Really excellent article about the damage society is causing girls

[DancelikeEmmaGoldman]

For all those worried about girls. We need to be concerned.

Self-Objectification: Objects Don’t Object
Dr EM

uncommongroundmedia.com/self-objectification-objects-dont-object/

This is really interesting. Bumping.

I thought we weren’t supposed to use suicide stats to win arguments. You know, ideation and all?

I would absolutely hate to be a teenage girl today. The unbelievable pressure they are under and how little control they have over their fate.

It's an excellent article.

The issue with using suicide stats is, I believe, where there's advert or awareness raising posters with a stat on. References to mh stats are relevant in articles. It's almost advertising suicide in that capacity.

Where perhaps it's tricky is not providing a context against mh stats overall for all teens, male and female, to compare. Though I imagine it's increased exponentially for girls.

SM is extremely involved in this I feel. Instagram for example. That took off unnoticed by most of us older people who'd perhaps notice issues around 2012. I remember a young colleague saying she didn't have a fb account a few years ago, favouring Instagram.

@Nomnomarrgh

I thought we weren’t supposed to use suicide stats to win arguments. You know, ideation and all?

Did you read the article? Because you don't seem to have understood it.

Thank you for sharing this article. This is very interesting. And depressing. Especially as a mother of a 12 yo girl.

This is a great article dances. It put a term to why I left Instagram. I saw so many women falling into this trap to become influencers and it made me uncomfortable.

When young women who wanted to be taken seriously for their work, start adopting the tactics of the beauty influencers for growing their own following, it is a sad indictment on society. Falling back into the ‘sex sells’ mode rather than expertise and knowledge.

And so even professional women from all professions using this self-objectification method filters down then to teenagers. And it is being lauded as being authentic.

That concept of ‘true self’ and ‘false self’ really resonates with social media culture at the moment.

Thank you for posting this OP.

For me, the advert in the middle of that article was ‘discover your own engagement ring’ with the ring taking up a third of the page.

A friend of mine has a great grasp of make up, I'm still applying it like it is the 90’s, and put a photo on last week and immediately got a collab offer. When i looked at the page it was all curvy women in underwear. She just laughed and ignored, but she is a married mother of two who feels strong and loved. For others, that validation would be difficult to ignore.

Our girls are living in a perfect storm now, with a coming economic crisis, rising unemployment, and the opportunity to earn money through sites like only fans. The best rebellion and route of escape from this appears to be to join the trans train, where, ironically, the popular YouTubers also have the opportunity to earn substantially.

DD had her friend from school to stay last week and I was treated to lots of gossip about their ex school mates and discussion of their Instagram pages. I was really shocked and saddened by some.

One in particular is apparently one of the top 2% on only fans (two years after leaving school) and has earned £90k presumably over the last 1-2 years. Her Instagram page is clearly the teaser for her only fans account, with hints at SM, pictures wearing fetish gear etc.

How else can girls earn that sort of money at that age? And it's all being normalised and praised.

It's very worrying how girls are forced to only value themselves by their sexual value to men. And how this just doesn't happen to boys. I want my DD to be able to feel pride and her sense of self by what her body and brain can achieve, but I feel it's impossible to nurture that when there is so much external influences that literally force it the other way.

And it's in conflict, too.

It feels like a female scientist has to be sexually appealing to get any recognition or interest in her work (think posed photos with lab coat and safety glasses with perfect makeup and smile), but then that is simultaneously used to devalue her work because she's then primarily just a pretty face, not a serious scientist like the men are.

Same with female athletes, and female everything, really.

Really great points in the article. It is going to give me nightmares though. We are still in the experimental phase with children and adolescents having social media. I hope that future generations will find a more healthy approach.

Just to give you an example of how bad things have become, the other day on FB I saw a cartoon that was basically pointing out how young women are more valued for their looks than their talent. A large number of wokey comments became really angry that the cartoon was ‘shaming and how, like, totally problematic’. When I commented that Kim Kardashian had more followers that all the recent female Nobel Prize winners put together and what a terrible comment on society that was, I had a tsunami of bad faith arguments telling me that I was also ‘shaming’.
Utterly fucked up.

This is now the main argument I put to people who’ve swallowed the whole woke agenda- If current progressive dogma, which has been around for a while now, is the correct way to improve society, why are we going backwards? When does it reach the point where it’s failure becomes so apparent that the need to reassess some of sacred cows becomes unavoidable?

The ‘shaming’ part is such a huge part of this.

Take away the shame for normalizing porn and misogyny and for allowing that to become so mainstream so that women are once again feel that self objectification is the only way to success and here we are. Add to that the change where people take this self objectification and a large degree of self absorption (some border on narcissism) as a short cut to ‘expertise’ and it is amplified.

I see ‘shaming’ as nothing more than a tactic to avoid having difficult conversations by using some peoples mental fragility as an excuse. The idea that you must be nice to everybody all the time (but only if they tick the right boxes, otherwise you may as well paint a target on your arse) is not the positive it’s made out to be.

Really interesting article. It’s amazing how quickly you get onto Instagram accounts that start with something innocuous like amazing tattoo designs (And there are some brilliant female tattoo artists and studios out there) that then link into latex fetish wear, young women being trussed up in rope ‘play’ (shibaru) and BDSM. It’s so just ‘there’.

And all these images that women are putting up of themselves posing in their underwear under the guise of showing that we come in all shapes and sizes and ‘we are valid too’. To me it just smacks of ‘I am worthy of being objectified too’. Like it’s a victory of sorts. It all plays in to the same ‘self objectification’ in my eyes.

And 14/15 year olds admiring their IG heroes (esp. of the non-binary/trans ilk) with cries of ‘stand on my neck’, ‘choke me Daddy’ etc.., it’s how this ‘empowerment’ of being free to choose to expose yourself and your sexual desires is being pushed onto younger and younger women.

I was on the account of a body positivity young woman who was encouraging women to send each other nude selfies. They made a point of saying only share the images with people you trust and don’t do it if you’re underage, and in private WhatsAps etc. but it sounded risky to me.

I get we shouldn’t give a shit what we look like and that it’s all about how you feel and love yourself but by putting it on IG and putting it out amongst all the ‘stereotypically attractive’ ‘societally accepted’ imagery, it’s just adding to the pile of wank fodder and reinforcing that how you look to other people (which is why you’re putting it out there in the public domain) IS important.

Women are seemingly being encouraged to be complicit in their own objectification - some unwittingly.

Trigger Warning Sadism/DV:

I reported a public Facebook page where a man tied up his naked wife with her unable to move, particularly her legs tied tightly open so she couldn't close them so the sexual connections were clear. He took pictures of her looking either scared or dead (and very cold) hanging from trees (not from the neck) with ropes cutting into her limbs, tied up face down posed as if dead on abandoned railway track, woods, abandoned cabins and public beaches. I didn't think this very alarming content was suitable for the 13 year old and up children allowed to make Facebook accounts but it was all allowed by FB because he had blurred her nipples. She did not have a Facebook account linked to the page so I can't say if she knew he was sharing these nude photos of her publicaly with the page's audience of men with sadistic fetishes or if she was a victim of domestic abuse. There were also explicit rape jokes posted on this page, which I reported but were also approved by Facebook. This was "shibari" and it looked strikingly similar to some of the BTK Killer's private photographs. I was shook up as a grown woman and abuse survivor, God forbid a young girl could see that content.