- Joined
- Oct 8, 2018
I haven't done this since 2017, but I did do a quick little experiment where I watched/played the top 10 movies/TV shows/video games for each year starting in 1980. The amount of sex and violence hasn't really gone up as much as people think. In fact, if you jump back to golden age comic books before things got pretty heavily censored during the silver age it had hit a far more extreme peak than current day. So I don't think media is to blame, instead I contribute it to three things:
- Social media. This is the big one, social media warps perceptions. Twitter is just a less edgy 4Chan without board segregation and the ability to easily track who is who. Anonymity used to be a requirement to act this way, not now. I really need to remind everyone, less than 12% of the twitter user base make up more than 90% of its posts, and removing business and corporate accounts drops that to less than 10% and 85% of the posts. Never judge society based on social media, it is its own little culture and is very warped towards a particular type of person. It just turns out two of these biggest groups in that less than 10% are coomers and lost kids looking for a place to belong and trying to find the right labels in an environment that is obsessed with labels.
- Kids feel pressured to figure themselves out too young, and aren't told they should constant revised their sense of self and who they are all while being bombarded with possible things they might identify as. You can see this with people trying to get their kids to figure out if they are gay, straight, cis, or trans before they are even 10 years old. They are given a weird warped idea of what these things are as they are told they are told things like "when boys like boys or girls like girls then they are gay" and little kids tend to play with their own gender and those are the people they like so they decide they are gay, attach that to their identity, which kids do with everything and healthy adults learn to undo and detach their interests form their identity, get it constantly reinforced and I have met a few people leaving their gay identity behind because it was something they make a decision on before they understood what it meant and felt pressured to stick to it. Similarly this happens with gender nonconforming kids being told they are trans when no, little Sally is just a tomgirl, and Billy just likes horses, but the troons are the biggest advocates for strict gender conformity, some of which I think is projections. Also the whole "representation in kids media" movement isn't helping this, as they are overly focused on who is dating who and not on the things kids care about (I won't get into the other aspects of this here, such as the projection of those making these things) so kids are being told that the most important part of their self is who they are kissing. The end result is that 14 year old kids don't know who they are, which is perfectly normal especially at that age, while they are forming an online identity and rather than figure it out and tell The Man they don't have to fit in his boxes, they desperately label themselves with these terms that are supposed to describe fundamental aspects of one's self and their identity when it comes to relationships, and since these kids don't fit into these frequently shamed and perceivably overly restricted boxes of "cisgendered" and "heterosexual" they assume they must be something else and find something that fits in that moment, and once they label themselves as such they are encouraged to stick to it for the rest of their lives, even if it turns out they were wrong. They also don't ever consider they might have changed in any other way, you often see them stick to their old likes, dislikes, and beliefs, even if it is becoming increasingly obvious those things are no longer true for them as they connected their identity to being into those things. (Disclaimer, I am not saying "being gay is a choice". I am just saying there are people being pushed to identify as things they aren't when they are young and suffering for it. Fuck the rainbow cult. Kids should be allowed to figure themselves out on their own time, not while they are in diapers and being told what they are by adults who have their own agendas.)
- The tribe got too big. Humans are tribalistic little monkeys. We really want to be part of a group and a tribe, and feel like we are doing some good to it in our own way. However as the tribe got bigger it became harder to appreciate our part in it, and now its this MASSIVE global thing with the internet, and seeing how you contribute to the greater thing is harder than ever. Instead we try to subdivide ourselves ever more. For some recontextualizing the tribe to merely a nation is enough, but we're past the point of that being too big as well in some countries, and that is why we see people clinging to smaller communities. Toss in the anti-intellectualism and the idea you need to agree with everything your particular community believes in and you can see the issues there. Not to mention that by so narrowly defining what people in the group can be you help make it more exclusive, making the part played by each member easier to see, and you help exercise some control over those who are in it preventing the group from falling apart and all your effort becoming "wasted". This phenomena seems to show up more in high population nations more so than being based on industrial, technological and societal development. In the West one form this took was the "queer community" and its many subcommunities. Labels are a way to designate the tribe you belong in, and being UwU special is a way to believe you inherently add something to your community. I also believe this is what is causing a lot of the modern day activism.
