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.
What crime have the parents committed?
Letting their kids go on the Internet. Get the brats out of here.
referring to a victim of misogynistic online abuse as a "brat". vile.
What's vile are the disgusting piece of shit parents who let their kids go out and get exposed to this. They should be in prison for being horrible, irredeemable human beings who allow this to happen. That's vile.
Letting their brat run around naked in front of a boar's head on a stick and then acting all shocked when their kid becomes a victim of misogynistic online abuse. That is beyond vile.
What the fuck is wrong with you? Get your brat out. You are the one responsible for this.
You are the one that is causing your child to be a victim of misogynistic online abuse. You are a negligent parent and you are victimizing your child. Stop it. And quit blaming everyone else for it and belligerently shifting the responsibility. Disgusting.
I'm not the parent, you dickhead, I just think you're a cunt. Goodbye.
The feeling's mutual, pal. Except you're wrong and I'm scientifically correct.
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?
How do you think we should prevent children from being the victims of misogynistic online abuse or grooming or trafficking or whatever else the government says is the reason we all need to fork over our biometric data to Persona?
I don't think you guys are looking at the bigger picture here. What beast this article is feeding.