead of an engagement algorithm ruling their feed.
Lord of the Flies is fiction. It is taught for its artistic merit, not its applicability to the real world.