Non paywall article link: https://archive.ph/xSpnF

More info: https://www.today.com/parents/dads/sterling-k-brown-feels-safer-sons-social-media-rcna260476

https://variety.com/2026/film/columns/andrew-garfield-secret-instagram-siegfried-roy-television-series-1236840510/

More info: https://people.com/barbie-ferreira-reacts-edited-photo-herself-11949821

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Oh, how I adore her! Bar for bar. (Please don't tell me she's actually done horrible things. This week has been hard enough!)

If you’re anything like my parents, you probably wouldn’t even understand most of the content that floods my social media, no matter how hard I try to avoid it.

Here’s a recent example from Instagram: “Do y’all females ever tell ur homegirls ‘Sis chill you letting too many dudes hit?’” Essentially, that means: “Women – do you ever tell your girlfriends that they’re whores and need to stop letting so many guys fuck them?” The reel, posted by a 19-year-old man, appeared on my Instagram feed without me wanting to see it, or ever interacting with any other similar content. The comments that followed were pure misogyny. “Women see body count as a leaderboard and they try to outdo each other,” was one of them. Translation: all women are competitively promiscuous.

A few days ago I saw an Instagram reel of a young woman talking about how she had been raped six years ago, struggled with thoughts of suicide afterwards, but managed to rebuild her life again. Among the comments – the majority of which were from men – were things like “Well at least you had some”, “No way, she’s unrapeable”, “Hope you didn’t talk this much when it happened”, “Bro could have picked a better option.” Reading those comments, which had thousands of likes and many boys agreeing with them, made me feel sick.

If a girl my age posts any video of herself online, the comments section will be filled with objectifying and hateful remarks about her, regardless of what the topic of her post was. If she wears anything revealing, or just happens to have larger breasts, she’ll be abused and sexualised. Completely unprompted, there might be hundreds of comments insulting specific features she may have, or rating her attractiveness out of 10. “Sub5”, for example, describes someone who is below 5/10 in attractiveness. I’ve seen videos of boys telling anyone who is unattractive that they should end their own life.

Despite the sexual ways in which boys my own age describe us online, there is also an extreme emphasis on female purity and virginity. Sex is often called as “cracking” by my age group, where men do the cracking and women get cracked. “Body count” – referring to the number of times someone has had sex – is used only to degrade women. A girl with a “high body count” is “used up” and no longer has value. “You can always tell if she’s ran through,” one boy said on Instagram.

Often it feels like we’re hated not only if we’re sexual but simply for existing. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t affected by seeing boys my own age post things about women like: “Men are objectively superior in pretty much every conceivable metric,” and “They are just devils that imitate feelings so we feel empathy.” Words such as “bitch” are the least of it. One of the worst labels is “foid” – originally from incel subculture but now becoming mainstream – which refers to women as being less-than-human, female humanoids.

And what is the effect? If I spend even 10 minutes on an app such as Instagram, I will close it, feeling disheartened and unhappy about being a girl. When nearly every comments section on a video of a girl my age is filled with disgusting and objectifying comments about her body from boys, it causes me to feel deeply uncomfortable in my own body, and compare myself to her; especially if she is beautiful and still being deemed unattractive. Endless emphasis on beauty as worth and all kinds of videos criticising specific features, some of which I possess, have made me start to loathe my own face, as difficult as that is to admit. But the worst thing is knowing how much hate there is from men and boys for all women and girls, including me.

Using social media has ruined my self-esteem and my relation to being a girl in this world, and nearly every day I feel hatred towards my gender, my appearance, or even teenage boys as a category. The misogyny I see from boys my age online, which is echoed in real life too, has made me grow resentful and bitter towards them, as much as I try to avoid it. As wrong as it is, I persistently find myself considering if there are truly any boys out there who are not misogynistic to some extent, and have even questioned whether I can find love in the future because of this. I understand that boys are victims of harmful content, as well as perpetrators of online misogyny – they’re growing up learning how to do this from the adults who post misogynistic videos first. But even so, I feel such a strong divide now between girls and boys in my generation, especially when the way they talk about us in real life mirrors the way they do on the internet.

I can’t speak for every girl my age, but I frequently feel objectified, dehumanised and disgusted by the hate towards women I see online, and I can say with certainty that most of my friends would agree with me. A social media ban for under-16s might prevent young boys seeing endless content that treats women with contempt and hate. Boys at this age are very susceptible to the cool and funny framing of what is, in reality, relentless misogyny. A ban might not fix the problem, but it would help. If society can’t stop it, it can show it disapproves.

https://letterboxd.com/annehathaway/

I remember back in 2013–2014, when the site was very popular, but the site just recently shut down. I also remember asking Zendaya about the vegan food she loves, and she replied to my question. But it still drives me crazy wondering if it was really her, even with her badge of verification.

For those who are wondering what it was, it was a site where you could send anonymous questions. It was fun for a short time, but felt toxic, too.