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Social media created a perpetual church gossip culture where every action and statement is endlessly evaluated by the peanut gallery, while also creating a land rush for finding new moral angles to exploit for social status. Naturally, this catty culture will affect females more and teen girls in particular.

Why specifically social media? It's a function of communication efficiency. It's why church is associated with this sort of cattiness, everyone knows everyone and is brought together regularly to provide a venue to trade gossip. It also supplies the moral standard by which everyone is evaluated and one's social status is tied to how well one appears to meet this standard. The cattiness is just status games playing out given these constraints.

Why 2010? It's when the "always online" culture went from niche nerd to ubiquitous.

> Naturally, this catty culture will affect females more and teen girls in particular.

Why naturally? Can you describe this without leaning on a vague and misogynist adjective. There might be something here but as stated it's no more nuanced and has no more explanatory power than "women are like that."

Women are more social, i.e. more agreeable[1], more people-oriented[2], and so on. As such, they will be more susceptible to status anxiety derived from their place in the social hierarchy. Men's social status is more about who you are, what you do, or what you have, and so social hierarchy is less relevant. Social media has massively scaled up the complexity and the stakes of managing one's place in the social hierarchy. Women feel this more acutely than men. Teens even moreso because they are actively negotiating their place in the hierarchy and are less likely to have a rigid social network to fall back on and feel secure in.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/

[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0018...

The fact you even had to explain this is surprising to me. We don't need papers to tell us this stuff, this is something one can learn by basic common sense observation of the world. Why are people so keen on pretending like there aren't very basic psychological differences between the sexes?

It's one thing to notice differences, it's completely another to attribute specific phenomena to them based on these lay observations. I mean, in recent memory, the "basic common sense" consensus was that women were not capable of owning property or voting because of these observed differences.

And I mean do I even need to point out that "cattiness" is not exactly a well-attested psychological axis in use by reputable professionals? This is simple straightforward misogyny. They adequately laundered it through a thesaurus to HN standards when pressed but the underlying attitude is just crusty old sexism.

By your lights, its literally impossible to refer to behaviors that are gender biased without being sexist. It turns out that stereotypes typically have a ring of truth to them. It is absurd to make any mention of them verboten in some misplaced effort to excise sexism from the discourse. We cant improve things if we can't accurately describe them. It's also stupid to insist on unnecessarily verbose descriptions just to avoid charges of sexism, which still wasn't enough for you. Efficient communication is a virtue.

> Naturally, this catty culture will affect females more and teen girls in particular.

How does it follow that this "naturally" affects teen girls more than other demographics?

This strikes me as at best hand-wavey. If you suspect some underlying cause of this, please state it explicitly rather than implying a tautological "teen girls are just like this."

See my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38940277

> If you want to posit an explanation for this phenomenon, you have to be able to explain two things: what changed abruptly in the early/mid 2010s?, and why did it uniquely affect teen girls?

And that it's cross-cultural, so three things.

> and yet it's much less clear now that there is any gender difference in technology uptake.

There are definitely well known differences in how the tech is used by the different sexes. Females are typically far more social than males.

>and even then there's no particular reason that a 13-year old girl would be so much more negatively impacted by changes that did occur than anyone else.

It would be a comparable reason (maybe even the exact same particular reason) to the reason that teen girls were uniquely impacted by earlier mass media to develop body image issues (and boy-band fandoms..). I think this is the (maybe implied) gender difference that a lot of people are seeing that you're missing.

Also, if the proposed explanation is exposure + susceptibility, with a gender difference in susceptibility, then your counterarguments that there's no gender difference in exposure doesn't really work.