Great, comprehensive, survey about an essential subject!
I saw this syndrome unfolding when my now-32 year old son was taught in his undergraduate cognitive neuroscience class that because the same part of the brain lights up when a person is physically hit or verbally insulted, “science proves that speech is violence”.
We’re dealing with a cultural mood that has found numerous ways to insidiously infiltrate our civilizational consensus. I hope articles like this--evidence-based and data-driven--can help turn the tide, but if not there are bad times ahead.
What an absurd conclusion to draw, when the obvious lesson to be inferred is that your brain will react to verbal insult in such a fashion, one should therefore be conscious of this and make a special effort to remind oneself that it is not the same as a physical assault. Sticks and stones etc.
Another way of putting it - we should be teaching kids how to take a punch, roll with it, absorb it, and yes how to punch back (proportionately) if necessary. One should be able to give as good as one gets, this is important to maintaining an internal locus of control.
I suspect the bad lessons learned from such research are related to it being interpreted in the context of 'zero tolerance' safety culture.
Yes, part of Haidt’s point is that truisms that guided us for centuries have been foolishly rejected. “Sticks and stones” is a great example.
Even more profoundly, this same pseudo-science is the supposedly “data-driven” foundation for the opposition of many sincere Americans to our constitutional right to free speech.
Here are a couple counterpoints for your consideration.
First, “sticks and stones” is great for dealing with an inarticulate bully in the schoolyard, but we do eventually grow up and learn that about things such as workplace harassment, politics, propaganda, etc. (Though I do find it amusing when authors continually argue against the power of words in their essays, hah.)
Second, I think we may be mischaracterizing some of these young folks as ill-equipped to deal with the real world simply because we want the world to be to our liking, not to theirs.
Another way of characterizing today’s youth is that when they hear something they find inconsiderate (or worse), they take action and push back. It may not be to our liking, but taking action is the opposite of having a victim mentality, is it not?
For example, whether or not a particular word is offensive is something that can (and does) change over time. Sure, we may find it annoying that the words we have become used to saying are more likely to bother younger generations, but how do we know we aren’t the ones catastrophizing (and pretending we have always been free-speech absolutists)?
Proportionate response is missing. The appropriate response to words is words - arguments should be met with arguments. One should give as good as one gets, obviously. Hysterical meltdowns because someone used a word that sounds like a word you don't like (as has actually happened) is not "pushing back", it's narcissistic rage on a mass scale. Liberal females making excuses for that are enablers when they're not directly responsible for breaking those kids' brains in the first place.
and YOU sound very much like a misogynist who has NO CLUE about female physiology, evolutionary differences, or women's psychological differences & the reasons for them.
I have been really struck by how unfamiliar with basic pain my 9-11 children I coach through youth sports are. They play a rough sport, and they will get hurt, and they just want to lay there until they get validation/attention. It takes surprisingly little "tough love" to teach them that no, this injury that you will forget about in 3 minutes does not require stopping the game, it doesn't require someone giving you attention. If it hurts and you need to cry, cry, if you cannot continue don't continue. But 98% (more) of the time, if you tell the kids to "buck up" they will, and then when they don't "buck up" you know there is actually something wrong with them.
So many seem to not have internalized that just because something has hurt, maybe even really bad, doesn't mean almost anything. Getting hit in the face with a ball or falling and skinning your knee hurt a TON. They also are things that are over within minutes.
Once they get a little older you need to watch out for more actual serious injuries, but the 9 year olds aren't breaking many bones. And it is important to teach them some toughness early on so you don't need to spend all your time sorting out real injuries from malingering later.
Your comment reminds me of my nephew who was bullied in school. His mother advised him to go to the (female) teacher if this would happen, my brother said he should punch the guy. One punch made the bullying stop. Oh well...
Females of most species are the NURTURERS - they GIVE LIFE - whereas the male of most species does the hard job of defense - killing & fighting. So the female is designed by evolution & motherhood to SUFFER WITH others & FEEL THEIR PAIN... while the male is designed to FOCUS ON SINGLE GOALS & DESTROY THE ENEMY. BOTH have positive & negative outcomes. The FEMALE is AVERSE to being violent & cringes at the notion while the MALE instantly and AUTOMATICALLY is ready for COMBAT - Hence - the male can & will at times maim & kill his own mate & offspring while the female (at best) will die to defend & protect her babies... THERE IS YOUR "Oh well"...
Not exactly. Large % of men who kill children do so in violent response to threat of separation or divorce. Women who do so, invariably are both mentally ill (in serious treatment) and depending on the age group will act out of despair over lifelong sacrifice via unwanted pregnancy, depression over spousal violence - in other words: despair & suicide versus rage & intent to murder. The women want to die - the men want to kill them. EXACTLY!
Everything is related and connected - life is a complete weaving whose interconnections create & define the identities that meet at each juncture. I'm not sure there is much change - 'mothers despair' or being forced to eliminate an infant for hunger is ages old and the male (among our ancestors-the apes) will literally tear an infant from the arms of its mother limb to limb FOR THE PURPOSE of freeing up the mother's energies and "womb" for HIM. Male apes will harass a female and much if not most sexual coupling is essentially rape among our various ape ancestry (perhaps except the Bonobos)... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_coercion_among_animals
I have MUCH longer answers to the question of whether recent & current evolutionary changes are good or bad. Until we literally change females into males and the reverse - women will continue to suffer as those of lower testosterone (men have on avg 20x the amount women have) which also means lower muscle mass, height, and the urge to cringe and scream in fear versus the urge to aggress, dominate, and kill.
Women's empowerment has slowly begun in direct response to social advances & freedoms wrought for OTHER groups (Black vote, etc...) coupled by cultural recognition of extreme inequality that led to women's lives as the lowest slave or the upifted slave - who somehow always remains the slave... It is to some degree "natural" for little boys to be told "don't be a sissy, be a boy not a girl!" as I overhear regularly in the local pool as young fathers talk to their whining sons. WE ALL grow up seeing & hearing and knowing that the female is beaten & raped - but it's done with such assumptive regularity (every news hour in every town & city around the country if not the world) - that mankind in general ACCEPTS IT AS INEVITABLE and it's heard so much that we no longer even react with ANY seriousness - just as we do when we get too much regular ingestion of a drug & become accustomed to it - requiring MORE in order for our senses to react to the stimulus. IF MEN were seriously changed - there should be large groups of men rallying and marching in protest over women's abusde - but given that more than 50% of all males at some time or other, threaten, want to, and do hit the women they "love"... 65% of all women murdered are killed by the men they sleep with. AND NUMBERS are only increasing - IN PART, BC MORE EASILY ACCESSIBLE GUNS AREN'T BEING BOUGHT UP BY ALL THE WOMEN - OVER 90% OF WEAPONS SALES & WEAPONS CRTIMES GO TO men. HENCE, THE MORE LIKELY VIOLENT MALE SIMPLY has IT EASIER TO KILL WOMEN (OR ANY "ENEMY" OF THE MOMENT TRIGGERED BY ADRENALINE) AT A DISTANCE...
I'm happy to learn from others and to discuss my thoughts and the little knowledge I may have from lots of reading & personal experience etc...
OK - so that works for some guys... but it doesn't work for females - who almost never automatically respond with violent physical actions to things - who learn submissive behavior towards men based on their father's deeper voice & watching Mommy being abused, criticized, crying & afraid.... who are programmed by evolution to be smaller, kinder, timid - and who learn early in life that boys are stronger & generally more physically brutal & capable....
Sounds like you were raised in a terrible family: "Mommy being abused, criticized, crying & afraid" and an awful neighborhood: "boys are stronger & generally more physically brutal".
I'm genuinely sorry for you, but your tragic personal experiences do not generalize to all men and women--not even close. I hope things have gotten better in your life.
Excuse me - but I was speaking NOT as a personal victim but rather a researcher and student of women's history & studies of both economic, historical roles & treatment of women going back thousands of years... From basic history to research on patterns of violence & family behaviors - and studies from a medical past as a nurse - corroborated by a majority of females and many educated & honest males... add a degree in psychology & 5 languages - I am a political refugee from communism & Vietnam Vet... lots of international & personal experience of male behaviors in general. Overall, since YOU are a guy & there's no ledge of knowledge from which your comment here makes any sense except for the arrogant bully perch, it sounds like you need to sit down. As a researcher, I would not say that anything can mean ALL - generalizations mean precisely what they are.... usually common knowledge based on majority experience - sometimes, they aren't valid but usually there's a foundation of truth to them - that's WHY they became generalizations...MY statements can be undergirded by research articles if you would like to confirm the basic premises & comments.
You're going to have to cite your sources. I am a woman, and your comments strike me as demonstrating the very cognitive distortions described in the essay, and this one in particular sets off alarms.
Excuse me Maria. I have read all of your comments on this subject and I think maybe you are off topic. The subject is more about how we are teaching our children and how it impacts their lives than about criminal violence against children and women. You have obviously researched the latter and I assume most people on this thread find empathy. However, it is not appropriate for a discussion about education and how we raise our children.
Thank you for writing in a reasoned, calm manner without accusations of stupidity etc... I admit that my reactions are based on the focus by a male author on "liberal girls" and their depression. Fact is that the overwhelming majority of DEPRESSED and those taking anti-anxiety or antidepressents are females! THAT has been the case since the dawn of the sexes... and has reasons so much deeper and more serious & real than college education or how we teach our children.... MY parents endured lives raised in wartorn countries overrun by Russia - we were bullied in America simply for being from somewhere else with a different way of thinking . I was raised to be strong & independent - started 3 doctorates, have 2 Masters degrees, 3 successful children - lived in 6 countries, 10 states, attended 10 schools before age 18 and 12 colleges in total. I was a feminist before it was popular, got raped in the Army for being a girl - in Central Park by an OTC Trader during a Morgan Stanley meeting I had to attend, and then again by a girlfriend's ex-Puerto Rican boyfriend (and his friend - 2 of them). 3 abortions - and that's just a tiny nothing part of my life among boys. I never spoke out or up about any of the things I endured and neither do most girls!
As for how we teach our children - it's such a BIG topic! We intentionally raise our girls to be sweet & dainty (high heels & nail polish...) as well as sexual (sexy 3 year old models)... Mothers are in a bind trying to prepare girls for what the world is like & how to make them successful in both career & marriage goals (most girls don't have career goals - we're programmed/evolution to desire to be companions to men & make babies). Girls are conflicted and depressed mostly bc this natural urge is challenged by the push & desire to NOT be a victim (make your own money & live YOUR life) when men are being pushed to be LESS of the old style men (responsible financially for family) and social norms push girls to have sex early - when they aren't mature enough to remember to take the pill to avoid pregnancy. Girls' lives are still pressured by much more than men's (women still usually insist on keeping their kids & men still avoid paying expenses for them once they are not in HIS house)... females are the poorest in every society. The point is that I could go on and on with excerpts from the 50 books & 100's or articles & personal experience or even just the NEWS...
The only way girls are safe is when they change both sexes & girls stop the flow of oxytocin (bonding-love chemical during sex & birth giving) while men stop the flow of testosterone (violence promoting hormone) along with the dopamine they have during sex (pure pleasure chemical - NO BONDING)... We seem to be working on all that with the LGBTQ stuff... but it will take time & who knows what the final outcome will be. But until then - girls need to be raised with a better understanding of the actual differences between men & women, the effects of these differences, and how to protect themselves physically & emotionally... NOBODY is actually doing that.
I think the writer is wrong - that the survey method of research is a faulty sieve (I did write some research papers & do have a background in education, psychology, research & writing). In general - men trying to write about women or women's thoughts, feelings, internal state of being - is an oxymoron. Thanks for being intelligent & thoughtful.
While you sound like someone I would describe as a “ well meaning crackpot”; I do appreciate your explanation of how generalities work, and don’t. Something can be generally true without the implication that it is universally true. And that the discerning mind needs to constantly remind itself of that fact in a specific situation. So thank you for the validation. Would you mind explaining this to others when we are navigating issues surrounding personal security and a general prevalence of higher crime in and around black communities?
What the original author never mentions as a partial cause and symptom of young women's depression is the march of rancid feminism through their lives.
"OK - so that works for some guys... but it doesn't work for females - who almost never automatically respond with violent physical actions to things - who learn submissive behavior towards men...."
Females learn to OUTSOURCE their violence towards men (and other women).... typically relying on other men in the vicinity to enact her violence for her, including relying on THE STATE (men with guns) to enact the violence for her.
The best way to outsource your violence to men is to be submissive, highlight your fragility (relative to your target) and play the victim / damsel in distress. A good introduction to this (mostly overlooked) gender dynamic is the documentary 'The Red Pill' by former feminist Cassie Jaye (her exploration of the issues men face at the hands of women and the state made her reject feminism).
When you factor in this kind of violence BY PROXY, the argument can be made women are actually more violent than men. We're all aware that a man can hit his wife with a frying pan (which is obviously not acceptable), but a woman can inflict far more damage to him simply by breaking her nails, ripping her blouse and then calling the police in tears and charging her husband with assault. In effect she has just hired armed thugs to kidnap him and put him in a cage, and then prevent him access to the house, kids etc when he is released from the cage. That's violence by proxy.
Certainly studies into domestic abuse back this up with lesbian relationships being by far the most violent, followed by gay male relationships and with heterosexual relationships being the least violent.
As the saying goes, "a man's perceived strength is his greatest vulnerability, and a woman's perceived vulnerability is her greatest strength".
Thank you for your research-based and data-driven comments, they’re illuminating and a welcome counter-balance to that other poster. I didn’t know about these studies: “Certainly studies into domestic abuse back this up with lesbian relationships being by far the most violent, followed by gay male relationships and with heterosexual relationships being the least violent.”
On the subject of violence by proxy, I recall a study showing that suicide bombers, who were overwhelmingly male, were basically chosen by their mothers from among their children and encouraged to do it for the monetary rewards their terrorism would earn the rest of the family.
Anyway, as you say we should all approach discussions about the sexes in a spirit of mutual appreciation and cooperation--and a dash of humor--not by trying to stigmatize the other half of the human race with ignorant over-generalizations.
"On the subject of violence by proxy, I recall a study showing that suicide bombers, who were overwhelmingly male, were basically chosen by their mothers from among their children and encouraged to do it for the monetary rewards their terrorism would earn the rest of the family."
Exactly. Men generally go to war for female approval. Like I said, without female approval (and with female shunning instead) there would be no wars (or suicide bombings).
An additional factor is having a culture/ religion in which young men are not allowed to masturbate, or socialise with the opposite sex (who are also clothed from head to toe in black and segregated from men)..... but they are promised 72 virgins if they carry out a suicide bombing. If that isn't sexual manipulation/ exploitation of men I don't know what is.
It's hard to imagine men inventing such a culture and imposing it upon themselves! And common sense tells us that religious and cultural beliefs are mostly indoctrinated to the next generation by mothers who obviously spend the most time around young children. Even in the west where feminism has driven mothers out of the lives of their own children, the majority of daycare staff and teachers are also women.
Feminism has always denied women's immense power to program the next generation's cultural, moral and religious beliefs because feminists' goal is to minimise the public perception of women's agency, power and therefore RESPONSIBILITY for how society turns out. This allows feminists to blame all of society's ills on men, and assume the passive role of 'children' demanding free stuff and special treatment from daddy government as compensation.
While this strategy works in the short term (in a material sense) it is ultimately devastating for the female psyche (which is hard wired to seek out male strength and masculine men to balance femininity) to be told by feminist mothers, teachers etc that men have systematically oppressed women throughout history and all violence is the fault of men. We've seen a progressive decline in women's mental health since second wave feminism, and now social media is just making things worse by allowing us all inside each other's heavily indoctrinated and traumatised minds.
Finally, the fact that most visible violence is enacted by men suggests men are the underdogs, not the rulers of the world. Violence is always associated with low social status, not high social status. Rich people enact their violence by proxy, because they can AFFORD to. Therefore women's tendency to have men enact violence on their behalf suggests women have greater social power/ social standing than men. Putting token men in leadership roles (president, police chief etc), is a great way to disguise this fact.
Wow, so much to unpack here. But none of this actually disproves the existence of patriarchy. Far from it, it can be readily explained by the fact that it is a massive pyramid scheme with ELITE men on top who designed it that way, even if the vast majority of men don't really benefit from it on balance and in fact are harmed by it (as are women as well, a fortiori).
You should ask him for sources to back up his assertion. The Intimate Partner Violence Survey indicates that lesbians /in lesbian relationships/ are less likely than heterosexual women to experience domestic violence, but this result is often misinterpreted because people fail to actually read the study, which reveals that 32% of lesbians who have experienced abuse experienced it /at the hands of men/.
Men have also been known to send other men to do the killing and dying for them. That's what happens in wars. Both men and women are capable of the same behaviors when it suits them. It's not as if a woman couldn't hit her husband on the head with a frying pan like in your example.
"Men have also been known to send other men to do the killing and dying for them. That's what happens in wars. "
If women stopped sleeping with soldiers and shunned them instead there would be no wars. If women didn't shame pacifists (white feather campaign) there would be no wars. If women didn't hit their babies and children (especially between the ages of 0-5) there would be no wars.
Most war propaganda involves telling young men they must go to war to protect their women and children. Soldiers are fantasy objects for women (think male strippers). Go out to any town centre on a Saturday night and you'll see men fighting men, with women egging them on.
We've spent the last century chastising men for their primitive behaviours, but women encouraging men to duel like stags (outside the pub, or on the battlefield) is a primitive behaviour that rarely gets criticised.
"Both men and women are capable of the same behaviors when it suits them."
Yes. But women's violence is not discussed or condemned in the way that male violence is. Social experiments show that when a woman is beating up a man in public people rarely intervene. Often they start smiling, cheering and even encouraging her. Even if the police are called, they are most likely to do nothing.
"It's not as if a woman couldn't hit her husband on the head with a frying pan like in your example."
Yes and the most common scenario when a woman is violent in a heterosexual relationship is for the man to take it (often for years), because he knows if he hits back (or tries to defend himself) and she so much as gets a scratch or a bruise she will be able to have him arrested and jailed. And if he loses access to the house and the children the woman is likely to take her violence out on the children instead.
“If women stopped sleeping with soldiers and shunned them instead there would be no wars.” OMG bro, it makes so much sense when you put it like that! The reason Russian soldiers invaded Ukraine was because Russian women were having heeeeeaaaaps of sex with them. If only those Russian ladies could have closed their legs for 2 freaking minutes, Ukraine would never have been threatened with annihilation by a nuclear power. About time we knew who to blame.
What's your evidence for the domestic abuse claim? In the study I usually see cited, people have looked at the tables but not read the surrounding text; and when the text is taken into account, it becomes clear that most lesbians experienced abuse at the hands of men.
Your other comment seems to be appealing to an external locus of control: men's actions are not their responsibility; they only do things because women have goaded them into doing them. But it is a fact that testosterone increases aggression, and it's also a fact that men comprise the vast majority of perpetrators of violent crime. Is it really helpful to say that women are to blame for the things that men do, or is that you avoiding an uncomfortable truth about your affinity group?
"What's your evidence for the domestic abuse claim?"
OMG the topic was done to death on the internet circa 2016 (before youtube censorship closed down the feminist/ anti feminist online debates) with numerous studies being thrown about. It's not even a controversial topic. A lot of lesbians (even lesbian feminists) admit that lesbian households are the most violent.
"Your other comment seems to be appealing to an external locus of control: men's actions are not their responsibility; they only do things because women have goaded them into doing them."
You're jumping from one extreme to the other. It's not an either / or scenario. One of the most annoying things about 150 years of feminist ideology is this idea that men and women are completely separate tribes, and that everything must be either men's fault or women's fault.... and that every social issue must therefore be a win / lose scenario.
For example, for every rich male CEO there is usually a wife who gets to have a walk in wardrobe and 300 pairs of shoes. Plus his huge taxes will be disproportionately spent on women. If we enforced equal pay women's standard of living would actually go DOWN as a result. This illustrates how absurd it is to view men and women as separate tribes in a win/ lose battle (of the sexes).
So anyway, the reality is that men and women's biology, psyches, motivations, drives, impulses and reactions are intimately linked and constantly feedbacking off each other.
To bring female motivations, female hard wiring, and female agency back into the equation is not to 'blame' women, but to reveal the other half of what motivates men. Male behaviour is very much a product of female behaviour (and vice versa).
There is no win / lose (except in the most superficial material sense). Human society is a joint enterprise and when EITHER sex lacks self awareness and self responsibility it adversely affects both sexes, and society as a whole.
" But it is a fact that testosterone increases aggression"
Well, in that case it makes sense that women would tend to employ passive-aggressive techniques instead. This trait of women has been recognised in all the great literature, fairy tales and art throughout history... the only place it is conspicuously absent is feminist ideology (which has almost completed its mission to re-write western history, western culture, the education system, Hollywood etc with its own weird, androgynous, anti-feminine view of women).
Also, testosterone promotes 'aggression' but not violence (in the sense of conflict). I believe recent studies show that in men testosterone is actually released IN RESPONSE to a violent conflict, helping to facilitate cooperation. There is even a hypothesis that high civilisations rely on high testosterone in men, and that when testosterone levels drop (as they are doing today) civilisations tend to descend into debauchery, violence and chaos. See any evidence of that?
"it's also a fact that men comprise the vast majority of perpetrators of violent crime"
Yes. So do poor people. As I explained in another comment, violence (like street crime) is an indication of low social status (desperation). In poor neighbourhoods when a couple is struggling to eat and pay the rent, the chances are it will be the man who goes out dealing drugs or robbing liquor stores. His female partner will stay indoors where it is safe. When he is arrested and jailed she will not be, even though she is effectively his accomplice.
Studies even show that women in poor neighbourhoods show a PREFERENCE for violent male criminals who have served time, when it comes to looking for a partner. She wants a man she can rely on to enact violence by proxy.
" Is it really helpful to say that women are to blame for the things that men do"
Yes. It is not just helpful but necessary to acknowledge that women have immense social power and that includes the power to define society's moral codes and cultural norms, which in turn dictates men's behaviour in society. I know that recognising women's agency and power is feminist blasphemy. I will go further and propose that men today actually need women to save them, or at least stop attacking them and denigrating everything about them.
Men - in general - stand no chance if women continue to play the passive victim (the inert object). In that scenario the only men who will thrive are psychopaths and tyrants. The sort of men who will ensure all other men are reduced to the status of serfs or bums, so they alone can create a harem of helpless, dependent women who must rely on them exclusively. Which is pretty much where western society is headed today.
If there are these studies that say lesbian couples are the most violence, etc - then you can't just assert that they exist and not link to them. You say it isn't even a "controversial topic" - I assume you mean the conclusions aren't controversial. However, having read a lot in this area, I have never come across even one such study - hey, might have missed it. But if you won't provide links to, at least, one - than I think it is reasonable to dismiss your claim.
Women are NOT all the same, and they do not all (or even most) think and behave the same way. All of your depictions are extremely stereotypical. Violence is more common among men for various reasons, but not exclusive to them. Women can also be quite violent.
"All of your depictions are extremely stereotypical"
I was giving examples of the ways that men suffer systemic violence at the hand of women (directly and by proxy). I was not making the case that 'All women are X'.
However, women outsourcing their violence to men IS A THING (and not just limited to humans) and society is very much set up to facilitate it. I'm not even saying it's necessarily a bad thing. It's part of nature and an integral aspect of sexual dimorphism.
Just as men 'rent' women's wombs/ breasts for reproduction and childcare, women 'rent' men's muscles for protection and resources. It's only a problem when the people start 'abusing the system', so to speak.
Our greatest safeguard is knowledge and awareness of how biology works and how it drives us ..... and a willingness to laugh at our own predictable hard wiring (and that of the opposite sex). When people lose that self awareness and a sense of humour, that's when everything starts to get really uptight.
> I saw this syndrome unfolding when my now-32 year old son was taught in his undergraduate cognitive neuroscience class that because the same part of the brain lights up when a person is physically hit or verbally insulted, “science proves that speech is violence”.
Wow, *that's* what the teacher took from that experiment? Seems to me that the takeaway there is "science proves that emotions do not necessarily reflect reality in any accurate way."
are you saying that feelings don't always trump facts, that "lived experience" may be limited or inaccurate, and that emotions should not always be trusted and/or obeyed?
FACTS are also an algorithm based on available experience... ALL experience begins in the physical realm - and feelings were the beginning of conscious thought... LOGIC is a meta-cognitive function that sometimes reigns in misguided feelings... but survival is based on autonomic reactions and so feelings always come first... Our education system & the sheer self-centered immaturity of American children doesn't allow much FACTUAL stuff - and most FACTS are questionable as well...
Definition of FACT=the truth about events as opposed to interpretation.
Definition of LOGIC=reasoning conducted or assessed according to strict principles of validity
You are obviously trying (unsuccessfully) to change the definition of the words 'fact' and 'logic' to fit a political agenda. That's clear enough from all the stereotypes about males and females that you are spouting. Extremists are so schizophrenic. One minute, you scream that people must "believe" in science as if it's a religion. The next, you claim that 'facts' can be anything you want. Both claims are false.
Additionally, the question is NOT which brain function came first in evolution. It's how to return to a sane society where freedom of speech and democracy are once again promoted, AND how to stop young people from being exposed to a mentality that promotes passivity, depression, extremism, and suicide attempts. The connection between both subjects is that the indoctrination of Generation Z also makes them vulnerable to the epidemic of authoritarianism.
No; incorrect assumption about my personal agenda, my presuppositions & reasoning. MY comment about FACTS relates to discussions in physics and other sciences about the definition of what facts are - and they are always based on feeling responses & the interpretation of (personal and/or culturally stimulated beliefs about) whatever may be behind the evolutionarily based filters of perception & perspective all living beings have... Try some cognitive scientists like Damasio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvwM6EINGZA&list=RDLVPrVJflJLooc&index=5&ab_channel=MicrosoftResearch
The FACT that you chose to attack without ASKING what I mean - and that you carried this straight into some political realm- simply tells others that YOU are motivated by political ideas & way too immersed in those biases & assumptions about people's approaches.
LOGIC is a set of methods to come to agreed upon generalized conclusions about agreed upon "events". It's a system for scientific exploration & a means of evaluation.
MY interest includes which functions came first in evolution and the FACT that conscious thought emerged from the capacity to FEEL and react rather autonomically and then via individualized patterns of reactions based on history & development... YOUR interest appears to lie in political prattle about changing society to your liking.
SCIENCE is a strict method that allows brighter minds than mine to share knowledge & make decisions regarding the nature of reality. I DO NOT SCREAM - and indeed, FACTS are agreed upon items within a cultural context. Historical facts often don't exist & were simply promoted (repeat anything 7 times & it becomes a truth to your mind) by the victors who promote the memes of societies. https://cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41235-021-00301-5 (The effects of repetition frequency on the illusory truth effect)
THIS article spreads memes... as does all media. Agreement of a few or many doesn't confirm the validity of ANY notion - it just makes it popular & easy to hold the belief about that topic.
Math is pure logic. By definition, logic ends are replicable. When one writes a query, for example, there can be many different equivalent queries, but if they all yield the same answers, then they are the same. Mathematical proofs are another example of this.
The reason why math is so important in education is not because it will be useful, but because it trains children how to think. One who works hard and masters calculus will reason better than one who did not. I believe that computer science flexes that same mental muscle that allows for better reasoning and conclusions.
I suspect that so much of the irrational, hysterical "activism" since the 1970's is a result of people with insufficient math training being allowed into positions for which they are not qualified. I have seen with with sociology students I have worked with. Students who are too lazy to learn the statistics they need to not only obtain their degrees, but to evaluate research in the careers they desire, are often the ones most likely to have unreasonable, hard-line positions on random subjects, and offer "feelings" as evidence for their positions. This is disturbing because I have seen such individuals awarded PhD's that they truly were not ready to receive.
Computers are wonderful because they do exactly what they are told to do. Most arguments are over assumptions, not the rational conclusions from those assumptions. We all need to stick with pure logic, and then debate the assumptions that underlie our differences. Feelings only get in the way. It is only lazy thinkers that avoid acquiring proper logic skills.
So sad that REAL science is now being abused to such a degree that logical fallacies are now being taught as 'science'.
Did you ever read the book 1984? The government in that sci fi classic had slogans like 'War is Peace', 'Freedom is Slavery', and 'Ignorance is Strength'. 'Speech Is Violence' fits right in there, doesn't it?
Having the misfortune to previously work in a profession where I was hit semi-regularly (maybe a couple times of year), I think your son missed in his class is that it is not the lighting up of a part of your brain that sucks about getting hit. Its actually the part the gets hit. Like getting hit in the nose sucks, or in the temple, or in the groin, or in even getting kicked in the shin.
The only people who compare actual violence with words have not had real, painful violence inflicted on them.
This can be quickly disproved with a simple experiment. Get someone to stand on a chair and then ask them to contemplate two scenarios (1) being verbally insulted (2) being punched in the face.
Then ask them which scenario they would chose if they had to choose one, and WHY.
Yeah this stuff has been ruminating in feminist circles for a long time. I remember once ~20 years ago in an argument with a long time college girlfriend who had stayed out all night getting hammered, on a night when I had driven a couple hours to her college to meet her (so she was way late getting back to meet me while I hung out with her roommate, and then just passed out vomiting). The next day while we bickered about it I took a piece of paper that was in my hand and crumpled it up and threw it at her.
Her friends seemed to think this was basically exactly the same as if I had beat her within an inch of her life. A single 8.5X11 thrown and hit her in the chest from 6 ft away. Definitely the same.
That's a good insight into the "speech is violence" fallacy. Words don't leave you with a broken nose or a concussion, so the equivalence is stupid.
Another example is that taking a large financial loss causes the same kind of emotional reaction that a threat to your life does. But of course losing money is not an actual threat to your life.
I agree with the main point, but if you lose enough money, it could be a threat to your life. When you can't afford food and shelter, that can seriously shorten your life.
In 1929, there were former stock brokers who lost everything and jumped out of windows. Just because you have money to invest temporarily doesn't mean you will have it forever. It's very easy to lose a lot of money very quickly with bad investments.
I have been very poor, and yes, a guy who robs a pizza delivery drive should be executed, but a guy who take millions from greedy jerks, a couple of years imprisonment and seizure of all his assets is good enough. In the US we do the opposite--we let the monsters who rob the destitute get off with a warning and we stick it to a guy who robbed greedy jerk who inherited the money anyway.
Weak people bring bad times. Bad times make strong people. Strong people make good times. Good times make weak people. And the cycle continues. The last cycle of high times followed by a crash was the 1920s followed by the crash of 1929.
I might also argue that since 1980 there has been a "slow crash" punctuated by larger recessions, as pay, welfare payments, and social security payments, have not kept up with the cost of living since then.
One could argue that welfare payments take people out of that cycle and create a sense of hopeless dependence that is worse than extreme poverty. I had a real bout of extreme poverty during COVID, but at least the time passed quickly because I was working 12-15 hours a day, seven days per week. The is an honor and a sense of belonging that one gets from a job, even awful labor jobs. The American welfare system is dehumanizing. Something like reparations and an end to welfare nd public housing would be preferable just for the psychological benefits.
> One could argue that welfare payments take people out of that cycle and create a sense of hopeless dependence that is worse than extreme poverty.
And yet that is the whole point of the welfare system, to make people hopeless and dependent. Hopeless and dependent people are more easily controlled and brainwashed.
I grew up in deep poverty and was homeless as a kid, and had a handful of times when we just didn't have food so I had to steal it. I can confidently say there was one kid in that small town that was worse off than us. And I watched the people on welfare, and the poor (my friends and neighbors), it seems like most of them just gave up on life. It was sad to see, and I was determined to never be like them.
We were on welfare and food stamps as well, it was a terrible experience and the rules changed every 1-2 years, which was confusing.
So I focused on my education and doing well with a good job. I also focused on working harder and smarter, not being dependent on anyone, and being hopeful and thinking positive.
Random, but for an amazing set of data to support this - check out the Opinion archive for The Tab, an all-UK student newspaper. You can directly see student opinions - and not those of just any students, but of wannabe journalists - change over the past 11-12 years. In 2011 the slant was still very much towards free speech, in 2020 there's an article admonishing Rihanna for appropriating the Qur'an. Everything politics-related is quite moralistic and scold-y in tone now, and echoes the mainstream Guardian/Twitter viewpoint. The writing also gets better and more interesting when you scroll back to 2010!
journo majors a totally brainwashed by journo professors. all as left learning as can be. journalism has become a cancer on American society. no attempt to be fair, multi-faceted, curious, questioning, open to many opinions/explanations. just adhere to cultural Marxism. talk about a lost generaition.
One of my friends toured a journalism department where his son was considering majoring and their student guide said “We comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” My friend said “I thought you were supposed to report the facts” and fortunately his son chose another major.
Gosh, vague in capital letters! I was simply appreciating and agreeing with the comment of Chris C's friend. I am a gender critical campaigner and a lot of the press are very bad at reporting the facts about gender issues. Reality is definitely on our side of the argument.
Discourse became quite insipid and dull around this time, yes. One must always say what is mandatory, never say what is forbidden, and all positions fall into the categories of obligatory or prohibited.
I have strongly suspected that my children's descent into depression over the last 5 to 10 years has had a correlation with the emergence of social media. I've even confirmed my hypothesis by enforcing technology-free weeks and seeing them return to the cheerful normal kids they once were. Alas, they are too old now for such heavy-handedness...one is living in the dorms and one partakes of virtual college. Both are connected inexorably to the Internet with social media like TikTok and all its damaging effects. The mere suggestion that they unplug from their screens elicits derision and being called a boomer. I know what I'm seeing though. It's like I've lost control of my own children to this evil world. My daughter even is in CBT but I fear her therapist is too liberal. We've even resorted to making her pay her own therapy bills which she happily does because she thinks this therapist is helping her but she's obviously only getting worse. This is my first time venturing into the substatic world, motivated by the brilliant writing in this piece and it's comments observed here.
I *just* left a comment to this piece saying much the same thing about therapists. Our teen daughter has had several and they all seem to be enabling her victim mentality (she's a white girl from a stable two-parent highly educated family), not getting her to step out of her disordered thinking. And yes, you cannot suggest that social media has anything to do with anything. or they rip you a new one (not that I care anymore about being derided).
It's certainly true that like doctors & all service providers, therapists live by selling their services on an ongoing basis - all things become subscriptions with reinforcing marketing for returning members... that goes for prescriptions, chiropractic, dental, phone, internet... nothing gets "taken care of" and everything becomes a lifelong chronic case for routine, ongoing care & cost. That's true. All I would work on to effect change is "where did she get the victim mentality and WHY is family influence not of help to her? It's not ALL just the therapists' fault or doing. Oftyen, what helps bring people out of such ruts is a serious change of venue (new environment, country - something to grab concentrated focus/attention).
Another overlooked factor is the effect of wireless pollution itself (microwaves) on our mental and emotional state. This is known to cause depression, mood swings, anxiety, brain fog (as well as heart palpitations, digestive issues, insomnia, skin rashes, nausea....etc).
I'm not downplaying the effects of social media, just adding more factors that make up the overall assault on our mental and emotional wellbeing!
WiFi is already being removed from schools in many countries because of the harms it causes to children (who are generally more susceptible than adults, with girls being the most sensitive as a rule). It's actually been banned from primary schools in France. Eventually it will be banned from all public spaces - just like smoking.
Dr. Erica Mallery-Blythe - Electromagnetic Radiation, Health and Children 2014
The background cosmic radiation is far worse than any of that. Furthermore, there have been so many attempts to find any correlations with radio, microwave and other forms of big wave radiation, and nothing, none, the same is true with power lines (that one is really silly). I would bet my life stating that there is no connection to electromagnetic radiation.
"The background cosmic radiation is far worse than any of that."
Background radiation is a quintillion times weaker than the man made radiation (that's 18 zeros). Even consumer meters show huge spikes in radiation around wifi, smart meters and cell towers.
And the frequencies used by the wireless industry are those which never existed on Earth before (except at infinitesimal levels). They are completely alien to our biology and that of all other plants and animals.
Microwave pollution from wifi or smart meters stunts the growth of cress or peas (in some cases they will not even sprout at all). Horses are often sick near high power electricity lines. Bees and birds have been observed literally falling out of the skies (dying in mid flight) next to cell towers.
The effects on animals and plants refute the claims that this is a psychological issue (nocebo etc). They - along with millions of people who are made sick by wireless technology - serve as the canaries in the coal mine.
Millions more people report the symptoms of EMR poisoning but without making the connection, because doctors get no training in the effects of EMR and there are no leaflets in doctors' surgeries informing the public on what symptoms to look out for. For decades microwave poisoning has been passed off as yuppie flu, chronic fatigue, the stress of modern living, long covid etc.
Typically people get sick and spend months or years unable to determine the cause, and they only stumble across EMR by chance - perform their own control experiments - and realise that is what is making them sick. The fact that the cause is discovered years after the symptoms appeared and they never feared wireless gadgets (often they love them) also rules out nocebo effects.
The only reason wireless has not been banned already is money. Having said that it is already beginning to get banned from schools in many countries because the children are getting too sick to reman in the classroom.
The collapse of the industry has already begun, and it is only being propped up because it is so profitable and such a wonderful tool of social control/ surveillance. But as more and more consumers throw their wireless gadgets in the trash and revert back to wired (and begin legal action to compel wireless free zones in public spaces) wireless gadgets will become increasingly worthless, as well as being toxic.
"I would bet my life stating that there is no connection to electromagnetic radiation."
You literally are betting your life. There is no 'would' about it. Although being sensitive to wireless pollution is somewhat of a curse at the moment, it has been pointed out that they are the lucky ones because they are already avoiding it like the plague and so are far less likely to develop chronic health problems and deadly diseases in later life. Being EHS is rather like being allergic to crystal meth. It's a blessing in disguise.
You might be willing to bet with your life, but don't forget all the major insurers are not willing to touch wireless tech with a barge pole. The silicon valley boffins who invent all this tech are notorious for being anti tech at home, and sending their children to Waldorf schools where wireless tech is not used. And the telecoms companies themselves warn their shareholders to expect massive class action lawsuits in the near future when consumers develop cancer, diabetes, infertility etc.
I work with a lot of wireless tech. I cannot see how large wave or visible light is going to hurt you unless you are staring at visible light. Short wave length radiation can get wicked, but radio waves??? No way. Even microwaves require a hell of a lot of power and concentration to get energy transfer.
There are no current electronically-produced forms of invisible radiation that do harm to mammals. They simply do not. Now visible radiation from the sun, that stuff is dangerous. I strongly recommend you avoid the radiation from the sun. That is worse than all the wifi and microwaves ever produced.
Similarly, short wave radiation coming from radiative materials (x-rays, gamma,...) are also some nasty stuff, but no one is using that outside of nuclear medicine. Alpha radiation from similar products can be bad as well, but no one is using that outside of nuclear medicine.
If you are seeing "poison" coming out of power lines or you can "feel" radio waves, please seek medical attention. This kind of condition is common and curable. I have heard Zyprexa works wonders for your condition.
Then you should know that thousands of wireless technicians get sick every year from microwave poisoning. It's a huge problem for the insurance industry.
"Short wave length radiation can get wicked, but radio waves??? No way. Even microwaves require a hell of a lot of power and concentration to get energy transfer"
Cancer clusters around radio masts have been documented for many decades. All the early pioneers of radio (Marconi etc) suffered chronic health problems. When Marconi first experimented with wireless on the Isle of Wight all the bees died.
Your inability to comprehend the harms caused by radio waves (including microwaves) is not an argument. The power argument is invalid because biological effects are caused at virtually zero power. In fact low power can sometimes be more harmful than high power. We are not talking 'sunburn' type of effects.
Water scolds at high temperatures but is perfectly benign at room temperature. However, standing in a ditch all day long or sleeping in a damp bed will cause injury over an extended period of time - despite the perfectly safe temperature of the water. Microwave radiation poisoning is similar in this respect.
Being fixated on the power of microwaves is as blinkered as being fixated on the temperature of water.
Yuri Gregoreiv (sp?) the Russian radiation expert who was brought in to help with the Chernobyl clean up stated before his death that non ionising radiation poses is far more of a threat than ionising radiation.
There are hundreds of military studies going back to the 1970's and before which have established dozens of horrendous biological effects at all power levels.
Until the 1980's microwaves were generally accepted to be useless for anything other than weaponry. Then the technology began to be used for consumer communications applications and a massive industry was born. All the science was swept under the mat.
Since the 1990's millions of people have suffered from microwave poisoning, starting with the most sensitive - as well as heavy users / early adopters who got 'yuppie flu'.... and then chronic fatigue .... and various other terms used to describe the symptoms of microwave poisoning.
The number of people now suffering these symptoms is exploding with the expansion of the wireless infrastructure. Most people now experience mild symptoms (insomnia, anxiety, depression, headaches, fatigue, heart palpitations etc). Many people are no so sick they cannot work.
"If you are seeing "poison" coming out of power lines or you can "feel" radio waves, please seek medical attention. This kind of condition is common and curable. I have heard Zyprexa works wonders for your condition."
The medical establishment is fully bought and paid for by the wireless industry (just like they were by the tobacco industry last century) and doctors get no training in the effects of EMF and so don't even know what symptoms to look out for.
They already are prescribing drugs to treat EMF poisoning, which of course is just adding more poisons to the body and not addressing the root cause of the poisoning. But of course this makes loads of money which is the main objective.
Despite the huge profits to be made from ignorance and misinformation on the subject, the science is slowly winning. Wifi is being pulled out of public spaces now as more people are getting sick. Russia has banned it (and phones) from schools, as has France. Many other countries are heading in that direction. Peru recently pulled down some cell towers which were causing local inhabitants to get sick.
The insurance industry won't insure the tech and the industry itself warns shareholders to expect a tsunami of health claims in the coming years. The tech should never have been deployed to begin with, and it will all eventually have to be taken down for the sake of public health, not to mention saving the environment. Birds, insects etc are dying in droves and they are not prone to nocebo effects because they have no awareness of the technology.
I will make sure to line my hat with foil good sir. My recommendations to you would be to:
1.) take at least two classes each in probability and statistics
2.) take a class on optics (you will probably need a few prerequisites first)
3.) get a therapist, and discuss your thoughts with her/him at length
I respectfully disagree with you, but I am more concerned with your health. Learning the core science and engineering will be good for you. It is also most interesting. I would recommend avoiding any formal training on radiology or nuclear medicine until you are significantly into recommendation 3.
Did you raise her to be feminine? Did you promote sexy bikinis at age 3? Did you tell her then that she is capable of being anything she wants? Did she sit through hours of news showing women being raped & killed? How about Trump era political statements about women not being pretty enough? How about the news about Weinstein or Epstein? How about the hours of Kavanaugh hearings? Was she exposed to old time TV Westerns with girls being slapped & shamed & sexually violated? Did you watch movies where girls were firghting stereotypes & becoming heros who "beat men" in fighting duels? (something that seldom if ever can happen in real life for her). Does she know that a 10 year old girl could be forced to give birth to her rapist's child? Does she know that girls have to travel far and wide & be shamed again for seeking an abortion? Does she live where girls can't easily get an abortion? Has she been sexually molested by any male family members? Is she caught between career & family decisions? Give your own daughter a fucking break!
Girl, you gotta break those chains you're shoving into everyone else's face. I'm sorry that you're in so much pain, but you're heartily and enthusiastically feeding the beast, not fighting it. You like, belong to it now. There's a whole other world out here waiting for you.
I've read more feminist literature (starting at age 16 with Simone de Beauvoir's historical account of women & oppression) than most people talking here - and "empowerment" is just psychotherapy to keep women silent and compliant. I majored in Psych in undergrad & my mother was a therapist. I am 70, so perhaps your understanding of history and culture is limited... but I must say that disavowing or ridiculing or denigrating anyone's deepest sense of knowledge about their world is a means of disarming the most victimized by societies. When you can ignore the every second REALITY of girls being sexually molested, beaten, raped & killed around the world... and deny history.... and shame your own daughter's feeliongs of depression based on HER life experiences & her understanding of the world - then you've not just lost your mind but your heart as well - and are buying into the most modern memes... or maybe the most ancient when it comes to women - "suck it up buttercup" - "it's OK, you're a girl - they have more pain & that's life!" - Have a drink bitch, after all, girls are girls... and it's not MY fault"... I lived the "empowerment" model - didn't buy into anything beyond acknowledging the rapes & abortions I went through as well as what I experienced in the world of men "Morgan Stanley, AT&T, ITT, and smaller firms". Sorry you guys live on putting down people rather than conversing - in believing you know more than you actually do - and in thinking that life is the same game for everyone everywhere...
I am happily married to a younger man - happily enjoying retirement. NONE OF THAT has anything to do with what I know from my life, the lives of most of my female friends, and the lives of our mothers' generation or my own daughter - OR the vast amount of feminist, historical, psychology and socio-cultural literature I've read. You guys are all about being king of some mountain.... I just appreciate lectures, books, & podcasts by scholars. Enjoy your psychological fist fight and pretending you're in some winning wrestling match. I have to go enjoy my day. Finding others who agree with you doesn't make your expressions true in any way - it just means you guys all live in the same era, same country, are of similar age and likely similar socio-economic or social backgrounds. ALL of limited openness, limited desire to understand or learn from others, limited empathy, similar desire to be right & get applauded online for it. ENJOY!
Limited is the correct finder on the male expression of "I know how it works!"
The exclusion of women's experience of living in a world governed and explained by 'experts'. The violence of war and pornography informs the male view everywhere like the air that surrounds us.
Sad thing is how quickly women also buy into the themes, memes, and slander terms based on (assuming they're mostly a lot younger than I am) a lack of really knowing the history of women OR having lived through the changes (and now back to the Dark Ages)... But societies forget the difficulties of the past unless they are constantly reinforced via media (as is done for the Jews and sometimes for Blacks). For women - what is reinforced via media & all news - is the fact that they are STILL the primary target of male aggression... and that women may FEEL free but are nevertheless the ones who can also say: 4,774,000 women in the U.S. experience physical violence by an intimate partner every year... and over 65% of women murdered are killed by their own lovers.... while 99% of all women are killed by men and 95% of all violent crimes are committed by men. So - this article wants to focus on the problems with being on social media "amplifying" a sense of victimhood??? HOW ABOUT JUST KNOWING THE FACTS? OR watching the news? Thanks for the willingness to state your truth...
Wow that took some effort to write…skimmed it, too busy otherwise. That said dear, stop your ‘projecting and controlling’ ways…my daughters are amazing and don’t subscribe to the negativity of this woke moment. They are mentally very healthy, well-educated and successful. Too many women today are too willing to moan & groan about their victimhood. This is a sure fire way to have a miserable life. Seems like you understand that.
Why don't you stop calling me "dear" - unless of course - you're an old sexist male with a superiority complex. OR are you being too young to be less than dumb enough to think someone with more life experience is just "an old woman"? What I understand is that
1) you need to promote that your girls are doing well and somehow you get the credit for that way beyond their genetics, early life experiences, socio-economic condition, etc...
2) You obviously are neither well read/educated nor interested in learning/reading
3) you like using current memetic phrases & terms such as "woke" in order to sound current while not really knowing much about the social order, history, or politics
3) You try to shut others down by telling them they are projecting or controlling - your own projection of your self-serving personality. I'm not selling anything while you're selling how successful you are as a Mom. Should we compete? (My son is an Air Force Officer - very well off & healthy - wonderful marriage & 3 lovely girls! - My other son is a dentist and "mentally very healthy" and well off. silly bs.
4) I wrote for a living my DEAR - so writing is FUN for me....
5) You are so caught up in your need to show off that you can't see the forest for the trees - EVERYONE hasn't had your fortunate life or lived in your neighborhoods or had the options or apparent fairly calm life you have had... In fact - most girls have lots of trauma - NOT drama!
6) I have a lovely life with a husband who is a great partner. I've lived a long, successful life despite the trauma of being a refugee born premature during war with Hep B, etc... travelled the world and love my studies & pets and nature. Have a great day you incredibly superior successful goliath.
So I understand you, the historic violence towards men and sexual exploitation of women is so essential to the human condition we should simply accept it and move on? I enjoyed reading The Second Sex when I was 16 as well. It made perfect sense to me (I am 46 now).
I want to disagree with you and hope we could someday create a safe society, but perhaps you are correct. Perhaps rape is is so natural that it is part of the human condition and can never be cured. Perhaps war is as well, and we are simply deluding ourselves instead of preparing for the next war.
Simone de Beauvoir is a feminist I can get behind. I do not understand why positive, empowering women such as that are not taught instead of this perpetual victimhood sadness that is spoon fed to young women today.
I told my two daughters to ignore the 'noise' - find out what you want to do in life and work really, really hard at it. Ignore the naysayers. And I am proud to report I have two very successful and well-adjusted women.
Stop being a victim and get on with your life. I understand, work-is-hard...but in a delicious way it also sets you free.
That's what the doctor told me in Nuernberg when I went for care after being raped anally at Monteith Baracks... Get on with it - don't be a victim - you'll be fine. Also what Dr Shah Zenian, Director of Psychiatrists told me at the Mid-MO Mental Health Hospital after he tried to rape me while interviewing me for an internship at 21. Also what I was told by the HR lady at Morgan Stanley after I was raped in Central Park at a company meeting... I was never a "victim" until I hit my 50's and the reality of all the events of abuse had time to sink in...Repressing is what women always had to do. Working hard never set me free - it gave me money to escape bad situations & serves as a distraction from dwelling on the past. You might want to wait until your girls are in their 50's and THEY tell you how they feel... Oh no! How they feel? - that's verboten!
I think there is a big difference between the same sentence told someone at the orientation to find the own way of and place in live or to tell it to a victim of a serious crime.
There was definitely a real problem that girls and women weren't encouraged to or even shamed for speaking out after being victims of abuse. But if now the pendulum swings too much to the other side with many people feeling and staging as victims for totally different things, this also causes real problems and this is what this article was about.
Today both types of victims exist and it is important not to mix them up and react according to context.
Another thing that would help greatly is to differentiate the different ways the word 'feeling' is used: emotions, intuition and physical senses (including pain).
I totally agree and know that girls are now under the guise of NEW and invalid assumptions about their situation - and that most girls don't have any idea of the past history of women's deaths in childbirth, from murder by spouses - or the social suppression of female ideas and abilities as well as rights. HOWEVER - that being true does NOT in any way take away from the FACTS - and those facts reflect that we are not only sliding rapidly backward in terms of women's rights to simple self-determination in choices related to their own lives & survival - but that 65% of women murdered are killed by their own lovers - and while we attempt to make a few derogatory words less harmful (all the verbal denigrating terms for girls that shame them for being girls) - the levels of actual violence against women have not changed and may be rising as we attempt to tighten the noose on men's ability to molest girls publicly.
There are always those who use systems for benefit and those who stretch truths - but in fact, victims are basically those who are the weaker being bullied by the bigger & stronger... and women are always in that position regardless of the judicial outcomes. Let's start with simple facts - mice can harass lions & cause discomfort - but ONLY lions can kill mice by simply stepping on them. Men by their larger stature, deeper voice, testosterone, & training to be aggressive & assertive BECAUSE of our social role differnces & physiological differences automatically are the ones who can cause the harm - the reverse is a relatively miniscule percentagfe of cases. ONLY men impregnate the person they have sex with (not the reverse) - so men never fear becoming pregnant - not being able to continue towards college or a career, etc... ONLY MEN can penetrate another person's body and invade it without consent.... but only women ever pay a heavy price for the outcomes of the act. Babies don't fear women's high pitched voices - they fear deep male voices. Young children don't fear Mommy's anger - they fear Daddy's anger; especially after seeing Mommy frightened and feeling her fear...
The focus on "women getting too soft & having too high expectations of men" is merely a distraction and diminishes women's already tenuous ability to deal with what everyone knows is the more difficult childhood and life... There are trans women who can't deal with the stressors on macho male behaviors (artists and nerds who aren't into football & boxing, etc...) - but overall, when they actually are speaking honestly and not just slandering women.... men don't desire to be women or live women's lives. Women are still seen as inferior in more ways than you can skin a cat (whatever that means). The point is that at a time when we are fighting the move between women being allowed to hold higher positions of authority & have a personal life (devoid of children strapped to her back & chest)... versus the recent moves to punish women for not wanting to end up with raising a child they didn't choose to give birth to... THIS KIND OF WRITING is on the border of disinformation.
There are those who abuse the welfare system - but that doesn't mean that the majority of them and others who get welfare aren't destitute or don't deserve help. What media has done is publicize and advertise the events - allowed women to get together in more forums to talk about their suffering & emotional trauma as well as advocate for women's needs. I know a lot of women - both among the poor & the highly educated & wealthier... and very few haven't experienced sexual violation, bullying, verbal assault, emotional trauma, a lifetime of verbal harassment and cajoling... they just don't talk about it once they become adults.... most have husbands and boyfriends and don't want to make them uncomfortable....
Meanwhile, women falsely believe that they can have sex at will (ala men) which is untrue since we're full of oxytocin & bond emotionally when we have sex (until we get broken emotionally by the excess & stop feeling altogether). Men don't bond that way - they are more visual & exude dopamine during sex... pure pleasure - over right after the act - once they engage in sex they look for new prey - dopamine surge. YES, women are depressed & teen girls more than ever - NOT because they are gaming a system or media bs, but because today's social setup that attempts to make the sexes "equal" under the law without taking into account the differences between the sexes & the fearful reactions of girls & the actual potential for death or lifelong suffering & 10 kids to raise - is a dysfunctional up social setup. The outcome? 22 year olf girls get knocked up by 15 year old student - SHE goes to jail for years - the baby is in foster care... BUT SHE didn't threaten or RAPE the guy, did she? NO - because HE had to have desire & was the primary actor in sticking his organ into HER! The laws about "age" and sexual activity was made to protect little girls from the violent act of a male inserting HIS penis into her.... now it's used against dumb and way too young girls who are teachers at 22 among high school boys... and most guys recall their desire for young female teachers!!! ANOTHER EXAMPLE - I'll use my own daughter... At age 14, she moved in with her 16 year odl boyfriend - he was a head taller 30 pounds heavier... muscular guy. They had a "fight" - he bullied and pushed her - in fright she hit his glasses off his face... he got a cut - and she got a "domestic violence" charge!
There are lots of problems with the ways we have attempted to make the sexes more "equal" - they include letting humans with penises now in girls bathrooms & taking over women's sports... Jailing girls for wanting abortions, for having sex with younger guys - allowing men to bully women in the courts after they've been raped & assaulted. I have 2 sons - 1 gay and the other a football-military type.... I sympathize completely with their troubles as well... but in the end, woman is the ngger of the world... still. Let the therapists deal with women's issues & let's just try to protect them from the murder by lover syndrome that is still so prevalent - every day we find girls bodies from some time ago... every day there are girls lured into sex & raped on porn sites... the majority of child sex trafficking is girls - not guys!!! The majority of people killed by spouses are also women!!! But we want to write about how women are either pussies & weak because they feel too much pain from it all or using the system due to too much online time? WHAT?
I cannot get over your conclusions (the inevitability of rape). Do we simply accept it, or do we exterminate the perpetrators? I would lean towards the latter, but I get the feeling you would say this is impossible.
Are the Persian Gulf countries correct in thinking that the only safe place for women is locked within family compounds? If your story is the norm, then we have a lot of execution chambers to construct. Prisons appear to only exist as a medium for corruption.
I wanted to chime in with an observation about progressive internet culture around the time in question that may be relevant to this discussion. I received my PhD in developmental psychology in 2013, and in 2014 when I was pregnant with my first child, I was invited by a grad school friend to a Facebook group called "Academic Mamas," which was full of > 10,000 other moms with PhDs from all over the world. A dynamic that I observed often in that group was a huge amount of pushback on any suggestion that people could, even temporarily, disconnect from politics to rest and prioritize their mental health. This was framed as a manifestation of "privilege." The argument was that people who were part of an oppressed class didn't have the option of disconnecting from politics EVER because their basic human rights were dependent on their constant engagement in activism. The argument seemed to be that for people with "privilege" to prove their ally-ship with oppressed minorities, they needed to similarly stay constantly engaged with political activism, both online and offline. This was a time when it appeared to become trendy to involve kids in political activism as well, so I have to assume that this ethic of constant engagement was being absorbed by children. The normalization of maladaptive cognitive distortions discussed in this article combined with the idea that it's shameful to ever take a break from political engagement just can't be good for growing brains.
Side note...I left Facebook in 2020, but I'd bet that there are some people here who are still in that Academic Mamas group. I'd love to know what the conversation about this Substack has been like there.
I've definitely heard that argument. I also like this counterargument from Salome Sibonex on Twitter: "If it's 'privileged' to focus on the parts of my world within my control, then I will live like the centuries of privileged peasants who came before us and before our mere decades-old invention of daily politics."
The root of the obsession with “privilege!” I think comes from social media as well. Looking at idealized versions of everyone else’s life has made everyone feel “un-privileged”.
It turned social media into a privilege contest of sorts, especially for <15 year old’s who at that age just want to achieve “coolness”. A recipe for the disaster we are dealing with now.
"The argument was that people who were part of an oppressed class didn't have the option of disconnecting from politics EVER because their basic human rights were dependent on their constant engagement in activism. "
This argument illustrates the level of ignorance so many progressive people have about what really goes on among those less privileged than themselves. The latter groups of people can't hang out with MSNBC all day because they have to go to work. For that matter, so do most of us.
I have seen this so much. It is repugnant how so-called progressives denigrate people of color and their agency. I am genuinely convinced that most of this nonsense was invented by hardcore racists who got rich white women to do their evil for them, when they are not self-congratulating for their advocacy.
What's sad is, for all these people are destroying their own mental health, and their children's, they are probably having net negative impact on the issues they are so passionate about. Constant online outrage is a recipe for burnout and not much else. For some it's just another professional-class status game, but I think most are actually sincere about wanting a better world, and just profoundly confused about what activism is and isn't. I speak from experience here unfortunately.
Brilliant stuff. All of it. While devices/screen time remain a pivotal impact on children's availability to "real world" activity/interaction with friends/peers...I also believe we've erred in pushing back against this attention-monopoly by creating an endless shuffle of curated activity for our kids.
We find the things they are 1) good at very early and/or 2) seem to bring them joy (very early)...and we go ALL IN. We ensure they remain enveloped in a world of like minds, unfettered successes, and relationships formed too strongly upon shared viewpoints/skillsets/desired experiences/outcomes.
Young Jenny is really good at softball at age 8? Softball to the MAX! Let's post about her softball successes on social media...let's make our family friendships revolve around our team(s) and trips...let's spend more time talking about our great softball memories and upcoming opportunities for softball greatness at the dinner table (when we make it...because we're usually at...softball practice).
This is bad for the softball heroes. And it's bad for those who don't necessarily have a curated activity like softball to embody their performative greatness. Young Jenny often loses interest in maintaining non-softball friendships...or simply sacrifices them to the alter of time/opportunity cost.
I see kids every day in my town that have NO life outside of organized sports and screen time in between. They are 10, 12...14 years old and have the social skills of 6 year olds. And their self-confidence is fragile. It's wholly-dependent. Their existence is unnecessarily narrow.
And it's the parents' unyielding desire to blanket their children in "be a winner" goodness that sets it all in motion. Resilience takes a back seat to feeling good.
This rings true to me and is particularly unfortunate because I have always considered team sports in particular to be a driver of resilience. Sometimes you lose! Sometimes you get called out on a bad call from the umpire. Sometimes you drop a pass. Team sports can teach resilience because you have to learn to accept the L and keep going, and you have a community experiencing the same disappointments to reinforce you. I don't think I'm refuting the point - turning sports into a helicopter parenting obsession probably undermines these benefits.
I agree. Youth athletics used to represent all those things...and more. It was an opportunity to turn strangers into new friends. Skilled players supported developing players. Fun was a priority. And it all took place in balance with "real life." Youth sports were recreational...accessible...and affordable.
They still are, somewhat, but we've now created a new class of youth sports that bastardizes much of those benefits. It is exclusive in more ways than one. It pulls kids apart. It monopolizes expansive chunks of time/attention that are/were otherwise available for the tedious, plodding, often frustrating purpose of exploring new activities/relationships, disparate interests, and alleviating boredom with a little help from (real life! in the flesh!) peers. Not a bad thing in a vacuum...but perhaps out of balance and exacerbating some of the long-term impacts we're seeing overwhelm a generation of kids.
Mike, this 'curated activity' eats into children's ability to tolerate boredom and consequently their creativity and free play. As a homeschool educator, I have observed that most families in the homeschooling community prioritize having enough free time to simply play soccer, swim, climb, or engage in a multitude of sports for fun. When my son was of kindergarten age, he observed that the lives of school kids seemed 'too goingly' - constantly on the move to get somewhere and do something scheduled; he much preferred getting his lessons done and then being free.
Thank you to everyone doing this work! I live in an extremely left liberal college town and have often remarked that the past 7 years have felt like living inside a communal mental illness. In 2018 a report on student mental health came out of the high school that was devastating. I noticed in a graph that social worker and therapy referrals had more than doubled after 2016-evidence of how much our Trump reaction was effecting our kids. I ended up reading Coddling of American Mind and started to painfully see how much we as a progressive left community were damaging our kids. When you live in a town that is completely ruled by this thinking you see how utterly corrosive it is. Taking away the agency of low income minority students to flatter this ideology is the absolute bottom and yet when you push back you are labeled an ‘ist’ and canceled. I know several students who are so anxious they are unable to go to the school and are sent to a therapy school run by the district. Friends and relatives living in purple or red areas have no idea what I’m talking about when I mention this. Even the kid’s appearance reflects this thinking-bedhead, sleepy pants, sweats, slippers, slides-like they never got out of bed. It’s a cult of mental illness. This way of thinking can not end soon enough and I plan to send this to our superintendent. Please keep going. The kids need this to stop!
I don't wanna belabor this analogy too much, but I just read the book "Raven" about Jim Jones and the People's Temple (highly recommend) and your comment reminded me of how children there and other cult members felt waking up every day in Jonestown: they never knew when they'd be singled out by Jim or the other leaders for insufficient zeal for the cause, or because someone overheard and reported a remark they made or dredged up an old comment they'd made and tried to paint it in a sinister light, or just because a personal enemy had it out for them—and they never knew if their punishment would be just to sit onstage and be berated by the group (Jim liked to have someone's family members lead the attacks, for extra destabilization) or some other bizarre punishment (like Jim getting to sleep w your wife).
There is also a commonality here in that both Jonestown and Social Justice are rooted in 60s Leftism, with some shades of Maoism too.
I think these things just represent modern manifestations of the fanatical religious eruptions that have taken place throughout human history.
When you visit extremely left liberal college towns you can feel the "communal mental illness." As a mom who raised kids in the cell phone generation, this article really spoke to me. I felt like I was watching in live time the lives of my kids friends and classmates. So spot on about the kids appearance comment. It will take articles like this to help others see what we see. These are very sad times for the young generation.
Respectfully, Dr. Haidt, there is no mention of the role of porn in the development of these toxic ideas and behaviours. Porn is so pervasive now and incredibly profitable. There are market forces that are normalizing the extreme sexual objectification and degradation of women, especially women of the age you're referring to. I think it's a huge blindspot in your analysis. It profoundly affects boys, too. I would imagine that boys, who are as young as 8 years old according to studies, cannot help but be traumatized when witnessing the brutality of today's porn. The book Big Porn Inc. https://www.amazon.com/Big-Porn-Inc-Exposing-Pornography/dp/1876756896/ describes the evolution (or devolution, really) of the porn industry and catastrophic effects it's had on the culture. Please consider adding this to your research.
What a perceptive idea. I agree. The rise of the personal phone and internet has made what was once seen as the realm of perverts into mainstream entertainment. Liberal women are more likely to try to please than a conservative (small c) one and porn has brought the ideas of degradation out of the computer screen into our schools and homes. If you have to talk someone into doing something, then it is not consensual.
Porn today is radically more extreme and pervasive in media. Combine today's porn with social media, then add the sexting and deep fake technologies and young women don't stand a chance. Porn teaches boys and men that girls and women enjoy being choked during sex. That it's OK to send nude photos to their boyfriends. That this is the normal way girls relate to boys. Girls are told this by their boyfriends and because they are trusting and naive, they accept it. This reinforces ever more degrading acts of sexual aggression. Boys also share the thrill of overpowering these girls with other boys normalizing and distorting what sex is about until it loses any of the pleasure, connection and sacredness it once offered between men and women. And older women like me who try to warn young women about this are shouted down and told to shut up. We're 'prudes' and 'ignorant', old-fashioned and 'out of step with the times'.
The ultimate travesty is that men who end up killing their sexual partners engaging in these firms of sexual violence that they've learned through today's porn are able to use the defense that she 'consented' and it was 'accidental'. And they're winning these court cases! This is just the tip of the iceberg of what's happening to girls in this culture.
The tragedy is that both men and women are being exploited by the porn industry - which makes over $100 billion a year. Not to mention sex trafficking. And don't even get me started on trans ideology which demands that women and girls completely drop any boundaries that remain. However, the most grotesque dehumanization is mostly happening to girls and young women. How do I know this is true? Because Every Single Female in my extended family has been molested, raped or abused by an immediate male relative or friend. Even my father was sexually abused by his grandfather.
So, it's no mystery to those of us, as older women, who've been noticing this widespread cultural trend which is fundamentally misogynist. This culture, which values and elevates boys and men, and devalues girls and women as human beings except as commodities that can be exploited, is known as patriarchy and it's in its end stage. The war on female human beings is real and it is accelerating. It is also the source of most suffering today in both men and women. Until the majority of men stop using porn, and recognize it as the destructive force it is and unless the culture learns that sexuality is not a weapon they can exploit in human beings, we will all go down in flames. Fewer and fewer young women will be capable of caring for their young. More and more will take their own lives. This world will become a hellscape for them.
Read the book Big Porn Inc. and you will understand what's in store for all of us. Many men like Jackson Katz and Robert Jensen have started offering young men an alternative. Let's hope they succeed.
I agree completely on what men do & how they behave - that sexism is alive & well & women continue to be molested, ridiculed, beaten, raped & killed (65% of women killed are killed by their own lovers/husbands) every second of every minute of every day in every country around the world.
HOWEVER, I must add that women play a MAJOR role in raising their daughters to be "successful" - and they raise most of them in pink rooms among stuffed animals & Barbie dolls with miniature kitchens to play with. They also raise them in mini-bikinis, teach them to be "soft & gentle" and how to use eyeliner & all sorts of sexually alluring items of clothing & make-up. AND if they try to NOT raise them this way - all little girls are exposed to endless marketing on TV, Billboards, in all stores, and online - and all of it channels the female this way. AND she watches the news & listens to movies & parents when we think she doesn't... all contributing to her understanding of her role, social expectations, and what the grown up world is like.
While I know that this sexualization of the female is almost a requirement for success to this day... THAT is also part of the BIG problem... LITTLE GIRLS ARE SEXY - and ALL MEN are attracted to sweet little sexy girls - taboos be damned. THEN, we try to KEEP girls innocent - which means they are specifically ignorant of the FLOOD of feelings that one day will hit her with an inability to resist the marketing advances of a guy... because she just 'FELL IN LOVE" and has no idea about the risks to her physically, or its potential theft of her career & time for herself, etc... OUR FEAR about porn & sex & our own ignorance & biases (inhibitions & perversion) result in her ignorance.... by not wanting her to be a slut - we make her totally susceptible to being conned & lured & manipulated into going places & doing things with people who will TEACH her about love & sex & the outcomes.
AS FOR PORN - Americans think they're the most advanced yet behave like a low functioning culture... IF we allowed sex -workers to be seen for what they are... social workers fulfilling the needs of populations of men who are unable to have the release of the most basic urge of all life... whose service to society manages the aggressive pent up energies of males who need to channel this force somewhere... THEN we could help limit the fallout from large swaths of men acting out their sex drive on children and women... using whatever means they can to achieve what is the driver of life itself...
A lot of our problems come from our American endless desire to fight for freedoms of every sort - and many of those freedoms harm others as a side effect. We should sometimes think: EVERY FREEDOM FOR SOMEONE RESTRICTS SOMEONE ELSE. Perhaps if would help if we were all more genuine (admit our faults & flaws) and forgiving - WE DON'T FEEL SAFE in part because we are always viewing others as someone to overpower rather than learn from. Many of social media posts are so much about BE YOU and self-love that we confuse the boundary lines between selfishness and self love.... we confuse what we need and what we want...
Our feeling lost is lartgely due to losing the extended family and our ethnic purities along with stable long-term neighborhoods.... none of us is safe at home in our feelings and the social media merely exaggerates or compiles the stories & conversations that reflect the reality of our lives.
In and of itself - social media allows for free flow of real information and lets me watch lectures with Profs at MIT etc... it's a virtual library and kids can finish college by age 10 in terms of knowledge if they choose to.... Social media is a boon for medical treatment that can be done virtually - such as Therapists & consults... Social media is a blessing to shy & socially inhibited or awkward people (such as Aspergers and high-anxiety) who prefer asnd can better engage socially at a distance - where they feel safe (and this i a large group of people!). The Internet is our next step to unite after we stop fighting. Porn wouldn't be such an issue if we weren't all so inhibited & unkind.
Boys did indeed have access to porn, but consider the added vehicle of porn that is mobile devices. Now, you're not restricted to the office or bedroom. Pre-smartphone/ipod touch (the device I began a porn addiction on), you needed a laptop or downloaded images/videos. Mobility of access is ease of access, in this case.
I don't think viewing porn on a small screen in a public toilet makes it somehow more enjoyable than it was before. If you want to argue it's porn, fine, but then you'd need to present an analysis like the one we're commenting on because it's really not obvious to me that anything meaningfully changed in terms of porn access at that time.
I was introduced to porn from Playboys my father left in the bathroom... and those pictures & cartoons ridiculing & exposing women messed up my sexuality significantly - I watch porn online now and am drawn to viewing very young looking girls servicing older men... THAT comes directly from my exposure to the many sexual magazines... at a very young age... I'm 70 & female.
Traumatized? I think that is a bit much, but I would say that many young men view women with a degree of objectification that would not have been acceptable to older generations. I feel like they heard feminist descriptions of objectification, and said "sure, I will do that just to spite you." Modern young men rebel by becoming racists and objectifying women the same way we used to playing pranks or spray painting public spaces. We grew out of it, but I suspect that they never will.
This is incredibly insightful, and aligns closely with my own observations. One thing that I'd add is that there is evidence that other social media, such as Facebook, has a deleterious, polarizing effect on discourse that also exerts a subtle but pervasive influence on adults. Over the last decade I've seen quite a few middle-aged friends, both men and women, become politically deranged, adopting the pathological politics of the liberal teenage girls discussed here - this despite no exposure to Tumblr.
My guess is that this is not something intrinsic to social media as a technology, but is algorithmic in nature. Big social designs their algorithms to maximize engagement - hence the slot machine addictiveness of it. They are also known to bias their algorithms to favor certain kinds of content. Thus, for example, liberal posts are more likely to be rewarded, while the timeline feed prioritizes liberal posts from one's contacts. The former creates a reinforcement learning loop, the latter distorts perception, and the combination acts as a Skinner box that gradually nudges people in a certain direction. I suppose that might sound conspiratorial, but actually it's not even necessary for the platform to put its thumb on the scale for a certain ideological position - an algorithm that simply learns what users "want" and gives them more of that will produce echo chambers of every ideology. However, the balance of evidence suggests that the polarization has been more due to radicalization of the left, than it has been due to the right becoming more extreme - hence my suspicion that Big Social has been engaging in social engineering.
That then implies another policy imperative: it must be absolutely forbidden for social media to engage in algorithmic social engineering.
I think it will also be very, very important for a cultural shift to take place, such that excessive social media use is shamed as low status. We need to unplug, and reengage with the physical world of real people, and we can't wait for government regulation to prod us in this direction.
Before responding I would just like to say, great comment John, lots to chew on.
I think we need frank acknowledgement and investigation into the massive potential for social media as a radicalising force and more education about how to counter it. In my life I have had three women close to me, all white, who have certainly had some ups and downs in their lives but not who I would describe as substantially disadvantaged, slide into fairly radical political beliefs during the pandemic. Even though these people are related to me, they're on different sides of my family and don't have a lot in common besides these simple factors, which makes me think that your point on "algorithmic social engineering" is spot on.
Steve Hassan's work on this has been really informative for me- I was recommended his ideas around deprogramming and deradicalization by an activist friend (who, I think crucially, is not white. Everyone else in this corner of my community simply recommended I cut out contact with my relatives, which is dismaying on many levels. I do think that Haidt's analysis of this polarization as a racial issue is crucial).
Hassan's work is much more involved than just this, but he talks to a lot of social research that we already know about radicalisation and what Haidt is discussing here too- that it is terribly easy to radicalise an isolated person (in any direction you like) and what is needed is to build relationships with real people.
I agree with you about the cultural shift around social media use, and hopefully at the same time it will be replaced by substantial efforts to build IRL community. I'm seeing efforts around this already, especially in faith communities, but I feel like it's still a long way off.
Building emotional connections across these divides is certainly the best way to bridge them, and to bring people out of the cult. This is much easier said than done. The totalizing nature of contemporary leftist ideology charges every subject with politics, meaning that anything you talk about, anything you do, is liable to venture into dangerous territory - at which point the interaction risks becoming angry and toxic. So it takes a lot of empathy, self control, and patience to do this, over a long period of time.
I think people default to debate because, one, they think they can win over the other person using logic rather than emotion (which generally isn't true), and two, because they're looking to win. It's a contest. This has gotten especially bad since the rise of social media because everyone is used to performing for an audience - one's interlocutor is not the intended audience, rather onlookers are, one is looking to score points with them, and after too long online this becomes second nature.
> It’s important to reframe your emotional response as something that’s under your control:
> * Stop saying “so-and-so made me angry by doing X.”
> * Instead say “so-and-so did X, and I reacted by becoming angry.”
I'm not sure about this, because it seems to me it obscures a small but very real and critical distinction, conflating emotion and response into one messy conglomerate.
Emotional reactions are not something a person has control over. If so-and-so did X and it made you angry, you did not have the choice to not feel anger in response to that. That's just not how emotions work. Emotional reactions, particularly immediate-term ones, operate more on the level of instinct than of decision-making.
What you *did* have the choice over was what to do with that anger. You could lash out in a rage. You could suppress the anger and not act on it at all. You could channel it into any number of positive motivations. You could let it fester in dark plans and desires for revenge. You could decide to take physical steps to calm down, such as slowing down, breathing deeply, etc. And so on. But it feels not only incorrect but a bit unhealthy to deny the basic reality that emotional reactions to external stimuli are not a thing that is under our control.
But CBT really does go further, and in my own experience rightly so. I highly recommend reading up on it if you haven’t. I really have found that between the stimulus and the emotion was an automatic thought — “He thinks I’m stupid”, “She’ll tell people I goofed”, “I’ll never get another job” — full of mind-reading, catastrophism, all the cognitive errors of which Jon and Greg list a few. And when you train yourself to notice them, and argue with them — “So what? I know I’m not stupid”, “What if she does? Everybody makes mistakes”, “That’s over the top, there’s lots of jobs out there” — it saps the automatic thought of much of its power over you and greatly lowers the valence of the resulting emotion.
The point of CBT is precisely that you *do* have at least some agency over your emotions, because you are not an automaton driven mindlessly by the stimula you experience — your emotions are at least modulated by the things you think, often so quickly that you are not actively conscious of those thoughts. But you can learn to be.
I think the old advice about “counting to ten” must have been an early intuition of this, not just to give you time to adjust your action, but also to adjust your thoughts and thereby your emotions.
I’ve done years of therapy (I’m a combat veteran) and this was exactly my experience, as well. With enough effort and practice, you can indeed modify your emotional reaction to situations. Over time, that rationalization you learn to do with yourself eventually changes the way you think and react entirely.
I agree. And if we want to influence or be heard by today’s teen girls we need more sophisticated responses than “sticks and stones...” They have experienced wounding from words that they feel deeply and need to learn to process in healthy ways.
True. While speech is clearly not the same thing as violence, there is some degree of merit to Randall Munroe's observation that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it." (Alt text of https://xkcd.com/1216/ )
I think a big part of the "missing link" here lies in Jonathan's earlier research on Moral Foundation Theory. This article talks about how so much of the harm that liberals do to themselves comes from looking at everything in terms of harm. Well, what does Moral Foundation Theory tell us about liberals? It says that they've only got two tools in their moral reasoning toolbox (out of a complete set of five,) and one of those two is "care/harm".
The old saw "if you're not a liberal at 20 you have no heart, but if you're not a conservative by 30 you have no brain" can be traced back to at least the late 19th century; the earliest form of it I'm aware of was a response to the French Revolution and people's reactions to it. The common stereotypes of young people being adventurous and wanting to change the world, and old people being set in their ways, are older still, with examples dating back to antiquity. It seems clear that human beings naturally become more conservative with age; it's a normal part of maturity.
Once you understand that, the Progressive indoctrination that children receive in schools becomes all the more horrifying when you see it for what it is: they are stopping our kids from growing up! No wonder those who listen are so full of mental problems; they've had their mental maturation held back in the name of political ideology. Instead of the full toolbox of moral reasoning that was supposed to be their birthright, they're left with only the simplistic tools of children, and they then turn around and prove the old saying that "when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail." When all you have is childish notions about harm/care, that's your only way to view the world!
And yet, for all that your cleverly-constructed bit of sophistry and cherry-picking may seem to make sense at first glance, the data clearly shows that *it does not work.* That adhering to it too strongly quite literally drives people insane.
It’s true that our first, default emotional reaction to any event or stimulus is automatically served up by the brain; the key is realizing that nothing requires or forces us to just ride that initial reaction and allow ourselves to be emotionally flooded by it. Through mindfulness we can observe our default emotional response to any situation, and that observation creates a mental space between us and our reaction. It’s experiencing that space that enables us to choose a different response.
It takes intentional daily effort to instill the habit of watching our automatic reactions and deliberately choosing less self-defeating ones, but there may be nothing we can do for ourselves that can more dramatically change mental health for the better and reduce or eliminate neuroses. Source: personal experience.
When I was molested at age 9 - I didn't know to get angry... I just reacted with fear & shame.... When I outperformed the men and did more pushups & was honor graduate - I got raped & then I got angry & did an IG report... The outcome of that was gang harassment - by all the males in the group... who REALLY got angry for my daring to outdo them...
When one has an instinctive reaction - it makes total sense to say "He did this and made me angry" or whatever feeling. The choice of what to do about it afterwards is about the capacity to think over the feelings and the actions that caused them to occur. But taking "responsibility" for feelings of victimhood? A victim is a victim! Like - tell the pig not to squeal in terror when you're slicing his throat to get blood for making bloodwurst....
I do find it interesting that we have to keep rediscovering these things. Buddhism established very fine ways to discuss and manage exactly what you're talking about over a thousand years ago, and despite having more access to information on things like this than almost any other people ever alive, we keep forgetting.
I used to try to use CBT and I found it very frustrating because I can't really control my thoughts or feelings in many cases. CBT for me works for me somewhat for some lower power thoughts, but I found the techniques of diffusion and expansion from Acceptance and Commitment (ACT) therapy to be more powerful ways of dealing with negative thoughts and feelings. Also general mindfulness and using meditation to cultivating witness awareness, to separate my thoughts and feelings from who I am. CBT felt too much like I was fighting myself.
Apologies for the length, but I just had to comment on this.
As a member of Gen Y (M, 33, born in '89) I couldn't be happier to read your encounter with the Tumblr/4Chan divide, the impact that online communities had on my generation, and Angela Nagle's work.
As I was reading this post of yours, I kept wishing you could find your way to that podcast series and to that episode in particular. But I was very happy to see that you already had!
When I listened to the third episode of "Trials", I felt like they had finally nailed a major, major issue that rarely gets explored in these conversations, and that's my generation's, and by extension Gen Z's, interaction with unsupervised online communities from a very early age, and what that entailed.
Jonathan, my generation, and Gen Z, have been running a kind of social experiment on a massive scale, a scale of hundreds of millions, and it's an experiment which asks, "What kind of personalities are formed, what kind of character is formed, when children grow up in spaces where they can talk amongst each other from a very early age and without supervision about how scary and alienating the world is? What happens when they start sharing amongst each other whatever they want? What happens when they start talking about alienation from a very early age? What happens when they come across sex from a very early age? What happens when their identity is formed in the amorphous liquidity of the internet? What happens when all you talk about, naturally, is how scary and confusing and inexplicable and incoherent everything in the adult institutional world is (from schools on up)? And what happens when you keep doing this year after year, and nobody asks you to look at how you grew up through a critical lens?" And since the early 2010's, we've been reaping the consequences of that experiment.
We (my generation) helped put an idiot in the White House for laughs; we helped QAnon become a thing -- in fact we helped generate it (CP = "Cheese Pizza" & "Child Pornography" simultaneously is an early bit of 4Chan culture from even before the 2010s!!); we became hyper-focused on reaffirming our pain and alienation to and at each other and the rest of the world be damned, because this is literally what we grew up doing!
The conclusions do stand, Jonathan. For years I've been waiting for the rest of the culture to catch up to the impact that these online communities, and internet use in general, have had on my generation. It's been a little more obvious to me because I grew up around people who used Tumblr and 4chan like maniacs. It has been the most surreal thing to have seen the fractious impulsive moods and cultures of those communities coming out into the real world and influencing actual elections, influencing actual national and international cultures and conversations, to an extent that it will now get written into the history books, chiseled in stone forever. I feel like this is the first major collective contribution my generation has made to the massive tome we call Human History, and I find it profoundly disappointing and saddening, because it's so scattered, it's so full of energy that's going nowhere, nowhere good. I remember thinking, "We are not paying attention to this stuff at our own peril. We need to talk about how we grew up with the internet with an extremely necessary transparency. In a way that we've never talked about it before. We need to start to deconstruct our own childhoods and adolescences looking at screens before we start to deconstruct the world."
I really think you should talk to Nagle, you should talk to people who study Tumblr and 4Chan. I think it's going to open your eyes a lot about why it all starts to spill out into the culture in the 2010s, just as Gen Y is becoming adult and starting to voice, as adults, their opinions about the world, in ways that now influence the actual course of daily events, even yearly "events".
An aspect of growing up in web communities that you don't quite capture in this article is how so much of that was constantly infused with the natural confusion and fear about the outside "grown up" world that everyone felt at that time -- that we ALL feel when we're kids and teens. And that developed and evolved into the activist streak that you see today, and also the nihilistic humor-mongering, irony-mongering, boundary-testing nihilism more common in boys, where there's a profound discomfort with the world, that has been cultivated from a very young age. Both sides of this divide are marked by an automated dissing of the world as it works today, even a disgust. When you let kids express to each other how weird and confusing and disgusting and painful and scary the adult world is, and if people keep reaffirming that because that's all they know, that's the only signaling of a "secure community" that they get, that's all they truly value (because it's coming from your isolated communities), and so people grow up to be confused and scared of the world. It never resolves. Along with helicopter parenting, and not enough unsupervised play time outside in the sun, and bulimia-advocacy videos, and porn use from a young age... you have this as well: the confusion and fear inherent in childhood not getting resolved.
My generation has grown up for 20 years without ever questioning how they got to be who they are. Not on this level. Not this deeply. The internet, and its influences and cultures, is just taken for granted. It is in fact seen as the only safe space, as the drug one goes for to be soothed, because that's home. The world out there, made by our parents and grandparents and their parents? That isn't home. At all. It's STILL scary. For a TON of people. I see this everywhere. Radical activism on a hundreds fronts? Doesn't surprise me. Almost suicidal nihilism and lack of sex? Doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
My generation's interaction with the internet, in the privacy of our bedrooms, is going to be the "wound", the nerve, that will have to be touched in order for this utter maelstrom of emotions and cacophonous scattershot energies to start healing. I guarantee you.
With the deepest respect for you and your work, and this ever-evolving conversation,
Hey João, I was really interested to read your comment as someone who also grew up on the American internet despite not being American, and born in the same year. I feel like you summed up our collective experience really well.
I think that some of our peers are making really interesting art outside of political binaries that interrogates this experience; our contribution as a generation isn't all bad. I have a whole list of this stuff in the back of my head if you're interested. Making or consuming art about it is one way to resolve this very EXTREME experience we had; a way to get to the "extremely necessary transparency" you mention. But apart from weird art and artists, I don't know many other people managing to resolve or incorporate our experiences of growing up like this, how to question it or heal it. Without trying to use the kind of pathologizing language that Haidt discusses as being such a problem, I do think it's a kind of mass trauma or wound as you describe. I was on both of these platforms; I rarely get a chance to deconstruct my childhood experiences of spending most days looking at the most extreme illegal content on 4chan and then going on Tumblr to be schooled in microscopic identity politics; people who didn't experience it don't want to hear about it, and for a lot of people who did, like you say, it's normalised.
Crucially I can talk about it with my wife, or some rare spaces like we're doing here. Otherwise, I'm not sure how to temper it- I do believe in the power of art and a reparative reading (Olivia Laing) so strongly; I'm also a bit religious which I think helps, talking to lots of different kinds of people; in the real world, as much as possible. How do we temper this fear? I have a lot of friends who are not interested in art or religion, and then this boxed in mindset makes community building hard. I would be very interested to hear what kinds of tactics you think we can use to resolve this alienation, us still stuck in our metaphorical childhood bedrooms in front of a cathode screen glow...
Thank you for mentioning Olivia Laing. I'm curious to look into her work.
You ask me if I have any ideas for how people of our generation can find their way back to each other. That's a hard question. Or maybe it's hard for us even though it's obvious and simple, which is simply to get off our asses and commune in whatever ways we feel are meaningful and really touch the soul, lol. But no, the path to get there, for many, no, is not easy. To even suggest this can be seen as offensive or triggering or misaligned with where people are, which I understand…
I think it's important for us to do internal work on ourselves, acknowledging that that work never really ends; I think it's important to know how to be in vulnerable spaces with others (you mention your wife, and religion, and that can be a good way to access that space); I think Art plays a role; I think music plays a role; I think reading and writing plays a role; I don't know how much of this will be addressed if we start being "social" in VR, with 3D avatars, no matter how engaging and fantastic it is. If on the other side of that coin I see someone taking off their VR goggles/helmet, alone in an empty apartment with a potted plant, with back problems and no exercise in his/her life, that's not a step forward I don't think; I think AI can help in a lot of spaces, for example therapy (imagine you struggle with being social and you can try as many variations of your own attitudes as you can without paying much cost, and using that experience to then go out in the world and interact with real people. Maybe that can help a lot of people. We don’t know.)
Despite having thought about all these interconnected, intersecting issues for many years, I still feel like I'm scratching the surface and not finding a lot of answers. And this is mostly because it's just so new, all of this.
I think we need to keep talking, opening spaces that haven't been opened yet, framing things in very new ways, we need to be innovative on a more cultural or social level, maybe even emotional level, and not just technologically.
I sometimes wonder where we would be if, instead of innovating so much in the technological sphere, on the "computer terminal" end of civilization, if we hadn't gone with the ideas of the “computer nerds”, and had instead focused on other kinds of innovations... I wonder where we would be. Cultural technologies, social technologies, interpersonal technologies, as opposed to physical, material technologies and gadgetry -- sort of non-corporeal technologies, new cultural structures, new rituals, etc. We're kind of distracted with the computer and its potentialities, letting it define everything else, and we're forgetting to look at ourselves and our needs and our limitations as organisms. We're like a prefrontal cortex civilization right now. I can't help looking at our relationship with computers and digitization since Englebart's UI presentation, and what I see is the whole of the culture letting itself be guided by what people who like sitting in front of computer terminals think are good ideas. That’s how we got social media and smartphones, and in the process isolated hundreds of millions of people and put billions in attention holes, just like the nerds who created these technologies like to do. It's like the computer nerds have become the tuning forks for the rest of civilization.
What if other social groups had become the tuning forks instead, you know? Some might say the intellectuals/philosophers; others might say the musicians, the artists, the Arts; others might say the shamans; others the Earth Goddess; others psychedelics; others religion; others War; others money, or the market; others might say the emotions; others might suggest whoever represents love or maturity of spirit; and so on.
That's what I wonder about, I wonder if it's possible to start veering in other directions at that scale, trying to put the computer, the digital world, more in the background, into a kind of invisible infrastructure domain, while human beings are then left to live their lives without having to necessarily having to interact with these more abstracted systems and their demands, getting to build more of a space for themselves and each other. I know this starts to sound a little too much like Richard Brautigan's poem "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace", but it's not quite that, lol, although, I’m sure AI is going to change a lot of things. The “Loving Grace” would fundamentally be human and not substituted, mediated, with technology.
That’s another thing. I sometimes don't understand why we put so many layers between us, between each other, and between us and the world. It's amazing how mediated everything between people is nowadays. And we’re going to add AI to that, we’re literally on our way to creating fake others now. What is that about? Looking for control again? Looking for understanding and empathy again? Looking for low risk again? Looking for efficiency above everything else (I think this is a big one). I sometimes wonder if it's not possible to "desintermediate", or "unmediate", or more fully "embody" humanity, as opposed to "disembody" our relationship with the world and with the other beings around us.
That's more or less where my mind goes, but I'm still very much exploring. I don't have any answers exactly. Haha
This is all very complicated stuff. The most important for me is to have humility when facing it all.
I'm happy that you saw something of your own experience in what I wrote. I'm sure plenty of people do not, but I think the amount of people who do relate is very large and it hasn't really been looked at. Not at this level.
I, of course, do think our generation has some fantastic individuals who are contributing in very important ways, in many dimensions of life. Too many to name here.
But you mention Art. Even though it's not an area I'm deeply immersed in, I don't doubt that there's plenty of contributions from our generation there.
I'd definitely be interested in Art that you think questions and explores some of the things I wrote above. For me, I don't have to explore these issues simply through arguments and statistics and data. I'm more than happy to welcome other angles at which we can look at what's been happening "to us" for the past 25 years or so. I agree with you, Art is a way to access that transparency that I mentioned and said was necessary, even though in my mind I was simply thinking of spoken word, scientifically informed discussions that look at the psychological depths of what's been happening. But I'm definitely open to exploring these things through more non-verbal / non-"verbalizable" means. I think art can be very stimulating and spark very interesting insights and new connections, which we definitely do need as well.
You say despite the art that some people make, you can't quite think of others who may be questioning and resolving the tensions. I think each person does this in their own way. Maybe one can notice trends, patterns. I think lots of people try to resolve it through activism, through wanting to change the world; I think many try to resolve it through more psychotherapeutic frameworks, sometimes well, sometimes distorting it; then I think there's attempts at doing this work that misfire, that aren't really that healthy, like the nihilism, like the constant demand that the world bend to your own sensitivities, etc. The world can't be the friend or parent we might feel we never had. Another problematic one might be through sexuality, masturbation and/or pornography use as a soothing mechanism in contexts where people aren't getting enough intimacy or releasing tension in other ways. And I mention this as someone who is incredibly sex positive and is definitely not a pearl clutching conservative who wants to see it all banned or whatever. There's something about this area that I think also needs to be looked at with some maturity. I don’t think our generation is quite ready to do that, although there’s some inklings of it here and there. There’s a sense that we’ve stretched ourselves really thin with all the total availabilities of the internet.
I think trauma plays a part, but I think the term gets overused nowadays -- this connects to the psychotherapeutic frameworks I mentioned above that I think people use to navigate their own experience of life, which is extremely understandable. I think this also connects with the internal experience of not knowing what to do with hurt as an internal event in oneself, that discomfort, that sadness, that slashing of expectations or innocence about something, and not knowing how to integrate new experiences, almost being offended at being asked to grow, being offended by personal growth when it’s painful (but this is very human, lol). And I'll digress for a bit, but I see this, in turn, in some ways, especially with boys, connecting with video game use (again, I sound like I'm only putting tired conservative points of view on the table here, but I really don't see it that way. I'm not coming at this from a traditionalist or conservative perspective).
I don't know if video games could be called art exactly, but some people do, so I guess it's relevant to the discussion in the way you've framed it?
Something about games, and the internet in general, that I've noticed is the control aspect.
Online, everything becomes hyper-managed and manageable. It's hyper-calibrated. You can manage who comes and talks to you; you can think before you speak and put your thoughts in order; you can delay responses; you can tinker with the difficulty levels in games; the consequences for behavior are much lower online as well as in games; pressures are much lower; risks are lower; it's a world that happily indulges whatever repetition compulsions you may have.
Growing up in that much more controlled environment habituates your system to a certain degree of pushback. But when out in the real world, that's immediately anxiety-inducing. And it puts a person in immediate contact with the feeling that they can't keep up (which I think is massive in our generation). And there's shame in this that very often just goes unspoken, because it's extremely vulnerable territory to get into with other people face to face, not to mention that a lot of people aren't even aware that this is what's going on for them. A lot of people of our generation, and Gen Z, have been put in a kind of hole where the key will be to express that they can’t keep up, that they need friends, and that they feel really lonely, and that’s a massive ask for people of this generation.
To express incomprehension at why the world cannot be more thoughtful, more aligned with you and your needs, to not understand why it can't be as simple and as emotionally meaningful as the entertainment you've consumed throughout your life, as meaningful and attuned as the conversations you've had online, these are all questions and frustrations that have come up in my conversations with friends who are of the same generation. This kind of stuff keeps showing up.
But back to trauma, or "the wound". When I wrote that I wasn't necessarily thinking of 4chan, or even porn use, even though it's certainly part of it. I was more looking at it from the alienation perspective, from others and from self (or "better self"). I don't think everyone's on 4chan getting traumatized and putting on enormous weights of shame on themselves, or going on Tumblr and getting their identity pushed and pulled in a hundred directions and excusing it all as freedom of spirit and fluidity. I think there's a trillion gradations for people in our generation. Some people might've gone through what could be considered a more classical youth path, but that’s definitely not the majority -- meaning, the majority is going through a very new kind of experience, and the internet, as a thing, plays a major role. And like you say, this can get so normalized, so taken for granted, that it becomes the kind of thing you don't even notice.
What I see is a generation interested in the pulverization of boundaries, of norms, of strictures, for reasons I've expressed above and in my previous post. And when the world, being what it is, pushes back, for many, there's a default response of either feeling hurt or feeling irritated/dismissive. This letting go of strictures, of expanding our own personal overton windows, of what we're comfortable with, can be freeing or it can distressing, depending on where we're going with the explorations and how much we feel those explorations contradict who we sense ourselves to be, or how others see us, whether we care or not.
These are pretty complicated topics, lol. And whenever I think about these things I feel like I'm overgeneralizing.
Great contribution to the conversation! And refreshing that you don't view things through a preset ideological template like some commenters do.
A lack of a sense of belonging and not being comfortable in the world as it is now are really important factors here.
Both the world needs to change somewhat, as well as the paths (social, institutional, personal) to individual growth and maturity need to improve and keep up with the times.
This seems to complement Twenge's argument about children's lack of free play. Apart from school, when a child's primary means of connecting with others and developing social skills is on social media, where their frames of reference on how to treat themselves and others is presented in the most trivial and histrionic ways, how much of their growth is being stunted thanks to these fast food substitutes?
Anecdotally speaking, I find myself preferring to text people instead of calling them, to have random conversations instead of scheduling a dedicated time to connect with them. It's so gosh darn easy to use these shortcuts when you have a smartphone! Lately I've been trying to encourage friends to text me less and either meet up with me in person or at least have a video chat so we can give each other our full attention. For some, it's very foreign to them!
If smartphones are here to stay, let's make sure we're using this technology intentionally and with discipline so it doesn't use us. If it's hard for me to do this, I can't imagine how hard it is for young teenagers with far more on their plates!
Social media may not be real life, but the behaviors it and smartphones encourage (fragmented multi-tasking, constant notification checking, social comparisons) are seeping into our real lives whether we like it or not.
Fully agree! Part of the solution is 'getting real'. I just recently posted an article on TikTok brain cure with three ingredients https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/tiktok-brain-cure-with-three-ingredients, which discusses steps to move back toward real relationships, conversation, nature, movement, tolerating boredom, and creating.
Couldn't you argue with the claim that "real world socializing [is] massively more valuable" given that a significant amount of time is actually spent interacting online (be it through messaging systems or social media in general)?
It seems like what we need is a broader notion of socialization that incorporates "real" and online communication. That would help us raise children, who will grow to be citizens, to handle both spheres and appreciate how they are intertwined. Social media and the internet in general has effectively broken the "real world" paradigm. Continuing to conceptualize these issues in dichotomous terms is reductionist and doesn't get us anywhere, imo.
Thank you for this wonderful article on an important topic.
In addition to writing about policy implications, you might consider including some less idealistic (and more realistic) coping strategies for parents. Some will read this and think, “Head to the hills!”--reinforcing the walls around their subculture in a way that prevents their kids from developing the skills to relate and engage with most of their contemporaries. Others will focus on trying to control internet usage in a way that inhibits their kids’ development of locus of control. Others will give up too soon. As an idealist myself, with a 17-year-old daughter, I found it useful to develop a “distract and delay” strategy. I delayed getting a phone as long as possible, prioritized and supported almost any sort of off-device engagement, kept phone away from her at night, on Sundays and during meals, etc. Knowing that she would eventually need to set her own limits, I relaxed rules later in high school. She never got into posting a lot and says “social media is boring after a while.”
Mar 9, 2023·edited Mar 9, 2023Liked by Zach Rausch
How do you think about the Tumblr hypothesis versus the Instagram hypothesis?
In this post, you focus more on the Tumblr-based hypothesis, which explains why the rise in depression is hitting liberals hardest. But in other writing you've talked more about Instagram and how it's implicated in the self reports of teen girls, particularly around body image. These hypotheses are very different, and the existence of both of them could open up you to charges of excessive theoretical flexibility.
I personally think it's reasonable to keep both hypotheses alive. Both Tumblr and Instagram were Gutenberg-level shocks to teen social life, so it wouldn't be surprising if they both had a big impact on mental health, each in their own way.
Here’s a thought. In Liberals, the main effect of social media on depression is driven by reverse-CBT. In girls, the main effect is driven by Instagram.
That would explain why there is maximal impact on liberal girls, as well as why you didn’t find strong gender differences in reverse-CBT mechanisms (e.g. Fig 3, Fig 6)
They're profoundly different platforms in terms of tone and content; I think the only real point of comparison is they're American products on a screen? They should be analyzed separately, I think this is a crucial point.
Even boys have strange body issues now. They no longer compete to see who can lift more, but instead talk about how "cut" they are and how they look. It is disturbing. I was terrified my nephews were being groomed by child molesters, then I simple found out that their obsession with their physical looks is the new normal. Instead of curing the female diseases, we spread them to boys.
“Has a doctor or other healthcare provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?”
While this is interesting, I'd first like to know how many of them went there explicitly to get that very diagnosis in the first place (so they can run and tell their TikTok followers that they're legit), and the doctor just went along with it because they like money.
As someone who's successfully manipulated doctors into saying what I want, I gotta say... I don't really trust them that much... and the last few years have not helped at all.
This reminded me of something that was in LinkedIn recently from Dr. Brad Klontz, Financial Psychologist.
To My Capitalism-Hating Friends,
I love you.
I appreciate your sensitivity, your sincerity, your sense of fairness and your desire to make the world a better place.
I also appreciate your thoughtful insights into the downsides of capitalism, which are many.
But you and I are different.
I am not an economist, politician or a sociologist.
I am a clinical psychologist.
I have dedicated my professional life to helping real people improve their day-to-day lives.
In my work in the trenches, highbrow political musings about capitalism, socialism, etc. are TOTALLY USELESS for people who actually want and need to change their lives TODAY.
Even worse, suggesting to people that they CAN’T change their plight because the “system is rigged” is just HORRIBLE.
You’re actually HURTING the people you say you want to help by spouting that disempowering nonsense.
Please stop doing that.
People like me - who grew-up economically disadvantaged - can’t afford to wait for people like YOU to change the entire system of government to give us a leg up.
We can’t afford to believe that “the system is rigged” and we are powerless to create a better life for ourselves and for our families - and the evidence just does NOT support this claim.
Politicians have been promising to make our lives better to get our votes - but nothing has changed.
As a clinical psychologist my role is to help people achieve their goals and reach their highest potential.
My focus has been in the area of financial psychology. I have conducted psychological studies on thousands of individuals from all socioeconomic backgrounds.
I have studied the mindsets, habits, and lifestyles of people who grew-up POOR and have been able to climb the socioeconomic ladder.
Their stories are inspiring, their psychology and behaviors can be taught, and their results can be replicated.
I will continue to share these mindsets and habits to help inspire people who want to create a better life. I will continue to dispel myths about the rich that keep people poor. I will continue to call out self-destructive beliefs about money.
I will continue to do my best to give people the tools they need to change their lives - because NOBODY is going to do it for them.
I will keep focusing on helping people win the game we were all born into.
I appreciate your desire to make the world a better place.
When you’ve successfully changed the game I will immediately shift-gears and do my best to teach people how to win at the new game you’ve created for us.
You have nicely displayed the inherent contradiction one always faces and it takes many forms. For instance I'm convinced that every time somebody gives 10,- $ to charity this reduces the amount the state provides out of taxes by the same amount because the state will always only give just "enough". So charity by ordinary people is just making the rich richer. But can I uphold that position when I see somebody in need ? No, of course I have to give when I can. Or take the so called disobedience by social protesters. They do break the law, which I resent. And they do hurt ordinary people, which I also resent. But do I want a world where protest that actually has any chance to change something becomes practically impossible ? No. This internal contradiction between good positions and doing bad things for the good cause is really why left positions never seem to be able to hit their mark while they are actually aimed to really help the overwhelming majority of the people. Navigating this in a successful way is close to impossible imho.
I was excited to see the reference to Tumblr in the piece. As someone who entered college in 2011 (and graduated in 2015), it always struck me as plain-as-day that Tumblr directly impacted this cultural shift. I was someone who always felt just a tad bit too old for Tumblr that people a few years my junior were obsessed with, which coincides with the timing you and Greg mention taking hold in colleges in 2013.
Great, comprehensive, survey about an essential subject!
I saw this syndrome unfolding when my now-32 year old son was taught in his undergraduate cognitive neuroscience class that because the same part of the brain lights up when a person is physically hit or verbally insulted, “science proves that speech is violence”.
We’re dealing with a cultural mood that has found numerous ways to insidiously infiltrate our civilizational consensus. I hope articles like this--evidence-based and data-driven--can help turn the tide, but if not there are bad times ahead.
What an absurd conclusion to draw, when the obvious lesson to be inferred is that your brain will react to verbal insult in such a fashion, one should therefore be conscious of this and make a special effort to remind oneself that it is not the same as a physical assault. Sticks and stones etc.
Another way of putting it - we should be teaching kids how to take a punch, roll with it, absorb it, and yes how to punch back (proportionately) if necessary. One should be able to give as good as one gets, this is important to maintaining an internal locus of control.
I suspect the bad lessons learned from such research are related to it being interpreted in the context of 'zero tolerance' safety culture.
Yes, part of Haidt’s point is that truisms that guided us for centuries have been foolishly rejected. “Sticks and stones” is a great example.
Even more profoundly, this same pseudo-science is the supposedly “data-driven” foundation for the opposition of many sincere Americans to our constitutional right to free speech.
Here are a couple counterpoints for your consideration.
First, “sticks and stones” is great for dealing with an inarticulate bully in the schoolyard, but we do eventually grow up and learn that about things such as workplace harassment, politics, propaganda, etc. (Though I do find it amusing when authors continually argue against the power of words in their essays, hah.)
Second, I think we may be mischaracterizing some of these young folks as ill-equipped to deal with the real world simply because we want the world to be to our liking, not to theirs.
Another way of characterizing today’s youth is that when they hear something they find inconsiderate (or worse), they take action and push back. It may not be to our liking, but taking action is the opposite of having a victim mentality, is it not?
For example, whether or not a particular word is offensive is something that can (and does) change over time. Sure, we may find it annoying that the words we have become used to saying are more likely to bother younger generations, but how do we know we aren’t the ones catastrophizing (and pretending we have always been free-speech absolutists)?
Proportionate response is missing. The appropriate response to words is words - arguments should be met with arguments. One should give as good as one gets, obviously. Hysterical meltdowns because someone used a word that sounds like a word you don't like (as has actually happened) is not "pushing back", it's narcissistic rage on a mass scale. Liberal females making excuses for that are enablers when they're not directly responsible for breaking those kids' brains in the first place.
Oof. No rage or hysterical meltdowns here, I guess? At the risk of appearing to self-censor, I’ll leave you guys to it.
and YOU sound very much like a misogynist who has NO CLUE about female physiology, evolutionary differences, or women's psychological differences & the reasons for them.
I'm not sure what the point is that you're trying to make with that little outburst.
Of course, someone like you would accuse everyone who disagrees with you of misogyny.
We know that because we aren’t the ones who are the depressed/anxious speech police.
I have been really struck by how unfamiliar with basic pain my 9-11 children I coach through youth sports are. They play a rough sport, and they will get hurt, and they just want to lay there until they get validation/attention. It takes surprisingly little "tough love" to teach them that no, this injury that you will forget about in 3 minutes does not require stopping the game, it doesn't require someone giving you attention. If it hurts and you need to cry, cry, if you cannot continue don't continue. But 98% (more) of the time, if you tell the kids to "buck up" they will, and then when they don't "buck up" you know there is actually something wrong with them.
So many seem to not have internalized that just because something has hurt, maybe even really bad, doesn't mean almost anything. Getting hit in the face with a ball or falling and skinning your knee hurt a TON. They also are things that are over within minutes.
Once they get a little older you need to watch out for more actual serious injuries, but the 9 year olds aren't breaking many bones. And it is important to teach them some toughness early on so you don't need to spend all your time sorting out real injuries from malingering later.
Your comment reminds me of my nephew who was bullied in school. His mother advised him to go to the (female) teacher if this would happen, my brother said he should punch the guy. One punch made the bullying stop. Oh well...
heh, the one time i had a bully in middle school that was exactly what got him to leave me alone. got me suspended for a day, but it needed to happen.
Females of most species are the NURTURERS - they GIVE LIFE - whereas the male of most species does the hard job of defense - killing & fighting. So the female is designed by evolution & motherhood to SUFFER WITH others & FEEL THEIR PAIN... while the male is designed to FOCUS ON SINGLE GOALS & DESTROY THE ENEMY. BOTH have positive & negative outcomes. The FEMALE is AVERSE to being violent & cringes at the notion while the MALE instantly and AUTOMATICALLY is ready for COMBAT - Hence - the male can & will at times maim & kill his own mate & offspring while the female (at best) will die to defend & protect her babies... THERE IS YOUR "Oh well"...
Actually, when compared to men, women are more likely to kill their own children.
Not exactly. Large % of men who kill children do so in violent response to threat of separation or divorce. Women who do so, invariably are both mentally ill (in serious treatment) and depending on the age group will act out of despair over lifelong sacrifice via unwanted pregnancy, depression over spousal violence - in other words: despair & suicide versus rage & intent to murder. The women want to die - the men want to kill them. EXACTLY!
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17396572/
Is the change in society detailed in the article above related to the empowerment of women? If so are the changes good or bad?
No-one dares address this question. I will apologise now Maria, and duck out :)
Everything is related and connected - life is a complete weaving whose interconnections create & define the identities that meet at each juncture. I'm not sure there is much change - 'mothers despair' or being forced to eliminate an infant for hunger is ages old and the male (among our ancestors-the apes) will literally tear an infant from the arms of its mother limb to limb FOR THE PURPOSE of freeing up the mother's energies and "womb" for HIM. Male apes will harass a female and much if not most sexual coupling is essentially rape among our various ape ancestry (perhaps except the Bonobos)... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_coercion_among_animals
I have MUCH longer answers to the question of whether recent & current evolutionary changes are good or bad. Until we literally change females into males and the reverse - women will continue to suffer as those of lower testosterone (men have on avg 20x the amount women have) which also means lower muscle mass, height, and the urge to cringe and scream in fear versus the urge to aggress, dominate, and kill.
Women's empowerment has slowly begun in direct response to social advances & freedoms wrought for OTHER groups (Black vote, etc...) coupled by cultural recognition of extreme inequality that led to women's lives as the lowest slave or the upifted slave - who somehow always remains the slave... It is to some degree "natural" for little boys to be told "don't be a sissy, be a boy not a girl!" as I overhear regularly in the local pool as young fathers talk to their whining sons. WE ALL grow up seeing & hearing and knowing that the female is beaten & raped - but it's done with such assumptive regularity (every news hour in every town & city around the country if not the world) - that mankind in general ACCEPTS IT AS INEVITABLE and it's heard so much that we no longer even react with ANY seriousness - just as we do when we get too much regular ingestion of a drug & become accustomed to it - requiring MORE in order for our senses to react to the stimulus. IF MEN were seriously changed - there should be large groups of men rallying and marching in protest over women's abusde - but given that more than 50% of all males at some time or other, threaten, want to, and do hit the women they "love"... 65% of all women murdered are killed by the men they sleep with. AND NUMBERS are only increasing - IN PART, BC MORE EASILY ACCESSIBLE GUNS AREN'T BEING BOUGHT UP BY ALL THE WOMEN - OVER 90% OF WEAPONS SALES & WEAPONS CRTIMES GO TO men. HENCE, THE MORE LIKELY VIOLENT MALE SIMPLY has IT EASIER TO KILL WOMEN (OR ANY "ENEMY" OF THE MOMENT TRIGGERED BY ADRENALINE) AT A DISTANCE...
I'm happy to learn from others and to discuss my thoughts and the little knowledge I may have from lots of reading & personal experience etc...
OK - so that works for some guys... but it doesn't work for females - who almost never automatically respond with violent physical actions to things - who learn submissive behavior towards men based on their father's deeper voice & watching Mommy being abused, criticized, crying & afraid.... who are programmed by evolution to be smaller, kinder, timid - and who learn early in life that boys are stronger & generally more physically brutal & capable....
Sounds like you were raised in a terrible family: "Mommy being abused, criticized, crying & afraid" and an awful neighborhood: "boys are stronger & generally more physically brutal".
I'm genuinely sorry for you, but your tragic personal experiences do not generalize to all men and women--not even close. I hope things have gotten better in your life.
Excuse me - but I was speaking NOT as a personal victim but rather a researcher and student of women's history & studies of both economic, historical roles & treatment of women going back thousands of years... From basic history to research on patterns of violence & family behaviors - and studies from a medical past as a nurse - corroborated by a majority of females and many educated & honest males... add a degree in psychology & 5 languages - I am a political refugee from communism & Vietnam Vet... lots of international & personal experience of male behaviors in general. Overall, since YOU are a guy & there's no ledge of knowledge from which your comment here makes any sense except for the arrogant bully perch, it sounds like you need to sit down. As a researcher, I would not say that anything can mean ALL - generalizations mean precisely what they are.... usually common knowledge based on majority experience - sometimes, they aren't valid but usually there's a foundation of truth to them - that's WHY they became generalizations...MY statements can be undergirded by research articles if you would like to confirm the basic premises & comments.
You're going to have to cite your sources. I am a woman, and your comments strike me as demonstrating the very cognitive distortions described in the essay, and this one in particular sets off alarms.
Excuse me Maria. I have read all of your comments on this subject and I think maybe you are off topic. The subject is more about how we are teaching our children and how it impacts their lives than about criminal violence against children and women. You have obviously researched the latter and I assume most people on this thread find empathy. However, it is not appropriate for a discussion about education and how we raise our children.
Thank you for writing in a reasoned, calm manner without accusations of stupidity etc... I admit that my reactions are based on the focus by a male author on "liberal girls" and their depression. Fact is that the overwhelming majority of DEPRESSED and those taking anti-anxiety or antidepressents are females! THAT has been the case since the dawn of the sexes... and has reasons so much deeper and more serious & real than college education or how we teach our children.... MY parents endured lives raised in wartorn countries overrun by Russia - we were bullied in America simply for being from somewhere else with a different way of thinking . I was raised to be strong & independent - started 3 doctorates, have 2 Masters degrees, 3 successful children - lived in 6 countries, 10 states, attended 10 schools before age 18 and 12 colleges in total. I was a feminist before it was popular, got raped in the Army for being a girl - in Central Park by an OTC Trader during a Morgan Stanley meeting I had to attend, and then again by a girlfriend's ex-Puerto Rican boyfriend (and his friend - 2 of them). 3 abortions - and that's just a tiny nothing part of my life among boys. I never spoke out or up about any of the things I endured and neither do most girls!
As for how we teach our children - it's such a BIG topic! We intentionally raise our girls to be sweet & dainty (high heels & nail polish...) as well as sexual (sexy 3 year old models)... Mothers are in a bind trying to prepare girls for what the world is like & how to make them successful in both career & marriage goals (most girls don't have career goals - we're programmed/evolution to desire to be companions to men & make babies). Girls are conflicted and depressed mostly bc this natural urge is challenged by the push & desire to NOT be a victim (make your own money & live YOUR life) when men are being pushed to be LESS of the old style men (responsible financially for family) and social norms push girls to have sex early - when they aren't mature enough to remember to take the pill to avoid pregnancy. Girls' lives are still pressured by much more than men's (women still usually insist on keeping their kids & men still avoid paying expenses for them once they are not in HIS house)... females are the poorest in every society. The point is that I could go on and on with excerpts from the 50 books & 100's or articles & personal experience or even just the NEWS...
The only way girls are safe is when they change both sexes & girls stop the flow of oxytocin (bonding-love chemical during sex & birth giving) while men stop the flow of testosterone (violence promoting hormone) along with the dopamine they have during sex (pure pleasure chemical - NO BONDING)... We seem to be working on all that with the LGBTQ stuff... but it will take time & who knows what the final outcome will be. But until then - girls need to be raised with a better understanding of the actual differences between men & women, the effects of these differences, and how to protect themselves physically & emotionally... NOBODY is actually doing that.
I think the writer is wrong - that the survey method of research is a faulty sieve (I did write some research papers & do have a background in education, psychology, research & writing). In general - men trying to write about women or women's thoughts, feelings, internal state of being - is an oxymoron. Thanks for being intelligent & thoughtful.
While you sound like someone I would describe as a “ well meaning crackpot”; I do appreciate your explanation of how generalities work, and don’t. Something can be generally true without the implication that it is universally true. And that the discerning mind needs to constantly remind itself of that fact in a specific situation. So thank you for the validation. Would you mind explaining this to others when we are navigating issues surrounding personal security and a general prevalence of higher crime in and around black communities?
What the original author never mentions as a partial cause and symptom of young women's depression is the march of rancid feminism through their lives.
"OK - so that works for some guys... but it doesn't work for females - who almost never automatically respond with violent physical actions to things - who learn submissive behavior towards men...."
Females learn to OUTSOURCE their violence towards men (and other women).... typically relying on other men in the vicinity to enact her violence for her, including relying on THE STATE (men with guns) to enact the violence for her.
The best way to outsource your violence to men is to be submissive, highlight your fragility (relative to your target) and play the victim / damsel in distress. A good introduction to this (mostly overlooked) gender dynamic is the documentary 'The Red Pill' by former feminist Cassie Jaye (her exploration of the issues men face at the hands of women and the state made her reject feminism).
When you factor in this kind of violence BY PROXY, the argument can be made women are actually more violent than men. We're all aware that a man can hit his wife with a frying pan (which is obviously not acceptable), but a woman can inflict far more damage to him simply by breaking her nails, ripping her blouse and then calling the police in tears and charging her husband with assault. In effect she has just hired armed thugs to kidnap him and put him in a cage, and then prevent him access to the house, kids etc when he is released from the cage. That's violence by proxy.
Certainly studies into domestic abuse back this up with lesbian relationships being by far the most violent, followed by gay male relationships and with heterosexual relationships being the least violent.
As the saying goes, "a man's perceived strength is his greatest vulnerability, and a woman's perceived vulnerability is her greatest strength".
Like Chris (and hi Chris!!), I am interested in the "certain studies" re violence in intimate relationships. Please provide links to these.
Hi Robin! 😊
I signed up for your Substack...
Thank you for your research-based and data-driven comments, they’re illuminating and a welcome counter-balance to that other poster. I didn’t know about these studies: “Certainly studies into domestic abuse back this up with lesbian relationships being by far the most violent, followed by gay male relationships and with heterosexual relationships being the least violent.”
On the subject of violence by proxy, I recall a study showing that suicide bombers, who were overwhelmingly male, were basically chosen by their mothers from among their children and encouraged to do it for the monetary rewards their terrorism would earn the rest of the family.
Anyway, as you say we should all approach discussions about the sexes in a spirit of mutual appreciation and cooperation--and a dash of humor--not by trying to stigmatize the other half of the human race with ignorant over-generalizations.
"On the subject of violence by proxy, I recall a study showing that suicide bombers, who were overwhelmingly male, were basically chosen by their mothers from among their children and encouraged to do it for the monetary rewards their terrorism would earn the rest of the family."
Exactly. Men generally go to war for female approval. Like I said, without female approval (and with female shunning instead) there would be no wars (or suicide bombings).
An additional factor is having a culture/ religion in which young men are not allowed to masturbate, or socialise with the opposite sex (who are also clothed from head to toe in black and segregated from men)..... but they are promised 72 virgins if they carry out a suicide bombing. If that isn't sexual manipulation/ exploitation of men I don't know what is.
It's hard to imagine men inventing such a culture and imposing it upon themselves! And common sense tells us that religious and cultural beliefs are mostly indoctrinated to the next generation by mothers who obviously spend the most time around young children. Even in the west where feminism has driven mothers out of the lives of their own children, the majority of daycare staff and teachers are also women.
Feminism has always denied women's immense power to program the next generation's cultural, moral and religious beliefs because feminists' goal is to minimise the public perception of women's agency, power and therefore RESPONSIBILITY for how society turns out. This allows feminists to blame all of society's ills on men, and assume the passive role of 'children' demanding free stuff and special treatment from daddy government as compensation.
While this strategy works in the short term (in a material sense) it is ultimately devastating for the female psyche (which is hard wired to seek out male strength and masculine men to balance femininity) to be told by feminist mothers, teachers etc that men have systematically oppressed women throughout history and all violence is the fault of men. We've seen a progressive decline in women's mental health since second wave feminism, and now social media is just making things worse by allowing us all inside each other's heavily indoctrinated and traumatised minds.
Finally, the fact that most visible violence is enacted by men suggests men are the underdogs, not the rulers of the world. Violence is always associated with low social status, not high social status. Rich people enact their violence by proxy, because they can AFFORD to. Therefore women's tendency to have men enact violence on their behalf suggests women have greater social power/ social standing than men. Putting token men in leadership roles (president, police chief etc), is a great way to disguise this fact.
Wow, so much to unpack here. But none of this actually disproves the existence of patriarchy. Far from it, it can be readily explained by the fact that it is a massive pyramid scheme with ELITE men on top who designed it that way, even if the vast majority of men don't really benefit from it on balance and in fact are harmed by it (as are women as well, a fortiori).
You should ask him for sources to back up his assertion. The Intimate Partner Violence Survey indicates that lesbians /in lesbian relationships/ are less likely than heterosexual women to experience domestic violence, but this result is often misinterpreted because people fail to actually read the study, which reveals that 32% of lesbians who have experienced abuse experienced it /at the hands of men/.
Indeed, I KNEW there was something suspicious about that specious claim. It's basically a canard.
Men have also been known to send other men to do the killing and dying for them. That's what happens in wars. Both men and women are capable of the same behaviors when it suits them. It's not as if a woman couldn't hit her husband on the head with a frying pan like in your example.
"Men have also been known to send other men to do the killing and dying for them. That's what happens in wars. "
If women stopped sleeping with soldiers and shunned them instead there would be no wars. If women didn't shame pacifists (white feather campaign) there would be no wars. If women didn't hit their babies and children (especially between the ages of 0-5) there would be no wars.
Most war propaganda involves telling young men they must go to war to protect their women and children. Soldiers are fantasy objects for women (think male strippers). Go out to any town centre on a Saturday night and you'll see men fighting men, with women egging them on.
We've spent the last century chastising men for their primitive behaviours, but women encouraging men to duel like stags (outside the pub, or on the battlefield) is a primitive behaviour that rarely gets criticised.
"Both men and women are capable of the same behaviors when it suits them."
Yes. But women's violence is not discussed or condemned in the way that male violence is. Social experiments show that when a woman is beating up a man in public people rarely intervene. Often they start smiling, cheering and even encouraging her. Even if the police are called, they are most likely to do nothing.
"It's not as if a woman couldn't hit her husband on the head with a frying pan like in your example."
Yes and the most common scenario when a woman is violent in a heterosexual relationship is for the man to take it (often for years), because he knows if he hits back (or tries to defend himself) and she so much as gets a scratch or a bruise she will be able to have him arrested and jailed. And if he loses access to the house and the children the woman is likely to take her violence out on the children instead.
“If women stopped sleeping with soldiers and shunned them instead there would be no wars.” OMG bro, it makes so much sense when you put it like that! The reason Russian soldiers invaded Ukraine was because Russian women were having heeeeeaaaaps of sex with them. If only those Russian ladies could have closed their legs for 2 freaking minutes, Ukraine would never have been threatened with annihilation by a nuclear power. About time we knew who to blame.
What's your evidence for the domestic abuse claim? In the study I usually see cited, people have looked at the tables but not read the surrounding text; and when the text is taken into account, it becomes clear that most lesbians experienced abuse at the hands of men.
Your other comment seems to be appealing to an external locus of control: men's actions are not their responsibility; they only do things because women have goaded them into doing them. But it is a fact that testosterone increases aggression, and it's also a fact that men comprise the vast majority of perpetrators of violent crime. Is it really helpful to say that women are to blame for the things that men do, or is that you avoiding an uncomfortable truth about your affinity group?
"What's your evidence for the domestic abuse claim?"
OMG the topic was done to death on the internet circa 2016 (before youtube censorship closed down the feminist/ anti feminist online debates) with numerous studies being thrown about. It's not even a controversial topic. A lot of lesbians (even lesbian feminists) admit that lesbian households are the most violent.
"Your other comment seems to be appealing to an external locus of control: men's actions are not their responsibility; they only do things because women have goaded them into doing them."
You're jumping from one extreme to the other. It's not an either / or scenario. One of the most annoying things about 150 years of feminist ideology is this idea that men and women are completely separate tribes, and that everything must be either men's fault or women's fault.... and that every social issue must therefore be a win / lose scenario.
For example, for every rich male CEO there is usually a wife who gets to have a walk in wardrobe and 300 pairs of shoes. Plus his huge taxes will be disproportionately spent on women. If we enforced equal pay women's standard of living would actually go DOWN as a result. This illustrates how absurd it is to view men and women as separate tribes in a win/ lose battle (of the sexes).
So anyway, the reality is that men and women's biology, psyches, motivations, drives, impulses and reactions are intimately linked and constantly feedbacking off each other.
To bring female motivations, female hard wiring, and female agency back into the equation is not to 'blame' women, but to reveal the other half of what motivates men. Male behaviour is very much a product of female behaviour (and vice versa).
There is no win / lose (except in the most superficial material sense). Human society is a joint enterprise and when EITHER sex lacks self awareness and self responsibility it adversely affects both sexes, and society as a whole.
" But it is a fact that testosterone increases aggression"
Well, in that case it makes sense that women would tend to employ passive-aggressive techniques instead. This trait of women has been recognised in all the great literature, fairy tales and art throughout history... the only place it is conspicuously absent is feminist ideology (which has almost completed its mission to re-write western history, western culture, the education system, Hollywood etc with its own weird, androgynous, anti-feminine view of women).
Also, testosterone promotes 'aggression' but not violence (in the sense of conflict). I believe recent studies show that in men testosterone is actually released IN RESPONSE to a violent conflict, helping to facilitate cooperation. There is even a hypothesis that high civilisations rely on high testosterone in men, and that when testosterone levels drop (as they are doing today) civilisations tend to descend into debauchery, violence and chaos. See any evidence of that?
"it's also a fact that men comprise the vast majority of perpetrators of violent crime"
Yes. So do poor people. As I explained in another comment, violence (like street crime) is an indication of low social status (desperation). In poor neighbourhoods when a couple is struggling to eat and pay the rent, the chances are it will be the man who goes out dealing drugs or robbing liquor stores. His female partner will stay indoors where it is safe. When he is arrested and jailed she will not be, even though she is effectively his accomplice.
Studies even show that women in poor neighbourhoods show a PREFERENCE for violent male criminals who have served time, when it comes to looking for a partner. She wants a man she can rely on to enact violence by proxy.
" Is it really helpful to say that women are to blame for the things that men do"
Yes. It is not just helpful but necessary to acknowledge that women have immense social power and that includes the power to define society's moral codes and cultural norms, which in turn dictates men's behaviour in society. I know that recognising women's agency and power is feminist blasphemy. I will go further and propose that men today actually need women to save them, or at least stop attacking them and denigrating everything about them.
Men - in general - stand no chance if women continue to play the passive victim (the inert object). In that scenario the only men who will thrive are psychopaths and tyrants. The sort of men who will ensure all other men are reduced to the status of serfs or bums, so they alone can create a harem of helpless, dependent women who must rely on them exclusively. Which is pretty much where western society is headed today.
If there are these studies that say lesbian couples are the most violence, etc - then you can't just assert that they exist and not link to them. You say it isn't even a "controversial topic" - I assume you mean the conclusions aren't controversial. However, having read a lot in this area, I have never come across even one such study - hey, might have missed it. But if you won't provide links to, at least, one - than I think it is reasonable to dismiss your claim.
Women are NOT all the same, and they do not all (or even most) think and behave the same way. All of your depictions are extremely stereotypical. Violence is more common among men for various reasons, but not exclusive to them. Women can also be quite violent.
"All of your depictions are extremely stereotypical"
I was giving examples of the ways that men suffer systemic violence at the hand of women (directly and by proxy). I was not making the case that 'All women are X'.
However, women outsourcing their violence to men IS A THING (and not just limited to humans) and society is very much set up to facilitate it. I'm not even saying it's necessarily a bad thing. It's part of nature and an integral aspect of sexual dimorphism.
Just as men 'rent' women's wombs/ breasts for reproduction and childcare, women 'rent' men's muscles for protection and resources. It's only a problem when the people start 'abusing the system', so to speak.
Our greatest safeguard is knowledge and awareness of how biology works and how it drives us ..... and a willingness to laugh at our own predictable hard wiring (and that of the opposite sex). When people lose that self awareness and a sense of humour, that's when everything starts to get really uptight.
Right!!!
> I saw this syndrome unfolding when my now-32 year old son was taught in his undergraduate cognitive neuroscience class that because the same part of the brain lights up when a person is physically hit or verbally insulted, “science proves that speech is violence”.
Wow, *that's* what the teacher took from that experiment? Seems to me that the takeaway there is "science proves that emotions do not necessarily reflect reality in any accurate way."
wow now you've landed on a real taboo.
are you saying that feelings don't always trump facts, that "lived experience" may be limited or inaccurate, and that emotions should not always be trusted and/or obeyed?
that is blasphemy in 21st century America.
Then speak 'blasphemy'. Evil triumphs when good people sit by and do nothing.
FACTS are also an algorithm based on available experience... ALL experience begins in the physical realm - and feelings were the beginning of conscious thought... LOGIC is a meta-cognitive function that sometimes reigns in misguided feelings... but survival is based on autonomic reactions and so feelings always come first... Our education system & the sheer self-centered immaturity of American children doesn't allow much FACTUAL stuff - and most FACTS are questionable as well...
Your statements are both incorrect and illogical.
Definition of FACT=the truth about events as opposed to interpretation.
Definition of LOGIC=reasoning conducted or assessed according to strict principles of validity
You are obviously trying (unsuccessfully) to change the definition of the words 'fact' and 'logic' to fit a political agenda. That's clear enough from all the stereotypes about males and females that you are spouting. Extremists are so schizophrenic. One minute, you scream that people must "believe" in science as if it's a religion. The next, you claim that 'facts' can be anything you want. Both claims are false.
Additionally, the question is NOT which brain function came first in evolution. It's how to return to a sane society where freedom of speech and democracy are once again promoted, AND how to stop young people from being exposed to a mentality that promotes passivity, depression, extremism, and suicide attempts. The connection between both subjects is that the indoctrination of Generation Z also makes them vulnerable to the epidemic of authoritarianism.
No; incorrect assumption about my personal agenda, my presuppositions & reasoning. MY comment about FACTS relates to discussions in physics and other sciences about the definition of what facts are - and they are always based on feeling responses & the interpretation of (personal and/or culturally stimulated beliefs about) whatever may be behind the evolutionarily based filters of perception & perspective all living beings have... Try some cognitive scientists like Damasio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvwM6EINGZA&list=RDLVPrVJflJLooc&index=5&ab_channel=MicrosoftResearch
The FACT that you chose to attack without ASKING what I mean - and that you carried this straight into some political realm- simply tells others that YOU are motivated by political ideas & way too immersed in those biases & assumptions about people's approaches.
LOGIC is a set of methods to come to agreed upon generalized conclusions about agreed upon "events". It's a system for scientific exploration & a means of evaluation.
MY interest includes which functions came first in evolution and the FACT that conscious thought emerged from the capacity to FEEL and react rather autonomically and then via individualized patterns of reactions based on history & development... YOUR interest appears to lie in political prattle about changing society to your liking.
SCIENCE is a strict method that allows brighter minds than mine to share knowledge & make decisions regarding the nature of reality. I DO NOT SCREAM - and indeed, FACTS are agreed upon items within a cultural context. Historical facts often don't exist & were simply promoted (repeat anything 7 times & it becomes a truth to your mind) by the victors who promote the memes of societies. https://cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41235-021-00301-5 (The effects of repetition frequency on the illusory truth effect)
https://www.virtusa.com/digital-themes/memetics
THIS article spreads memes... as does all media. Agreement of a few or many doesn't confirm the validity of ANY notion - it just makes it popular & easy to hold the belief about that topic.
Math is pure logic. By definition, logic ends are replicable. When one writes a query, for example, there can be many different equivalent queries, but if they all yield the same answers, then they are the same. Mathematical proofs are another example of this.
The reason why math is so important in education is not because it will be useful, but because it trains children how to think. One who works hard and masters calculus will reason better than one who did not. I believe that computer science flexes that same mental muscle that allows for better reasoning and conclusions.
I suspect that so much of the irrational, hysterical "activism" since the 1970's is a result of people with insufficient math training being allowed into positions for which they are not qualified. I have seen with with sociology students I have worked with. Students who are too lazy to learn the statistics they need to not only obtain their degrees, but to evaluate research in the careers they desire, are often the ones most likely to have unreasonable, hard-line positions on random subjects, and offer "feelings" as evidence for their positions. This is disturbing because I have seen such individuals awarded PhD's that they truly were not ready to receive.
Computers are wonderful because they do exactly what they are told to do. Most arguments are over assumptions, not the rational conclusions from those assumptions. We all need to stick with pure logic, and then debate the assumptions that underlie our differences. Feelings only get in the way. It is only lazy thinkers that avoid acquiring proper logic skills.
So sad that REAL science is now being abused to such a degree that logical fallacies are now being taught as 'science'.
Did you ever read the book 1984? The government in that sci fi classic had slogans like 'War is Peace', 'Freedom is Slavery', and 'Ignorance is Strength'. 'Speech Is Violence' fits right in there, doesn't it?
Totally agree!
Having the misfortune to previously work in a profession where I was hit semi-regularly (maybe a couple times of year), I think your son missed in his class is that it is not the lighting up of a part of your brain that sucks about getting hit. Its actually the part the gets hit. Like getting hit in the nose sucks, or in the temple, or in the groin, or in even getting kicked in the shin.
The only people who compare actual violence with words have not had real, painful violence inflicted on them.
the neurosci prof was either pushing an agenda or the world's worst logician.
[insert "Why Not Both?" meme here]
"science proves that speech is violence"
This can be quickly disproved with a simple experiment. Get someone to stand on a chair and then ask them to contemplate two scenarios (1) being verbally insulted (2) being punched in the face.
Then ask them which scenario they would chose if they had to choose one, and WHY.
lol Unfortunately, these cults are not about facts and proofs.
Touché
Yeah this stuff has been ruminating in feminist circles for a long time. I remember once ~20 years ago in an argument with a long time college girlfriend who had stayed out all night getting hammered, on a night when I had driven a couple hours to her college to meet her (so she was way late getting back to meet me while I hung out with her roommate, and then just passed out vomiting). The next day while we bickered about it I took a piece of paper that was in my hand and crumpled it up and threw it at her.
Her friends seemed to think this was basically exactly the same as if I had beat her within an inch of her life. A single 8.5X11 thrown and hit her in the chest from 6 ft away. Definitely the same.
That's a good insight into the "speech is violence" fallacy. Words don't leave you with a broken nose or a concussion, so the equivalence is stupid.
Another example is that taking a large financial loss causes the same kind of emotional reaction that a threat to your life does. But of course losing money is not an actual threat to your life.
I agree with the main point, but if you lose enough money, it could be a threat to your life. When you can't afford food and shelter, that can seriously shorten your life.
Someone who is living that close to starvation wouldn't have even a little money to invest though.
In 1929, there were former stock brokers who lost everything and jumped out of windows. Just because you have money to invest temporarily doesn't mean you will have it forever. It's very easy to lose a lot of money very quickly with bad investments.
https://www.businessinsider.com/rich-famous-celebrities-who-lost-all-their-money-2018-5
I have been very poor, and yes, a guy who robs a pizza delivery drive should be executed, but a guy who take millions from greedy jerks, a couple of years imprisonment and seizure of all his assets is good enough. In the US we do the opposite--we let the monsters who rob the destitute get off with a warning and we stick it to a guy who robbed greedy jerk who inherited the money anyway.
Hi Chris. Agree.
Weak people bring bad times. Bad times make strong people. Strong people make good times. Good times make weak people. And the cycle continues. The last cycle of high times followed by a crash was the 1920s followed by the crash of 1929.
I might also argue that since 1980 there has been a "slow crash" punctuated by larger recessions, as pay, welfare payments, and social security payments, have not kept up with the cost of living since then.
One could argue that welfare payments take people out of that cycle and create a sense of hopeless dependence that is worse than extreme poverty. I had a real bout of extreme poverty during COVID, but at least the time passed quickly because I was working 12-15 hours a day, seven days per week. The is an honor and a sense of belonging that one gets from a job, even awful labor jobs. The American welfare system is dehumanizing. Something like reparations and an end to welfare nd public housing would be preferable just for the psychological benefits.
> One could argue that welfare payments take people out of that cycle and create a sense of hopeless dependence that is worse than extreme poverty.
And yet that is the whole point of the welfare system, to make people hopeless and dependent. Hopeless and dependent people are more easily controlled and brainwashed.
I grew up in deep poverty and was homeless as a kid, and had a handful of times when we just didn't have food so I had to steal it. I can confidently say there was one kid in that small town that was worse off than us. And I watched the people on welfare, and the poor (my friends and neighbors), it seems like most of them just gave up on life. It was sad to see, and I was determined to never be like them.
We were on welfare and food stamps as well, it was a terrible experience and the rules changed every 1-2 years, which was confusing.
So I focused on my education and doing well with a good job. I also focused on working harder and smarter, not being dependent on anyone, and being hopeful and thinking positive.
Wow. That’s insane 😳😳😳
Random, but for an amazing set of data to support this - check out the Opinion archive for The Tab, an all-UK student newspaper. You can directly see student opinions - and not those of just any students, but of wannabe journalists - change over the past 11-12 years. In 2011 the slant was still very much towards free speech, in 2020 there's an article admonishing Rihanna for appropriating the Qur'an. Everything politics-related is quite moralistic and scold-y in tone now, and echoes the mainstream Guardian/Twitter viewpoint. The writing also gets better and more interesting when you scroll back to 2010!
journo majors a totally brainwashed by journo professors. all as left learning as can be. journalism has become a cancer on American society. no attempt to be fair, multi-faceted, curious, questioning, open to many opinions/explanations. just adhere to cultural Marxism. talk about a lost generaition.
One of my friends toured a journalism department where his son was considering majoring and their student guide said “We comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” My friend said “I thought you were supposed to report the facts” and fortunately his son chose another major.
“We comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
That is a very trendy saying these days. The problem with it is they think they can identify the two cases.
I love 'I thought you were supposed to report the facts' :)
There's so much VAGUE in that comment that it's a rather useless one....
Gosh, vague in capital letters! I was simply appreciating and agreeing with the comment of Chris C's friend. I am a gender critical campaigner and a lot of the press are very bad at reporting the facts about gender issues. Reality is definitely on our side of the argument.
I strongly agree with you here. Journalists have turned some simple social progress into a divisive issue that should not even be an issue.
Discourse became quite insipid and dull around this time, yes. One must always say what is mandatory, never say what is forbidden, and all positions fall into the categories of obligatory or prohibited.
I have strongly suspected that my children's descent into depression over the last 5 to 10 years has had a correlation with the emergence of social media. I've even confirmed my hypothesis by enforcing technology-free weeks and seeing them return to the cheerful normal kids they once were. Alas, they are too old now for such heavy-handedness...one is living in the dorms and one partakes of virtual college. Both are connected inexorably to the Internet with social media like TikTok and all its damaging effects. The mere suggestion that they unplug from their screens elicits derision and being called a boomer. I know what I'm seeing though. It's like I've lost control of my own children to this evil world. My daughter even is in CBT but I fear her therapist is too liberal. We've even resorted to making her pay her own therapy bills which she happily does because she thinks this therapist is helping her but she's obviously only getting worse. This is my first time venturing into the substatic world, motivated by the brilliant writing in this piece and it's comments observed here.
I *just* left a comment to this piece saying much the same thing about therapists. Our teen daughter has had several and they all seem to be enabling her victim mentality (she's a white girl from a stable two-parent highly educated family), not getting her to step out of her disordered thinking. And yes, you cannot suggest that social media has anything to do with anything. or they rip you a new one (not that I care anymore about being derided).
It's certainly true that like doctors & all service providers, therapists live by selling their services on an ongoing basis - all things become subscriptions with reinforcing marketing for returning members... that goes for prescriptions, chiropractic, dental, phone, internet... nothing gets "taken care of" and everything becomes a lifelong chronic case for routine, ongoing care & cost. That's true. All I would work on to effect change is "where did she get the victim mentality and WHY is family influence not of help to her? It's not ALL just the therapists' fault or doing. Oftyen, what helps bring people out of such ruts is a serious change of venue (new environment, country - something to grab concentrated focus/attention).
I have seen men run through many cities, then many countries, but they could never run away from their demons. I was one of those men.
I’ve heard young people say they watched Prager U videos in order to deprogram from the brainwashing
Another overlooked factor is the effect of wireless pollution itself (microwaves) on our mental and emotional state. This is known to cause depression, mood swings, anxiety, brain fog (as well as heart palpitations, digestive issues, insomnia, skin rashes, nausea....etc).
I'm not downplaying the effects of social media, just adding more factors that make up the overall assault on our mental and emotional wellbeing!
WiFi is already being removed from schools in many countries because of the harms it causes to children (who are generally more susceptible than adults, with girls being the most sensitive as a rule). It's actually been banned from primary schools in France. Eventually it will be banned from all public spaces - just like smoking.
Dr. Erica Mallery-Blythe - Electromagnetic Radiation, Health and Children 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNFdZVeXw7M
Diagnosis, Treatment and Reversal of Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity by Erica Mallery-Blythe MD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iP-Zv3VLV4
The background cosmic radiation is far worse than any of that. Furthermore, there have been so many attempts to find any correlations with radio, microwave and other forms of big wave radiation, and nothing, none, the same is true with power lines (that one is really silly). I would bet my life stating that there is no connection to electromagnetic radiation.
"The background cosmic radiation is far worse than any of that."
Background radiation is a quintillion times weaker than the man made radiation (that's 18 zeros). Even consumer meters show huge spikes in radiation around wifi, smart meters and cell towers.
And the frequencies used by the wireless industry are those which never existed on Earth before (except at infinitesimal levels). They are completely alien to our biology and that of all other plants and animals.
Microwave pollution from wifi or smart meters stunts the growth of cress or peas (in some cases they will not even sprout at all). Horses are often sick near high power electricity lines. Bees and birds have been observed literally falling out of the skies (dying in mid flight) next to cell towers.
The effects on animals and plants refute the claims that this is a psychological issue (nocebo etc). They - along with millions of people who are made sick by wireless technology - serve as the canaries in the coal mine.
Millions more people report the symptoms of EMR poisoning but without making the connection, because doctors get no training in the effects of EMR and there are no leaflets in doctors' surgeries informing the public on what symptoms to look out for. For decades microwave poisoning has been passed off as yuppie flu, chronic fatigue, the stress of modern living, long covid etc.
Typically people get sick and spend months or years unable to determine the cause, and they only stumble across EMR by chance - perform their own control experiments - and realise that is what is making them sick. The fact that the cause is discovered years after the symptoms appeared and they never feared wireless gadgets (often they love them) also rules out nocebo effects.
The only reason wireless has not been banned already is money. Having said that it is already beginning to get banned from schools in many countries because the children are getting too sick to reman in the classroom.
The collapse of the industry has already begun, and it is only being propped up because it is so profitable and such a wonderful tool of social control/ surveillance. But as more and more consumers throw their wireless gadgets in the trash and revert back to wired (and begin legal action to compel wireless free zones in public spaces) wireless gadgets will become increasingly worthless, as well as being toxic.
"I would bet my life stating that there is no connection to electromagnetic radiation."
You literally are betting your life. There is no 'would' about it. Although being sensitive to wireless pollution is somewhat of a curse at the moment, it has been pointed out that they are the lucky ones because they are already avoiding it like the plague and so are far less likely to develop chronic health problems and deadly diseases in later life. Being EHS is rather like being allergic to crystal meth. It's a blessing in disguise.
You might be willing to bet with your life, but don't forget all the major insurers are not willing to touch wireless tech with a barge pole. The silicon valley boffins who invent all this tech are notorious for being anti tech at home, and sending their children to Waldorf schools where wireless tech is not used. And the telecoms companies themselves warn their shareholders to expect massive class action lawsuits in the near future when consumers develop cancer, diabetes, infertility etc.
I work with a lot of wireless tech. I cannot see how large wave or visible light is going to hurt you unless you are staring at visible light. Short wave length radiation can get wicked, but radio waves??? No way. Even microwaves require a hell of a lot of power and concentration to get energy transfer.
There are no current electronically-produced forms of invisible radiation that do harm to mammals. They simply do not. Now visible radiation from the sun, that stuff is dangerous. I strongly recommend you avoid the radiation from the sun. That is worse than all the wifi and microwaves ever produced.
Similarly, short wave radiation coming from radiative materials (x-rays, gamma,...) are also some nasty stuff, but no one is using that outside of nuclear medicine. Alpha radiation from similar products can be bad as well, but no one is using that outside of nuclear medicine.
If you are seeing "poison" coming out of power lines or you can "feel" radio waves, please seek medical attention. This kind of condition is common and curable. I have heard Zyprexa works wonders for your condition.
"I work with a lot of wireless tech".
Then you should know that thousands of wireless technicians get sick every year from microwave poisoning. It's a huge problem for the insurance industry.
"Short wave length radiation can get wicked, but radio waves??? No way. Even microwaves require a hell of a lot of power and concentration to get energy transfer"
Cancer clusters around radio masts have been documented for many decades. All the early pioneers of radio (Marconi etc) suffered chronic health problems. When Marconi first experimented with wireless on the Isle of Wight all the bees died.
Your inability to comprehend the harms caused by radio waves (including microwaves) is not an argument. The power argument is invalid because biological effects are caused at virtually zero power. In fact low power can sometimes be more harmful than high power. We are not talking 'sunburn' type of effects.
Water scolds at high temperatures but is perfectly benign at room temperature. However, standing in a ditch all day long or sleeping in a damp bed will cause injury over an extended period of time - despite the perfectly safe temperature of the water. Microwave radiation poisoning is similar in this respect.
Being fixated on the power of microwaves is as blinkered as being fixated on the temperature of water.
Yuri Gregoreiv (sp?) the Russian radiation expert who was brought in to help with the Chernobyl clean up stated before his death that non ionising radiation poses is far more of a threat than ionising radiation.
There are hundreds of military studies going back to the 1970's and before which have established dozens of horrendous biological effects at all power levels.
Until the 1980's microwaves were generally accepted to be useless for anything other than weaponry. Then the technology began to be used for consumer communications applications and a massive industry was born. All the science was swept under the mat.
Since the 1990's millions of people have suffered from microwave poisoning, starting with the most sensitive - as well as heavy users / early adopters who got 'yuppie flu'.... and then chronic fatigue .... and various other terms used to describe the symptoms of microwave poisoning.
The number of people now suffering these symptoms is exploding with the expansion of the wireless infrastructure. Most people now experience mild symptoms (insomnia, anxiety, depression, headaches, fatigue, heart palpitations etc). Many people are no so sick they cannot work.
"If you are seeing "poison" coming out of power lines or you can "feel" radio waves, please seek medical attention. This kind of condition is common and curable. I have heard Zyprexa works wonders for your condition."
The medical establishment is fully bought and paid for by the wireless industry (just like they were by the tobacco industry last century) and doctors get no training in the effects of EMF and so don't even know what symptoms to look out for.
They already are prescribing drugs to treat EMF poisoning, which of course is just adding more poisons to the body and not addressing the root cause of the poisoning. But of course this makes loads of money which is the main objective.
Despite the huge profits to be made from ignorance and misinformation on the subject, the science is slowly winning. Wifi is being pulled out of public spaces now as more people are getting sick. Russia has banned it (and phones) from schools, as has France. Many other countries are heading in that direction. Peru recently pulled down some cell towers which were causing local inhabitants to get sick.
The insurance industry won't insure the tech and the industry itself warns shareholders to expect a tsunami of health claims in the coming years. The tech should never have been deployed to begin with, and it will all eventually have to be taken down for the sake of public health, not to mention saving the environment. Birds, insects etc are dying in droves and they are not prone to nocebo effects because they have no awareness of the technology.
I will make sure to line my hat with foil good sir. My recommendations to you would be to:
1.) take at least two classes each in probability and statistics
2.) take a class on optics (you will probably need a few prerequisites first)
3.) get a therapist, and discuss your thoughts with her/him at length
I respectfully disagree with you, but I am more concerned with your health. Learning the core science and engineering will be good for you. It is also most interesting. I would recommend avoiding any formal training on radiology or nuclear medicine until you are significantly into recommendation 3.
I genuinely wish you the best.
Did you raise her to be feminine? Did you promote sexy bikinis at age 3? Did you tell her then that she is capable of being anything she wants? Did she sit through hours of news showing women being raped & killed? How about Trump era political statements about women not being pretty enough? How about the news about Weinstein or Epstein? How about the hours of Kavanaugh hearings? Was she exposed to old time TV Westerns with girls being slapped & shamed & sexually violated? Did you watch movies where girls were firghting stereotypes & becoming heros who "beat men" in fighting duels? (something that seldom if ever can happen in real life for her). Does she know that a 10 year old girl could be forced to give birth to her rapist's child? Does she know that girls have to travel far and wide & be shamed again for seeking an abortion? Does she live where girls can't easily get an abortion? Has she been sexually molested by any male family members? Is she caught between career & family decisions? Give your own daughter a fucking break!
Girl, you gotta break those chains you're shoving into everyone else's face. I'm sorry that you're in so much pain, but you're heartily and enthusiastically feeding the beast, not fighting it. You like, belong to it now. There's a whole other world out here waiting for you.
Maria's bought into 'victimhood' - she neglected the feminist module on 'empowerment' which just goes to show feminism is dead.
I've read more feminist literature (starting at age 16 with Simone de Beauvoir's historical account of women & oppression) than most people talking here - and "empowerment" is just psychotherapy to keep women silent and compliant. I majored in Psych in undergrad & my mother was a therapist. I am 70, so perhaps your understanding of history and culture is limited... but I must say that disavowing or ridiculing or denigrating anyone's deepest sense of knowledge about their world is a means of disarming the most victimized by societies. When you can ignore the every second REALITY of girls being sexually molested, beaten, raped & killed around the world... and deny history.... and shame your own daughter's feeliongs of depression based on HER life experiences & her understanding of the world - then you've not just lost your mind but your heart as well - and are buying into the most modern memes... or maybe the most ancient when it comes to women - "suck it up buttercup" - "it's OK, you're a girl - they have more pain & that's life!" - Have a drink bitch, after all, girls are girls... and it's not MY fault"... I lived the "empowerment" model - didn't buy into anything beyond acknowledging the rapes & abortions I went through as well as what I experienced in the world of men "Morgan Stanley, AT&T, ITT, and smaller firms". Sorry you guys live on putting down people rather than conversing - in believing you know more than you actually do - and in thinking that life is the same game for everyone everywhere...
I am happily married to a younger man - happily enjoying retirement. NONE OF THAT has anything to do with what I know from my life, the lives of most of my female friends, and the lives of our mothers' generation or my own daughter - OR the vast amount of feminist, historical, psychology and socio-cultural literature I've read. You guys are all about being king of some mountain.... I just appreciate lectures, books, & podcasts by scholars. Enjoy your psychological fist fight and pretending you're in some winning wrestling match. I have to go enjoy my day. Finding others who agree with you doesn't make your expressions true in any way - it just means you guys all live in the same era, same country, are of similar age and likely similar socio-economic or social backgrounds. ALL of limited openness, limited desire to understand or learn from others, limited empathy, similar desire to be right & get applauded online for it. ENJOY!
Limited is the correct finder on the male expression of "I know how it works!"
The exclusion of women's experience of living in a world governed and explained by 'experts'. The violence of war and pornography informs the male view everywhere like the air that surrounds us.
Sad thing is how quickly women also buy into the themes, memes, and slander terms based on (assuming they're mostly a lot younger than I am) a lack of really knowing the history of women OR having lived through the changes (and now back to the Dark Ages)... But societies forget the difficulties of the past unless they are constantly reinforced via media (as is done for the Jews and sometimes for Blacks). For women - what is reinforced via media & all news - is the fact that they are STILL the primary target of male aggression... and that women may FEEL free but are nevertheless the ones who can also say: 4,774,000 women in the U.S. experience physical violence by an intimate partner every year... and over 65% of women murdered are killed by their own lovers.... while 99% of all women are killed by men and 95% of all violent crimes are committed by men. So - this article wants to focus on the problems with being on social media "amplifying" a sense of victimhood??? HOW ABOUT JUST KNOWING THE FACTS? OR watching the news? Thanks for the willingness to state your truth...
Wow that took some effort to write…skimmed it, too busy otherwise. That said dear, stop your ‘projecting and controlling’ ways…my daughters are amazing and don’t subscribe to the negativity of this woke moment. They are mentally very healthy, well-educated and successful. Too many women today are too willing to moan & groan about their victimhood. This is a sure fire way to have a miserable life. Seems like you understand that.
Why don't you stop calling me "dear" - unless of course - you're an old sexist male with a superiority complex. OR are you being too young to be less than dumb enough to think someone with more life experience is just "an old woman"? What I understand is that
1) you need to promote that your girls are doing well and somehow you get the credit for that way beyond their genetics, early life experiences, socio-economic condition, etc...
2) You obviously are neither well read/educated nor interested in learning/reading
3) you like using current memetic phrases & terms such as "woke" in order to sound current while not really knowing much about the social order, history, or politics
3) You try to shut others down by telling them they are projecting or controlling - your own projection of your self-serving personality. I'm not selling anything while you're selling how successful you are as a Mom. Should we compete? (My son is an Air Force Officer - very well off & healthy - wonderful marriage & 3 lovely girls! - My other son is a dentist and "mentally very healthy" and well off. silly bs.
4) I wrote for a living my DEAR - so writing is FUN for me....
5) You are so caught up in your need to show off that you can't see the forest for the trees - EVERYONE hasn't had your fortunate life or lived in your neighborhoods or had the options or apparent fairly calm life you have had... In fact - most girls have lots of trauma - NOT drama!
6) I have a lovely life with a husband who is a great partner. I've lived a long, successful life despite the trauma of being a refugee born premature during war with Hep B, etc... travelled the world and love my studies & pets and nature. Have a great day you incredibly superior successful goliath.
So I understand you, the historic violence towards men and sexual exploitation of women is so essential to the human condition we should simply accept it and move on? I enjoyed reading The Second Sex when I was 16 as well. It made perfect sense to me (I am 46 now).
I want to disagree with you and hope we could someday create a safe society, but perhaps you are correct. Perhaps rape is is so natural that it is part of the human condition and can never be cured. Perhaps war is as well, and we are simply deluding ourselves instead of preparing for the next war.
I hope you are wrong.
Simone de Beauvoir is a feminist I can get behind. I do not understand why positive, empowering women such as that are not taught instead of this perpetual victimhood sadness that is spoon fed to young women today.
I’ve memorized your response Candis, and am going to start using it verbatim.
Thank you. Because it's the truth.
I told my two daughters to ignore the 'noise' - find out what you want to do in life and work really, really hard at it. Ignore the naysayers. And I am proud to report I have two very successful and well-adjusted women.
Stop being a victim and get on with your life. I understand, work-is-hard...but in a delicious way it also sets you free.
That's what the doctor told me in Nuernberg when I went for care after being raped anally at Monteith Baracks... Get on with it - don't be a victim - you'll be fine. Also what Dr Shah Zenian, Director of Psychiatrists told me at the Mid-MO Mental Health Hospital after he tried to rape me while interviewing me for an internship at 21. Also what I was told by the HR lady at Morgan Stanley after I was raped in Central Park at a company meeting... I was never a "victim" until I hit my 50's and the reality of all the events of abuse had time to sink in...Repressing is what women always had to do. Working hard never set me free - it gave me money to escape bad situations & serves as a distraction from dwelling on the past. You might want to wait until your girls are in their 50's and THEY tell you how they feel... Oh no! How they feel? - that's verboten!
I think there is a big difference between the same sentence told someone at the orientation to find the own way of and place in live or to tell it to a victim of a serious crime.
There was definitely a real problem that girls and women weren't encouraged to or even shamed for speaking out after being victims of abuse. But if now the pendulum swings too much to the other side with many people feeling and staging as victims for totally different things, this also causes real problems and this is what this article was about.
Today both types of victims exist and it is important not to mix them up and react according to context.
Another thing that would help greatly is to differentiate the different ways the word 'feeling' is used: emotions, intuition and physical senses (including pain).
I totally agree and know that girls are now under the guise of NEW and invalid assumptions about their situation - and that most girls don't have any idea of the past history of women's deaths in childbirth, from murder by spouses - or the social suppression of female ideas and abilities as well as rights. HOWEVER - that being true does NOT in any way take away from the FACTS - and those facts reflect that we are not only sliding rapidly backward in terms of women's rights to simple self-determination in choices related to their own lives & survival - but that 65% of women murdered are killed by their own lovers - and while we attempt to make a few derogatory words less harmful (all the verbal denigrating terms for girls that shame them for being girls) - the levels of actual violence against women have not changed and may be rising as we attempt to tighten the noose on men's ability to molest girls publicly.
There are always those who use systems for benefit and those who stretch truths - but in fact, victims are basically those who are the weaker being bullied by the bigger & stronger... and women are always in that position regardless of the judicial outcomes. Let's start with simple facts - mice can harass lions & cause discomfort - but ONLY lions can kill mice by simply stepping on them. Men by their larger stature, deeper voice, testosterone, & training to be aggressive & assertive BECAUSE of our social role differnces & physiological differences automatically are the ones who can cause the harm - the reverse is a relatively miniscule percentagfe of cases. ONLY men impregnate the person they have sex with (not the reverse) - so men never fear becoming pregnant - not being able to continue towards college or a career, etc... ONLY MEN can penetrate another person's body and invade it without consent.... but only women ever pay a heavy price for the outcomes of the act. Babies don't fear women's high pitched voices - they fear deep male voices. Young children don't fear Mommy's anger - they fear Daddy's anger; especially after seeing Mommy frightened and feeling her fear...
The focus on "women getting too soft & having too high expectations of men" is merely a distraction and diminishes women's already tenuous ability to deal with what everyone knows is the more difficult childhood and life... There are trans women who can't deal with the stressors on macho male behaviors (artists and nerds who aren't into football & boxing, etc...) - but overall, when they actually are speaking honestly and not just slandering women.... men don't desire to be women or live women's lives. Women are still seen as inferior in more ways than you can skin a cat (whatever that means). The point is that at a time when we are fighting the move between women being allowed to hold higher positions of authority & have a personal life (devoid of children strapped to her back & chest)... versus the recent moves to punish women for not wanting to end up with raising a child they didn't choose to give birth to... THIS KIND OF WRITING is on the border of disinformation.
There are those who abuse the welfare system - but that doesn't mean that the majority of them and others who get welfare aren't destitute or don't deserve help. What media has done is publicize and advertise the events - allowed women to get together in more forums to talk about their suffering & emotional trauma as well as advocate for women's needs. I know a lot of women - both among the poor & the highly educated & wealthier... and very few haven't experienced sexual violation, bullying, verbal assault, emotional trauma, a lifetime of verbal harassment and cajoling... they just don't talk about it once they become adults.... most have husbands and boyfriends and don't want to make them uncomfortable....
Meanwhile, women falsely believe that they can have sex at will (ala men) which is untrue since we're full of oxytocin & bond emotionally when we have sex (until we get broken emotionally by the excess & stop feeling altogether). Men don't bond that way - they are more visual & exude dopamine during sex... pure pleasure - over right after the act - once they engage in sex they look for new prey - dopamine surge. YES, women are depressed & teen girls more than ever - NOT because they are gaming a system or media bs, but because today's social setup that attempts to make the sexes "equal" under the law without taking into account the differences between the sexes & the fearful reactions of girls & the actual potential for death or lifelong suffering & 10 kids to raise - is a dysfunctional up social setup. The outcome? 22 year olf girls get knocked up by 15 year old student - SHE goes to jail for years - the baby is in foster care... BUT SHE didn't threaten or RAPE the guy, did she? NO - because HE had to have desire & was the primary actor in sticking his organ into HER! The laws about "age" and sexual activity was made to protect little girls from the violent act of a male inserting HIS penis into her.... now it's used against dumb and way too young girls who are teachers at 22 among high school boys... and most guys recall their desire for young female teachers!!! ANOTHER EXAMPLE - I'll use my own daughter... At age 14, she moved in with her 16 year odl boyfriend - he was a head taller 30 pounds heavier... muscular guy. They had a "fight" - he bullied and pushed her - in fright she hit his glasses off his face... he got a cut - and she got a "domestic violence" charge!
There are lots of problems with the ways we have attempted to make the sexes more "equal" - they include letting humans with penises now in girls bathrooms & taking over women's sports... Jailing girls for wanting abortions, for having sex with younger guys - allowing men to bully women in the courts after they've been raped & assaulted. I have 2 sons - 1 gay and the other a football-military type.... I sympathize completely with their troubles as well... but in the end, woman is the ngger of the world... still. Let the therapists deal with women's issues & let's just try to protect them from the murder by lover syndrome that is still so prevalent - every day we find girls bodies from some time ago... every day there are girls lured into sex & raped on porn sites... the majority of child sex trafficking is girls - not guys!!! The majority of people killed by spouses are also women!!! But we want to write about how women are either pussies & weak because they feel too much pain from it all or using the system due to too much online time? WHAT?
I cannot get over your conclusions (the inevitability of rape). Do we simply accept it, or do we exterminate the perpetrators? I would lean towards the latter, but I get the feeling you would say this is impossible.
Are the Persian Gulf countries correct in thinking that the only safe place for women is locked within family compounds? If your story is the norm, then we have a lot of execution chambers to construct. Prisons appear to only exist as a medium for corruption.
I wanted to chime in with an observation about progressive internet culture around the time in question that may be relevant to this discussion. I received my PhD in developmental psychology in 2013, and in 2014 when I was pregnant with my first child, I was invited by a grad school friend to a Facebook group called "Academic Mamas," which was full of > 10,000 other moms with PhDs from all over the world. A dynamic that I observed often in that group was a huge amount of pushback on any suggestion that people could, even temporarily, disconnect from politics to rest and prioritize their mental health. This was framed as a manifestation of "privilege." The argument was that people who were part of an oppressed class didn't have the option of disconnecting from politics EVER because their basic human rights were dependent on their constant engagement in activism. The argument seemed to be that for people with "privilege" to prove their ally-ship with oppressed minorities, they needed to similarly stay constantly engaged with political activism, both online and offline. This was a time when it appeared to become trendy to involve kids in political activism as well, so I have to assume that this ethic of constant engagement was being absorbed by children. The normalization of maladaptive cognitive distortions discussed in this article combined with the idea that it's shameful to ever take a break from political engagement just can't be good for growing brains.
Side note...I left Facebook in 2020, but I'd bet that there are some people here who are still in that Academic Mamas group. I'd love to know what the conversation about this Substack has been like there.
I've definitely heard that argument. I also like this counterargument from Salome Sibonex on Twitter: "If it's 'privileged' to focus on the parts of my world within my control, then I will live like the centuries of privileged peasants who came before us and before our mere decades-old invention of daily politics."
The root of the obsession with “privilege!” I think comes from social media as well. Looking at idealized versions of everyone else’s life has made everyone feel “un-privileged”.
It turned social media into a privilege contest of sorts, especially for <15 year old’s who at that age just want to achieve “coolness”. A recipe for the disaster we are dealing with now.
"The argument was that people who were part of an oppressed class didn't have the option of disconnecting from politics EVER because their basic human rights were dependent on their constant engagement in activism. "
This argument illustrates the level of ignorance so many progressive people have about what really goes on among those less privileged than themselves. The latter groups of people can't hang out with MSNBC all day because they have to go to work. For that matter, so do most of us.
I have seen this so much. It is repugnant how so-called progressives denigrate people of color and their agency. I am genuinely convinced that most of this nonsense was invented by hardcore racists who got rich white women to do their evil for them, when they are not self-congratulating for their advocacy.
What's sad is, for all these people are destroying their own mental health, and their children's, they are probably having net negative impact on the issues they are so passionate about. Constant online outrage is a recipe for burnout and not much else. For some it's just another professional-class status game, but I think most are actually sincere about wanting a better world, and just profoundly confused about what activism is and isn't. I speak from experience here unfortunately.
Brilliant stuff. All of it. While devices/screen time remain a pivotal impact on children's availability to "real world" activity/interaction with friends/peers...I also believe we've erred in pushing back against this attention-monopoly by creating an endless shuffle of curated activity for our kids.
We find the things they are 1) good at very early and/or 2) seem to bring them joy (very early)...and we go ALL IN. We ensure they remain enveloped in a world of like minds, unfettered successes, and relationships formed too strongly upon shared viewpoints/skillsets/desired experiences/outcomes.
Young Jenny is really good at softball at age 8? Softball to the MAX! Let's post about her softball successes on social media...let's make our family friendships revolve around our team(s) and trips...let's spend more time talking about our great softball memories and upcoming opportunities for softball greatness at the dinner table (when we make it...because we're usually at...softball practice).
This is bad for the softball heroes. And it's bad for those who don't necessarily have a curated activity like softball to embody their performative greatness. Young Jenny often loses interest in maintaining non-softball friendships...or simply sacrifices them to the alter of time/opportunity cost.
I see kids every day in my town that have NO life outside of organized sports and screen time in between. They are 10, 12...14 years old and have the social skills of 6 year olds. And their self-confidence is fragile. It's wholly-dependent. Their existence is unnecessarily narrow.
And it's the parents' unyielding desire to blanket their children in "be a winner" goodness that sets it all in motion. Resilience takes a back seat to feeling good.
This rings true to me and is particularly unfortunate because I have always considered team sports in particular to be a driver of resilience. Sometimes you lose! Sometimes you get called out on a bad call from the umpire. Sometimes you drop a pass. Team sports can teach resilience because you have to learn to accept the L and keep going, and you have a community experiencing the same disappointments to reinforce you. I don't think I'm refuting the point - turning sports into a helicopter parenting obsession probably undermines these benefits.
I agree. Youth athletics used to represent all those things...and more. It was an opportunity to turn strangers into new friends. Skilled players supported developing players. Fun was a priority. And it all took place in balance with "real life." Youth sports were recreational...accessible...and affordable.
They still are, somewhat, but we've now created a new class of youth sports that bastardizes much of those benefits. It is exclusive in more ways than one. It pulls kids apart. It monopolizes expansive chunks of time/attention that are/were otherwise available for the tedious, plodding, often frustrating purpose of exploring new activities/relationships, disparate interests, and alleviating boredom with a little help from (real life! in the flesh!) peers. Not a bad thing in a vacuum...but perhaps out of balance and exacerbating some of the long-term impacts we're seeing overwhelm a generation of kids.
Mike, this 'curated activity' eats into children's ability to tolerate boredom and consequently their creativity and free play. As a homeschool educator, I have observed that most families in the homeschooling community prioritize having enough free time to simply play soccer, swim, climb, or engage in a multitude of sports for fun. When my son was of kindergarten age, he observed that the lives of school kids seemed 'too goingly' - constantly on the move to get somewhere and do something scheduled; he much preferred getting his lessons done and then being free.
Many treat their children like race horses: it's all about competition and success.
I think this comes from several directions:
1. to be proud of the own child and brag with the success.
2. giving them the best start in live witch is connected with
3. being anxious of the childs falling into poverty
4. being successfull in parenting: show that you care for the child and keep it from dangers
Thank you to everyone doing this work! I live in an extremely left liberal college town and have often remarked that the past 7 years have felt like living inside a communal mental illness. In 2018 a report on student mental health came out of the high school that was devastating. I noticed in a graph that social worker and therapy referrals had more than doubled after 2016-evidence of how much our Trump reaction was effecting our kids. I ended up reading Coddling of American Mind and started to painfully see how much we as a progressive left community were damaging our kids. When you live in a town that is completely ruled by this thinking you see how utterly corrosive it is. Taking away the agency of low income minority students to flatter this ideology is the absolute bottom and yet when you push back you are labeled an ‘ist’ and canceled. I know several students who are so anxious they are unable to go to the school and are sent to a therapy school run by the district. Friends and relatives living in purple or red areas have no idea what I’m talking about when I mention this. Even the kid’s appearance reflects this thinking-bedhead, sleepy pants, sweats, slippers, slides-like they never got out of bed. It’s a cult of mental illness. This way of thinking can not end soon enough and I plan to send this to our superintendent. Please keep going. The kids need this to stop!
I don't wanna belabor this analogy too much, but I just read the book "Raven" about Jim Jones and the People's Temple (highly recommend) and your comment reminded me of how children there and other cult members felt waking up every day in Jonestown: they never knew when they'd be singled out by Jim or the other leaders for insufficient zeal for the cause, or because someone overheard and reported a remark they made or dredged up an old comment they'd made and tried to paint it in a sinister light, or just because a personal enemy had it out for them—and they never knew if their punishment would be just to sit onstage and be berated by the group (Jim liked to have someone's family members lead the attacks, for extra destabilization) or some other bizarre punishment (like Jim getting to sleep w your wife).
There is also a commonality here in that both Jonestown and Social Justice are rooted in 60s Leftism, with some shades of Maoism too.
I think these things just represent modern manifestations of the fanatical religious eruptions that have taken place throughout human history.
" A cult of mental illness." That's great line that Haidt and others should use. It's got political punch.
When you visit extremely left liberal college towns you can feel the "communal mental illness." As a mom who raised kids in the cell phone generation, this article really spoke to me. I felt like I was watching in live time the lives of my kids friends and classmates. So spot on about the kids appearance comment. It will take articles like this to help others see what we see. These are very sad times for the young generation.
Respectfully, Dr. Haidt, there is no mention of the role of porn in the development of these toxic ideas and behaviours. Porn is so pervasive now and incredibly profitable. There are market forces that are normalizing the extreme sexual objectification and degradation of women, especially women of the age you're referring to. I think it's a huge blindspot in your analysis. It profoundly affects boys, too. I would imagine that boys, who are as young as 8 years old according to studies, cannot help but be traumatized when witnessing the brutality of today's porn. The book Big Porn Inc. https://www.amazon.com/Big-Porn-Inc-Exposing-Pornography/dp/1876756896/ describes the evolution (or devolution, really) of the porn industry and catastrophic effects it's had on the culture. Please consider adding this to your research.
What a perceptive idea. I agree. The rise of the personal phone and internet has made what was once seen as the realm of perverts into mainstream entertainment. Liberal women are more likely to try to please than a conservative (small c) one and porn has brought the ideas of degradation out of the computer screen into our schools and homes. If you have to talk someone into doing something, then it is not consensual.
But the graphs show not much happening to boys overall. And, boys had access to internet porn before 2012.
Porn today is radically more extreme and pervasive in media. Combine today's porn with social media, then add the sexting and deep fake technologies and young women don't stand a chance. Porn teaches boys and men that girls and women enjoy being choked during sex. That it's OK to send nude photos to their boyfriends. That this is the normal way girls relate to boys. Girls are told this by their boyfriends and because they are trusting and naive, they accept it. This reinforces ever more degrading acts of sexual aggression. Boys also share the thrill of overpowering these girls with other boys normalizing and distorting what sex is about until it loses any of the pleasure, connection and sacredness it once offered between men and women. And older women like me who try to warn young women about this are shouted down and told to shut up. We're 'prudes' and 'ignorant', old-fashioned and 'out of step with the times'.
The ultimate travesty is that men who end up killing their sexual partners engaging in these firms of sexual violence that they've learned through today's porn are able to use the defense that she 'consented' and it was 'accidental'. And they're winning these court cases! This is just the tip of the iceberg of what's happening to girls in this culture.
The tragedy is that both men and women are being exploited by the porn industry - which makes over $100 billion a year. Not to mention sex trafficking. And don't even get me started on trans ideology which demands that women and girls completely drop any boundaries that remain. However, the most grotesque dehumanization is mostly happening to girls and young women. How do I know this is true? Because Every Single Female in my extended family has been molested, raped or abused by an immediate male relative or friend. Even my father was sexually abused by his grandfather.
So, it's no mystery to those of us, as older women, who've been noticing this widespread cultural trend which is fundamentally misogynist. This culture, which values and elevates boys and men, and devalues girls and women as human beings except as commodities that can be exploited, is known as patriarchy and it's in its end stage. The war on female human beings is real and it is accelerating. It is also the source of most suffering today in both men and women. Until the majority of men stop using porn, and recognize it as the destructive force it is and unless the culture learns that sexuality is not a weapon they can exploit in human beings, we will all go down in flames. Fewer and fewer young women will be capable of caring for their young. More and more will take their own lives. This world will become a hellscape for them.
Read the book Big Porn Inc. and you will understand what's in store for all of us. Many men like Jackson Katz and Robert Jensen have started offering young men an alternative. Let's hope they succeed.
I agree completely on what men do & how they behave - that sexism is alive & well & women continue to be molested, ridiculed, beaten, raped & killed (65% of women killed are killed by their own lovers/husbands) every second of every minute of every day in every country around the world.
HOWEVER, I must add that women play a MAJOR role in raising their daughters to be "successful" - and they raise most of them in pink rooms among stuffed animals & Barbie dolls with miniature kitchens to play with. They also raise them in mini-bikinis, teach them to be "soft & gentle" and how to use eyeliner & all sorts of sexually alluring items of clothing & make-up. AND if they try to NOT raise them this way - all little girls are exposed to endless marketing on TV, Billboards, in all stores, and online - and all of it channels the female this way. AND she watches the news & listens to movies & parents when we think she doesn't... all contributing to her understanding of her role, social expectations, and what the grown up world is like.
While I know that this sexualization of the female is almost a requirement for success to this day... THAT is also part of the BIG problem... LITTLE GIRLS ARE SEXY - and ALL MEN are attracted to sweet little sexy girls - taboos be damned. THEN, we try to KEEP girls innocent - which means they are specifically ignorant of the FLOOD of feelings that one day will hit her with an inability to resist the marketing advances of a guy... because she just 'FELL IN LOVE" and has no idea about the risks to her physically, or its potential theft of her career & time for herself, etc... OUR FEAR about porn & sex & our own ignorance & biases (inhibitions & perversion) result in her ignorance.... by not wanting her to be a slut - we make her totally susceptible to being conned & lured & manipulated into going places & doing things with people who will TEACH her about love & sex & the outcomes.
AS FOR PORN - Americans think they're the most advanced yet behave like a low functioning culture... IF we allowed sex -workers to be seen for what they are... social workers fulfilling the needs of populations of men who are unable to have the release of the most basic urge of all life... whose service to society manages the aggressive pent up energies of males who need to channel this force somewhere... THEN we could help limit the fallout from large swaths of men acting out their sex drive on children and women... using whatever means they can to achieve what is the driver of life itself...
A lot of our problems come from our American endless desire to fight for freedoms of every sort - and many of those freedoms harm others as a side effect. We should sometimes think: EVERY FREEDOM FOR SOMEONE RESTRICTS SOMEONE ELSE. Perhaps if would help if we were all more genuine (admit our faults & flaws) and forgiving - WE DON'T FEEL SAFE in part because we are always viewing others as someone to overpower rather than learn from. Many of social media posts are so much about BE YOU and self-love that we confuse the boundary lines between selfishness and self love.... we confuse what we need and what we want...
Our feeling lost is lartgely due to losing the extended family and our ethnic purities along with stable long-term neighborhoods.... none of us is safe at home in our feelings and the social media merely exaggerates or compiles the stories & conversations that reflect the reality of our lives.
In and of itself - social media allows for free flow of real information and lets me watch lectures with Profs at MIT etc... it's a virtual library and kids can finish college by age 10 in terms of knowledge if they choose to.... Social media is a boon for medical treatment that can be done virtually - such as Therapists & consults... Social media is a blessing to shy & socially inhibited or awkward people (such as Aspergers and high-anxiety) who prefer asnd can better engage socially at a distance - where they feel safe (and this i a large group of people!). The Internet is our next step to unite after we stop fighting. Porn wouldn't be such an issue if we weren't all so inhibited & unkind.
> EVERY FREEDOM FOR SOMEONE RESTRICTS SOMEONE ELSE
How does my freedom of association restrict someone else’s freedom of association?
Boys did indeed have access to porn, but consider the added vehicle of porn that is mobile devices. Now, you're not restricted to the office or bedroom. Pre-smartphone/ipod touch (the device I began a porn addiction on), you needed a laptop or downloaded images/videos. Mobility of access is ease of access, in this case.
I don't think viewing porn on a small screen in a public toilet makes it somehow more enjoyable than it was before. If you want to argue it's porn, fine, but then you'd need to present an analysis like the one we're commenting on because it's really not obvious to me that anything meaningfully changed in terms of porn access at that time.
I was introduced to porn from Playboys my father left in the bathroom... and those pictures & cartoons ridiculing & exposing women messed up my sexuality significantly - I watch porn online now and am drawn to viewing very young looking girls servicing older men... THAT comes directly from my exposure to the many sexual magazines... at a very young age... I'm 70 & female.
Traumatized? I think that is a bit much, but I would say that many young men view women with a degree of objectification that would not have been acceptable to older generations. I feel like they heard feminist descriptions of objectification, and said "sure, I will do that just to spite you." Modern young men rebel by becoming racists and objectifying women the same way we used to playing pranks or spray painting public spaces. We grew out of it, but I suspect that they never will.
This is incredibly insightful, and aligns closely with my own observations. One thing that I'd add is that there is evidence that other social media, such as Facebook, has a deleterious, polarizing effect on discourse that also exerts a subtle but pervasive influence on adults. Over the last decade I've seen quite a few middle-aged friends, both men and women, become politically deranged, adopting the pathological politics of the liberal teenage girls discussed here - this despite no exposure to Tumblr.
My guess is that this is not something intrinsic to social media as a technology, but is algorithmic in nature. Big social designs their algorithms to maximize engagement - hence the slot machine addictiveness of it. They are also known to bias their algorithms to favor certain kinds of content. Thus, for example, liberal posts are more likely to be rewarded, while the timeline feed prioritizes liberal posts from one's contacts. The former creates a reinforcement learning loop, the latter distorts perception, and the combination acts as a Skinner box that gradually nudges people in a certain direction. I suppose that might sound conspiratorial, but actually it's not even necessary for the platform to put its thumb on the scale for a certain ideological position - an algorithm that simply learns what users "want" and gives them more of that will produce echo chambers of every ideology. However, the balance of evidence suggests that the polarization has been more due to radicalization of the left, than it has been due to the right becoming more extreme - hence my suspicion that Big Social has been engaging in social engineering.
That then implies another policy imperative: it must be absolutely forbidden for social media to engage in algorithmic social engineering.
I think it will also be very, very important for a cultural shift to take place, such that excessive social media use is shamed as low status. We need to unplug, and reengage with the physical world of real people, and we can't wait for government regulation to prod us in this direction.
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-devouring-mother-of-the-digital
Before responding I would just like to say, great comment John, lots to chew on.
I think we need frank acknowledgement and investigation into the massive potential for social media as a radicalising force and more education about how to counter it. In my life I have had three women close to me, all white, who have certainly had some ups and downs in their lives but not who I would describe as substantially disadvantaged, slide into fairly radical political beliefs during the pandemic. Even though these people are related to me, they're on different sides of my family and don't have a lot in common besides these simple factors, which makes me think that your point on "algorithmic social engineering" is spot on.
Steve Hassan's work on this has been really informative for me- I was recommended his ideas around deprogramming and deradicalization by an activist friend (who, I think crucially, is not white. Everyone else in this corner of my community simply recommended I cut out contact with my relatives, which is dismaying on many levels. I do think that Haidt's analysis of this polarization as a racial issue is crucial).
Hassan's work is much more involved than just this, but he talks to a lot of social research that we already know about radicalisation and what Haidt is discussing here too- that it is terribly easy to radicalise an isolated person (in any direction you like) and what is needed is to build relationships with real people.
I agree with you about the cultural shift around social media use, and hopefully at the same time it will be replaced by substantial efforts to build IRL community. I'm seeing efforts around this already, especially in faith communities, but I feel like it's still a long way off.
People from many ideological backgrounds generally seem to find this idea repellent and want to instead approach the person with logic, not emotional connection or bridge building. But we know from much more bigger conflicts and radicalisation movements like Rwanda or Colombia that that's what people actually respond to (https://onbeing.org/programs/amanda-ripley-stepping-out-of-the-zombie-dance-were-in-and-into-good-conflict-that-is-in-fact-life-giving/)
I wonder where the urge to debate people into sensibility or common ground comes from?
Building emotional connections across these divides is certainly the best way to bridge them, and to bring people out of the cult. This is much easier said than done. The totalizing nature of contemporary leftist ideology charges every subject with politics, meaning that anything you talk about, anything you do, is liable to venture into dangerous territory - at which point the interaction risks becoming angry and toxic. So it takes a lot of empathy, self control, and patience to do this, over a long period of time.
I think people default to debate because, one, they think they can win over the other person using logic rather than emotion (which generally isn't true), and two, because they're looking to win. It's a contest. This has gotten especially bad since the rise of social media because everyone is used to performing for an audience - one's interlocutor is not the intended audience, rather onlookers are, one is looking to score points with them, and after too long online this becomes second nature.
Very insightful comment, by the way.
> It’s important to reframe your emotional response as something that’s under your control:
> * Stop saying “so-and-so made me angry by doing X.”
> * Instead say “so-and-so did X, and I reacted by becoming angry.”
I'm not sure about this, because it seems to me it obscures a small but very real and critical distinction, conflating emotion and response into one messy conglomerate.
Emotional reactions are not something a person has control over. If so-and-so did X and it made you angry, you did not have the choice to not feel anger in response to that. That's just not how emotions work. Emotional reactions, particularly immediate-term ones, operate more on the level of instinct than of decision-making.
What you *did* have the choice over was what to do with that anger. You could lash out in a rage. You could suppress the anger and not act on it at all. You could channel it into any number of positive motivations. You could let it fester in dark plans and desires for revenge. You could decide to take physical steps to calm down, such as slowing down, breathing deeply, etc. And so on. But it feels not only incorrect but a bit unhealthy to deny the basic reality that emotional reactions to external stimuli are not a thing that is under our control.
I was always taught that:
"emotions are information for you, about yourself. They are NEVER a guide to action."
That's pretty good! Where'd you hear that from?
Check out Susan David’s Ted talk and book. She’s got a great angle on emotional granularity.
But CBT really does go further, and in my own experience rightly so. I highly recommend reading up on it if you haven’t. I really have found that between the stimulus and the emotion was an automatic thought — “He thinks I’m stupid”, “She’ll tell people I goofed”, “I’ll never get another job” — full of mind-reading, catastrophism, all the cognitive errors of which Jon and Greg list a few. And when you train yourself to notice them, and argue with them — “So what? I know I’m not stupid”, “What if she does? Everybody makes mistakes”, “That’s over the top, there’s lots of jobs out there” — it saps the automatic thought of much of its power over you and greatly lowers the valence of the resulting emotion.
The point of CBT is precisely that you *do* have at least some agency over your emotions, because you are not an automaton driven mindlessly by the stimula you experience — your emotions are at least modulated by the things you think, often so quickly that you are not actively conscious of those thoughts. But you can learn to be.
I think the old advice about “counting to ten” must have been an early intuition of this, not just to give you time to adjust your action, but also to adjust your thoughts and thereby your emotions.
I’ve done years of therapy (I’m a combat veteran) and this was exactly my experience, as well. With enough effort and practice, you can indeed modify your emotional reaction to situations. Over time, that rationalization you learn to do with yourself eventually changes the way you think and react entirely.
That's quite interesting. I've been struggling with that. Could you recommend any lecture about the topic?
There are probably lots of them, but my introduction — from before there was a web :-) — was David Burns’s book “Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy”.
Very kind, thank you.
I agree. And if we want to influence or be heard by today’s teen girls we need more sophisticated responses than “sticks and stones...” They have experienced wounding from words that they feel deeply and need to learn to process in healthy ways.
True. While speech is clearly not the same thing as violence, there is some degree of merit to Randall Munroe's observation that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it." (Alt text of https://xkcd.com/1216/ )
I think a big part of the "missing link" here lies in Jonathan's earlier research on Moral Foundation Theory. This article talks about how so much of the harm that liberals do to themselves comes from looking at everything in terms of harm. Well, what does Moral Foundation Theory tell us about liberals? It says that they've only got two tools in their moral reasoning toolbox (out of a complete set of five,) and one of those two is "care/harm".
The old saw "if you're not a liberal at 20 you have no heart, but if you're not a conservative by 30 you have no brain" can be traced back to at least the late 19th century; the earliest form of it I'm aware of was a response to the French Revolution and people's reactions to it. The common stereotypes of young people being adventurous and wanting to change the world, and old people being set in their ways, are older still, with examples dating back to antiquity. It seems clear that human beings naturally become more conservative with age; it's a normal part of maturity.
Once you understand that, the Progressive indoctrination that children receive in schools becomes all the more horrifying when you see it for what it is: they are stopping our kids from growing up! No wonder those who listen are so full of mental problems; they've had their mental maturation held back in the name of political ideology. Instead of the full toolbox of moral reasoning that was supposed to be their birthright, they're left with only the simplistic tools of children, and they then turn around and prove the old saying that "when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail." When all you have is childish notions about harm/care, that's your only way to view the world!
Depressing indeed!
And yet, for all that your cleverly-constructed bit of sophistry and cherry-picking may seem to make sense at first glance, the data clearly shows that *it does not work.* That adhering to it too strongly quite literally drives people insane.
Why do you think that is?
It’s true that our first, default emotional reaction to any event or stimulus is automatically served up by the brain; the key is realizing that nothing requires or forces us to just ride that initial reaction and allow ourselves to be emotionally flooded by it. Through mindfulness we can observe our default emotional response to any situation, and that observation creates a mental space between us and our reaction. It’s experiencing that space that enables us to choose a different response.
It takes intentional daily effort to instill the habit of watching our automatic reactions and deliberately choosing less self-defeating ones, but there may be nothing we can do for ourselves that can more dramatically change mental health for the better and reduce or eliminate neuroses. Source: personal experience.
When I was molested at age 9 - I didn't know to get angry... I just reacted with fear & shame.... When I outperformed the men and did more pushups & was honor graduate - I got raped & then I got angry & did an IG report... The outcome of that was gang harassment - by all the males in the group... who REALLY got angry for my daring to outdo them...
When one has an instinctive reaction - it makes total sense to say "He did this and made me angry" or whatever feeling. The choice of what to do about it afterwards is about the capacity to think over the feelings and the actions that caused them to occur. But taking "responsibility" for feelings of victimhood? A victim is a victim! Like - tell the pig not to squeal in terror when you're slicing his throat to get blood for making bloodwurst....
Great distinction between these levels Bob.
I do find it interesting that we have to keep rediscovering these things. Buddhism established very fine ways to discuss and manage exactly what you're talking about over a thousand years ago, and despite having more access to information on things like this than almost any other people ever alive, we keep forgetting.
I used to try to use CBT and I found it very frustrating because I can't really control my thoughts or feelings in many cases. CBT for me works for me somewhat for some lower power thoughts, but I found the techniques of diffusion and expansion from Acceptance and Commitment (ACT) therapy to be more powerful ways of dealing with negative thoughts and feelings. Also general mindfulness and using meditation to cultivating witness awareness, to separate my thoughts and feelings from who I am. CBT felt too much like I was fighting myself.
Apologies for the length, but I just had to comment on this.
As a member of Gen Y (M, 33, born in '89) I couldn't be happier to read your encounter with the Tumblr/4Chan divide, the impact that online communities had on my generation, and Angela Nagle's work.
As I was reading this post of yours, I kept wishing you could find your way to that podcast series and to that episode in particular. But I was very happy to see that you already had!
When I listened to the third episode of "Trials", I felt like they had finally nailed a major, major issue that rarely gets explored in these conversations, and that's my generation's, and by extension Gen Z's, interaction with unsupervised online communities from a very early age, and what that entailed.
Jonathan, my generation, and Gen Z, have been running a kind of social experiment on a massive scale, a scale of hundreds of millions, and it's an experiment which asks, "What kind of personalities are formed, what kind of character is formed, when children grow up in spaces where they can talk amongst each other from a very early age and without supervision about how scary and alienating the world is? What happens when they start sharing amongst each other whatever they want? What happens when they start talking about alienation from a very early age? What happens when they come across sex from a very early age? What happens when their identity is formed in the amorphous liquidity of the internet? What happens when all you talk about, naturally, is how scary and confusing and inexplicable and incoherent everything in the adult institutional world is (from schools on up)? And what happens when you keep doing this year after year, and nobody asks you to look at how you grew up through a critical lens?" And since the early 2010's, we've been reaping the consequences of that experiment.
We (my generation) helped put an idiot in the White House for laughs; we helped QAnon become a thing -- in fact we helped generate it (CP = "Cheese Pizza" & "Child Pornography" simultaneously is an early bit of 4Chan culture from even before the 2010s!!); we became hyper-focused on reaffirming our pain and alienation to and at each other and the rest of the world be damned, because this is literally what we grew up doing!
The conclusions do stand, Jonathan. For years I've been waiting for the rest of the culture to catch up to the impact that these online communities, and internet use in general, have had on my generation. It's been a little more obvious to me because I grew up around people who used Tumblr and 4chan like maniacs. It has been the most surreal thing to have seen the fractious impulsive moods and cultures of those communities coming out into the real world and influencing actual elections, influencing actual national and international cultures and conversations, to an extent that it will now get written into the history books, chiseled in stone forever. I feel like this is the first major collective contribution my generation has made to the massive tome we call Human History, and I find it profoundly disappointing and saddening, because it's so scattered, it's so full of energy that's going nowhere, nowhere good. I remember thinking, "We are not paying attention to this stuff at our own peril. We need to talk about how we grew up with the internet with an extremely necessary transparency. In a way that we've never talked about it before. We need to start to deconstruct our own childhoods and adolescences looking at screens before we start to deconstruct the world."
I really think you should talk to Nagle, you should talk to people who study Tumblr and 4Chan. I think it's going to open your eyes a lot about why it all starts to spill out into the culture in the 2010s, just as Gen Y is becoming adult and starting to voice, as adults, their opinions about the world, in ways that now influence the actual course of daily events, even yearly "events".
An aspect of growing up in web communities that you don't quite capture in this article is how so much of that was constantly infused with the natural confusion and fear about the outside "grown up" world that everyone felt at that time -- that we ALL feel when we're kids and teens. And that developed and evolved into the activist streak that you see today, and also the nihilistic humor-mongering, irony-mongering, boundary-testing nihilism more common in boys, where there's a profound discomfort with the world, that has been cultivated from a very young age. Both sides of this divide are marked by an automated dissing of the world as it works today, even a disgust. When you let kids express to each other how weird and confusing and disgusting and painful and scary the adult world is, and if people keep reaffirming that because that's all they know, that's the only signaling of a "secure community" that they get, that's all they truly value (because it's coming from your isolated communities), and so people grow up to be confused and scared of the world. It never resolves. Along with helicopter parenting, and not enough unsupervised play time outside in the sun, and bulimia-advocacy videos, and porn use from a young age... you have this as well: the confusion and fear inherent in childhood not getting resolved.
My generation has grown up for 20 years without ever questioning how they got to be who they are. Not on this level. Not this deeply. The internet, and its influences and cultures, is just taken for granted. It is in fact seen as the only safe space, as the drug one goes for to be soothed, because that's home. The world out there, made by our parents and grandparents and their parents? That isn't home. At all. It's STILL scary. For a TON of people. I see this everywhere. Radical activism on a hundreds fronts? Doesn't surprise me. Almost suicidal nihilism and lack of sex? Doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
My generation's interaction with the internet, in the privacy of our bedrooms, is going to be the "wound", the nerve, that will have to be touched in order for this utter maelstrom of emotions and cacophonous scattershot energies to start healing. I guarantee you.
With the deepest respect for you and your work, and this ever-evolving conversation,
Cheers from Portugal!
Hey João, I was really interested to read your comment as someone who also grew up on the American internet despite not being American, and born in the same year. I feel like you summed up our collective experience really well.
I think that some of our peers are making really interesting art outside of political binaries that interrogates this experience; our contribution as a generation isn't all bad. I have a whole list of this stuff in the back of my head if you're interested. Making or consuming art about it is one way to resolve this very EXTREME experience we had; a way to get to the "extremely necessary transparency" you mention. But apart from weird art and artists, I don't know many other people managing to resolve or incorporate our experiences of growing up like this, how to question it or heal it. Without trying to use the kind of pathologizing language that Haidt discusses as being such a problem, I do think it's a kind of mass trauma or wound as you describe. I was on both of these platforms; I rarely get a chance to deconstruct my childhood experiences of spending most days looking at the most extreme illegal content on 4chan and then going on Tumblr to be schooled in microscopic identity politics; people who didn't experience it don't want to hear about it, and for a lot of people who did, like you say, it's normalised.
Crucially I can talk about it with my wife, or some rare spaces like we're doing here. Otherwise, I'm not sure how to temper it- I do believe in the power of art and a reparative reading (Olivia Laing) so strongly; I'm also a bit religious which I think helps, talking to lots of different kinds of people; in the real world, as much as possible. How do we temper this fear? I have a lot of friends who are not interested in art or religion, and then this boxed in mindset makes community building hard. I would be very interested to hear what kinds of tactics you think we can use to resolve this alienation, us still stuck in our metaphorical childhood bedrooms in front of a cathode screen glow...
part 2 of my reply
Thank you for mentioning Olivia Laing. I'm curious to look into her work.
You ask me if I have any ideas for how people of our generation can find their way back to each other. That's a hard question. Or maybe it's hard for us even though it's obvious and simple, which is simply to get off our asses and commune in whatever ways we feel are meaningful and really touch the soul, lol. But no, the path to get there, for many, no, is not easy. To even suggest this can be seen as offensive or triggering or misaligned with where people are, which I understand…
I think it's important for us to do internal work on ourselves, acknowledging that that work never really ends; I think it's important to know how to be in vulnerable spaces with others (you mention your wife, and religion, and that can be a good way to access that space); I think Art plays a role; I think music plays a role; I think reading and writing plays a role; I don't know how much of this will be addressed if we start being "social" in VR, with 3D avatars, no matter how engaging and fantastic it is. If on the other side of that coin I see someone taking off their VR goggles/helmet, alone in an empty apartment with a potted plant, with back problems and no exercise in his/her life, that's not a step forward I don't think; I think AI can help in a lot of spaces, for example therapy (imagine you struggle with being social and you can try as many variations of your own attitudes as you can without paying much cost, and using that experience to then go out in the world and interact with real people. Maybe that can help a lot of people. We don’t know.)
Despite having thought about all these interconnected, intersecting issues for many years, I still feel like I'm scratching the surface and not finding a lot of answers. And this is mostly because it's just so new, all of this.
I think we need to keep talking, opening spaces that haven't been opened yet, framing things in very new ways, we need to be innovative on a more cultural or social level, maybe even emotional level, and not just technologically.
I sometimes wonder where we would be if, instead of innovating so much in the technological sphere, on the "computer terminal" end of civilization, if we hadn't gone with the ideas of the “computer nerds”, and had instead focused on other kinds of innovations... I wonder where we would be. Cultural technologies, social technologies, interpersonal technologies, as opposed to physical, material technologies and gadgetry -- sort of non-corporeal technologies, new cultural structures, new rituals, etc. We're kind of distracted with the computer and its potentialities, letting it define everything else, and we're forgetting to look at ourselves and our needs and our limitations as organisms. We're like a prefrontal cortex civilization right now. I can't help looking at our relationship with computers and digitization since Englebart's UI presentation, and what I see is the whole of the culture letting itself be guided by what people who like sitting in front of computer terminals think are good ideas. That’s how we got social media and smartphones, and in the process isolated hundreds of millions of people and put billions in attention holes, just like the nerds who created these technologies like to do. It's like the computer nerds have become the tuning forks for the rest of civilization.
What if other social groups had become the tuning forks instead, you know? Some might say the intellectuals/philosophers; others might say the musicians, the artists, the Arts; others might say the shamans; others the Earth Goddess; others psychedelics; others religion; others War; others money, or the market; others might say the emotions; others might suggest whoever represents love or maturity of spirit; and so on.
That's what I wonder about, I wonder if it's possible to start veering in other directions at that scale, trying to put the computer, the digital world, more in the background, into a kind of invisible infrastructure domain, while human beings are then left to live their lives without having to necessarily having to interact with these more abstracted systems and their demands, getting to build more of a space for themselves and each other. I know this starts to sound a little too much like Richard Brautigan's poem "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace", but it's not quite that, lol, although, I’m sure AI is going to change a lot of things. The “Loving Grace” would fundamentally be human and not substituted, mediated, with technology.
That’s another thing. I sometimes don't understand why we put so many layers between us, between each other, and between us and the world. It's amazing how mediated everything between people is nowadays. And we’re going to add AI to that, we’re literally on our way to creating fake others now. What is that about? Looking for control again? Looking for understanding and empathy again? Looking for low risk again? Looking for efficiency above everything else (I think this is a big one). I sometimes wonder if it's not possible to "desintermediate", or "unmediate", or more fully "embody" humanity, as opposed to "disembody" our relationship with the world and with the other beings around us.
That's more or less where my mind goes, but I'm still very much exploring. I don't have any answers exactly. Haha
This is all very complicated stuff. The most important for me is to have humility when facing it all.
Hi :) sorry for the late reply
I'm happy that you saw something of your own experience in what I wrote. I'm sure plenty of people do not, but I think the amount of people who do relate is very large and it hasn't really been looked at. Not at this level.
I, of course, do think our generation has some fantastic individuals who are contributing in very important ways, in many dimensions of life. Too many to name here.
But you mention Art. Even though it's not an area I'm deeply immersed in, I don't doubt that there's plenty of contributions from our generation there.
I'd definitely be interested in Art that you think questions and explores some of the things I wrote above. For me, I don't have to explore these issues simply through arguments and statistics and data. I'm more than happy to welcome other angles at which we can look at what's been happening "to us" for the past 25 years or so. I agree with you, Art is a way to access that transparency that I mentioned and said was necessary, even though in my mind I was simply thinking of spoken word, scientifically informed discussions that look at the psychological depths of what's been happening. But I'm definitely open to exploring these things through more non-verbal / non-"verbalizable" means. I think art can be very stimulating and spark very interesting insights and new connections, which we definitely do need as well.
You say despite the art that some people make, you can't quite think of others who may be questioning and resolving the tensions. I think each person does this in their own way. Maybe one can notice trends, patterns. I think lots of people try to resolve it through activism, through wanting to change the world; I think many try to resolve it through more psychotherapeutic frameworks, sometimes well, sometimes distorting it; then I think there's attempts at doing this work that misfire, that aren't really that healthy, like the nihilism, like the constant demand that the world bend to your own sensitivities, etc. The world can't be the friend or parent we might feel we never had. Another problematic one might be through sexuality, masturbation and/or pornography use as a soothing mechanism in contexts where people aren't getting enough intimacy or releasing tension in other ways. And I mention this as someone who is incredibly sex positive and is definitely not a pearl clutching conservative who wants to see it all banned or whatever. There's something about this area that I think also needs to be looked at with some maturity. I don’t think our generation is quite ready to do that, although there’s some inklings of it here and there. There’s a sense that we’ve stretched ourselves really thin with all the total availabilities of the internet.
I think trauma plays a part, but I think the term gets overused nowadays -- this connects to the psychotherapeutic frameworks I mentioned above that I think people use to navigate their own experience of life, which is extremely understandable. I think this also connects with the internal experience of not knowing what to do with hurt as an internal event in oneself, that discomfort, that sadness, that slashing of expectations or innocence about something, and not knowing how to integrate new experiences, almost being offended at being asked to grow, being offended by personal growth when it’s painful (but this is very human, lol). And I'll digress for a bit, but I see this, in turn, in some ways, especially with boys, connecting with video game use (again, I sound like I'm only putting tired conservative points of view on the table here, but I really don't see it that way. I'm not coming at this from a traditionalist or conservative perspective).
I don't know if video games could be called art exactly, but some people do, so I guess it's relevant to the discussion in the way you've framed it?
Something about games, and the internet in general, that I've noticed is the control aspect.
Online, everything becomes hyper-managed and manageable. It's hyper-calibrated. You can manage who comes and talks to you; you can think before you speak and put your thoughts in order; you can delay responses; you can tinker with the difficulty levels in games; the consequences for behavior are much lower online as well as in games; pressures are much lower; risks are lower; it's a world that happily indulges whatever repetition compulsions you may have.
Growing up in that much more controlled environment habituates your system to a certain degree of pushback. But when out in the real world, that's immediately anxiety-inducing. And it puts a person in immediate contact with the feeling that they can't keep up (which I think is massive in our generation). And there's shame in this that very often just goes unspoken, because it's extremely vulnerable territory to get into with other people face to face, not to mention that a lot of people aren't even aware that this is what's going on for them. A lot of people of our generation, and Gen Z, have been put in a kind of hole where the key will be to express that they can’t keep up, that they need friends, and that they feel really lonely, and that’s a massive ask for people of this generation.
To express incomprehension at why the world cannot be more thoughtful, more aligned with you and your needs, to not understand why it can't be as simple and as emotionally meaningful as the entertainment you've consumed throughout your life, as meaningful and attuned as the conversations you've had online, these are all questions and frustrations that have come up in my conversations with friends who are of the same generation. This kind of stuff keeps showing up.
But back to trauma, or "the wound". When I wrote that I wasn't necessarily thinking of 4chan, or even porn use, even though it's certainly part of it. I was more looking at it from the alienation perspective, from others and from self (or "better self"). I don't think everyone's on 4chan getting traumatized and putting on enormous weights of shame on themselves, or going on Tumblr and getting their identity pushed and pulled in a hundred directions and excusing it all as freedom of spirit and fluidity. I think there's a trillion gradations for people in our generation. Some people might've gone through what could be considered a more classical youth path, but that’s definitely not the majority -- meaning, the majority is going through a very new kind of experience, and the internet, as a thing, plays a major role. And like you say, this can get so normalized, so taken for granted, that it becomes the kind of thing you don't even notice.
What I see is a generation interested in the pulverization of boundaries, of norms, of strictures, for reasons I've expressed above and in my previous post. And when the world, being what it is, pushes back, for many, there's a default response of either feeling hurt or feeling irritated/dismissive. This letting go of strictures, of expanding our own personal overton windows, of what we're comfortable with, can be freeing or it can distressing, depending on where we're going with the explorations and how much we feel those explorations contradict who we sense ourselves to be, or how others see us, whether we care or not.
These are pretty complicated topics, lol. And whenever I think about these things I feel like I'm overgeneralizing.
Great contribution to the conversation! And refreshing that you don't view things through a preset ideological template like some commenters do.
A lack of a sense of belonging and not being comfortable in the world as it is now are really important factors here.
Both the world needs to change somewhat, as well as the paths (social, institutional, personal) to individual growth and maturity need to improve and keep up with the times.
I recently finished Cal Newport's "Digital Minimalism", and there were a few passages I found really insightful:
"𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘮 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘮𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘢 𝘥𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘦𝘴 𝘶𝘴 𝘶𝘯𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘺...𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘬𝘦𝘺 𝘪𝘴𝘴𝘶𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘮𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘢 𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘢𝘸𝘢𝘺 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭-𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥 𝘴𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘻𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵'𝘴 𝘮𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘷𝘢𝘭𝘶𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦. 𝘈𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘨𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘺, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘮𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘢, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘦𝘷𝘰𝘵𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘷𝘢𝘭𝘶𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘵 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘴 - 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘴𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘮𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘢 𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘮𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦 𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦...𝘖𝘧𝘧𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘺 𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘳𝘦𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘣𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘤𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘭𝘢𝘳𝘨𝘦 𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘪𝘯𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘴𝘶𝘣𝘵𝘭𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘨 𝘤𝘶𝘦𝘴 𝘴𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘢𝘴 𝘣𝘰𝘥𝘺 𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘶𝘢𝘨𝘦, 𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘷𝘰𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘵𝘰𝘯𝘦. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘰𝘸-𝘣𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘸𝘪𝘥𝘵𝘩 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘴𝘶𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘺 𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘥𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘰𝘰𝘭𝘴...𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘩𝘪𝘨𝘩-𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘤𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘯𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘴 𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘥."
This seems to complement Twenge's argument about children's lack of free play. Apart from school, when a child's primary means of connecting with others and developing social skills is on social media, where their frames of reference on how to treat themselves and others is presented in the most trivial and histrionic ways, how much of their growth is being stunted thanks to these fast food substitutes?
Anecdotally speaking, I find myself preferring to text people instead of calling them, to have random conversations instead of scheduling a dedicated time to connect with them. It's so gosh darn easy to use these shortcuts when you have a smartphone! Lately I've been trying to encourage friends to text me less and either meet up with me in person or at least have a video chat so we can give each other our full attention. For some, it's very foreign to them!
If smartphones are here to stay, let's make sure we're using this technology intentionally and with discipline so it doesn't use us. If it's hard for me to do this, I can't imagine how hard it is for young teenagers with far more on their plates!
Social media may not be real life, but the behaviors it and smartphones encourage (fragmented multi-tasking, constant notification checking, social comparisons) are seeping into our real lives whether we like it or not.
Fully agree! Part of the solution is 'getting real'. I just recently posted an article on TikTok brain cure with three ingredients https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/tiktok-brain-cure-with-three-ingredients, which discusses steps to move back toward real relationships, conversation, nature, movement, tolerating boredom, and creating.
Thanks for sharing Ruth! I love a lot of the suggestions you present in your article!
Couldn't you argue with the claim that "real world socializing [is] massively more valuable" given that a significant amount of time is actually spent interacting online (be it through messaging systems or social media in general)?
It seems like what we need is a broader notion of socialization that incorporates "real" and online communication. That would help us raise children, who will grow to be citizens, to handle both spheres and appreciate how they are intertwined. Social media and the internet in general has effectively broken the "real world" paradigm. Continuing to conceptualize these issues in dichotomous terms is reductionist and doesn't get us anywhere, imo.
Thank you for this wonderful article on an important topic.
In addition to writing about policy implications, you might consider including some less idealistic (and more realistic) coping strategies for parents. Some will read this and think, “Head to the hills!”--reinforcing the walls around their subculture in a way that prevents their kids from developing the skills to relate and engage with most of their contemporaries. Others will focus on trying to control internet usage in a way that inhibits their kids’ development of locus of control. Others will give up too soon. As an idealist myself, with a 17-year-old daughter, I found it useful to develop a “distract and delay” strategy. I delayed getting a phone as long as possible, prioritized and supported almost any sort of off-device engagement, kept phone away from her at night, on Sundays and during meals, etc. Knowing that she would eventually need to set her own limits, I relaxed rules later in high school. She never got into posting a lot and says “social media is boring after a while.”
How do you think about the Tumblr hypothesis versus the Instagram hypothesis?
In this post, you focus more on the Tumblr-based hypothesis, which explains why the rise in depression is hitting liberals hardest. But in other writing you've talked more about Instagram and how it's implicated in the self reports of teen girls, particularly around body image. These hypotheses are very different, and the existence of both of them could open up you to charges of excessive theoretical flexibility.
I personally think it's reasonable to keep both hypotheses alive. Both Tumblr and Instagram were Gutenberg-level shocks to teen social life, so it wouldn't be surprising if they both had a big impact on mental health, each in their own way.
But I am curious what you think.
Here’s a thought. In Liberals, the main effect of social media on depression is driven by reverse-CBT. In girls, the main effect is driven by Instagram.
That would explain why there is maximal impact on liberal girls, as well as why you didn’t find strong gender differences in reverse-CBT mechanisms (e.g. Fig 3, Fig 6)
I don't buy the instagram hypothesis at all. It just seems like a rehash of anorexia discourse.
The influence of tumblr is undeniable and massive.
They're profoundly different platforms in terms of tone and content; I think the only real point of comparison is they're American products on a screen? They should be analyzed separately, I think this is a crucial point.
Even boys have strange body issues now. They no longer compete to see who can lift more, but instead talk about how "cut" they are and how they look. It is disturbing. I was terrified my nephews were being groomed by child molesters, then I simple found out that their obsession with their physical looks is the new normal. Instead of curing the female diseases, we spread them to boys.
“Has a doctor or other healthcare provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?”
While this is interesting, I'd first like to know how many of them went there explicitly to get that very diagnosis in the first place (so they can run and tell their TikTok followers that they're legit), and the doctor just went along with it because they like money.
As someone who's successfully manipulated doctors into saying what I want, I gotta say... I don't really trust them that much... and the last few years have not helped at all.
This reminded me of something that was in LinkedIn recently from Dr. Brad Klontz, Financial Psychologist.
To My Capitalism-Hating Friends,
I love you.
I appreciate your sensitivity, your sincerity, your sense of fairness and your desire to make the world a better place.
I also appreciate your thoughtful insights into the downsides of capitalism, which are many.
But you and I are different.
I am not an economist, politician or a sociologist.
I am a clinical psychologist.
I have dedicated my professional life to helping real people improve their day-to-day lives.
In my work in the trenches, highbrow political musings about capitalism, socialism, etc. are TOTALLY USELESS for people who actually want and need to change their lives TODAY.
Even worse, suggesting to people that they CAN’T change their plight because the “system is rigged” is just HORRIBLE.
You’re actually HURTING the people you say you want to help by spouting that disempowering nonsense.
Please stop doing that.
People like me - who grew-up economically disadvantaged - can’t afford to wait for people like YOU to change the entire system of government to give us a leg up.
We can’t afford to believe that “the system is rigged” and we are powerless to create a better life for ourselves and for our families - and the evidence just does NOT support this claim.
Politicians have been promising to make our lives better to get our votes - but nothing has changed.
As a clinical psychologist my role is to help people achieve their goals and reach their highest potential.
My focus has been in the area of financial psychology. I have conducted psychological studies on thousands of individuals from all socioeconomic backgrounds.
I have studied the mindsets, habits, and lifestyles of people who grew-up POOR and have been able to climb the socioeconomic ladder.
Their stories are inspiring, their psychology and behaviors can be taught, and their results can be replicated.
I will continue to share these mindsets and habits to help inspire people who want to create a better life. I will continue to dispel myths about the rich that keep people poor. I will continue to call out self-destructive beliefs about money.
I will continue to do my best to give people the tools they need to change their lives - because NOBODY is going to do it for them.
I will keep focusing on helping people win the game we were all born into.
I appreciate your desire to make the world a better place.
When you’ve successfully changed the game I will immediately shift-gears and do my best to teach people how to win at the new game you’ve created for us.
Sincerely,
Dr. Brad Klontz
You have nicely displayed the inherent contradiction one always faces and it takes many forms. For instance I'm convinced that every time somebody gives 10,- $ to charity this reduces the amount the state provides out of taxes by the same amount because the state will always only give just "enough". So charity by ordinary people is just making the rich richer. But can I uphold that position when I see somebody in need ? No, of course I have to give when I can. Or take the so called disobedience by social protesters. They do break the law, which I resent. And they do hurt ordinary people, which I also resent. But do I want a world where protest that actually has any chance to change something becomes practically impossible ? No. This internal contradiction between good positions and doing bad things for the good cause is really why left positions never seem to be able to hit their mark while they are actually aimed to really help the overwhelming majority of the people. Navigating this in a successful way is close to impossible imho.
I was excited to see the reference to Tumblr in the piece. As someone who entered college in 2011 (and graduated in 2015), it always struck me as plain-as-day that Tumblr directly impacted this cultural shift. I was someone who always felt just a tad bit too old for Tumblr that people a few years my junior were obsessed with, which coincides with the timing you and Greg mention taking hold in colleges in 2013.
I don't really have any empirical evidence for it. But I found writings that talked about this very personally compelling (e.g. Katherine Dee's discussion at https://www.theamericanconservative.com/tumblr-transformed-american-politics/ and Kat Rosenfield's discussion at https://unherd.com/2023/01/how-tumblr-corrupted-the-new-york-times/).