Handing DD who is in first year of high school my phone so she can type what she is seeing in her friend groups.
- hi, I’m in the first year of high school, and I’ve noticed a lot of this stuff happen to the friend group I was in. I just wanted to say first that my mom taught me about the LGB when I was younger and I have a gay godfather so I don’t have any issues with any of that, but that’s completely different from the stuff that happened to all the girls I knew.
So I grew up in a culture of tolerance and acceptance, but these are the kind of things that started happening. When my friends were about nine, they all started talking about “dating” everyone, and then they were doing that. I actually wasn’t bothered with joining them in what they did, but I still had to listen to them talking about it. A while later, when we were around 10, one of the girls i knew (let’s just say A) was asking us if we’d ever had crushes on other girls. I think after that A was looking at all the stuff about being “pansexual” even though we were 10.
When we were 11, A and the rest of the girls in that group started talking about being “pan” and other things like that. I was also being asked if I had been abused before, and even now thinking about that question my “friend” asked me makes me feel sick. Another girl, B, was watching weird anime videos. Not just normal animation of that genre but the really disgusting maid outfit stuff. Soon they all were obsessed with it, and they were reading this really weird manga which was just gross. And the whole time their parents weren’t realising that it was like that because they just saw the anime stuff as a “kid-friendly cartoon”.
When we went to high school it got worse. They spent all their time looking at the gross videos, and B came into school multiple times wearing maid outfits and stuff like that. A then starting identifying as “non-binary” (she also had a relative who started identifying as something a few weeks before) and was asking other people to declare their pronouns. She also met this weird boy, who was really creepy, and they’d both look at really disgusting webcomics of people making out and stuff, and it just made me feel sick. A also started watching this anime series on Netflix called Beastars, which is about humanoid animals making out and eating each other at the same time and she says “she really liked” the series, even though the whole show was about the guy doing stuff to the girl while beating her. The boy I mentioned earlier and A would also constantly talk about how much they hated J.K. Rowling for being a huge “transphobic peice of crap” (aka. Standing up for women) and would say that trans people were the most oppressed people on earth, and that they were “having to go through what women went through all those years ago” as if it isn’t still happening.
Meanwhile B was talking about being “Animesexual” which I didn’t even think could be a thing because it’s so stupid it doesn’t even make any sense whatsoever, and wearing maid outfits to school and heavily coating her face in makeup to look like Belle Delphine, an Internet personality who’s famous for making disgusting content. It was also worth noting that A’s mom was boasting about A being “pan” and seemed to think her child being “interesting” made herself more interesting.
I also met a girl in my class who seemed like a nice normal person, but then she started reading fanfic in class. She started saying she was a “gay man” and a furry.
Another thing I would like to mention, is about my stepsister. She’s 4 years younger than me, but she’s had access to the web since she was 5. She had a game on her phone called gacha life, that’s notorious for having a horrible fanbase and people use it to create the kind of pervy stuff the girls I mentioned before were all looking at. She also had a social media app called popjam that’s meant to be kid-friendly but the stuff she was doing was far from that. A boy she met who was a year younger that me and was one of my friends at school (although he was annoying), also had an account that he didn’t use anymore. My stepsister became obsessed with him and started Making posts on the gacha life game of him and her kissing and stuff. She also “adopted a child” (who was another user) with him, basically saying she was in a family with a random person she didn’t know. She also did that with other people she didn’t know, saying she was in families, and even love triangles. She was told to not flirt with people online and she said herself that she’d stop, but she lied and did it worse than before.
Eventually, she stopped using popjam and started playing Roblox, an online platform for players to upload their own games for the world to play. I’ve been using it since I was eight, but I’d never want to online date anyone. My stepsister started doing that right away, and saying she was depressed, self harming, pregnant, and wanting an abusive relationship. She’s kinda obsessed with relationship stuff because she’s seen so much of it online. She was also joining depression groups, and a few lgbtq ones as well. And this is ALL because of games that look like they’re kid-friendly. She’s been banned from using roblox at her dad’s but not at her mom’s. that doesn’t stop her from looking at weird stuff on her laptop which she uses for school.
I want mothers to know this stuff, because as a kid in this world, I’m experiencing this first hand and don’t want anyone else to have to deal with this, whether that’s getting a sibling off the internet when parents won’t listen, or feeling stressed about having to declare pronouns at school. Alot of parents won’t talk to their kids about this either. Please be the parents that do.