Question Is the internet to blame for all of this?

Yes. Definitely.

The fact that a lot of people who work in tech keep their kids offline tells you everything. They know how it’s designed and what it can do.

I think males on the internet are to blame more than the internet itself.

No, you're not off base. A lot of this bullshit is about people wanting to become their avatars.

I use male pronouns online. In the sense that if someone calls me a "he" in a forum or group chat I won't correct that person. From that, I get good feelings. A feeling of relief. A feeling of hiding in plain sight. I feel if I was much younger this could easily be twisted at me as "gender euphoria", that me wishing to hide my femaleness on the internet, meant I wasn't really female at all. Nah I just knew I had a target on my head and still know that. Furthermore, that phrase "the internet: where men are men, women are men, and little girls are the fbi" (who made that up? No idea) rings true: the more someone presents as female openly the more suspicious I am that they're a man and so on.

The aloofness of boyhood is attractive to misfit girls. I was a weird girl. I wonder now, if I had received more access to this time of visual social media instead of growing up on BBS boards, which really this tiktok thing only missed me by a few years - would i have misinterpreted these feelings of wishing to be safe and wishing to be left alone as wishing to be something I'm not? The internet would have facilitated it quite easily.

Is online life separating young people from their physical bodies?

Yes - but also just accelerating a shift that can happen in the mind. Or giving idle thoughts a place to grow wild and fester. There are a lot of sci fi pieces about whether we will need the body or not past a certain point; the internet made this a more apparent question.

I definitely think the technological goal is to ultimately separate us from our bodies in some ways. There are "good" motivations for this. For example if I had been permanently paralyzed, perhaps i would enjoy being able to walk again in a simulator. But there is obviously a high cost to this techno-dissociation, which is thinking that in the "real world" you can do and become anything or whatever is going on. And the "bad" motivations for it are to turn people into a product, to divorce us from the flesh, to deny us actual life.

Also — any sense of self (identity) that depends on the validation of others to continue existing is unhealthy. I do not, for instance, need others to validate my identity as a woman, a member of a certain ethnic group, or a socialist. These are things that I am whether anyone else recognizes it or not. Neither do I need anyone to validate my love of certain foods for that love to be solid in my mind. Gender identities depend on constant outside validation, however, and this is something the internet offers in abundance. Thereby, the world of the internet can maybe perpetuate gender identities that would otherwise have waned over time.

By the same token, there's a constant stream of trans content that prevents young people from really forming their own sense of self through lived experience, as the way they should feel or interpretations of preexisting feelings are constantly fed to them by others.

I read this earlier today which is excellent and horrifying on the malign influence of the internet.

https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-audience-capture

People are literally destroying themselves for the approval of strangers who couldn’t give a fig about them and see them as disposable commodities rather than human beings.

I don't know. I do think that some children and young adults are probably more susceptible to that kind of separation. I'm in my 40's, so my teen/young adult internet experience was probably vastly different than what teens experience now. While I was an avid gamer (played text based MMO's in high school) and used early versions of social media at the time (icq, irc chat, myspace, etc.), I luckily didn't experience any misogynistic attacks beyond the standard stuff that I would encounter in the real world (basically, guys being stupid, gross and occasionally creepy), so I never felt that I needed to create characters/alter egos that were a different sex. Most of my online personas/nicknames were copied from strong female characters from fantasy/sci-fi novels that I loved to read as a teen. I also didn't have the frame of reference that a girl with non-stereotypical feminine hobbies (gaming, D&D, Star Trek/sci-fi, fantasy, anime fan) was anything other than just a girl with atypical hobbies. No where was I given the idea that because I liked these things, I was really a boy. I'm not sure what my teenage self would have thought if society was pushing that narrative at the time.

I definitely think it’s been an accelerant more than any other form of mass media. Even TV and movies usually had TIPs portrayed as something abnormal and to be mocked even as portrayals of LGBs became more humanized and sympathetic. It was always “there” and discussed as an issue in feminist and LGB circles particularly with the advent of the women’s and gay rights movements of the ‘70s (i.e. Janice Raymond, Germaine Greer) but nowhere near as mainstreamed to the point of a ubiquitous contagion until the always-on Internet of the late 2010s and, thus, an always-on gaming and porn environment (and pornified gaming, gamified porn).

There was that New Yorker cartoon dated 1995 that lampooned the sort of dissociative identification of online interaction (“on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog”), with two dogs sitting at the computer pretending, supposedly, to be human. But even then it was viewed as a cautionary tale. It wasn’t until this kind of disembodiment became the accepted norm (because the Internet became as commonplace in homes as flush toilets— with similar “content” traveling through the “series of tubes”) that, I think, a certain generation that never knew a time before it, just came into knowing this “virtual reality” as being real life.

Tech bigwigs are really big on promoting genderwoo, and a sort of mind-over-matter philosophy of “trans humanist evolution” where we are our avatars, so the theory doesn’t strike me as being off the mark of what their bizarre mission is. They are predominantly middle aged little boys who never outgrew hating their sisters for beating them at Nintendo games or mom pulling the plug so they would go to bed or do their homework, so they’ve embarked on creating this misogynistic tech-addled society where the worst thing anyone can be is a girl, unless it’s to get inside her avatar and custom-design her body. And they have bajillions of dollars at their disposal, to make their VR fantasy into something crudely resembling “real life.”

1000% yes. Like most things, the seeds were already there. The internet is like super fertilizer that made all these horrible ideologies grow steadily over time.

I think at least partially this can lead to dissociative behaviors and social contagion. And the ongoing sexism and misogyny that goes largely unpunished in online spaces doesn't help girls. You might find the Netflix documentary "The Social Dilemma" interesting. It covers several social networking sites and discusses rising rates of self-harm and suicide in young girls.

as someone who was on the internet before it was called web 1.0 and we are in web.30 post net nuetrality now.

The internet allowed pedophiles a community outside of the Vatican and other world religions;

it was a combination of the tech industry, where there are many men who are diagnosable so the tech industry

along with the university ending women's studies for gender studies and rolling out projected mental illness as if an academic idea which demands - like religion- to not be questioned - and both deny ordinary human senses along with all individual rights to own ideas and most importantly, to a no. or be able to protect own person