banning social media accounts for under 16s.
You mean, ban it everyone under 16? Why ban social media for boys if it only negatively affects teenage girls?
You mean, ban it everyone under 16? Why ban social media for boys if it only negatively affects teenage girls?
Meanwhile, boys struggle just the same, society just doesn't really accept vanity in teen boys the same way they do teen girls. Being a teen is very rough these days in terms of mental health, and this applies to all genders and sexes.
We had IRC, BBS et al in the '90s, they weren't designed to be addictive. It's such a different landscape these days for so many reasons. Models were airbrushed, then models started being Photoshopped, that affected how people felt too. It isn't necessarily a problem unique to social media.
Imagine reading a magazine full of ads and perfectly good-looking people almost every waking hour as a teen. You're going to end up very unhappy if none of what you're seeing looks like you. This is why representation is important, but when it's reduced to a box-ticking exercise then we have a problem, albeit a different one.
Teen suicide has been a problem for a long while though, even pre-internet.
MySpace was interesting because you saw average looking people generally instead of algorithmic focus on the best x. Not saying MySpace was healthy though, the "number of friends" popularity contest and hoping to be in someone's "top y friends" was miserable.
In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds." [1] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese, not just overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's [2]. I have to wonder if it's related. A lot of teenagers are bombarded with images of their peers' perfectly healthy bodies that, quite simply, won't match what they see in the mirror. The solution? Ban mirrors.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obe...
Social media shows you whatever the algorithm is designed to show you at any given moment.
These two things are not the same.
The implication is that society is also very hostile to men and boys right now, demonstrated by them becoming incels in large numbers.
Thus, while it may linguistically be the western version of some exotic-sounding Japanese word that translates as "single adult", the implication is the exact opposite causality of your question: they are single because they are bad, not vice-versa.
Being an incel is something you choose. Everyone else just isn't having sex.
But a lot of them act in bad ways because they believe/have been told to believe that their difficulty in finding a relationship is someone else's fault.
This often makes them utterly insufferable to be around, which is a positive feedback loop.
And then, hey, look, here's a disaffected community of angry young men, all feeling that society has taken a great big dump on them, all ripe for radicalization by some cynical ideologue.
They are bad people because incel forums are normally filled with crab-bucket mentality users who regurgitate highly misogynistic tropes up until the edge of being openly violent to women.
If you are unable to see the misogyny towards woman in many incel communities for whatever reason, at the very least I would say that they are bad for men because they tend to grow by reinforcing the idea that their community will never be good enough, that there is nothing that they can do, and it is the fault of society for all their problems.
If you are going to sit here and pretend Elliot's manfesto wasn't misogynist, then so be it, there's no point to carry water for these guys.
The first paragraph speaks for itself. The whole "involuntary" part of "incel" implies that your celibacy - the fact that people don't want you as a partner - is totally out of your control. Incels are the epitome of "nice guys".
It is common to see some one with that mindset to see outcomes as inevitable or as a function of things wholly out of their control such as looks or a perceived social dynamic involving 'chads' and 'staceys' that they are ineluctably locked out of.
Just some real bad vibes.