Young paying the price for the old?

@achillestoes I agree. You make some very interesting points!

Hands up which of us hated getting boobs and the accompanying gripes and leers?

That would be about all of us wouldn’t it? But imagine being so gullible that believe changing your label to ‘he’ ‘they’ or whatever would protect you more than what we used to do - wear baggy tops and jeans, and sports bras, or dress as a punk/goth and hope it would scare them off.

‘But I’m talking about younger girls- the 11-16 age where this seems to set in. When puberty kicks in and suddenly girls enter a world they didn’t know they were a part of, I mean that of the male gaze . The rejection of ‘she’ might be what they think will protect them from having to be this beautiful, sexy image.’

I think it’s certainly part of it (and why young gay women find ‘shelter’ under the label of ‘trans’ or ‘queer’ or ‘asexual’). But overall I think the engine (the thing that’s driving those young women to be more easily indoctrinated) is that identifying in such a way makes you a better person. It removes you from an elite group (the ‘privileged’) and places you in a group that is so oppressed it’s beyond criticism - what a heady drug for an adolescent!

And to go on, being a female ‘ally’ is the other way to identify out of your privilege. They’re not ‘allies’ so much as handmaidens, and if we use that term thoughtfully, it means ‘servants’. It’s competitive humility in action - look how small I can be, look how little space I can take up. But like every group, that group contains people who twist that ‘allyship’ into another form of the exercise of power: they find people to bully, ‘calling out’ and ‘holding accountable’ people who haven’t joined their self-flagellating group. It’s the best of both worlds for them.

I would think it's social media not the occasional mother - I think very few older mothers are as described

I don’t think it’s that driving this. We’ve always lived in a sexist and sexualised world, and if anything the decades we just lived through were better from that perspective than earlier ones.

I think this is a more an outgrowth of identity politics. Gender ideology affects (more than anyone else) young white middle class females, and has exploded in the last five years (after slower growth over the last decade). Why might that be? Could it be because people (particularly on the hard left - and I am ‘left’) spent the last few years blaming ‘Karens’ for everything and teaching those young white middle class females to internalise a self-hatred based on their own ‘privilege’? Identifying out of that group and into the ‘queer’ community may be a way for them to evade the feelings of guilt and self-hatred that society has inculcated in them. It allows them both to claim the status of ‘oppressed’ and escape the label of ‘oppressor’ (although because they’re thirteen year old kids that’s obviously a label they haven’t earned, it’s certainly a label that’s been placed on them) in a way that assuages their own sense of guilt for not being born into a less privileged group. That also explains why gender ideology is strongest in universities (middle class white kids) and industries where middle class white kids now progress (civil service, unions, politics, publishing, media, law).

I was a kid in the 70s - we had page 3 (which was rude and naughty) but can’t say I was subject to porn, silly reality tv ‘bikini clad babes’, mainstream tv pushing out pretty explicit materials, books in school about sex… it was more sexist than ‘sexy’.

I noticed a difference when I went to a work conference (after being out of the industry for a while) and instead of seeing women in suits, it was like low cut/short shirt, selfie ready faces, lots of pumped up lips/tattooed eyebrows and fancy nails. My young colleagues gossip about reality tv, clothes and makeup, and drag shows.

This kid is a product of current trends. Alway blaming other women/mums eh?