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.
Delete TikTok and Instagram for starters.
This is simple advice for an adult who isn’t mired in the drama of high school. For most teens, these apps are how they socialise, how they share information and learn what is cool or uncool. Deleting the apps means you have cut yourself off from the social system and have made yourself a social pariah.
An equivalent for the millennials and gen Xers would be not having Facebook as a teen. It meant not being invited to parties because Facebook was the only platform people used to plan events. No one was going to seek you out individually because it was assumed you were on Facebook and would see the updates.
I agree that social media is harming all of us, but telling teens to just not use it ignores what it was like to be a teenager.
Facebook didn’t exist when Gen X was in highschool, likely all of them had been through college.
I agree with this sentiment, but fuck do I feel old rn. Myspace was my generation’s Facebook. And it was so much cooler! Custom backgrounds/layouts, and music. Facebook just seems so sterilized in comparison, and it makes me sad.