Trigger warning, obviously. This is dark.
The kids aren’t alright.
I know why they tried to put a positive spin on it at the end, but those numbers are still staggering. They mean a certain percentage of the people you meet and interact with throughout the day think sexual violence toward you is justified. They think you have too many rights. They don’t think you deserve equality. That’s goddamn horrifying to put into numbers.
Next we need to poll the bears.
What scares me is that it’s the younger generation that’s regressing to below the supposedly worst of the worst Boomers…
Or the older generation has grown out of it.
new poll shows most bears agree, human women should go away this is their part of the forest. small minority says they should come around more often because they are easy to hunt.
Oh I’m saving this picture, thanks hahaha
That’s still a better answer than the Gen Z men gave.
Okay the gen z men/boys data is shocking, but also, what the fuck is going on with Gen z women/girls?! The fact that the percentages associated with any of those questions are non zero is wild. I guess some of those could be explained through religious indoctrination, but it’s crazy they would be higher than the boomer women responses.
Like I said. The kids aren’t alright. 😢
No, no they are not. All of those numbers are shocking. The manosphere is an abomination. I would say social media has really done a number on a significant number of people, but it looks like porn correlates most with these attitudes.
I wonder what the differences are between how and how much the general population uses/views pornography versus the mysoginistic population. The article doesn’t really discuss that.
The math in the study does show a moderate correlation between frequency of pornography use and misogyny.
However, the key finding of the study is that once one accounts for misogyny and other hostile attitudes, the correlation of online behaviors with violent extremism mostly falls away. It’s heartbreaking to read that their teacher survey found misogynist attitudes in children as young as six and seven. Meger’s recommendations at the end of the study focus at length on catching this stuff early.
There’s a small problem with the “pornography use” framing.
Which pornography?
My SO and I use pornography. But it’s specifically “couples porn” most times, not the hyper-degrading stuff that seems to be most popular these days. There’s a lot of room for nuance in the pornography discussion. There’s a world of difference between Japanese rape porn (and yes, I’m calling it out that specifically!), American degradation porn (and yes, again I’m calling it out that specifically!), and so on down a spectrum that leads to couples-oriented porn.
My read here is that the study backs you up on that, since it suggests the misogynistic attitudes are driving so much of the extremism, but the survey didn’t get more granular than frequency of use. What I’d love to know is if certain categories of pornography overlap with advertising for the manosphere, since the picture coming into focus here is one of overlapping, rather unpleasant content soup.
Did they work out whether that was from kids being left unsupervised with tablet or from learned attitudes from their psychopath gen z parents?
Could go either way. Here’s some of the quotes from the teachers:
- “Girls having to clean up because it’s their job.”
- “Boys thinking girls can’t carry anything heavy.”
- “Men should earn more money because they work harder.”
- “Girls can’t play footy/soccer.”
- “My dad said you are a woman and you don’t know.”
Lots of talk about Andrew Tate videos going viral, too (though I’d hope that’s older students).
Meger’s article on phys.org on her study is worth a read, as is the study itself. There’s a link to it in the article, and this kind of sociology research is approachable.
Her comments on algorithms as a driving factor weren’t in the original article for this post, but that’s my biggest takeaway from this study. I think we’re starting see real danger in how efficiently algorithms accelerate and harden extreme behaviors. It’s never been easier to go from extreme content to extreme content to a conversation with a person that validates that content.
Sometimes society tolerates the ugly things, but when the environment they dwell in starts to catalyze them into more, things get untenable. I think it’s past time people started pushing for full transparency about algorithmic recommendation design so we can have a real conversation about the dangers of it.
this is both depressing and important
There was also this absolutely horrifying survey: https://www.humanrights.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/files/documents/Identifying and understanding child sexual offending behaviour and attitudes among Australian men.pdf
On how many men would rape kids if they could/have viewed CP or CP adjacent material.
Now I will say, Aussie masculinity culture is completely fucked. So translating these results outside of the Australian context is not necessarily straight forward.
But like yikes on those numbers, and that left wing attitudes aren’t protective to any substantial degree is unsurprising but dissapointing.
It is sometimes hard to trust the men in my life, which isn’t necessarily fair to them but like… results like these tqo survey
Jesus christ I knew it was going to be bad but I wasnt expecting 25-30%. I think we might be cooked.
This is why we need algorithms to be depolarising and deradicalising, rather than radicalising into fascism.
Or, you know, no algorithms beyond “what I ask for is what I get”.
Pretty bold assertion that we need social media algorithms.
Misogyny is already an extremist way of thinking and acting?
Watch a movie. Watch an hour of television. Watch videos on YouTube or Tik-Tok. Listen to lawmakers discussing laws related to women.
Misogyny is mainstream, not extremist.
It is extreme in the sense that it normalizes horrid things. Obviously lots of horrible things are mainstream right now in many places :(
Because it all comes down to pathological desire for power and control.