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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can confirm this. Kill your television rings true.
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.
If anyone uses the word “female” to refer to women/girls, they instantly disqualify themselves from any right to be taken serious. Those people need a psychotherapist.
I think it depends a bit on how multicultural an environment is. In a lot of places (including here), for plenty of people English isn’t their first language. I have seen ‘Female’ used on bathroom signs several times. The focus should be on intention, not language.
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.
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
I fell the problem is also how social media platforms promote ragebait content. If you are enraged by a post, you will tend to react more, thus spending more time on the platform. I am not saying misoginy and racisme does not exist, but i experience it way more often on social media than IRL. Leaving social media won’t cure these shitty behaviours, but it will help her feel less endangered
the internet is not a daycare for children.
if you don’t have the skin to be online, don’t be online.
it’s like walking into a biker bar and complaining about the loud music, smoke and lack of healthy food.
But the thing is, the author is not a child and they didn’t declare that they expected a daycare. The only thing that they wanted was a friendly interaction with their peers - as opposed to misogyny.
I am a 15-year-old girl.
author is not a child
something doesn’t add up here…
Shit is infuriating.
I always hear the “it’s ok for boys to have sex” part and I guess I’m a pod person but me and my entire circle of friends would say neither sex should be promiscuous. So we’d say both the men and women in question are whores. Also, it’s a proven fact that a small percentage of men get the majority of attention from women on dating apps. So I’d wager the average male’s body count is lower than the average woman’s.
And no I’m not saying the online vitriole is ok, good, or warranted. I’m specifically talking about the idea of celebrating high body counts of men. I’m just saying no one I know thinks a man having a high body count is a good thing. But that line is always said so confidently.
To people downvoting GaMEChld, I invite you to read a blog post Okcupid once published on how women judge male attractiveness on their own site.
Obviously this was archived from 17 years ago, because this blog post was published two years before Match bought out the platform, and several more years before they would begin monopolizing and enshittifying the entire online dating landscape in the wake of Tinder’s popularity.
It’s very understandable why a bunch of greedy corporate fucks who want to sucker you into a £40/month subscription to see what fake accounts liked your profile would want to bury the truth that women rate 80% of guys as below-average attractiveness.
remind me, what is the male coded word for someone who has sex a lot? or do we only have female coded ones?
it’s not that male promiscuity is valued “good”, but it is acceptable, barely raises any eyebrows, meanwhile for women, it’s almost always a widely accepted condemnation
I don’t understand. Is she posting with her real name and photo? If so, her parents should be in jail. That’s mindless. There are billions of people online and millions of them are going to be unhinged assholes and lunatics. WTF!
What crime have the parents committed?
Letting their kids go on the Internet. Get the brats out of here.
What country are you from, where kids who are 15 are forbidden from free social media apps?
It’s not illegal but it should be and the parents should be the ones responsible. This article is a prime example of why it should be illegal.
Do you have kids? Have you ever tried telling a kid something was important? Did they listen?
This article starts off with a kid saying, “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.”
So is this kid going online despite being told not to? If so, then what’s the story here? This is like a kid saying “I snuck into a titty bar and you just won’t believe how many titties I saw!” If this is what’s going on, then no, the parents shouldn’t get in trouble. The kid disobeyed the parents.
But if the parents are handing this kid a wad of dollar bills and dropping them off at the titty bar, I think they should be held responsible. Maybe it’s not illegal to force a bunch of strippers to babysit your kid, but maybe it should be.
It’s not illegal to have computers in the same house as teenagers. Many of us grew up in an era where kids needed a computer at home to type out essays (these days they let kids borrow school laptops).
Do you think it’s also a crime to own serrated kitchen knives in the same house as teenagers? Since it’s possible for them to cut people with them?
Let me guess the solution before reading the article - some form of weakening to digital privacy.
Yep: “A social media ban for under-16s might prevent young boys seeing endless content that treats women with contempt and hate. Boys at this age are very susceptible to the cool and funny framing of what is, in reality, relentless misogyny. A ban might not fix the problem, but it would help. If society can’t stop it, it can show it disapproves.”
Essentially, this article is an argument to introduce online ID, and I disagree with that on a fundamental level.
The soil misogyny has dug it’s roots into is the iniquity we created while seeking equity. It was done for the best of reasons, but now we see the price. That’s not a problem we can solve easily, and certainly not via creating state spying infrastructure.
We have mostly 50-80 year old Republicans pushing to strip women of rights and somehow misogyny is all the internets fault? This is a deep societal problem that can’t be fixed by internet law.
Word it like that, the guardian has some pretty authoritarian leaning shit.
The main pieces of the article don’t read like fabricated and are possibly genuine; however, the last part about the ban might be an deliberate attempt to manipulate the reader using emotional baggage after reading the main section. It may aswell be injected there by the Guardian, and its probable the author didn’t even think about the bans.
This yet again is ageism in a nutshell. The Guardian has completely invalidated the authors claims, just because they are a minor. This is where humanity is going: misogyny, ageism, and deliberate injection of stories with malicious intent.
