471–480 of 687 posts
It used to be that if you were queer - in any sense of the word - and lived in one of the countless small, conservative, traditional communities in this country, you were shit out of luck. Now, thanks to the internet, there exists inclusive and positive communities for people of every type of background and experience. This simply did not exist for most people just a few decades ago, but now it's accessible to almost…
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It used to be that if you were queer - in any sense of the word - and lived in one of the countless small, conservative, traditional communities in this country, you were shit out of luck. As bad as that was, in the past you could move to another of the 380,000 towns on this planet. Today, if your social media trail renders you unemployable (or the target of persecution) there's no longer any corner of the planet to…
You probably wouldn't want to get hired by someone who wouldn't tolerate (if not share) your views.
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How about numbers / net outcome? If we trade 10 good things for 10 000 terrible, then is it worth?
According to another commenter here, the research that spawned the WSJ article said Instagram made 41% feel better, 31% worse, and no impact for the other 28%. I haven't found the original material to verify, but if this is accurate, seems like the net outcome argument works in Instagram's favor.
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You probably wouldn't want to get hired by someone who wouldn't tolerate (if not share) your views.
Wait, what? Why should intellectual homogeneity be a requirement (or expectation) for coworkers? That seems like the opposite of encouraging diversity.
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> I don't blame Facebook (or Twitter, or any particular company) for this. Perhaps I would agree with you that I don't blame Facebook for the root problem here. After all, it's been around a lot longer than Facebook. However, Facebook is actively providing the scale you're talking about. They are an accelerant. Not only that, they're making absolutely wild amounts of money while they do so. So, they have an opportuni…
Who cares? Everyone makes money by pulling a magic lever that hurts other people. Apple pulls their slave labor lever to make a new iPhone, Facebook holds down their 'moderate content' key until their employees start falling apart, and Microsoft occasionally pulls the 'fuck it, ship it' lever to the chagrin of millions of Windows users. There's always a bigger fish, and sometimes that fish is more shareholders, not m…
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How about numbers / net outcome? If we trade 10 good things for 10 000 terrible, then is it worth?
Not an ethicist, but I don't think this is how ethical evaluations work in most frameworks.
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According to another commenter here, the research that spawned the WSJ article said Instagram made 41% feel better, 31% worse, and no impact for the other 28%. I haven't found the original material to verify, but if this is accurate, seems like the net outcome argument works in Instagram's favor.
It doesn't necessarily work in Instagram's favor. If the 41% and 31% had a baseline of both feeling "ok" then you took 72% who had a baseline that is acceptable and polarized them into groups who felt better or worse. Is it more favorable to have more people who have a stable baseline or to have one group have a good baseline and another similar sized group with a bad baseline?
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You seem to be aware that you are just navel gazing here. You've based your analysis on a comedy you saw in the 2000s that in turn based itself on the experiences of white affluent American teenagers. The second leg of your analysis is not grounded in an understanding of actual female biology. The one 'fact' you cite is wrong, 'young girls' are not the most fertile, the range for peak fertility for women is from thei…
>You seem to be aware that you are just navel gazing here. I like to think of it more as "presenting the details of my argument clearly so that they can be discredited if I've made an error.," rather than "navel gazing." Of course, there is nothing wrong with criticizing ideas, and so thank you for your response. I don't know that I have a direct counterpoint to your claim, and it might be that my argument is irrepar…
Yes.
Women are taught from a young age how they must act, dress, etc. What they should look like, that they should fit into a size 0, be Keep in mind that every attempt at a teenage boy's magazine has flopped, while teenage girl's magazines (at least until the decline of magazines and print media more generally) were quite popular. And this is in large part because there are a lot of expectations placed on girls that were never placed on guys, so these magazines helped guide a lot of young women through puberty (whether they guided them well is a matter for another discussion entirely, but they certainly did hold a lot of influence).
While there certainly are images of the ideal man that societies have held up over time, they don't have the same weight as expectations for women. If you have a dad bod, nobody is going to be glaring at you at the beach for showing it off, whispering about how "un-masculine" you look, that you need to show a little modesty, but a woman who goes to the beach with hairy legs will absolutely be subject to comments about how un-ladylike you are and that you look "masculine," even though body hair is entirely natural.
But it's not just when you're at the beach, and it's not just leg hair - it's everywhere, about everything, and it starts very early on. It's your parents telling you, advertisements and Hollywood reinforcing it, being told by your teachers you should be more feminine, your pastor saying that your outfit isn't "appropriate" for Sunday school (because it's not a dress), random men saying you should lose some weight... it never ends.
So while men are definitely having more body issues these days, it's nowhere near the same extent. Social media helps to reinforce societal beauty standards that have been taught to us all our lives.
> If so, do you believe this relies on a psychological tendency which existed prior to social media? If so, do you believe there's any evolutionary component to it, or do you believe there's some other explanation?
Not any innate tendency but just being beaten down until you conform. The advent of social media didn't magically erase the expectations we place on women, instead it became another place for reinforcing them.
> Women could still be quite invested their sexual prospects shortly before they hit their peak fertility.
I am single and have no desire to have kids despite being in "peak fertility." I am also not actively seeking out a partner. I'm not opposed to dating, it's just more convenient for me not to at the moment.
This is entirely anecdotal, but of my friends who do want kids, they don't really think about "oh god gotta find a mate and have kids I'm about to turn 26." They're more interested in finding the right person first, especially since we have so many fertility treatment options today (and having kids has gotten more expensive than ever). Having kids when you're not ready is generally a bad idea, and I hope I don't have to explain why.
It used to be that if you were queer - in any sense of the word - and lived in one of the countless small, conservative, traditional communities in this country, you were shit out of luck. Now, thanks to the internet, there exists inclusive and positive communities for people of every type of background and experience. This simply did not exist for most people just a few decades ago, but now it's accessible to almost…
It used to be that if you were queer - in any sense of the word - and lived in one of the countless small, conservative, traditional communities in this country, you were shit out of luck. As bad as that was, in the past you could move to another of the 380,000 towns on this planet. Today, if your social media trail renders you unemployable (or the target of persecution) there's no longer any corner of the planet to…
1. That assumes you have the money to move, can land in a new city and find housing, and then find a job. Pre-internet this was absolutely nontrivial.
2. It's not 380,000 towns on this planet, in the 80's/90's it was just a handful of cities that were more evolved, like San Francisco or P Town. There's a reason those cities are so LGBTQ heavy.