When I was growing up, my sisters and I shared everything. I am the youngest, with two older sisters but we all are within a 5-year age gap from one another. We all grew up in the early 2000s, becoming adults in the 2010's. Being the youngest, I developed a strong skill of observation of my sisters and what they consumed through hand me downs. One thing that I picked up an obsession through this skill was reading teenage magazines, such as Seventeen magazine or TeenVogue. I was reading these probably even before I was in the key demographic of tweens, teens or young adults. The magazines were heavily drenched with the imagery of youthful, thin, flirty, trendy young femmes, usually leaning towards the Eurocentric side of the beauty standard scale. We as a society have collectively (for the most part) realized how much we pressure young teens to conform to unrealistic versions of themself, but one aspect I think has been not discussed until recently is how growing up in this time span has had an effect on the way we grew up to tolerate mistreatment or dangerous behaviors.
I am not one to be uptight about young teens and adults exploring sexuality, its natural. I am a little concerned looking back on how adults took on the role of sexualizing teens in order to make money. It seems like there was not much concern for the potential consequences of the decisions made by those in the position to empower young minds, instead of telling them they won't be accepted unless they have a certain brand or don't wear a certain size. Luckily, we do not see this as heavily pushed today at our local grocery store check-out, but I think it could have possibly shifted to a different aspect of our lives. We see the rise in social media trends such as the incels and their "mewing" tutorials, rising to the extremes of forums that promote literally breaking bones in your face to try to create a stronger jawline. We live in the post Kardashian BBL era, now Kim wants us to buy her body shape wear. and hey, I LOVE me some body shape wear, girlies! I own some cute shape wear myself! But I think in the future there will be some interesting lessons learned looking back on how much we desire to not be ourselves naturally.
Back to my tales of growing up in the 2000's; I want to touch on the early internet social experience. I remember being maybe... 12? And the thing I wanted to do was be on myspace and go on AIM. I grew up low income so I didn't have a phone growing up, but I would go on my computer to log in to myspace and customize my profile. I didn't have a lot of photos of myself online, because of my lack of phone, but i found a way to get a myspace style selfie in the mirror as my profile pic. This was one of my earliest examples of looking at others online and wanting to be like them. Looking at all the cool scene kids and being in awe lmao. I don't know why but i was sooo fascinated by scene culture. ANYWAYS! one major scary thing I remember about this period of growing up was the first encounters with older men on the internet. with websites like aim or apple store apps like kik or even internet chat rooms like omegele, I see how these things were early normalization towards minor on adult contact.
I watched the HBOMax documentary series "Quiet On The Set" today, and it woke up a lot of the previous stated memories in me. I see a lot of myself in the now adults who were misguided and mistreated by adults with the power to control not only the environment, but also their own behaviors. It made me think about how these productions and tv shows were another factor of the overall numbing conditioning of my generation. We wanted to be what we saw on TV, so we went into our own lives and seek out these experiences. All the shows growing up we observed young teens navigating their own lives, lack of parental guidance or presence, and now the HBO documentary really opened up the box of secrets about how we were purposefully exposed to adult style humor disguised by children actors. Is it surprising then to see how as adults, our society has become apathetic towards holding predators accountable?
We like to think that our current social network atmosphere is one of safe spaces, accountability and community, but at the same time we have to also be aware of the current dangerous behaviors permitted on spaces on the web. People like Andrew Tate or Sneako hold the moldable minds of so many young boys and men, only to tarnish the opportunity to lead them to true empowerment and instead promote wide spectrum of hate towards multiple communities and straight up sexual abuse towards women. We live in the podcast boom, where anyone who can get access to a mic and some cameras gets to broadcast their unfiltered opinions. while open minded conversations are great for progress, we should ask ourselves if we really need to have all our inner thoughts projected to impressionable people with no outside perspectives to balance out with. Look towards podcasts such as Fresh and Fit, No Jumper, or the Whatever podcast; these all mirror each other with the format of inviting women they deem low value just to make them the joke and target for harassment. Yes, these women do agree and yes queens get your bags! But the large attention gained by these podcasts are angry men looking for a punching bag, finding comfort in attempting to find answers to their problems by calling OnlyFans models "whores".
Is all this necessary? Freedom of speech exists, but at what cost lmao. It's very hard not to be disillusioned for our future generations. Why do you think birth rates are low! Why tf do I want to make a kid grow up in a world like this! I don't have these answers, but I do wonder what we can do to undo the social conditioning that seems to continue to this day. How do we protect our youth? I can only wish the best for everyone, but I can't lie; shit is rough out here lmao. I don't know if this will resonate with anyone reading this, but I guess I just wanted to share my thoughts here in the hopes to encourage yall to stay safe and keep your media literacy skills sharp! Be kind to the youth even though it's easy to write them off as too far gone! It's a boomer's mentality to completely give up on planting the correct seeds for our future seasons of life. I hope you have a good rest of your day/night! :)
other videos i found interesting about internet influence and culture:
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