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I think it's somewhat important to ask why this effect is more observable for girls than for boys, and Haidt does not seem to really reflect on that. Social med

by lsy 4y ago

I think it's somewhat important to ask why this effect is more observable for girls than for boys, and Haidt does not seem to really reflect on that. Social media in and of itself is really just an accelerant for the particular set of social expectations we stack on girls and women around appearance and how that relates to self-worth. Boys have more capacity to transcend social media's focus on image and beauty by finding other ways to be valued as human beings. What does it say about our society that we are not equipping girls and women in the same way? I'm a little confused about Haidt's pearl-clutching in this instance, when he has elsewhere argued against "coddling" and bugaboos like "intersectionality" and "identity politics". While there is certainly much to criticize in these areas, you would think one solution to this issue would be to advance a society in which women are valued equally to men. Reading between the lines of his body of work, it appears Haidt wants to return to a type of mid-century traditionalism, where children and young people are both protected and challenged by traditional adult authority figures (who are conveniently mostly people like him and his collaborators). I'm not so sure that's the direction we should be going in, but heavy-handedly cutting off the exploration at "social media as cause" certainly precludes any further analysis of an underlying dynamic.

eastbound 4y ago
> Boys have more capacity to transcend social media's focus on image and beauty by finding other ways to be valued as human beings. Before absconding boys from harm, maybe we should check twice on their health. They are often forgotten or their difficulties brushed off in studies. How are addictions progressing? Obesity maybe? Why are they all on 9Gag? Let’s check their level of racism and misogyny, it might be a proxy for self-esteem. Have right-wing groups gotten more expressive recently? Are we taking proper care of the boys? Can we ensure, if we measure something where girls are particularly exposed, that we also measure an area where boys are particularly exposed, before assuming boys are exempt from harm.
- Zetice 4y ago
  Boys are for sure not exempt from harm, but the harm seems to be as a result of equity: https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-young-men-are-single-most-young-women-are-not/amp/ https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-yo... > “Today in America, women expect more from men,” Levant said, “and unfortunately, so many men don’t have more to give.” Powerful stuff.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - RangerScience 4y ago
    Quote in more context: > Women are tiring of their stereotypical role as full-time therapist for emotionally distant men. They want a partner who is emotionally open and empathetic, the opposite of the age-old masculine ideal. > “Today in America, women expect more from men,” Levant said, “and unfortunately, so many men don’t have more to give.” I think it’s pretty clear that the harm isn’t caused by equity, but that the equity exposes the harm caused by other things.
    - Zetice 4y ago
      Yeah fair, I obviously don't think equity is a bad thing, I just think a lot of men were taught to rely on inequity and now that it's being reduced, those men aren't adapting.
  - marcellus23 4y ago
    A bit disappointing seeing the implicit bias in that article. The thrust seems to basically be "women are fine, men are failing and need to do better". Some choice quotes: > Women are tiring of their stereotypical role as full-time therapist for emotionally distant men > “Today in America, women expect more from men,” Levant said, “and unfortunately, so many men don’t have more to give.” > The same emotional deficits that hurt men in the dating pool also hamper them in forming meaningful friendships. At first glance the article is even-handed, but reading closely you notice that not a single trait of women is described using negative terms, but men are described as needing women to be their therapists, as "not having more to give" women, and as having "emotional deficits." This is basically an inversion of the ancient trope that women are defective men, and just as harmful.
    - Zetice 4y ago
      Of course it's on the men to adjust, and that's what we see in most men overall. The ones who struggle to find relationships are the men who aren't adjusting. We should figure out why they're not adjusting, not ask the women to give back some of their hard-earned freedoms because some men can't handle it. The inversion would be if the claim was that a trait of men is causing this maladjustment, but the claim is instead that men are misprioritizing an equal relationship with a woman in favor of career and unequal relationships that they're now struggling to find. Also I dunno if you missed this quote, but it's firmly discussing actions women are taking that impact these single men: > Heterosexual women are getting more choosy. Women “don’t want to marry down,” to form a long-term relationship to a man with less education and earnings than herself, said Ronald Levant, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Akron and author of several books on masculinity. The article also ended on a hopeful note, giving an example of a group of men who do prioritize relationships, with their Man of the Year trophy, saying literally: > “We treat friendship as a luxury, especially men,” Ritter said. “It’s a necessity.”
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  >misogyny, it might be a proxy for self-esteem Seems to me misandry would be a better proxy for self-esteem. I do know men who are very much misandrist. I'm not just talking about them "going woke" I'm talking about kids whose fathers abandoned them or whatever and they feel a lot of resentment when they look around and see this is a common story. As men collectively become more productive, more empathetic, less toxic, and all this stuff I only hear more and more people pleading that we ratchet up scrutiny of men to the point Gilette think's it's a good idea to run an ad directed by women about how men need to do better and do this and that wrong and just need to get their shit together [1]. Similarly, I would say that self-hating racism is a better proxy for self-esteem than racism in general. In fact this shit is out of control in Incel communities to the point they have terms like "currycels", "ricecels", etc. You know why they feel this way? Is it because they themselves are racist towards towards others? No it's generally because they look at dating site stats and see how women are racist towards them (in a highly specific context) and internalise the racism of others and hate themselves. Oddly I don't think I've EVER heard somebody suggest that women should be less racist towards men to improve men's self-esteem, even though I've seen such racism CRUSH men's self-esteem over and over. I don't know I see the idea that the key towards self-esteem is holding people other than yourself in high esteem and think they're totally absurd on its face. If an Indian Man or Black Man or White Man or Asian Man doesn't like people like themselves, if they don't look up to proud Malcolm X like role models, their self-esteem is always going to be shit. Men are generally portrayed as either oppressor or oppressed, either way they have cause to feel bad about themselves. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYaY2Kb_PKI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYaY2Kb_PKI
  - josephg 4y ago
    I saw a video the other day which pointed out a troubling statistic: Universities today have more gender bias than they had in the 70s. But the gender bias has reversed - instead of men differentials succeeding more than women, men are now much less likely to graduate from university than women are. I think it’s pretty awful having one gender succeed at the expense of another, whichever way around that goes. For society to be healthy we need everyone to thrive. https://youtu.be/DBG1Wgg32Ok https://youtu.be/DBG1Wgg32Ok
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  I think this might be whataboutism. It’s clear to me the original poster was speaking exclusively on the social media aspect and the fact that social media does not have a similar causal effect of mental illness specifically on boys, and so I don’t know how addiction/obesity/etc contribute here. I agree there may be other effects on men, but it seems very clear here that the original poster was talking about social media specifically.
  - eastbound 4y ago
    We should not accept topics which de facto exclude men.
    - Zetice 4y ago
      Huh? The article is about how social media impacts the mental health of girls. They didn't study boys, why would we talk about boys without any data on them in the source? It's overly inclusive to insist on talking about everything all the time, lest we leave someone out... We'll talk about the men, lots of people are talking about the men, but let's take a second to talk about how women are feeling, okay?
  - Nadya 4y ago
    The answer of why is quite obvious to many people but no longer politically acceptable. There is a large external pressure for studies to show that there are no differences between men and women while there is also demand for studies that show negative outcomes of women in comparison to men. The same problem happens again and again with these studies in that nothing explains the negative outcomes of women. Except one explanation that is instantly discarded for being socially untenable. The intersectionalist looks at the studies and declares, "It must be something - let's keep looking!" while the sexist takes a look and nods. Nobody is going to risk their careers or their funding when they can continue being paid to investigate other avenues of explanation. The suffering of people will continue until a more acceptable explanation is found. And because I don't wish to speak between the lines: There are psychological and emotional differences between men and women. And, from all the humans I've known at least, women tend to give more of a shit about the opinions of other people than men give a shit about the opinions of other people. While the toxic negativity of social media impacts both genders I would honestly be shocked if it didn't impact women more if for no reason other than because they care more.
- nsfmc 4y ago
  an earlier newsletter shows this distressing graph of teen suicides and, shocker, boys are doing terribly, a suicide rate at least three times more than girls, but the author seems to find the 34% delta less distressing. the data is unsettling, but the author doesn't remotely confront the question about why 2017 is a post-2010 maxima for both boys and girls. (which would probably change the boys delta to at least 60 percent and possibly undermine the premise that social media exclusively harms young women) https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/101249738/increases-in-suicide https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/101249738/increases-in-...
  - fleddr 4y ago
    Recently an organization representing war news reporters was distressed by the rise in female reporters getting killed, 6 more than the year before. The fact that 85% of killed reporters were men...ah, well. Men are not doing alright. And our response to it is nothing at all or...do better.
ravenstine 4y ago
Reflecting on that question means saying things that many people would find offensive. It's a lost cause to suggest that corporations implicitly understand something innate about female psychology and are taking advantage of it, and that's exactly why social media wins; the current politics you mentioned are a protective layer against taking meaningful action against the machine. If society was as concerned about the online activity of boys (news flash, your kid is likely watching hardcore porn every day), action would be more swift because there's no political manifold to dissuade elders from trying to save boys. This analogy is of course imperfect because parents are evidently not as concerned about boys. > you would think one solution to this issue would be to advance a society in which women are valued equally to men. There's no reason to believe such a society can exist any more than believing it's possible for a thing to be both dry and wet at the same time. It's dubious whether such a society is even desirable, and even if it is, it's been debated since time immemorial and isn't a practical way to address real world issues. You might as well ask why the world can't be more like Star Trek.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  You think it would be dubious for a society to value men and women equally?
  - catiopatio 4y ago
    Men and women are not identical; inescapably, the mean value contributed by each will material differ in at least some contexts. If a society equally values the contributions of men and women in all contexts, then, by definition, it must be using an inequitable metric to ascribe value to their contributions.
    - pwinnski 4y ago
      People aren't abstract mathematical concepts. No two people are identical, and the range of difference between the two most extreme men almost certainly exceeds the range of difference between the most woman-like men and the most man-like women. Given the obvious differences between humans, nobody expects that every single person will contribute identical value, or should be valued identically. However, there is a very, very, very long history of the inverse. In nearly every area of life, the activities and contributions most commonly fulfilled by women are under-valued, while the activities and contributions most commonly fulfilled by men are over-valued. This can be seen historically, as the primary occupants of careers shifted from one sex to the other. The early computer programmers (women) were treated as doing secretarial work, while modern computer programmers (mostly men) are compensated like rock stars. Conversely, early school teachers were highly respected and well-compensated when they were mostly men, and respect and compensation both dropped relative to other careers as teachers became more likely to be women. These are systemic biases so ingrained that we don't think about them. People are lining up to respond to this comment to helpfully explain to me that those earlier programmers weren't the same, or that modern teachers are every bit as respected and well-compensated as they should be, or whatever. The Venn diagram of all men and all women is not a circle, because of course there are differences. But there is much overlap between the two circles, and women are mostly not valued equally where the circles overlap, and the non-overlapping areas of each circle are valued completely differently as well. When you see it, it's clear as day. When you don't or won't, it sounds silly. Feel free to dig in to the truth of it, or dismiss it as folklore.
xwdv 4y ago
We know why. But few authors are going to come out and talk about that. They do not want to be perceived in the wrong way. It should be very obvious to anyone who has spent some time on social media and has thought critically about the topic.
xkcd1963 4y ago
First paragraph: I agree Second no, just because Haidt is not advocating in his bodies of work for feminism doesn't mean he is against a more equal society.
luckylion 4y ago
> Boys have more capacity to transcend social media's focus on image and beauty by finding other ways to be valued as human beings. If we assume that there's really zero genetic involvement, and it's all just environment: If you treat girls like boys (have to achieve something to be valued, no inherent value), you'll get tougher girls and fewer issues with social media. But you'll also get more girls killing themselves and being violent towards others when they fail to achieve things that get them recognition. Not sure if that's a huge improvement. > What does it say about our society that we are not equipping girls and women in the same way? The issue is with girls using social media, not with society somehow favoring boys and giving them all the great tools and what not. Boys are insulting each other in a shooter games or trolling people while girls are on social media. If one group hikes through a forest and another swims through a river and some of the latter drown, it's not the better equipment the hikers were given that kept them from drowning.
coryfklein 4y ago
> why this effect is more observable for girls than for boys I'll take a stab at it: 1. During most of homo sapiens evolution as hunter gatherers, women were more likely to congregate in centralized groups while men hunted in small groups. It is documented that gossip is an integral activity among the women of a tribe moreso than their male counterparts. Without the inhibitions produced by in-person interaction, women gossiping on social media are more likely to produce negative interactions than their male counterparts who have a much lessened propensity to gossip. 2. From an evolutionary standpoint, a woman's reproductive fertility is closely associated with their appearance. Men are hardwired to pay close attention to a woman's looks whereas women are hardwired to care more about a man's ability to "protect and provide". Since social media promotes visibility of the most attractive women, this has the effect of reducing feelings of self-worth for the female users moreso than the male users.
trieste92 4y ago
> Social media in and of itself is really just an accelerant for the particular set of social expectations we stack on girls and women around appearance and how that relates to self-worth. Boys have more capacity to transcend social media's focus on image and beauty by finding other ways to be valued as human beings. Sounds like one of those truisms that people love to repeat. Like all other instances, this one likely isn't grounded in anything concrete
- josephg 4y ago
  I just think the gender norms for men are different. Traditionally, women are valued more for their beauty and (later) their capacity to raise children. Men are traditionally valued for their capacity to be bread winners. “Women are valued for what they are. Men are valued for what they do.” I think both ideas can be pretty toxic to their respective genders. The problems just show up differently. Social media, online bullying and body shaming hurt girls more than boys. And video game addiction, desperation due to purposelessness and suicide seem to hurt men more than women. Every human deserves to have a life in which they flourish. We should, as much as we can, work to tackle all of these problems.
  - trieste92 4y ago
    > The problems just show up differently. Social media, online bullying and body shaming hurt girls more than boys. And video game addiction, desperation due to purposelessness and suicide seem to hurt men more than women. Idk. I feel like this is just culture trying to make up stories for each gender to define what deviance is supposed to look like It reminds me of how some people gravitate towards mbti types or enneagram even though they're obviously pseudoscience Are gender norms different though? Yes. But I don't think they should be. And the first step to overcoming them is disregarding the stupid stories that sound true
    - josephg 4y ago
      > Idk. I feel like this is just culture trying to make up stories for each gender to define what deviance is supposed to look like Regardless of how much the differences are cultural or innate, gender specific outcomes certainly show up in the data. Eg, this chart from the linked article: https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/80c49cc1-56e5-497c-ab69-d301a00857b8_1047x897.png https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/8... > the first step to overcoming them is disregarding the stupid stories that sound true Yeah; it would help immensely if we could teach everybody that they're essentially healthy and worthy of love. Good, consistent parenting acts as an inoculation against these problems. When we're talking about the kids with the worst mental health outcomes, they're probably disproportionally poor, and more often than not come from single parent households. I suspect more support for struggling families would make more of a difference to the mental health outcomes of kids than somehow overcoming gender norms. It seems like a much more tractable solution, too. Convincing regular people to not buy into the expectations of their own gender sounds like a borderline impossible task.
caput770 4y ago
I think part of it is that for every teenage girl spending 5 hours a day on social media, there's a teenage boy spending 5 hours a day playing video games, often with other teenage boys. I'd guess that video games are a more positive way to socialize, because teenagers are cooperating and competing rather than comparing themselves to others on social media.
- josephg 4y ago
  Yep. People seem to forget the pearl clutching in the 90s over boys playing violent video games. If the media was to be believed, video games were inevitably going to raise a generation of men ready to shoot up schools at the slightest provocation. Lots of research later, we started finding the men who grew up playing multiplayer video games were more strategic and often made better leaders. The fact that overwatch has guns doesn’t actually matter much in practice. However, the experience of getting a bunch of random people to cooperate is a lifelong skill that carries over into lots of other areas of life. Most of what I learned about working in teams, I learned from playing world of Warcraft in my early 20s. If you can run a successful raid every week with 40 strangers, working with a team in an office is easy.
  - beecafe 4y ago
    No, we have a generation of men who love shooting up schools and each other.
    - gallopingcomp 4y ago
      Not exactly a “generation”, but you are onto something here - men (broadly speaking) do appear to be more susceptible to radicalization.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    uhhhhh I don't think the video games are the reason but boys shooting up schools did turn out to be a big problem you know. So, idk, they were probably worried about the wrong thing but it seems they were right to be worried about that outcome.
ClassyJacket 4y ago
[flagged]
- devindotcom 4y ago
  Don't be an asshole.
denton-scratch 4y ago
> why this effect is more observable for girls than for boys I agree that's an interesting question. I think it's that girls are (conditioned to be?) more sociable than boys. After a divorce, many more men find themselves friendless than women, because the mens' social networks were really their wives. The stereotype that women gossip isn't wrong; women chatting about nonsense is simply maintaining social networks. Men maintain social connnections through team sports and work. I don't happen to believe it's "conditioned" - I think women are different from men, and behave differently. On the whole. (And for "women", read "girls and women") So if women communicate verbally more than men, it's not surprising that women make greater use of social media. The body-image thing obviously isn't about verbal communication, and I think it's a distinct phenomenon. I see a lot of young women in the street, with lots of exposed skin despite the wintery conditions; and with orange make-up applied with a trowel (they're always staring down at their fondle-slab). I don't know why young women want to look tacky, like a porn actress.
ErikVandeWater 4y ago
> While there is certainly much to criticize in these areas, you would think one solution to this issue would be to advance a society in which women are valued equally to men. Women are valued moreso than men. Men are 10x more likely to die at work, have little to no access to domestic violence shelters, and if war comes, the only people who will be conscripted to potentially die will be men.
belorn 4y ago
It is a very interesting aspect of all this kind of discussion that when any problem exist for girls and women, the problem is described as being caused by an external force. When ever a problem exist for boys and men, the problem is described as an internal force within the boys and men themselves. As long I have seen those topics on HN it never fails to display this cultural view about men and women. Men not graduating as much as women, must be mens fault for not studying enough. Women not earning the same as men, must be mens fault. Boys being isolated and depressed, must their video gameing and porn habits. Girls getting mental illness from social media, must be social expectations we stack on girls and women. Men getting worse outcomes in hospitals? Must be their behavior. Women getting worse outcomes in hospitals? Must be bias by doctors against women. Why are there more men in prisons? Must be testosterone. Why more women at home taking care of children? Must be cultural. Any observable difference between men and women, can be describe as either being caused by external factors like social expectations or internal factors like behavior and hormones. Whenever I see researchers doing a comprehensive and deep study to explain why something is observed more in one gender than the other the usual answer is a tiny bit of biology and a huge (dominating) dose of culture. Such answer generally does not change base on gender, so if we are asking why social media is causing mental illness more in girls and boys, the answer is likely a tiny bit of biology and a huge dose of culture.
- nostromo 4y ago
  And it’s extremely patronizing to women and girls. It takes away their agency and centers their choices back onto men and society. By contrast, if a man spends too much time playing video games, he’s seen as lacking discipline (something within his control), not as a victim of society or corporations (something outside of his control).
  - gallopingcomp 4y ago
    (1) You speak as if by “we” (or “society”), grandparent was exclusively referring to men. We (non-men, for example women) are a part of society, and some of us can be quite awful to each other; this, I expect, is common sense. The obvious reading is that GP simply meant any cultural pressure for women to (over)value appearance (or conversely the lack of cultural immunity to such pressures), regardless of whether it comes from men or women, because it has always come from both (historically, and today). So I fail to see how they are taking away agency from women and attributing it to men. (2) If you live in the English-speaking parts of the West, our cultural awareness absolutely has an equivalent of this for men and boys. It’s sometimes called “toxic masculinity” (we can debate whether it’s the appropriate choice of words, but the awareness exists). If a boy or a man man spends too much time playing video games, because he is repressing his emotions, some would certainly ask whether it’s because society has never taught him to process emotions and display vulnerability. (I had a roommate like this.) And conversely, if a girl or woman spends too much time on social media (but stripped away from context), you’d bet “poor self-discipline” is on the list of hypotheses too in people’s minds, rightly or wrongly. I think this is trying too hard to conjure bias _ex nihilio_, or at least lumping GP’s reasoning with what you’ve seen elsewhere. (3) Part of what people do is influenced, or inspired, or sometimes constrained by culture. Admitting this does not take away agency from people.
hbrn 4y ago
> Social media in and of itself is really just an accelerant for the particular set of social expectations we stack on girls and women around appearance and how that relates to self-worth This is an extremely reductive take. The depressing part about social media isn't just about beauty, it's about success in general. Social media made it very easy to show the image of success without actually being successful. If you're basing your understanding of reality on social media, you will think that life is extremely unfair to you. Apparently all your friends are always eating at expensive restaurants, driving luxury cars, going on fancy vacations, and getting flowers every day. This leads to a weird state where pretty much everyone is faking their success, but thinks everybody else's success is real. Which, if you think about, can be quite depressing.
anigbrowl 4y ago
Reading between the lines of his body of work, it appears Haidt wants to return to a type of mid-century traditionalism, where children and young people are both protected and challenged by traditional adult authority figures (who are conveniently mostly people like him and his collaborators) You raise a lot of worthwhile questions. It's certainly possible this piece isn't written in good faith, or that Haidt has become fixated on a particular theory and gone into some confirmation bias spiral. This might be part of a broader push to rein in 'big tech'. I know little to nothing about him as an individual, and have doubts about his theory here, but submitted it because it seems to have the position and traction required to become a political football with longer-term ramifications.
callmeed 4y ago
Women on average score higher than men on the dimension of neuroticism in big-5 personality tests (as well as anxiety-related dimensions in other tests). [1] Couldn't the why be due to (at least in part) these innate gender differences? [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/
jahewson 4y ago
Sometimes we should just accept that we don’t know why.
- ggfhvt6yyghvhuf 4y ago
  Honestly. Why.
fleddr 4y ago
"We" as in a total society or specifically as men do not stack any of these specific expectations on young girls. Young girls do this to each other. The influencers are girls and followed by girls. Instagram is girl territory and all the social gossip around it is girls. They're not trying to win boys' approval, instead girls' approval. Social ranking amidst young girls is natural behavior, what changed is that the limits of the physical world that kept it in check were removed, and now we see the fly-wheel effect.
- civilized 4y ago
  Indeed, I am glad someone said this. The myopic GP analysis, characterizing young women as victims of murky cultural dynamics, is decades out of date at this point, and does not consider the complex real-world experiences and tremendous personal agency of these women. I think the supposed "mid-century traditionalists" have a keener appreciation of that agency.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    To simplify the reasoning about this dynamic, I call it the duck lip effect. At what point did "society" ask for duck lips? Where exactly did specifically men ask for it and actively select for it? If anything, they widely reject it. The expectation for duck lips does not exist, it was spontaneously fabricated by female influencers and that puts the idea and "expectation" in young girls' heads. In other words, for as a long as we richly reward female influencers setting exactly the wrong example and being awful role models, this carries on.
    - civilized 4y ago
      I think if you put ten random women in a house for a week, you're going to get girl drama and pictures of duck lips. Just like if you put ten random men in a house for a week, you're going to get wrestling and videos of Jackass stunts.
zeroonetwothree 4y ago
Suicide rates are much higher for boys. Part of it could be that girls are more likely to respond 'yes' to the subjective questions being asked in the survey. It's always tricky to compare groups when we are discussing people's subjective experiences.
raxxorraxor 4y ago
This isn't about appreciation. Platforms that boys more often frequent are also often less toxic. They tend to be more vulgar perhaps, but there is a difference. Although that differentiation seems to be too much for many as some even suggested we need to end anonymity. Not a good idea. Some platforms have distinct demographics that favor one gender or the other and their focus is different. Even platforms like 4chan or reddit are less toxic in a way because they are more impersonal. That is a huge difference compared to social media where you need to present yourself and people compare themselves to each other, a main source of social pressure. One kind of platform is centered around topics, the other kind is centered around people. Twitter is perhaps a mix in between. Do you believe the common users on a platform primarily consisting of boys do value other users more? In a way that might even be true, but it certainly isn't about the appreciation of those you communicate with. Granted, some equations change for public figures. There is a reason there are PR agencies for that and that was even before social media. Girls tend to impose expectations on each other. There isn't some "traditional authority" who does so. Who would that be exactly? The parents? For teenage girls?
jasmer 4y ago
Not only that they should differentiate between kinds of media. I suggest that TikTok may not be bad at all. My feed is cats and farm animals. But girls are higher on 'neuroticism' than boys, and I suggest that's a strong correlating aspect. Whey they are higher on that I have no idea but they are.

by lsy 4y ago

eastbound 4y ago

> Boys have more capacity to transcend social media's focus on image and beauty by finding other ways to be valued as human beings. Before absconding boys from harm, maybe we should check twice on their health. They are often forgotten or their difficulties brushed off in studies. How are addictions progressing? Obesity maybe? Why are they all on 9Gag? Let’s check their level of racism and misogyny, it might be a proxy for self-esteem. Have right-wing groups gotten more expressive recently? Are we taking proper care of the boys? Can we ensure, if we measure something where girls are particularly exposed, that we also measure an area where boys are particularly exposed, before assuming boys are exempt from harm.

Zetice 4y ago
Boys are for sure not exempt from harm, but the harm seems to be as a result of equity: https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-young-men-are-single-most-young-women-are-not/amp/ https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-yo... > “Today in America, women expect more from men,” Levant said, “and unfortunately, so many men don’t have more to give.” Powerful stuff.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- RangerScience 4y ago
  Quote in more context: > Women are tiring of their stereotypical role as full-time therapist for emotionally distant men. They want a partner who is emotionally open and empathetic, the opposite of the age-old masculine ideal. > “Today in America, women expect more from men,” Levant said, “and unfortunately, so many men don’t have more to give.” I think it’s pretty clear that the harm isn’t caused by equity, but that the equity exposes the harm caused by other things.
  - Zetice 4y ago
    Yeah fair, I obviously don't think equity is a bad thing, I just think a lot of men were taught to rely on inequity and now that it's being reduced, those men aren't adapting.
- marcellus23 4y ago
  A bit disappointing seeing the implicit bias in that article. The thrust seems to basically be "women are fine, men are failing and need to do better". Some choice quotes: > Women are tiring of their stereotypical role as full-time therapist for emotionally distant men > “Today in America, women expect more from men,” Levant said, “and unfortunately, so many men don’t have more to give.” > The same emotional deficits that hurt men in the dating pool also hamper them in forming meaningful friendships. At first glance the article is even-handed, but reading closely you notice that not a single trait of women is described using negative terms, but men are described as needing women to be their therapists, as "not having more to give" women, and as having "emotional deficits." This is basically an inversion of the ancient trope that women are defective men, and just as harmful.
  - Zetice 4y ago
    Of course it's on the men to adjust, and that's what we see in most men overall. The ones who struggle to find relationships are the men who aren't adjusting. We should figure out why they're not adjusting, not ask the women to give back some of their hard-earned freedoms because some men can't handle it. The inversion would be if the claim was that a trait of men is causing this maladjustment, but the claim is instead that men are misprioritizing an equal relationship with a woman in favor of career and unequal relationships that they're now struggling to find. Also I dunno if you missed this quote, but it's firmly discussing actions women are taking that impact these single men: > Heterosexual women are getting more choosy. Women “don’t want to marry down,” to form a long-term relationship to a man with less education and earnings than herself, said Ronald Levant, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Akron and author of several books on masculinity. The article also ended on a hopeful note, giving an example of a group of men who do prioritize relationships, with their Man of the Year trophy, saying literally: > “We treat friendship as a luxury, especially men,” Ritter said. “It’s a necessity.”
faeriechangling 4y ago
>misogyny, it might be a proxy for self-esteem Seems to me misandry would be a better proxy for self-esteem. I do know men who are very much misandrist. I'm not just talking about them "going woke" I'm talking about kids whose fathers abandoned them or whatever and they feel a lot of resentment when they look around and see this is a common story. As men collectively become more productive, more empathetic, less toxic, and all this stuff I only hear more and more people pleading that we ratchet up scrutiny of men to the point Gilette think's it's a good idea to run an ad directed by women about how men need to do better and do this and that wrong and just need to get their shit together [1]. Similarly, I would say that self-hating racism is a better proxy for self-esteem than racism in general. In fact this shit is out of control in Incel communities to the point they have terms like "currycels", "ricecels", etc. You know why they feel this way? Is it because they themselves are racist towards towards others? No it's generally because they look at dating site stats and see how women are racist towards them (in a highly specific context) and internalise the racism of others and hate themselves. Oddly I don't think I've EVER heard somebody suggest that women should be less racist towards men to improve men's self-esteem, even though I've seen such racism CRUSH men's self-esteem over and over. I don't know I see the idea that the key towards self-esteem is holding people other than yourself in high esteem and think they're totally absurd on its face. If an Indian Man or Black Man or White Man or Asian Man doesn't like people like themselves, if they don't look up to proud Malcolm X like role models, their self-esteem is always going to be shit. Men are generally portrayed as either oppressor or oppressed, either way they have cause to feel bad about themselves. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYaY2Kb_PKI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYaY2Kb_PKI
- josephg 4y ago
  I saw a video the other day which pointed out a troubling statistic: Universities today have more gender bias than they had in the 70s. But the gender bias has reversed - instead of men differentials succeeding more than women, men are now much less likely to graduate from university than women are. I think it’s pretty awful having one gender succeed at the expense of another, whichever way around that goes. For society to be healthy we need everyone to thrive. https://youtu.be/DBG1Wgg32Ok https://youtu.be/DBG1Wgg32Ok
SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
I think this might be whataboutism. It’s clear to me the original poster was speaking exclusively on the social media aspect and the fact that social media does not have a similar causal effect of mental illness specifically on boys, and so I don’t know how addiction/obesity/etc contribute here. I agree there may be other effects on men, but it seems very clear here that the original poster was talking about social media specifically.
- eastbound 4y ago
  We should not accept topics which de facto exclude men.
  - Zetice 4y ago
    Huh? The article is about how social media impacts the mental health of girls. They didn't study boys, why would we talk about boys without any data on them in the source? It's overly inclusive to insist on talking about everything all the time, lest we leave someone out... We'll talk about the men, lots of people are talking about the men, but let's take a second to talk about how women are feeling, okay?
- Nadya 4y ago
  The answer of why is quite obvious to many people but no longer politically acceptable. There is a large external pressure for studies to show that there are no differences between men and women while there is also demand for studies that show negative outcomes of women in comparison to men. The same problem happens again and again with these studies in that nothing explains the negative outcomes of women. Except one explanation that is instantly discarded for being socially untenable. The intersectionalist looks at the studies and declares, "It must be something - let's keep looking!" while the sexist takes a look and nods. Nobody is going to risk their careers or their funding when they can continue being paid to investigate other avenues of explanation. The suffering of people will continue until a more acceptable explanation is found. And because I don't wish to speak between the lines: There are psychological and emotional differences between men and women. And, from all the humans I've known at least, women tend to give more of a shit about the opinions of other people than men give a shit about the opinions of other people. While the toxic negativity of social media impacts both genders I would honestly be shocked if it didn't impact women more if for no reason other than because they care more.
nsfmc 4y ago
an earlier newsletter shows this distressing graph of teen suicides and, shocker, boys are doing terribly, a suicide rate at least three times more than girls, but the author seems to find the 34% delta less distressing. the data is unsettling, but the author doesn't remotely confront the question about why 2017 is a post-2010 maxima for both boys and girls. (which would probably change the boys delta to at least 60 percent and possibly undermine the premise that social media exclusively harms young women) https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/101249738/increases-in-suicide https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/101249738/increases-in-...
- fleddr 4y ago
  Recently an organization representing war news reporters was distressed by the rise in female reporters getting killed, 6 more than the year before. The fact that 85% of killed reporters were men...ah, well. Men are not doing alright. And our response to it is nothing at all or...do better.

ravenstine 4y ago

Reflecting on that question means saying things that many people would find offensive. It's a lost cause to suggest that corporations implicitly understand something innate about female psychology and are taking advantage of it, and that's exactly why social media wins; the current politics you mentioned are a protective layer against taking meaningful action against the machine. If society was as concerned about the online activity of boys (news flash, your kid is likely watching hardcore porn every day), action would be more swift because there's no political manifold to dissuade elders from trying to save boys. This analogy is of course imperfect because parents are evidently not as concerned about boys. > you would think one solution to this issue would be to advance a society in which women are valued equally to men. There's no reason to believe such a society can exist any more than believing it's possible for a thing to be both dry and wet at the same time. It's dubious whether such a society is even desirable, and even if it is, it's been debated since time immemorial and isn't a practical way to address real world issues. You might as well ask why the world can't be more like Star Trek.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
You think it would be dubious for a society to value men and women equally?
- catiopatio 4y ago
  Men and women are not identical; inescapably, the mean value contributed by each will material differ in at least some contexts. If a society equally values the contributions of men and women in all contexts, then, by definition, it must be using an inequitable metric to ascribe value to their contributions.
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    People aren't abstract mathematical concepts. No two people are identical, and the range of difference between the two most extreme men almost certainly exceeds the range of difference between the most woman-like men and the most man-like women. Given the obvious differences between humans, nobody expects that every single person will contribute identical value, or should be valued identically. However, there is a very, very, very long history of the inverse. In nearly every area of life, the activities and contributions most commonly fulfilled by women are under-valued, while the activities and contributions most commonly fulfilled by men are over-valued. This can be seen historically, as the primary occupants of careers shifted from one sex to the other. The early computer programmers (women) were treated as doing secretarial work, while modern computer programmers (mostly men) are compensated like rock stars. Conversely, early school teachers were highly respected and well-compensated when they were mostly men, and respect and compensation both dropped relative to other careers as teachers became more likely to be women. These are systemic biases so ingrained that we don't think about them. People are lining up to respond to this comment to helpfully explain to me that those earlier programmers weren't the same, or that modern teachers are every bit as respected and well-compensated as they should be, or whatever. The Venn diagram of all men and all women is not a circle, because of course there are differences. But there is much overlap between the two circles, and women are mostly not valued equally where the circles overlap, and the non-overlapping areas of each circle are valued completely differently as well. When you see it, it's clear as day. When you don't or won't, it sounds silly. Feel free to dig in to the truth of it, or dismiss it as folklore.

xwdv 4y ago

We know why. But few authors are going to come out and talk about that. They do not want to be perceived in the wrong way. It should be very obvious to anyone who has spent some time on social media and has thought critically about the topic.

xkcd1963 4y ago

First paragraph: I agree Second no, just because Haidt is not advocating in his bodies of work for feminism doesn't mean he is against a more equal society.

luckylion 4y ago

> Boys have more capacity to transcend social media's focus on image and beauty by finding other ways to be valued as human beings. If we assume that there's really zero genetic involvement, and it's all just environment: If you treat girls like boys (have to achieve something to be valued, no inherent value), you'll get tougher girls and fewer issues with social media. But you'll also get more girls killing themselves and being violent towards others when they fail to achieve things that get them recognition. Not sure if that's a huge improvement. > What does it say about our society that we are not equipping girls and women in the same way? The issue is with girls using social media, not with society somehow favoring boys and giving them all the great tools and what not. Boys are insulting each other in a shooter games or trolling people while girls are on social media. If one group hikes through a forest and another swims through a river and some of the latter drown, it's not the better equipment the hikers were given that kept them from drowning.

coryfklein 4y ago

> why this effect is more observable for girls than for boys I'll take a stab at it: 1. During most of homo sapiens evolution as hunter gatherers, women were more likely to congregate in centralized groups while men hunted in small groups. It is documented that gossip is an integral activity among the women of a tribe moreso than their male counterparts. Without the inhibitions produced by in-person interaction, women gossiping on social media are more likely to produce negative interactions than their male counterparts who have a much lessened propensity to gossip. 2. From an evolutionary standpoint, a woman's reproductive fertility is closely associated with their appearance. Men are hardwired to pay close attention to a woman's looks whereas women are hardwired to care more about a man's ability to "protect and provide". Since social media promotes visibility of the most attractive women, this has the effect of reducing feelings of self-worth for the female users moreso than the male users.

trieste92 4y ago

> Social media in and of itself is really just an accelerant for the particular set of social expectations we stack on girls and women around appearance and how that relates to self-worth. Boys have more capacity to transcend social media's focus on image and beauty by finding other ways to be valued as human beings. Sounds like one of those truisms that people love to repeat. Like all other instances, this one likely isn't grounded in anything concrete

josephg 4y ago
I just think the gender norms for men are different. Traditionally, women are valued more for their beauty and (later) their capacity to raise children. Men are traditionally valued for their capacity to be bread winners. “Women are valued for what they are. Men are valued for what they do.” I think both ideas can be pretty toxic to their respective genders. The problems just show up differently. Social media, online bullying and body shaming hurt girls more than boys. And video game addiction, desperation due to purposelessness and suicide seem to hurt men more than women. Every human deserves to have a life in which they flourish. We should, as much as we can, work to tackle all of these problems.
- trieste92 4y ago
  > The problems just show up differently. Social media, online bullying and body shaming hurt girls more than boys. And video game addiction, desperation due to purposelessness and suicide seem to hurt men more than women. Idk. I feel like this is just culture trying to make up stories for each gender to define what deviance is supposed to look like It reminds me of how some people gravitate towards mbti types or enneagram even though they're obviously pseudoscience Are gender norms different though? Yes. But I don't think they should be. And the first step to overcoming them is disregarding the stupid stories that sound true
  - josephg 4y ago
    > Idk. I feel like this is just culture trying to make up stories for each gender to define what deviance is supposed to look like Regardless of how much the differences are cultural or innate, gender specific outcomes certainly show up in the data. Eg, this chart from the linked article: https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/80c49cc1-56e5-497c-ab69-d301a00857b8_1047x897.png https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/8... > the first step to overcoming them is disregarding the stupid stories that sound true Yeah; it would help immensely if we could teach everybody that they're essentially healthy and worthy of love. Good, consistent parenting acts as an inoculation against these problems. When we're talking about the kids with the worst mental health outcomes, they're probably disproportionally poor, and more often than not come from single parent households. I suspect more support for struggling families would make more of a difference to the mental health outcomes of kids than somehow overcoming gender norms. It seems like a much more tractable solution, too. Convincing regular people to not buy into the expectations of their own gender sounds like a borderline impossible task.

caput770 4y ago

I think part of it is that for every teenage girl spending 5 hours a day on social media, there's a teenage boy spending 5 hours a day playing video games, often with other teenage boys. I'd guess that video games are a more positive way to socialize, because teenagers are cooperating and competing rather than comparing themselves to others on social media.

josephg 4y ago
Yep. People seem to forget the pearl clutching in the 90s over boys playing violent video games. If the media was to be believed, video games were inevitably going to raise a generation of men ready to shoot up schools at the slightest provocation. Lots of research later, we started finding the men who grew up playing multiplayer video games were more strategic and often made better leaders. The fact that overwatch has guns doesn’t actually matter much in practice. However, the experience of getting a bunch of random people to cooperate is a lifelong skill that carries over into lots of other areas of life. Most of what I learned about working in teams, I learned from playing world of Warcraft in my early 20s. If you can run a successful raid every week with 40 strangers, working with a team in an office is easy.
- beecafe 4y ago
  No, we have a generation of men who love shooting up schools and each other.
  - gallopingcomp 4y ago
    Not exactly a “generation”, but you are onto something here - men (broadly speaking) do appear to be more susceptible to radicalization.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  uhhhhh I don't think the video games are the reason but boys shooting up schools did turn out to be a big problem you know. So, idk, they were probably worried about the wrong thing but it seems they were right to be worried about that outcome.

ClassyJacket 4y ago

[flagged]

devindotcom 4y ago
Don't be an asshole.

denton-scratch 4y ago

> why this effect is more observable for girls than for boys I agree that's an interesting question. I think it's that girls are (conditioned to be?) more sociable than boys. After a divorce, many more men find themselves friendless than women, because the mens' social networks were really their wives. The stereotype that women gossip isn't wrong; women chatting about nonsense is simply maintaining social networks. Men maintain social connnections through team sports and work. I don't happen to believe it's "conditioned" - I think women are different from men, and behave differently. On the whole. (And for "women", read "girls and women") So if women communicate verbally more than men, it's not surprising that women make greater use of social media. The body-image thing obviously isn't about verbal communication, and I think it's a distinct phenomenon. I see a lot of young women in the street, with lots of exposed skin despite the wintery conditions; and with orange make-up applied with a trowel (they're always staring down at their fondle-slab). I don't know why young women want to look tacky, like a porn actress.

ErikVandeWater 4y ago

> While there is certainly much to criticize in these areas, you would think one solution to this issue would be to advance a society in which women are valued equally to men. Women are valued moreso than men. Men are 10x more likely to die at work, have little to no access to domestic violence shelters, and if war comes, the only people who will be conscripted to potentially die will be men.

belorn 4y ago

It is a very interesting aspect of all this kind of discussion that when any problem exist for girls and women, the problem is described as being caused by an external force. When ever a problem exist for boys and men, the problem is described as an internal force within the boys and men themselves. As long I have seen those topics on HN it never fails to display this cultural view about men and women. Men not graduating as much as women, must be mens fault for not studying enough. Women not earning the same as men, must be mens fault. Boys being isolated and depressed, must their video gameing and porn habits. Girls getting mental illness from social media, must be social expectations we stack on girls and women. Men getting worse outcomes in hospitals? Must be their behavior. Women getting worse outcomes in hospitals? Must be bias by doctors against women. Why are there more men in prisons? Must be testosterone. Why more women at home taking care of children? Must be cultural. Any observable difference between men and women, can be describe as either being caused by external factors like social expectations or internal factors like behavior and hormones. Whenever I see researchers doing a comprehensive and deep study to explain why something is observed more in one gender than the other the usual answer is a tiny bit of biology and a huge (dominating) dose of culture. Such answer generally does not change base on gender, so if we are asking why social media is causing mental illness more in girls and boys, the answer is likely a tiny bit of biology and a huge dose of culture.

nostromo 4y ago
And it’s extremely patronizing to women and girls. It takes away their agency and centers their choices back onto men and society. By contrast, if a man spends too much time playing video games, he’s seen as lacking discipline (something within his control), not as a victim of society or corporations (something outside of his control).
- gallopingcomp 4y ago
  (1) You speak as if by “we” (or “society”), grandparent was exclusively referring to men. We (non-men, for example women) are a part of society, and some of us can be quite awful to each other; this, I expect, is common sense. The obvious reading is that GP simply meant any cultural pressure for women to (over)value appearance (or conversely the lack of cultural immunity to such pressures), regardless of whether it comes from men or women, because it has always come from both (historically, and today). So I fail to see how they are taking away agency from women and attributing it to men. (2) If you live in the English-speaking parts of the West, our cultural awareness absolutely has an equivalent of this for men and boys. It’s sometimes called “toxic masculinity” (we can debate whether it’s the appropriate choice of words, but the awareness exists). If a boy or a man man spends too much time playing video games, because he is repressing his emotions, some would certainly ask whether it’s because society has never taught him to process emotions and display vulnerability. (I had a roommate like this.) And conversely, if a girl or woman spends too much time on social media (but stripped away from context), you’d bet “poor self-discipline” is on the list of hypotheses too in people’s minds, rightly or wrongly. I think this is trying too hard to conjure bias _ex nihilio_, or at least lumping GP’s reasoning with what you’ve seen elsewhere. (3) Part of what people do is influenced, or inspired, or sometimes constrained by culture. Admitting this does not take away agency from people.

hbrn 4y ago

> Social media in and of itself is really just an accelerant for the particular set of social expectations we stack on girls and women around appearance and how that relates to self-worth This is an extremely reductive take. The depressing part about social media isn't just about beauty, it's about success in general. Social media made it very easy to show the image of success without actually being successful. If you're basing your understanding of reality on social media, you will think that life is extremely unfair to you. Apparently all your friends are always eating at expensive restaurants, driving luxury cars, going on fancy vacations, and getting flowers every day. This leads to a weird state where pretty much everyone is faking their success, but thinks everybody else's success is real. Which, if you think about, can be quite depressing.

anigbrowl 4y ago

Reading between the lines of his body of work, it appears Haidt wants to return to a type of mid-century traditionalism, where children and young people are both protected and challenged by traditional adult authority figures (who are conveniently mostly people like him and his collaborators) You raise a lot of worthwhile questions. It's certainly possible this piece isn't written in good faith, or that Haidt has become fixated on a particular theory and gone into some confirmation bias spiral. This might be part of a broader push to rein in 'big tech'. I know little to nothing about him as an individual, and have doubts about his theory here, but submitted it because it seems to have the position and traction required to become a political football with longer-term ramifications.

callmeed 4y ago

Women on average score higher than men on the dimension of neuroticism in big-5 personality tests (as well as anxiety-related dimensions in other tests). [1] Couldn't the why be due to (at least in part) these innate gender differences? [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/

jahewson 4y ago

Sometimes we should just accept that we don’t know why.

ggfhvt6yyghvhuf 4y ago
Honestly. Why.

fleddr 4y ago

"We" as in a total society or specifically as men do not stack any of these specific expectations on young girls. Young girls do this to each other. The influencers are girls and followed by girls. Instagram is girl territory and all the social gossip around it is girls. They're not trying to win boys' approval, instead girls' approval. Social ranking amidst young girls is natural behavior, what changed is that the limits of the physical world that kept it in check were removed, and now we see the fly-wheel effect.

civilized 4y ago
Indeed, I am glad someone said this. The myopic GP analysis, characterizing young women as victims of murky cultural dynamics, is decades out of date at this point, and does not consider the complex real-world experiences and tremendous personal agency of these women. I think the supposed "mid-century traditionalists" have a keener appreciation of that agency.
- fleddr 4y ago
  To simplify the reasoning about this dynamic, I call it the duck lip effect. At what point did "society" ask for duck lips? Where exactly did specifically men ask for it and actively select for it? If anything, they widely reject it. The expectation for duck lips does not exist, it was spontaneously fabricated by female influencers and that puts the idea and "expectation" in young girls' heads. In other words, for as a long as we richly reward female influencers setting exactly the wrong example and being awful role models, this carries on.
  - civilized 4y ago
    I think if you put ten random women in a house for a week, you're going to get girl drama and pictures of duck lips. Just like if you put ten random men in a house for a week, you're going to get wrestling and videos of Jackass stunts.

zeroonetwothree 4y ago

Suicide rates are much higher for boys. Part of it could be that girls are more likely to respond 'yes' to the subjective questions being asked in the survey. It's always tricky to compare groups when we are discussing people's subjective experiences.

raxxorraxor 4y ago

This isn't about appreciation. Platforms that boys more often frequent are also often less toxic. They tend to be more vulgar perhaps, but there is a difference. Although that differentiation seems to be too much for many as some even suggested we need to end anonymity. Not a good idea. Some platforms have distinct demographics that favor one gender or the other and their focus is different. Even platforms like 4chan or reddit are less toxic in a way because they are more impersonal. That is a huge difference compared to social media where you need to present yourself and people compare themselves to each other, a main source of social pressure. One kind of platform is centered around topics, the other kind is centered around people. Twitter is perhaps a mix in between. Do you believe the common users on a platform primarily consisting of boys do value other users more? In a way that might even be true, but it certainly isn't about the appreciation of those you communicate with. Granted, some equations change for public figures. There is a reason there are PR agencies for that and that was even before social media. Girls tend to impose expectations on each other. There isn't some "traditional authority" who does so. Who would that be exactly? The parents? For teenage girls?

jasmer 4y ago

Not only that they should differentiate between kinds of media. I suggest that TikTok may not be bad at all. My feed is cats and farm animals. But girls are higher on 'neuroticism' than boys, and I suggest that's a strong correlating aspect. Whey they are higher on that I have no idea but they are.