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.
She wanted to communicate her gender and her student status concisely, avoiding the word "female." What word or phrase would be better, taking all those considerations into account?
Boys avoid saying "schoolboy" because there is a weakness/insignificance connotation baked into the term, which would run counter to the machismo/boldness boys are encouraged to strive for.
Someone else suggested that it's a common regional term, and (apparently) not my region. I'll give her the benefit of the doubt that it's common and nonsexual in her area. However, around here I would've avoided terms and phrases associated with porn/fetish.
As for how it could've been written, she had already very clearly established her gender, so she could've just said student. But that can also be reasonably inferred from her age, and isn't really relevant to the rest of the point she was making. The entire clause could've been dropped. Start the sentence with "Like most teenagers".
I presume her goal was to highlight her age and lack of obligations. That would make sense given the following details of her and her peers spending so much time on these apps. The more natural flow (again, my local dialect) would be "15-year-old high-school student", or possibly "15-year-old girl in high school". But these are still unnecessary.
A 15-year-old is not going to anticipate readers thinking about porn/kink associations with terms that also have innocuous meanings.