U.S. Teen Girls Experiencing Increased Sadness and Violence
cdc.gov
cdc.gov
We need more research on this without "teen girls" in the clickbait titles. This affects everyone. It affected the person of my romantic interest and I had to break up at the end.
This affects 30+ year old men too. Don't dismiss it.
Besides research we need solutions. We need advice on how to approach this topic. We need to find a way to be able to help those who want it.
Society does not care about male problems. Let's just label them incels or terrorists and be done with it. Also at the same time let's wonder why Andrew Tate and similar are easily getting such a huge following.
I think social media amplifies the extreme minorities voices that state that they don't care about male problems, that men are incels and far-right terrorists and other unsavory takes. I don't think most people label males as such. But I do think social media is extremely good at bringing up these takes - because they create a lot of engagement (particularly from the opposing side).
I think social media affects 30 year old males in the exact same way as teenage girls get body image problems from looking at "perfect" lives on Instagram. Men get served toxic and outrage based content that shows the extreme outliers - multiple times a week, for multiple years in a row.
I think most people are reasonable. I think most people care about male problems. I think a minority label men as incels or terrorists. I think the internet exaggerates this position greatly, and it's at least partly overblown.
Here's something I've seen happen. A couple of women in a corporate Slack channel says, hey CEO, what are you going to do to celebrate International Women's Day? Some dudes respond and say, cool, good idea but if we do something for that can we also celebrate International Men's Day? The women reply with angry face and eyeroll emojis before saying: no we should not, because "every day is international men's day".
This is the type of casual misandry and anti-male sentiment that is an everyday experience when dealing with feminists. Were these women the "reasonable" type? They weren't literally tweeting #KillAllMen but when it came to the crunch they wanted special privileges for women and justified this sexism with shallow, untrue meme-based kneejerks.
So the OPs point is accurate. Nobody cares about men being depressed or angry, especially not in government, academia or the media. Phrase it in terms of teen girls and the floodgates of tax money open. Let that affect strategy or don't, but that's how it is.
OTOH, introducing men's day sounds fair as then everyone is treated equally (in this aspect)
I really don't know which side of this particular debate we should support more. What I'm sure is that the topic is more delicate and complicated than having a one-sentence answer to it.
Firstly, every day is clearly not a celebration of men. This is exactly the same lie that the feminists pushed in the Slack channel. A "celebration" has lots of very specific aspects to it, for example they wanted the company doing public announcements, praising female employees (for existing, more or less), talking about how important it is to hire more women and so on.
Secondly, men don't receive higher salaries when controlling for the work done and age. When you control for those things women now earn higher salaries, reflecting feminist biases in hiring. This insistence that work and motherhood should be ignored is also a feminist meme that's been repeatedly debunked since the 1980s. It never goes away because if feminists were to accept this, they'd have to also concede that different choices lead to different outcomes, that men and women make different choices, and therefore that disparate outcomes is not oppression. And that would undermine the whole premise of feminist ideology. So feminists can never be honest about salaries, if they were, they'd no longer be feminists.
In fact, it's a very practical holiday that encourages male bonding and keeping long-term friendships, something lacking these days, so it's not just symbolic.
Other initiatives such as November 19 and Movember also have a lot of practical stuff, related to health.
I really don't see what's the controversy.
Jumping into these "reactionary" mens rights positions as a counter to feminist issues is the wrong way to do it and understandably makes people a bit angry. Just as in if real life someone is telling you about an issue - countering with a "buuut, group Y has it bad too..." would probably make someone double take a bit. It's unproductive, but normal on social media because it's engaging and creates a hot comment section.
In my opinion some major male problems are related to:
* Mental health, suicide and the lack of services and support for men.
* How the education system works better for females than males.
* How platonic relationships with males have been systemetically decreasing.
* How in rural societies women are more likely to move to the cities and get an education leading to men having way less romantic options.
If you bring these topics up with women they'll probably sympathise and maybe also agree that these are issues that our society should be assisting with solving. How it should be "solved" may be up for debate. But framing it as a counter position to the feminist movement isn't the right way to do it. But very normalised online, which feeds into my point of the internet exaggerating issues as most debates you see online is controversial by design of the algorithms and content creators trying to get engagement.
Disclaimer: I'm from Norway, which gives some context. But I think these issues are pretty common across the westernized world.
It's the old standard of not wanting to appear weak or needy. This is a real thing with men (as a generalized group, exceptions exist) and also plays a powerful role is shaping how society treats men's versus women's problems in this context.
The focus only being on teen girls is objectively false. We literally have no idea what this technology is doing to us, and the research communities are scrambling to figure out the effects of social media and technology on all of us. But these are extremely time consuming and hard things to do conclusive studies on.
I do concede that girls were the first group to be broadly reported though. Probably because that age and gender group is especially vulnerable to the damages caused by social media and signs clearly starting showing up in 2012-2017 in a greater degree than boys of the same age group. Also it doesn't surprise me that a group who is constantly monitored by authority (parents and schools) are the first to be reported on. Males aged 20-60 are more likely to isolate themselves and not reach out creating far greater "dark cases".
My original point is that the internet exaggerates and selectively filters for engagement. If your knowledge on this topic is primarily from online sources optimised for engagement you have an incomplete view on the area. I'm not trying to change your mind on this topic in particular. I'm just saying that the internet inherently exaggerates and removes nuance (and I've felt a bit of that lack of nuance in your comments) and that this affects everyone and every single topic online today. Including me.
I gotta ask because you seem to be disagreeing with the thesis of this thread, but then it appears like you keep rephrasing the points:
TheLoafOfBread says: "Society does not care about male problems. Let's just label them incels or terrorists and be done with it."
Your response: "there's tons of research being done on men as well. Incels and Japanese Hikikomori, conspiracy theories and online extremism is more male oriented"
Yes that's what he said?? Academics research girls to solve their problems, they research men as problems. Put another way, if this is really the view of only a tiny minority that is exaggerated by social media engagement optimization, how can there also be "tons of research" on these things?
Ok, I'll spell it out clearly for you then.
Research is being done on both girls and boys, adults and children. There are rational explanations for why you mostly hear about the girls (the numbers there are insane, and more likely to bubble up into your feed).
But the comment thread here seems to take the stance that men are being profiled and biased by this research through a political and an ideological stance. There is no/little research being done on men or boys - and the research that is being done is attributed to ideological and political reasons and to suppress boys and men through stamping them as "extremists, incels and such".
Women don't care about men. #killallmen. This is absolutely absurd and doesn't mirror real life in the slightest. It's an extreme position you've been fed through the information you consume online. It's a position based on vicitimisation and outrage. Your talking points lack nuance.
The reason you haven't heard about research is not because it doesn't exist - but because the information sources you consume online doesn't filter it up to you. There are rational explanations for why boys and men are underreported in this research, you just aren't picking it up, and you're attributing it to malice and conspiracies.
This is what the internet does. It polarizes people.
But it seems like this thread was removed from HN. I won't be returning.
DoctorRandomercam plug XD
The main problem men have when it comes to medical outcomes is their absolute refusal to seek help. I can name multiple men I know who died or came close to it because they refused to see a doctor. I intend to go out the same way, for what it is worth. Seems likely that attitude carries over to mental health.
Besides, we'd probably expect strictly gendered disease problems to be biased towards spending on women. Men have a prostrate and a penis to keep tabs of, women have an entire reproductive system that looks mighty complex and delicate. Given the amount of money that is hopefully sloshing around to make it safe for women to have kids, maybe some of it spilled over into breast cancer funding. It is a reasonable situation.
Society doesn't fix things unless women are affected
Its routine, right now in popular culture to regard rape as a joke, to make fun of the victims, to trivialise it, to limit discussions about it... Unless it's a female victim.
Same with violence, more men are victims than women, but only females receive the help and support.
Even with these new (dubious) numbers there is no mention that males still outnumber females in terms of suicides.
And, yes, suicide attempts and suicide injuries are included in the report. I suggest you read past the headline. The report does not support your "this affects everybody equally" claims.
But not suicides.
It's always been the case that females attempt suicide or express suicidal thoughts more than males but we lose, by a massive margin, more males to suicide than females: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide
Actual death is a more important problem than injury, and yet it's the injury that is getting the attention, not the actual death.
> I suggest you read past the headline. The report does not support your "this affects everybody equally" claims.
Before you jump to conclusions you might want to read up on this particular area of research. The wikipedia page above is a good starting point (follow the link "suicide paradox").
But its interesting that you'd use all the redpill tropes that men have been getting fed by social media to passive aggressively point out that men suffer from the same problems too. You're both explicitly and implicitly arguing the point that men suffer as well.
It is just more difficult to track grown men because right wing radio has been making them miserable for decades, so there hasn't been a stark change in the past 15 years or so.
In other words, I agree men are being made miserable by social media, because you sound miserable.
Ah yes, shaming language. The correct response to a suicide epidemic.
Well done -that's never been done before /s
It is just like pointing out that eating processed foods leads to physical obesity.
That isn't shaming, that's advice.
Dismissing statistics from a Wikipedia page on suicide as propaganda is also not new.
"Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence."
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
Parents are obviously to blame; most are ambivalent or enmeshed in social media themselves.
Their communities are to blame as well. I wonder, do schools ever address these issues? Or do they just tell kids to put down their phones in class?
Parents should have the right and responsibility to monitor and regulate their children's consumption of aforementioned tools.
While I don't blame anyone solely, there's lots of blame to go around - solely blaming the parents doesn't hold up. Kids are ostracized if they don't have a smartphone, don't have TikTok, and don't have YouTube. It's easy to blame the parents, but it's unreasonable to expect them to know how to deal with new technology and how to enforce it with kids.
Probably an unpopular take here, but I think within a decade or so social media and technology will have it's "smoking moment" and be regulated harder. Probably some sort of age limits, protections for minors and enforced parental controls (like whitelisted channels, screentime, and such). As today it's pretty much impossible for a parent to see what kids are doing on these applications, and pretty much impossible for them to enforce it if they aren't in the same room.
The digital twin isn’t in real time, only near real time with some lag.
Parents are the adults in society, so if they're not doing anything about it then no one is.
So?
I was ostracized for being into science, math, and computers in the early 90s. It sucked at the time, but at the end of the day it's better having a solid filter for who are the superficial garbage people, and who are not.
Kids are ostracized in different generations for different things. It's in our nature to be shitty to each other.
Oh, Johnny doesn't think I'm cool because I don't post vapid content on instagram? That's a win, because now I can regard Johnny as the trash that he is.
Do you blame personal responsibility for a smoker’s lung cancer?
Do you blame personal responsibility for the liver failure of an alcoholic?
Do you blame personal responsibility for the Rohingya genocide?
It’s easy to blame the parents when Meta creates a hyper addictive application with beauty filters for example that amplifies society’s pressure on young girls to be of a certain pre-determined “norm”.
The issues young girls are facing go far beyond the extremely narrow view of “it’s the parent’s fault”.
Umm.... yes?
I mean, who should be blamed for a genocide other than the people who carried it out?
(edited to remove unnecessary snark)
You are aware that literally billions of people somehow manage to use Facebook without going out afterward and murdering their neighbors, yes?
There is a time where it's excusable, like when it wasn't clear that smoking causes cancer. But when you should know, then you should know.
I also understand that addiction is extremely difficult to fight, so I don't judge people who are addicted. But it is still their responsibility to solve the problem, or not to. It's the community's responsibility to support people fighting their addictions.
I judge people who pretend that there's no problem, say it isn't their responsibility, and let their children get addicted too.
Meta, and the entire internet, is a shit show. Corporations poison people's minds and addict them to useless content. They ruin lives. But that doesn't mean I'm not disappointed in myself if I give into it.
Is that this boring place where people get abducted from constantly? /s
14% of all the teenage girls are raped? How is this possible?
I'm really not the one to grab the pitchfork first for sure but this... I don't know... How are we okay with this?
>Have you ever been physically forced to have sexual intercourse when you did not want to?
If forced sexual intercourse does not fit your definition of rape, perhaps that's what's being too narrow?
I'm not here to doubt the statistics. But when I was young peer pressure was a problem when it came to sex.
I don't know if I would consider "I was pressured by my peers to have sex, but I didn't really want to" as rape. Or at least, I don't know who the rapist would be in this case.
And it affects men too. First time I made out with a girl, I really didn't like her (as in I found her boring and not attractive). But my friends were pressuring me towards it. A few shots of vodka later, and I did what I had to do.
2) in this case it is "physically forced", see the paper.
2) I didn't read the paper, but if it is "physically forced to have sex", that is as unambiguous as it gets. Thanks for clarifying!
2) I didn't read it carefully but I ctrl-Fed to find these details
And to reply to those who say that boys are also raped, yes. But only 4% of males reported that.
That doesn't make the less-obviously traumatic incidents okay; they're still very bad.
> It's insulting to victims of the former to pretend otherwise.
There's nothing insulting to victims in acknowledging other victims. There is something extremely insulting to victims in refusing to acknowledge any harm to them if it doesn't meet your arbitrary standard for significance.
I'm not trying to minimize the issue or trip you up here. There is obviously enough coercive and violent SA taking place for it to be a major social issue no matter how broad the definition is. I'm trying to figure out how pressure as a sufficient condition for rape squares with the lived experience of people like myself who do frequently feel pressure to have sex.
Coerced consent isn't consent [1]; the fact that there are different levels of violence and pressure involved in some cases of coercion doesn't mean that the less-obvious levels are okay.
IMO in an ideal world there would never be any pressure or obligation associated with any interaction. But in the real world, "okay" must have a wide enough margin to include situations that aren't ideal but are limited in terms of harm caused and moral responsibility of participants. It can't be that I am a rape victim for not wanting to hurt my partners feelings by sexually rejecting them. Some pressure is surely okay.
Is not the same as
> to avoid a fight
or
> to stop them from nagging me
There is a subtle but important difference between 'having sex for reasons other than immediate desire' and 'pressured into having sex'.
So-called "duty sex" has been recognized as a complex topic where consent is concerned. Surely this is a continuum rather than yes/no. I can't go around calling an ex-girlfriend a rapist because she nagged me for sex now and then.
>Have you ever been physically forced to have sexual intercourse when you did not want to?
There, so you won't have to assume wrongly.
Sorry about the snark but my sister was raped 4 years ago. The rapist is still free. At least his daughter (same age as my sister) know about it.
It's way better than just saying "It's probably the same study they've talked about on TV!" and you can really tell "I've done my own research!" without lying.
There is much more external reasons for young american females to feel sad right now. Culture wars, politicians becoming extremists, legislations and many other factors. I think people in general feel much less save right now, not only teen girls
Fully agree. A sci-fi novel from Robert Heinlein [0] was describing end of life as a discontinuity. In this sense, with the very rapid changes of society that we are currently experiencing, we could say that the society is dying to let place to a new society.
As examples of rapid changes, we have social network, climat change, artificial intelligence to cite a few.
From a child point of view it could be harder to project themself in a society changing rapidly. How do you gain recognition for you and your creations using new medias? How do you reach confort and enjoy leisures without causing pollution? Which skills should you learn that won't become obsolete with AI?
It is inevitable that societies change: our current society is very different from the society during middle-age for instance. Yet it is easier to adapt when the changes are slow and continuous than when they are sudden and discontinuous. In the first case, you can learn from your parents and other adults. In the second case, you are on your own. In the history of most countries, recovering from a revolution could take decades.
It baffles me that I cannot eat some spices from Asia just because for most local people is kinda indigestible or not good, basically destroying the market for that kind of spice. Yet, we can allow big corps to produce shitty social media apps without any rules.
There should be an FDA for mental things.
They do have rules. They publish the rules. You have to agree to the rules to get an account. On top of that, they're bound by numerous laws and regulations.
https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745339344/sad-by-design/
https://thinkbelt.org/shows/interstitial/sad-by-design-geert...
It's already basically a platform here in Japan for women to advertise their services and arrange encounters with older men... just need to use one's imagination.
All that's left is to monetize the depressed crazies that make up the remainder of the userbase.
They've already come this far in exploiting people, why stop?
Plastic surgery is similar, wearing some make up is one thing, changing the structure of your face is something else.
Nonsense. I "know" nothing of the kind.
> Plastic surgery is similar, wearing some make up is one thing, changing the structure of your face is something else.
On the contrary. Plastic surgery is a permanent alteration. Wearing makeup and using "beauty filters" are both temporary.
But I feel we tend to give a pass to the people who are actually producing the content that is damaging a generation and making bank, as if they have no agency or responsibility.
Instagram would probably be great overnight if those people suddenly all disappeared.
I wonder if the guy cares about anything in the world other than his rich list position and VR. Certainly not the 'dumb f**' users.
It's either the nature of what you're competing in, or how is it viewed by the society at large. Not sure which yet, I haven't thought enough about it.
My two main non-work, non tabletop activities are now windsurfing and rock climbing, two activities that are split roughly 70-30 male/female. We compete the same.
Such a weird statement. I guess it has the implicit “generally”. But a lot of ways that men compete can be more negative from a physical point of view. Sure I won’t feel bad about my self but If I challenge someone’s macho in the wrong state or neighborhood I might end up with Bullet Holes in my body.
We have a culture where people either don't know what a woman is or are too intimidated to talk about it.
Is this what girls have to look forward to?
I'd be depressed, too.
In the past, we thought both were more exact (mostly because gender was a synonym for "sex" aka "allosome configuration" aka "XX haver").
On the other side, in the west, we have a very body-centered idea of self-worth, exaggerated by TV, music and social media. Fundamentally, I do not see this situation getting any better because of how society is wired right now. There are more dramatical changes needed than what we are perhaps capable of.
3 main changes that might help come to mind -
1. We are in an obesity epidemic. Acknowledge this, make changes in the eating and exercise habits, feed children less sugar, especially what’s provided at school during lunch.
2. Due to most kids being overweight, find ways to acknowledge their other talents. Encourage high school kids to find paid work. Help them derive self-worth from other avenues.
3. Help them learn to work their minds. It does not need to be esoteric eastern meditation techniques but learning to sit still for 20 mins a day and watch the breath, and one more time for 5 mins or so before sleep, will have tremendous transference to the rest of one’s life.
It think tight regulation of advertisement industry could help. They really have all the incentive to make people feel worse. It directly translates to their income.
There should be pre-publishing check on every advert. Like a focus group paid for by advertiser, but organized by government body. If it makes people feel worse after watching it it shouldn't be allowed to publish.
Advertisement is not a free speech.
Yes it obviously is. Even advertisements that make people feel bad are free speech.
"The Supreme Court extended First Amendment free speech protection to commercial speech in Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, Inc. (1976). The court held that commercial speech is protected by the First Amendment because it serves the public interest by providing information about products and services."
And since it became apparent that it's not the only thing it does, but also hurts people and leads to destruction of social and natural environment that decision should get reversed after 46 years. Especially since technology enabled us to have a single all encompassing catalog of products and services which customers can draw such information from whenever they request it instead of advertisements being shoved into their faces from all sources causing them psychological harm at no small cost to the economy.
https://truthinadvertising.org/resource/federal-laws-governi...
(Although, IANAL, so I can't tell if that page is an accurate summary or if it's the legal equivalent of someone ranting about why the CEO of Facebook can't stop naughty pictures showing up in Google search results…)
While we can't change society, we can make personal choices or choices within our families. I would say that it's beneficial to recognize parts of the modern world that are illusory and attempt to scale them back or avoid them.