#<- case study in unsupervised internet use at formative ages

[dramatic-dolphin]

when i was like 11 i liked to lie that i was a 16 year old girl named kriszti. i didn't say this under the last post because um. i did not use that lie to avoid being targeted by older people. quite the opposite 😐

[whispydaze]

How Social Media Damages a Young Mind.

*Something I wrote for my English speaking exam a year ago... I got a distinction for it.*

What is social media? It is defined as “the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, and/or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks.” This means that anyone with internet access can freely engage with all of the content available on social media. In some cases it can be a positive experience but for many, the internet is an easy way for people to lie about their own demographics and this can be worrying since children are getting access to a device earlier and earlier in their lives.

Around 45% of children own a phone by the age of 10 according to an Ofcom report in September 2023. This gives children an easy, unsupervised gateway into the world of social media, which allows them to access mind-damaging content which can shape the way they think for the rest of their lives. However, the same report tells us that most adults have said they wait for their children to start the transition from primary school to secondary school which is something that is more commonly heard.

An Ofcom report shows that 77% of 8-17 year olds have a social media account, but why is this bad? Why is social media discouraged in young people? 

Well, in an article written by the McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, they describe social media as having a “reinforced nature”. They tell us that social media “activates the brains reward center by releasing dopamine”. However, the dopamine we are used to, which is released by things such as meditation, exercise and music do not fall into the same category as the dopamine we receive from social media. Instant dopamine is a form of dopamine that is addictive and easy to obtain, though not all instant dopamine is bad. Drinking, drugs and gambling fall into the same negative instant dopamine category that social media does, the excitement that these dopamine induced activities creates, motivates those using it to continue which eventually leads to addiction, this can lead to things such as anger, anxiety, low self esteem and in some cases, schizophrenia.

Social media comes with numerous outcomes which keeps its users hooked, not knowing how many likes a post may get can keep the desire to continuously come back to these sites strong. 

FOMO (the fear of missing out), is a strong contender when it comes to keeping young people online. Adolescents specifically, fear missing something like a joke or an invitation if they aren’t on social media. If someone went on social media and realised they weren’t invited somewhere, it would significantly damage their feelings just because they know, through social media, that they are missing out. Another study conducted by the McLean Hospital in Massachusetts in 2018 says that “a British study tied social media use to decreased, disrupted, and delayed sleep, which is associated with depression, memory loss, and poor academic performance.” This is all clearly linked to the way a child’s mind reacts to social media.

Misinformation is another huge topic that can strongly persuade the way a young mind thinks. For example, when COVID-19 peaked, multiple people were sharing both fake and real news on social media. A study from UK Safer Internet Centre says that 48% of young people see misleading information everyday with more than one in 10 seeing it more than six times a day. Most adults are able to tell the different between real and fake news, but a young person may not be able to decipher the two, meaning that they may believe something just because someone they trust someone on the internet.

Personal information and privacy is a big thing when it comes to being online. Protecting things such as your full name, address and phone number can be important when being on social media. A survey conducted by the Global Data and Marketing Alliance in 2022 says that young people are much less concerned about their own privacy than the older generations. They also say that 18-24 year olds are the “most willing” to share their own personal data and don’t have as many concerns about it. This then means that this same age group are more at risk of things such as stalking, just because they are not as careful with sensitive information.

Self esteem is something young people tend to battle with each day. Social media is one of the biggest conglomerates of platforms that fuels the fire to a young persons negative spiral of emotions. Many teens who actively use social media may post a carefully edited photo, pretending to be something they aren’t. This causes a lot of self hatred and frustration. However, it also affects those who view the posts. These people may compare their lives to someone else’s despite not really knowing how that person lives and therefore damaging their own self esteem.

To conclude, social media is something that should be carefully monitored in a child, depending on their age. It is more common now to see mental health issues which all seem to have the common denominator of social media and children should not have such easy access to platforms that seem to promote this.

[langstuff132]

MEN NEED TO STOP GETTING OFFENDED WHEN THEY LEARN WOMEN ARE SCARED OF THEM

The man who hurt me said he was sorry. Everything was fine at first, and the ensuing roughness didn’t even last long. He swore he thought it was “all just part of the fantasy.” I was upset, but I was more significantly confused; I was having trouble imagining how my cries could sound erotic in any way. The man obviously regretted causing me physical pain, but did not realize how frightened I was, how angry I felt that I wasn’t listened to.  

Amensalism is a type of symbiosis where one party’s neutral behavior causes the other party harm. A common example is humans walking on grass. This is how men tend to see sexual assault. Women tend to see it as predation. “But #NotAllMen have violent intentions! Sometimes it’s a misunderstanding!” Ok…that is true. Sexual assault is certainly not predatorial in every case, but it is not amensalistic either.

It would be generous to call it a competition where one party clearly has the advantage over the other. The dominant party fulfills their needs by whatever means possible, and through those means, they harm the other party. (Predators are those who are aware of this power imbalance and try to use it to their advantage.) This is why women’s rights activists tend to support Yes-Means-Yes legislation, policy that addresses the fact that men tend to see the absence of rejection as confirmation, and then women get hurt without the man feeling responsible. The issue, as  Cathy Young points out, is that women give consent in uncomfortable situations all the time out of fear. You wouldn’t say you “gave” your wallet to someone who was holding a blade against your chest. In sexual assault cases, the blade would be something like 12-inch height difference.  After the initial violation, The man rubbed my back until I calmed down (without asking if he could touch me, of course) —which I could never completely do, since I was acutely aware that my companion was someone who derives pleasure from causing pain. Or, perhaps, more true to the competition analogy, he prioritized his pleasure while neglecting my pain. This is why it bothers me when people belittle the woman who accused Aziz Ansari of sexually harassing her. I know #NotAllMen are psychopathic predators, but #YesAllWomen have been frightened into silence or have suffered for a man’s benefit.

Vocal, enthusiastic consent is hard for people to swallow; we often talk about it as if it’s an obstacle. It’s the biggest challenge facing men on the path to sex. I want men to understand that deciding to be alone with them in a bedroom is the biggest challenge facing women on the path to sex.

This also begs the question, in my case, of how this struggle turned into a kink for people? What “fantasy” was The man referring to? Why did my needs not matter and why do some people get off on that? Poor sex education is one of the biggest contributing factors to this epidemic. If a school doesn't teach abstinence-based sex education, they probably still make sex sound transactional and goal-oriented as opposed to an intimate experience shared between two people. Since we’re taught that sex is over once you orgasm or meant to get someone pregnant, men benefit because they tend to finish faster (and aren’t the ones who carry children). On top of this, women feel societal pressure to pleasure men, but men feel no such pressure. This is bad, not only because women are getting cheated out of orgasms, but because it perpetuates their objectification--more specifically, the notion that it is ok and even biologically natural to treat a human woman like a blow-up doll.

Sexual liberation and education would help this problem, and my generation is starting to figure that out, but we’re going about it in a potentially harmful way. Dr. Jennifer Johnson, a professor at the Virginia Commonwealth University, did a sociological study of about 500 young men that revealed pornography is becoming a primary source of sex education. I don’t see this statistic as being such a bad thing, since, as Dr. Christopher Ryan asserts, “Nothing inspires murderous mayhem in human beings more reliably than sexual repression.” It really depends what kinds of porn people are watching. Just like you wouldn’t teach your toddler to swim in the deep end, you wouldn’t want your 13-year old obtaining sex education from BDSM pornography. However, just like stealing mom’s wine coolers or drinking orange juice from the carton, unsupervised kids do a lot of things they aren’t supposed to do. Anyway, this is more pressing than a child’s lack of etiquette, since Dr. Jennifer Johnson mentions that pornography is widely recognized as being responsible to some extent for normalizing sexually violent, dehumanizing, or degrading behavior. When Fifty Shades of Grey came out, women’s rights activists from all sects and corners of the world were anxious that there would be an increase in domestic and sexual violence to follow.

Unfortunately, pornography is incredibly difficult to censor given the scale of its presence on the somewhat lawless internet. And who decides what erotica is a damaging amount of weird versus a normal or healthy amount of weird? Some people even use Dominant/submissive relationships to deal with trauma—it would be against my liberal sensibilities to judge someone’s method of recovery. Maybe they should just keep it in the bedroom and try not to encourage their lifestyle..? Yikes--we’ve heard that before, and we didn’t like it!

I don’t think I have the authority or experience to make any of these judgements; but I do think there are some clear red flags in the online Porn industry that it would be easy for them to remove. Large companies like Pornhub have shown a liberal and compassionate side by coming down on deep fakes. Deep fakes are objectively quite impressive, and the audience for them exists, but Pornhub considers them to be a form of sexual assault since the person depicted can not consent.

So then what about rape-fantasy pornography? Don’t they see that the liberating effects of erotica are dampened by the sexual violence that occurs as a consequence of normalizing this type interaction? Just like deep fakes, though an audience exists for pornography with “Gang-rape,” “Rape,” or “Attack/Ambush” in the freaking title, it doesn’t mean you have to publish it.

In a broader vein, a lot could change if the media felt more responsible for glamorizing violent behavior. Luckily, a movement  is gaining speed in Hollywood right now to slow down production on all these War-hero movies and leave behind antiquated, aggressive notions of masculinity. The mainstream media is starting to understand that even though an audience exists for these types of stories, their implicit messages do long-term damage to society, which is a compelling argument to just..write other stories. And, not only do we want more young, sensitive father archetypes, we need more projects that convey explicit messages about problematic socialization. David Schwimmer's six short films about sexual harassment tell men quietly, but also deafeningly, that the behavior they have been seeing as neutral--even romantic or seductive--for ages, is actually perceived as scary, awkward, and silencing. The men who aren’t aware of this need to learn, and the men who are aware...are predators.

(PS this is essay isn’t a cry for help or anything, Im ok!!  it was actually very therapeutic to write)