Are younger generations more regressive?

[bryceQ]

I'm in my mid 30s, my brother is in his early 20s. He believes in gender ideology, TWAW... But also agrees there are sex differences in sport 🤷‍♀️. Knows I've faced a lot of street harassment by men which makes me feel unsafe... Knows our mum faced domestic violence. I think his opinion is quite confused, but also think his opinions in general lack maturity which is normal at his age.

Anyway.... Today he was saying that his girlfriend has decorated her room in very "girly colours" - and apparently gen z call this "girly core". I found it really irritating that this generation seem to cling to gender stereotypes in a way that seems so regressive. It feels like we are going the opposite way. I find it so perplexing, for all the obsession with what you identify as...., all of the identifications seem to be rooted in outdated stereotypes. Girls like pink 🙄

I know this is just a silly anecdote, but I wondered those of you with grown-up children or younger siblings, have you noticed this too?

There are about 500 types of -core, including stuff like goblin-core, so pink being called "girly-core" sounds par for the course. I think the key is that the word used is "girly-" rather than e.g.: woman-core, female-core etc, it is more referencing a specific aesthetic than saying it is the only possible presentation for the whole gender.

Well all I'm going to say is that I'm 20 and, usually, agree with the consensus on here regarding TWAW and such. That seems to make myself and my immediate friends regressive compared to many people of my age who delight in being "woke" and allowing men - sorry, transwomen - into our toilets and changing rooms.
It may have something to do with being SA'd when I was 14 (and 2 of my bffs have suffered similarly).
Sorry if, as usual, I'm going off at tangents.

I think maybe 20-25 years ago things like clothes and toys started to be split very heavily along the lines of everything for girls being pink and everything for boys being trucks and dinosaurs. The marketers managed to find a way to sell twice to families who had both male and female children. Even pushchairs began to be gender coded. I've often wondered if that's why kids who were born around that time rely very heavily on sex stereotypes around gender identity.

I tried to push against that and DD was steered away from all the pink nonsense. I question whether if she'd been bought Barbie's etc would she ever have gone down the non-binary path or if she would have accepted that she was a girl because her toys and clothes marked her out as one just like her peers. In trying to do the right thing and smash stereotypes, did I push her into gender ideology? Can't do right for doing wrong ☹️

Extreme gender ideologists do tend to come from a specific generation, yes. (Unfortunately my generation.)

Thankfully a lot of the younger generation coming through are typically rebellious and are going against the ideas around TWAW etc in their teens.

I see it as a wave.

Many people of the TWAW/No debate/bekind etc end up peaking after having children of their own so their own children will be more reasonable on this issue.

I think it comes from a misguided view of 'tolerance' and online indoctrination. The T in LGBTQ+ has always been tolerated as it was seen as part of the gay umbrella, so it was tolerated as homosexuality is tolerated and accepted.

However the T has snowballed and become a monster, superseding the LBG but people are still tolerant. Because it's predominantly male led, the fact that it harms women and girls is also tolerated. In that many girls are attracted to the ideology and it encroaches on women's spaces.

If I were embedded in a generation that routinely hen pecked the non conformists into a hormonally and surgically corrected box then you better believe that I'd have jettisoned my tomboy like manner for a "girly core" shield.

Yeah I do think it's regressed very badly. I grew up in the 80s (which had its own issues) but we had a female prime minister, female head of state, lots of very gender non conforming female role models in pop culture (Annie Lennox, Tracy Chapman, Salt n Pepa, Alison Moyet) and strong ambitious women (being a 'bitch' was a good thing) from all backgrounds were all over TV. Women with short hair and trousers were normal. There was no 'be kind'. Pop videos weren't 3 minute soft porn and Germaine Greer was a celebrity.

The tide is definitely turning. I know lots of the adult "be kind" brigade that have turned. I don't think they fully understood what they were asked to agree with. There is still masses of misinformation out there in media. Also the gender identity theory is definitely waning in the school children I know. They think stereotypes should not define who they are and how they present themselves

Younger people are more likely to support minority rights, just as they did when gay people were more vilified and oppressed. There are always exceptions, of course, but time usually deals with the problem.

By nature young people are at their most conservative, in the sense that they are very much inclined to feel social pressure around their views, and they are most heavily peer influenced.

It doesn't matter, IME, if the views around them are liberal or conservative or whatever in the political or economic sense. They are just not free thinkers, and they are inexperienced.

Why anyone ever thought society should follow the lead of the young I have no clue.

I think there are a number of things that make the current crop vulnerable to stupid ideologies. ne is the commercialization as mentioned above - sex differerntiation is good for consumerism.

One is their educations have been completely fucked up, they have largely been indoctrinated as social justice activists rather than thought to think about things. ANd they learn only the history that supports them having the correct views.

And then, they spend more time on assemblies about social fads than they do reading serious literature.

So - they are kind of open to any clever ideologist who tells them they have believe a certain things or they will be a bigot.

You could ask your friends how they'd feel if a "regular" man (i.e. balding, middle-aged with a beer belly, rather unattractive to them) used our toilets and changing rooms.

My daughter asks friends that and they're all horrified at the thought and instantly call Mr Regular a perve.

Funny, that. 'Cause there really isn't any difference.

I keep seeing shows where the kids are saying "I want to be my best self" or other crap stuff parroted from the internet. They don't need to think because the internet thinks for them. So yes, definitely more regressive.

Meanwhile, while girls are told to be kind, boys are seeing more and more violence at an earlier age. I was shocked to find a friend's 10 yr old is now regularly watching the same anime I watch as an adult and consider extremely violent with lots of sexualised images of girls. And so are his friends.

So increased violence with immature brains.

I try to avoid the 'young folk these days, don't know they're born' trope [don't understand it fully anyway, how can you not know you're born??] but..

I agree with TempestTost about the role of education.

I think the lack of knowledge of history, even fairly recent history, has blunted [some] young people's understanding of the present. I'm often shocked at how little younger people know about the past - for instance I've heard several young people mix up the [Irish] War of Independence and the Civil War, which as you can guess just from the names, were very very different events!

Another example is the ahistorical use of the word 'apartheid'. People who haven't learnt about the history of South Africa in the 20th century seem to think that 'apartheid' is just a useful word meaning 'discriminatory' or 'oppressive', which is to misappropriate the specific horrors of the actual apartheid regime in SA.

It's also obvious that a lot of young people haven't a clue about the history of women's rights and gay rights, and that's why any old guff about being kind to the most marginalised people in society can become an article of faith.

I suppose every generation thinks they know better than the old dinosaurs they are replacing, but in important areas younger people seem to know a lot less.
Not their fault, of course, so I'm not being judgmental about them as people.

The - core is a young person on social media thing. If you’re a fan of anything, you can literally add core and make it sound more legitimate. They do this with TikTok too- CleanTok is for people who like cleaning videos etc

I agree with the regressiveness and I think that an ideal world would have no gender expectations. A male who liked pink could just say that they liked it without people assuming that his gf makes him live in a house with pink walls.

The trouble is that it's pretty white middle class as a movement. So who is "most marginalised" in a white middle class family? Probably someone gay or neurodivergent. "Most marginalised" in their worldview doesn't incorporate working class boys with lower academic attainment leaving school with no qualifications and feeling so unsafe in their lives that they carry knives every day. Nor does it include women victims of domestic abuse, or Muslim women brought from Pakistan to marry their cousin, unable to speak much English . Nor does it include people with learning disabilities.

At the end of the day gender ideology is so much about the intersection of oppression and class to me. Which doesn't mean that many of those caught up in the ideology are not indeed very vulnerable and marginalised; but to me the gender issues are a symptom of the marginalisation, not the cause of it.

The only exception to that are the very tiny numbers of "old school" children with gender dysphoria which begins in very early childhood in highly gender non confirming male children, who often go on to become very "feminine" gay men (or at least, they did, before gender ideology). I do think their vulnerability stems from their gender non conformity; whereas the new puberty-onset cohort, their gender non conformity stems from their vulnerability.

You mean for everyone of the female sex?

Gender is presentation.

I suppose it would be better if it were called CutesyCore or something. Maybe that already exists 🤔

So much today seems to revolve around identities and 'presentations' that can be purchased. It really does seem like the end point of capitalism and individualism combined. Everything is for sale; everything has a label; and these identities have to be 'advertised' in very conspicuous ways.

'Girly core' involves buying lots of punk stuff to wear and with which to decorate your bedroom......

Take Halloween as another example.it used to be that you'd have a few apples bobbing round in a baby's bathtub, or maybe hanging from a string - but now it is full on consumerism, with supermarkets full of outfits; candles; platic artefacts; make-up and other Halloween accoutrements.

Yes, this is exactly what I see. They way they talk about current events makes it clear very quickly that they have no knowledge about what has come before, or what happens elsewhere.

It's very odd for a group that is consistently complaining that older people didn't learn about bad things in the past, or don't know about other cultures.

Even lack of literary experience seems a problem, they don't read older books so seem to have strange idea about how people who lived even 50 years ago thought.

So nice to know that you joyfully await the deaths of everyone who disagrees with you ideologically. Very heartwarming of you to mention it to us. I feel really touched to know how you really feel about us all 💐

That's a hell of a stretch - it's simple how demographics work.

I wish you all good health, happiness and a long life.

I'm not sure how being wedded to very conservative ideas about gender, so much so that you feel it is better to demolish your body to fit the stereotype of pink and blue brains, is at all indicative to being favourable to minority rights?

To me, it seems the opposite of progress to be waiting and hoping for a tipping point when a highly conformist generation can lean into very conservative ideologies without an opposing voice to contend with.