What is it about teen girls and young women that makes them (us) highly susceptible to fandom, wokism and gender ideology?

[Ravensclawdropout]

I was watching another excellent interview with Helena, the 23 yr old American distransitioner and she described all the online culture that sucked her in incrementally over about 3 years until she decided she was a transboy.

I have noticed here in the USA that the woke ideological agenda that is particularly disconnected with reality is most enthusiastically promoted by young females.

I don't want to have a conversation that is all about "yes well boys are obsessed with gaming too" yes, I know that. I am particularly interested in the female psychology that finds this stuff so appealing and addictive, because unless we address this head on and can communicate differently with young women, the numbers of young women graduating with a militant sense of needing to implement this Ideology will drown out older women.

I think one aspect is of it being the next progressive thing and they genuinely think older women just don’t understand it and if they “educated” themselves they would get it. I wonder if they think like they are the vanguard of the revolution and therefore must be the ones to take action.

Maybe it’s another form of radicalisation?
Also they are just getting one viewpoint, it’s an echo chamber but more all-consuming because it’s across social media and with them 24/7 and they’re teenagers.

@Ravensclawdropout this is of huge interest to me, please could you tell me the names or link to the content you've been watching/ reading?

My daughter is a pre teen and the obsession is now closer to home than just seeing things online now. Her good friend has now said they're trans at 12 and I'm shocked at how lightly they as a group take it when it's such a huge and potentially damaging matter. The friend has ASD and so does my daughter so there seems extra vulnerability there from what I've read so far. I've been dismissed as a boomer and I'm trying to learn as much as I can about this. To hear what people who detransitioned are saying would be very helpful to me.

This is a very good point.

I was reading a review today of the new Matilda film (sounds like Emma Thompson had enormous fun playing Miss Trunchbull), where as an example of how horrific her school is they cite a poster aimed at pupils declaiming "NONE of you are special". I thought that was funny, but perhaps not the way the film makers intended.

Social media encourages a mentality that everyone is special and interesting, and everything that happens in your day is fascinating to the rest of the world. Are girls heavier users of social media than boys?

I agree with pattihews. A lot of pop-evolutionary psychology is bullshit IMO, but I think this theory is correct.

It’s also tied up with magical thinking similar to what you see when rape victims are blamed. It’s hard as a woman to accept you are so vulnerable to male physical strength - easier to make up some ‘rules’ so you can pretend that if you never do anything ‘wrong’ you won’t be a victim.

ultimately it’s siding with the oppressor (men) as a way of trying to keep yourself (and your children) safe in a society where being a woman makes you very vulnerable.

This isn't really answering the question, but I think girls are massively susceptible to peer pressure. Boys are too, obviously, but teenage girls are very into creating in-groups and out-groups, so if X becomes the fashionable thing that all the cool girls do, whether it's wearing a particular style of shoes, having your hair a certain length, liking a particular band etc, then all the girls will go along with it, for fear of being ostracised. Social media has magnified this effect.

The harder question is why girls are so susceptible to peer pressure - nature or nurture, or a mix of both?

I don't know. It's just something that appeals strongly to a certain kind of girl - I have one of those girls and she had autism, and likely ADHD - yet to be diagnosed. Introduction came via Roblox , MovieStarPlanet and BlockStarPlanet - if your girls are playing these games get on them and see what they're saying and what's being said. A great deal of grooming and sinister stuff. I didn't realise, I just thought she had found an on line community and pretty much let her get on with it with the occasional cursory look through her iPad and laptop histories.

I'm staunchly GC and was aware of the dangers very early on - 2015. I was open about it and spoke to both of my children about the issues. One day my dd asked me if I was "transphobic" and that's when I stepped up my game and started looking closely at what she was looking at. I believe my dd was being groomed on line - not strenuously - but enough to get her teetering on the path - and from then on I handled all discussion around "gender" and "trans", and supervised on line time with an iron fist inside a velvet glove. I told her my concerns and gave her all the information - how it's wrong for children to be allowed to make these decisions and that people with ulterior motives were pushing this agenda. School were good too, loads of education around the dangers from on line predators and being safe online. She's totally clued up now, still a bit obsessed with fandoms, fanfic and "ships" but she knows fine well that you can't change sex and will often come and tell me stuff that's being said at school or in her peer group that she knows is wrong and is worried about.

OP I have said before that I don't think this avenue that girls are being pushed down is discussed enough so I am very glad to see this thread

Social pressure to conform is foisted on girls in a way that it isn't on boys. Girls have to behave. Boys can be free spirits.

Then if you don't fit in and belong you are very alienated and can be ostricised.

So it pushes a desire to confirm, belong along with this idea of being inclusive of others who might feel this same alienation.

I have gone through similar a generation ago. But it tended to focus on music as that was the culture of the time. So it centred on bands. I caught the start of social media and we went and did meet ups and socialised. I think we were part of the last wave of bands that had fans in this way but the first wave of the internet.

Now that kind of community is focused on politics. Its social justice and having a cause. The cause / band almost becomes secondary to the community you find and join.

It lasts until people start to pair up and then settle down and have other pressures and centres of community in their lives.

I think men tend to go down the sport route more often and find similar communities within football etc. But they also have them in gaming (I was also part of the first gaming social media communities which were pretty toxic even from the beginning) and in anime / fantasy culture.

All these communities - regardless of sex - do have groups that take things to the extreme and can egg each other on because it almost become competitive to take it as far as possible to prove how dedicated / loyal you are to friends and the cause.

Online communities excellarate this and take it further because communication is constant rather than more intermittent as it was in the past. Its also allows a pushing to the extremes more easily.

I don't think its a gendered thing particularly. I think men / women lean towards different interests more often and the manifestation is different because of social conditioning. Social conscious politics therefore has a particularly appeal to a particular group who have been conditioned a certain way. They are looking for something different to other groups because of that.

Young women have always been the target particularly when the word teenager was first coined probably during the 50s. Girls are probably more suggestible and their emotions can be played with more. They also go through far more noticeable body changes where they don’t know who they are, which makes them fair play for the latest fashionable fad that is going around. Unfortunately now with social media girls tend to be more isolated and the negative effects of social media are far out weighing the positive ones. These ideas such as transitioning which should only effect a tiny tiny percentage of girls now are looked upon as the silver bullet to cure all ills. It is complete nonsense of course because mostly these ghastly procedures create far more problems than they solve but people who are wedded to this cultish view plough on regardlessly sucking a lot of vulnerable children into it.

I do think it's important to acknowledge that quite often it's a simple as it being a role play that goes too far. Kids like belonging to something "interesting" and colourful - see flags - and the accepting and excitable "community" they discover online sucks them in and convinces that actual sex change is the only authentic route to belong to this particular club. Many children cannot extricate themselves from that and cannot bear the idea of losing their crowd. This is why the adults have to step in and prevent it. I genuinely believe that in 99.9% of cases where parents and adults are encouraging and facilitating enthusiastically there is an ulterior motive or they are personality disordered.

One day my dd asked me if I was "transphobic" and that's when I stepped up my game and started looking closely at what she was looking at. I believe my dd was being groomed on line - not strenuously - but enough to get her teetering on the path - and from then on I handled all discussion around "gender" and "trans", and supervised on line time with an iron fist inside a velvet glove. I told her my concerns and gave her all the information - how it's wrong for children to be allowed to make these decisions and that people with ulterior motives were pushing this agenda.

That sounds a really sensible approach.

It’s also tied up with magical thinking similar to what you see when rape victims are blamed. It’s hard as a woman to accept you are so vulnerable to male physical strength - easier to make up some ‘rules’ so you can pretend that if you never do anything ‘wrong’ you won’t be a victim.

ultimately it’s siding with the oppressor (men) as a way of trying to keep yourself (and your children) safe in a society where being a woman makes you very vulnerable.

Yes, this. The Just World Fallacy. Women who victim blame rape victims tend to do this, it's often different to male victim blaming of rape victims.

www.centerpsychologygroup.com/2020/09/22/how-the-just-world-hypothesis-worsens-the-trauma-of-sexual-assault-survivors/

Fandom has been around for 60 years and Internet based fandom for thirty years without there being a sudden massive increase in transgenderism.

Fandom is a moral good for the vast majority of women who participate in it. The same cannot be said for gender ideology.

Evo psych is just another method of reifying gender.

Evo psych is just another method of reifying gender.

I agree to some extent, but I think aeons of learned behaviours and socialisation making certain psychological or physical traits more likely to be selected are a slightly more compelling argument than innate ladybrains which can sometimes end up in a male body.

Physical traits are just evolution, not evo psych.

Some psychological traits do come from the environment of evolutionary adaptation, but we have no good evidence that that environment was the kind of hell hole of misogyny that we have experienced since.

And while yes, evo psych isn't as insane as the wrong body, it still spends a great deal of time engaging in fanciful speculation about lady brains without much in the way of scientific evidence.

I mentioned physical traits to tie them in with evo psych in a way that would make it more understandable but I didn't word it very well.

Yes I basically agree with you and have argued elsewhere about evo psych.

Yes I think we are probably in agreement!

There was a great blog linked on here about Tumblr fandom and how that was appealing to young women/girls - unfortunately I lost the link but maybe somebody else will have it.

Tumblr is just a platform that skews female popular a few years ago. Fandom migrates from platform to platform.

Unless we are saying there's something particular about how posts or functionality work on Tumblr that provokes particular behaviours? Something like the way Twitter is set up to encourage outrage and mobbing.

Well think about the other typical elements of the teenage girl experience, that are different than what you usually see among teenage boys.

One that's really interesting and I think very related is that teenage girls are the quickest among all demographics to pick up new trendy changes in language and use them. And those may be just aesthetic in some cases but they can also include new ideas and constructs.

I would say that girls have often been more quick than boys to pick up on trends like goth, especially in the early teen years.

And they are much more involved with social hierarchies and groupings that can be complex and also very toxic. I don't know many girls who have never encountered a really toxic girl or group of friends as teens, but lots of boys don't seem to have those issues.

And while boys do get drawn into gaming girls get drawn into these social media groups. They are the ones being influenced mainly by weird trends like tik tok facial tics, for example. I don't think that's down to socialization.

For me it seems like girls are predisposed to forming complex shifting social dominance hierarchies that include things like mirroring, in a way that boys aren't typically.

A moral good? That seems a little over the top.

I think there's a lot in this. I am very honest with my teens and when they offer an opinion on anything related to current affairs/issues I always offer "the other side" and tell them to go and find out more about that side - probably annoys the f*ck out of them but I think it's essential. I will feel I have failed as a parent if I turn out two young adults who cannot think critically and/or are unwilling to look at issues from every angle. I am regularly called unpleasant names right here on MN and other platforms for doing exactly this, which shows me just how pervasive it has become to only think The Right Way and not question the narrative.

A moral good? That seems a little over the top.

I don't get this either. In what way? Genuine question.

Actually this just reminded me of the latest Strike book, which has a fandom and on line behaviour as a major part of the narrative. Scary stuff and well worth a read.

There is this thing where these pressure groups put the word ‘phobic’ on the end to try and gain the moral high ground but let’s not have it. I am not ‘transphobic’ because I don’t swallow the unscientific dogma that we can change sexes simply by saying we do. I am just applying my brain and training to the dogma and questioning it on grounds both of science and common sense. There is nothing ‘phobic’ about it!