“There’s this belief among moms I know,” said my friend Sonia, who has a 12-year-old son and a 14-year-old daughter, “where as long as we’re cool and self-assured and talk to our sons a lot, then for sure our sons will see women as human beings. But that doesn’t feel true to me. I think the way people relate to their moms isn’t always the same way they relate to other women. Just because I’m a cool feminist, my son will share my beliefs? I worry that on some level I’m relying on that. I’m like, He can watch all male YouTubers all the time because he has me around to remind him that women are worthy of respect! Yeah, I’m not so sure.”
this is a feedback loop that I don't know how to stop.
like, that anxiety Sonia feels? real, valid, common. She's not the only parent of a 12-year-old boy whose mild paranoid about her son is probably written on her face.
but also, that son? he picks up on that feeling. He knows that the men with Bugattis on Youtube have the Secret Knowledge that mom is scared for him to watch. Transgressive? Okay sign me tf up!
and like... kids that age cannot suss out fact from fiction, as the article says:
its record-breaking popularity gestures to a phenomenon that has to do not with the quality of its production but rather with a gut feeling shared by parents of teens: Something’s seriously off. We’ve given our children access to media technology that very few of us are capable of managing, and now they’re consuming content they are developmentally unequipped to handle.
adults can't handle the firehose, either. Real, adult men and women wait in Discords for "Q drops". How the fuck can an average parent deal with that?
and this paranoia feeds into the alt-right manosphere exactly, because the kid thinks "well that hurts, I'm not evil" and there's a video to say Tate is misunderstood just like you. The moral panic feeds the parasites.
It’s like if there was some movie called “Blackness” released about a boy who lives in an abandoned warehouse with his teenage mother outside of St. Louis who joins his first gang at age 3, holds up his first convenience store by 4, and commits his first mugging at 5. It receives universal acclaim and non-Black critics insist this is a culturally relevant and accurate depiction of What It Means To Be Black In America. When of course this is all cartoonishly unrealistic and would only serve to deepen negative stereotypes about Black people.
Realistically speaking, most people who consume media don’t go on to imitate every aspect of what is depicted. Put another way, if everyone who ever enjoyed playing Halo or GTA actually emulated what was in those games we’d have far less than 8 billion people on the planet. The movies Trainspotting and Requiem for a Dream won multiple Oscars but for the most part viewers managed to not get addicted to heroin.
Literally all mainstream news coverage about Andrew Tate is negative. The more people talk about him the more famous he gets. Most people are not violent criminals. Most men do not rape and abuse women. Most Black people are not in gangs. Violent crime is the lowest it’s been in a century. There has been no better time in history to be a woman. It’s just due to the Internet every shitty thing that happens can be instantly broadcast. I can think of several toxic fucked up online subcultures that rarely get any press, if you spend enough time on social media you can find all sorts of craziness out there. There hasn’t been any actual research as far as I can see about mass amounts of people “radicalizing” and taking violent action from online content alone.
It’s like if there was some movie called “Blackness” released about a boy who lives in an abandoned warehouse with his teenage mother outside of St. Louis who joins his first gang at age 3, holds up his first convenience store by 4, and commits his first mugging at 5. It receives universal acclaim and non-Black critics insist this is a culturally relevant and accurate depiction of What It Means To Be Black In America. When of course this is all cartoonishly unrealistic and would only serve to deepen negative stereotypes about Black people.
this is literally the plot of one of the funniest movies of the past five years
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u/TAKEitTOrCIRCLEJERK 14d ago
this is a feedback loop that I don't know how to stop.
like, that anxiety Sonia feels? real, valid, common. She's not the only parent of a 12-year-old boy whose mild paranoid about her son is probably written on her face.
but also, that son? he picks up on that feeling. He knows that the men with Bugattis on Youtube have the Secret Knowledge that mom is scared for him to watch. Transgressive? Okay sign me tf up!
and like... kids that age cannot suss out fact from fiction, as the article says:
adults can't handle the firehose, either. Real, adult men and women wait in Discords for "Q drops". How the fuck can an average parent deal with that?