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 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.
Yep, some is a shitplace, that only shows you very sterotypical things about the world around you, through very disective algorythms. It learns you about how small the world is, how we all are the same. When we are not! Humans are complex individuals the world is huge. That is social medias first lie. But you are in fact all just numbers to them. Social media, reduces us to numbers.
Social media like everything else takes personal responsibility. I have an IG and it’s full of yummy desserts, puppy videos, my bands and pics of my kids so my parents can see.
It’s up to everyone what they do on social media and what they consume, just like television, don’t just watch porn, Fox News and trash tv, and say it’s TVs fault. It’s a medium like everything else, stay away from the crazies and if you can’t handle it don’t use it
I can confirm this. Kill your television rings true.