Fôlego

As if the misogyny of these men is somehow unique. As if their fathers and grandfathers didn’t hold exactly the same opinions when they were teens and probably still do.

There is a perception that young men are backsliding from their previously held progressive values, but I think that young men were never progressive or feminist in the first place, even over the last ten years. They pretended to have those values so they could consider themselves good people, but as soon as large internet personalities showed them that misogyny is still considered acceptable all they had to do was remove the mask.

So, in terrorist studies, one of the core models to describe why or how extremism develops (extremism =/= terrorism, but terrorism is always extreme) is called the Three N's model: Need, Narrative, Network.

Need: an individual's desire for personal significance

Narrative: How an ideology can guide one in their quest for need

Network: membership of an in-group that validated and rewards those who implement the ideology.

And so, in a world that's highly patriarchal and finally getting just steps forward in feninism, a lot of men will feel left behind. They don't have that personal significance awarded upon them for being male, as they had for thousands of years before- and some men alive today may have even previously experienced. The narrative IS misogyny. And the network is the manosphere. The Internet allows for the spread of propaganda and communication with like groups who may never have met before.

RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOURSELF MEANS THAT YOU DON’T FALL FOR SHALLOW AND EASY SOLUTIONS

Like with your fat woman example. The answer isn’t like don’t consume tv or like don’t ever have skinny people or something. It’s that we should include more fat people. (This sounds more stupid in writing I’m just trying the make the question I’m asking make sense).

Like with your fat woman example. The answer isn’t like don’t consume tv or like don’t ever have skinny people or something. It’s that we should include more fat people. (This sounds more stupid in writing I’m just trying the make the question I’m asking make sense).

the reason why porn can never be ethical is because as long as there is money involved, sex will be coerced, which is the definition of rape. if you agree that consent must be freely given, without any kind of coercion, all porn becomes rape (whether it be gay porn, straight porn, "feminist porn"). the exchange of money for performing sex on camera is inherently unethical, as it goes directly against the concept of free and uncoerced consent. and the porn industry is precisely that, an industry, one of the most lucratives in the world. it wouldn't exist without economical gain and profit. this is why reforming the industry to make it more "feminist" and more "ethical" wouldn't work. there will always be women needing money to survive (for as long as we live in a capitalist society).

any attempt at making porn feminist and ethical will fail, because this "type" of porn is going to get swallowed by the industry as a whole, becoming just one more "category" for porn websites.

pornography is just a reflection of how our society views sex: as transactional and impersonal. when you feel the need to watch other people having sex, you're not having a personal connection to any of them, you're not seeing or feeling them as people, just as images on a screen (and here i'm not being a puritanical pearl clutching nun, saying you always need to love your partner to have sex with them and that you can only have sex in very special occasions. but, during sex, there must be connection. connection between people, between bodies. otherwise, you end up dehumanizing and objectifying the person you're with. because you're not seeing them as a person with desires and wants, you're just seeing them as a sex toy to get off — sex without connection is just masturbation). porn is one of the biggest symptoms of the unhealthy and patriarchal view of sex we've developed in society.

pornography is unhealthy in a biological way as well. the more you watch porn, the more addicted you become. an orgasm is the most powerful training tool. you become addicted to having that same feeling again, however, overexposure to it will cause you to become desensitized, so you search for different kinds of porn to satiate your needs, and the cycle repeats (which is actually why the people who only watch softcore porn thinking its okay to porn addicts who look for hardcore violent porn pipeline exists).

Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? (Celeste Davis, Oct 6 2024)

"White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in.

White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value.

Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.

Take veterinary school for example:

In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.

By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.

By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%

A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.

But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”

Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.

For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied.

One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition! (…)

Since males had dominated these professions for centuries, you would think they would leave slowly, hesitantly or maybe linger at 40%, 35%, 30%, but that’s not what happens.

Once the tipping point reaches majority female- the men flee. And boy do they flee!

It’s a slippery slope. When the number of women hits 60% the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining.

Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:

“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”

Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.

As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.

Scanning through Reddit and Quora threads, many men seem to be in agreement - college is stupid and unnecessary.

A waste of time and money. You’re much better off going into the trades, a tech boot camp or becoming an entrepreneur. No need for college. (…)

When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important.

Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice. (…)

School is now feminine. College is feminine. And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.

This article of the New York Times on the Blake Lively lawsuit against Justin Baldoni is worth the reading

If you were wondering what some people's priorities are in the wake of the Mazan trial

Translation: "Justice for Gisèle, justice for every woman", defaced to turn "every woman" into "everyone"

Mrs Maggot is kind and sensible. Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is jealous and petty but in the end principled and stout. Arwen is beautiful and kind and learned. Galadriel is powerful and ancient and wise, but is tempted by terrible power. The Ents have lost their womenfolk and miss them, because without women there is a loss greater than not reproducing. Ioreth of the houses of healing talks too much and is a little annoying but is knowledgeable and capable. Eowyn believed her work looking after her uncle to be less important than going to war, but she realizes she was wrong. It may be noble to lay down your life, but it's possible to keep on living and building and healing and that is more important than any battle, and much better than making a home in your despair. Rosie Cotton is faithful and patient and does not take bullshit and keeps the hearth warm in times of crisis.

the only female characters in lotr who actually sort of affect the plot at all are galadriel and eowyn. arwen pines and rosie cotton doesn't exist until the last 15 minutes of the last movie. and they're both very much a male character's reward.

lotr is a story that someone deliberately wrote, not a documentary. no quest "just happened" to fall into anyone's hands, it was all a deliberate choice the writer(s) made. tolkien could have just as easily made one or more of the members of the fellowship a woman. peter jackson could have decided to make that change too, and it would have been less detrimental to the story than whatever he did to gondor.

The reach is so unreal it’s pathetic. Think critically please, I’m begging you to think critically with your adult brain.

It probably would be more believable that the ladies you rattled off had that imaginary “better and more important shit to do in the shire while four idiot male teenage hobbits went off and saved the goddamn world” you’re talking about if you hadn’t just listed off pretty much the only female hobbit characters that have names

Rosie cotton has exactly ONE speaking line where she lets Sam know they thought he was dead but she waited for him. So romantic! Love that for her, get it girlfriend. It’s awesome for him that Sam gets rewarded for working so hard in the journey by marrying a nice girl when he gets home. That really rules for him

Now speaking of speaking roles - what was Mrs maggots first name again? Remind me

Except that was a trick question actually because according to the LOTR wiki she doesn’t fucking have one. Real important female background character, there. Lotta depth of personality. Literally her only known detail is that she’s someone’s wife. Fuck all the way off with calling her “kind and sensible” you don’t know shit about her because all ANYONE knows about her is that she’s a farmers wife - I’m pretty sure that makes her not even a character, just a background detail. Like, prove me wrong and tell me even one canon fact or quote about her.

And you DEFINITELY can’t call the entwives female LOTR characters because they’re never named, never speak, never mentioned as more than details in someone else’s story, and are out of the picture before OUR story even fucking begins.

Plus the very fact that Galadriel has such a long cool history as one of the oldest female elves is not exactly as dope as it seems when it clicks that she’s basically the equivalent of at least three different women he didn’t want to take the trouble to make into separate characters. “Long lived” say less JRR we get how hard it is to craft complex characters, you did your best

And the fact that Tolkien wrote literal armies of named and relevant and important male characters for his world and like six women is not something you can philosophize away just because unnamed and unspoken women exist in the background of his world??? Like pull your head out of your goddamn ass. This is some women who cooked the last supper shit. Being there and being completely ignored and unexplored does not a character make.

Stop giving men credit they haven’t earned! Stop praising the absolute bare fucking minimum- yeah I guess he could have explicitly said middle earth has no females and he chose not to do that, good girlboss choice JRR, thanks for not doing that. That’s how you sound.

Later, in letter 53, he condemns the spread of feminism (among other things) as diminishing the diversity of the world.

I read this week that Instagram is pushing “overtly sexual adult videos” to young users. For a Wall Street Journal investigation, journalists created accounts that could belong to children, following young gymnasts, cheerleaders and influencers. The test accounts were soon served sexual and disturbing content on Instagram Reels, alongside ads for dating apps, livestream platforms with “adult nudity” and AI chatbots “built for cybersex”. Some were next to ads for kids’ brands like Disney.

This is something I’ve been trying to get across to parents about social media. The problem is not just porn sites. They are of course a massive concern. Kids as young as nine are addicted. The average age to discover porn is now 13, for boys and girls. And many in my generation are now realising just how much being raised on porn affected them, believing it “destroyed their brain” and distorted their view of sex.

But the problem is bigger than that. Porn is everywhere now. TikTok is serving up sex videos to minors and promoting sites like OnlyFans. The gaming platform Twitch is exposing kids to explicit live-streams. Ads for “AI sex workers” are all over Instagram, some featuring kids’ TV characters like SpongeBob and the Cookie Monster. And there’s also this sort of “soft-porn” now that pervades everything. Pretty much every category of content that kids could stumble across, from beauty trends to TikTok dances to fitness pages, is now pornified or sexualised in some way for clicks.

I think this does a lot of damage to Gen Z. I think it desensitises us to sex. I think it can ruin relationships. But beyond that, I also believe a major problem with everything being pornified is the pressure it puts on young girls to pornify themselves. To fit the sex doll beauty standard; to seek validation through self-sexualisation, and potentially monetise all this like the influencers they’re inundated with.

Which, of course, puts girls at risk of predators. Predators who are all over TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. Predators whose algorithms helpfully deliver them more content of minors and steer them towards kids’ profiles. Predators who are taking TikToks of underage girls and putting them on platforms like Pornhub.

And this is even more terrifying because adolescent girls are especially vulnerable today. They are vulnerable anyway at that age—but today they have far less life experience than previous generations of girls did. They are extremely insecure and anxious, and much less resilient. Combine this with the fact that they are now more easily exposed to predatory men than ever before in history, and served to strangers by algorithms. And another thing: girls are also able to look way older now. They have AI editing apps to sexualise themselves. TikTok filters to pornify their bodies. And access to every kind of make-up and hair and fashion tutorial you can think of to look sexier and more mature. I don’t think enough parents realise how dangerous this situation is.

Which is why I find it so frustrating to see some progressives downplay the dangers of all this. Those that dismiss anyone concerned about the pornification of everything as a stuffy conservative. And somehow can’t see how the continual loosening of sexual norms might actually empower predatory men, and put pressure on vulnerable girls? That seems delusional to me.

Let’s just say I have little patience for those on the left who loudly celebrate women sexualising themselves online, selling it as fun, feminist and risk-free, but are then horrified to hear about 12 year-olds doing the same thing. C’mon. No wonder they want to.

But I also find it frustrating to see some on the right approach this with what seems like a complete lack of compassion. I don’t think it helps to relentlessly ridicule and blame young women for sexualising themselves online. I don’t think it’s fair either. We can’t give girls Instagram at 12 and then be surprised when as young women they base their self-worth on the approval of strangers. We can’t inundate kids with sexual content all the time and be shocked when they don’t see sex as sacred, or think sex work is just work! We can’t give them platforms as pre-teens where they are rewarded for sexualising themselves and presenting themselves like products and then shame them for starting an OnlyFans. We can’t expose them to online worlds where everything is sexualised and then be confused why some of Gen Z see their sexuality as their entire identity.

And again, on top of these platforms, girls are growing up in a culture that celebrates all of this. They are being raised to believe that they must be liberated from every restraint around sex and relationships to be free and happy, and many have never heard any different. Celebrities encourage them to be a slut, get naked, make/watch porn and make money! Mainstream magazines teach them how to up their nude selfie game! Influencers tell millions of young followers to start an OnlyFans, and pretend it’s about empowering young girls to do whatever they want with their bodies! I can’t say this enough: their world is one where the commodification and sexualisation the self is so normalised. It’s heartbreaking. And cruel that anyone celebrates it.

So sure, young women make their own choices. But when we have children sexualising themselves online, when girls as young as 13 are using fake IDs to post explicit content on OnlyFans, when a third of those selling nudes on Twitter are under the age of 18, I think it’s safe to say we are failing them from an early age.

I guess what I’m trying to get across is this: it’s tough for girls right now. It’s tough to be twelve and anxious and feel unattractive and this is how everyone else is getting attention. It’s tough to constantly compare yourself to the hyper-sexualised influencers that the boys you’re interested in are liking and following and thinking you have to compete. It’s tough to feel like the choice is sexualise yourself or nobody will notice you. The sad reality is we live in a superficial, pornified culture that rewards this stuff, and in many ways punishes you if you’re modest and sensitive and reserved, and a lot of girls are just trying to keep up with it.

We need serious cultural change. We need to wake up to how insane this all is, how utterly mental it is that we allow young girls anywhere near social media, and how we’ve let the liberalising of sexual mores escalate to the point where pre-teens are posing like porn stars and are lied to that it’s liberation. And where we need to start is with an absolute refusal from parents to let their kids on these platforms.

So many people just being like, "Well now that we're all stuck indoors" as if "essential workers" didn't count, and virtually every commercial being like, "Welcome back!" after companies started making employees come back to the office, ignoring that some of us never "left" our work stations to begin with. Nowadays you see so many people say, "Remember when we were all indoors?" and I'm like...no, I don't actually, some of us never had that privilege.

Women in 1977 burning porn magazines in Oslo, Norway 🇳🇴. In this time, there was a huge movement where feminists would tear porn magazines off the bookshelves and burn them in bonfires.

A demonstration against the opening of a brothel in the same month, which proved itself successful as the establishment was never opened. The banner in the middle reads: "The female body is not for sale"

In the 80s, the organisation behind the movement, the "Kvinnefronten" (Norwegian for "Women's Front") gave certificates to shops who did not sell pornographic magazines

So yeah, all my love goes out to the Norwegian feminists of the late 70s and 80s ❤️ 🇳🇴🇳🇴🇳🇴

If they could do it, we can too! 💪

Sexual strangulation has become so popular that more than half of Australian young people have used it for pleasure, though it can cause lasting brain damage in seconds and death within minutes.

Known as sexual “choking”, the practice has taken off because it is mainstreamed in contemporary pornography, researchers say, but new national data shows it is so widespread that 57 per cent of those aged 18 to 35 have been strangled during sex at least once.

More than half (51 per cent) had strangled a partner during sex, found a study of 4702 young people around Australia by the University of Melbourne Law School and the University of Queensland.

Close to one-third of those who had been strangled by a sexual partner were aged between 19 and 21 when it first happened. Respondents who had been strangled had it done an average of five times, by three partners, found the research, published on Tuesday in Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Police, physicians and the researchers, led by Professor Heather Douglas, say there is no safe way to use strangulation or choking during sex. They say understanding of the dangers is so lacking that even those who consent to it are not aware of the grave risks to their brain health and life.

Douglas said brain injury from repeated strangulation could build up, like the impact of concussion among sportspeople. Symptoms, including stroke, could occur up to many months later.

Strangulation in sex is the second most common cause of stroke in women under 40, UK research suggests.

“It [sexual strangulation] is happening incredibly frequently, people are doing it regularly … and half the people are doing it at least several times,” said Douglas, who has been researching non-lethal strangulation for several years.

“Brain injury accumulates — the more times you are strangled, the greater the impact on the brain. I suspect there are probably a lot of young people with impacts on their brain as a result of this behaviour and that’s incredibly concerning,” she said.

Blood clots, “thyroid storm” – increased heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature that could be fatal – and miscarriage might happen in the weeks or months after strangulation, Douglas said.

Pressure on young women not to be vanilla in their sexual practice was contributing to the uptick in the popularity of choking, the experts said, though many young women in the new research were comfortable giving consent.

Women’s safety experts have long warned that strangulation is an indicator of potential future homicide. Consent advocate Chanel Contos has been warning since 2022 that choking, though never safe, has been normalised from kink to “not out of the ordinary” in her age group.

Forensic physician Dr Jo Parkin said sexual strangulation was exceptionally dangerous, and sexual choking memes were being promoted in social media hashtags.

“In terms of what [young people are] seeing, it’s not just the hands around the neck; it can be a ligature, clothing, it can be rope or just a forearm across the neck,” said Parkin.

“It can be legs used in what is being promoted as a playful hold, but it isn’t. There is no safe level of neck compression in a community setting.”

She said it was not possible to give informed consent because people did not understand the risks “which are in seconds a loss of consciousness and minutes to death”.

“They don’t understand the anatomy of the neck and the risk of compression of the vital structures,” Parkin said. “Within seconds, once you’ve lost consciousness, you can have seizures, and ongoing compression leads to death.”

There have been documented cases where serious impacts to the brain from sexual strangulation have not appeared until one year after the incident. But in 40 to 50 per cent of cases that Parkin and her colleagues examine at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, there are no external symptoms or signs of it at the time.

Jackie McMillan, senior project officer at Women’s Health NSW, said it was important for those using choking to understand you could acquire a brain injury without losing consciousness, and other symptoms were an indication urgent medical help should be sought.

“More serious choking involves loss of consciousness and sometimes urination and sometimes defecation; so if you engage in sexual choking and one of these things happens, you definitely need to seek medical advice,” she said.

Violence-prevention educator Maree Crabbe said as well as pornography influencers, mainstream TV was showing sexual strangulation as “a relatively normal part of the sexual script”.

Young people she had interviewed for a forthcoming campaign around sexual strangulation, Breathless, said they believed it could be done safely.

“People from different places, cultural backgrounds and socioeconomic groups all talked about strangulation being normal; our team was shocked,” she said.

“What was really concerning was the way it was framed as about being adventurous … and if they express lack of enthusiasm, or resistance, to engaging in strangulation or other rough sex, they are seen as vanilla and that’s shameful.”

Crabbe said the fact porn was promoting consent of very dangerous practices “raises questions about having multibillion-dollar industries shaping our sexual experience in ways that put other people’s lives at risk”.

More support for young people was required to help define who they want to be in their sexual roles.

A Victoria Police spokeswoman said if someone consented to sex, it did not mean they consented to other acts, and that non-consensual strangulation during sex was assault.