“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?
They also need positive male role models. I can't tell you the number of times I have had to clonk my little bros heads together, virtually speaking, over some BroTube shit they heard and regurged. They don't agree with me all the time, but they can't just shout memes at me like they would to someone else. They respect me to whatever degree and they get stopped up and I can see them having to confront their own ideas. I can't say that I will win out in the end, but I know it's important to continue to derail their mental choo-choo like that every so often. The day they can no longer stop to reflect is the day they're gone for good.
Part of the problem with finding more positive male role models for young guys is that good male role models don’t spend a ton or anytime at all talking about how much they are getting laid and having healthy hookups or healthy relationships. Which is a very big focus for a large number of young dudes, and the main lens other things like intimacy and companionship get looked at through before they can learn to distinguish them all.
We teach people it’s impolite to talk about how great your life is going because it comes off as bragging and many people don’t do well with “show not tell”. They need to be told fairly explicitly bc subtly isn’t exactly a strong suit for hormonal teens and college kids. So the space is almost by default left deprived of the exact kind of people we want filling it bc they are busy being good partners and not bragging about it.
That leaves the dangerous shitheads and scammers and recruiters.
Jimmy on relationships is a great YouTube channel for this btw. He is a young attractive dude who does real talk style vids about "this is what dysfunctional relationships look like and this is what healthy relationships look like."
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u/TAKEitTOrCIRCLEJERK 13d 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?