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.
> ...that many people would find offensive. It's a lost cause to suggest that corporations implicitly understand something innate about female psychology...
You are wrong. Feminism as a broad social movement, and as an academic discipline, explicitly sought to question and attack the social structures and behaviors that were often insisted to be "innate" about female psychology and well being. Basically no one would find that offensive today. It's profoundly mainstream.
Many more people would find it offensive to imply that social media addiction, or that an increasing trend of suicidal ideation as a result of social media use, is somehow a result of femaleness tout-court. That's downright archaic.
Social media companies take advantage of the ways women are socialized into an incredible and unnecessary focus on their bodies by pouring rocket fuel on it.
The reflexive rejection of any inmate gender differences can do just as much harm as good. For instance, if girls are innately predisposed to fall into harmful social media habits and feminism rejects and denounces any acknowledgement of it does that help girls? Or does it hurt them?
For instance, a greater tendency among girls to express aggression through social violence rather than physical violence is universal across all cultures. Few would say this is not an inmate difference, and it has obvious roots in sexual dimorphism. This is significant with respect to social media because you can't punch someone through a screen, but it amplifies the ability to carry out social violence. Group chats, and threads denouncing rivals are a very effective tool of social violence.
Failure to recognize this innate difference in how boys and girls express aggression could lead to platforms failing to recognize the importance of curtailing this behavior, leading to greater harm.
Because the implication of their argument is biological causation, which is pure conjecture on their part.
On the other hand, the entire posted article goes at length to study the social impact of social media for young people and young girls in particular and routinely references the heightened effect of the hyper focus on bodies for young girls.
Their comment is just a naked assertion. Would people find it offensive? Well, if the entire basis for your point is a strawman, then yes. But as far as I can tell, there is no causal evidence between femaleness and social media addiction or suicidal ideation. The need to leap to biological causation is unwarranted and unsupported.
Acting like they're already agrieved is a rhetorical slight of hand without substance.
It is fairly common that biological causation is suggested or suspected when dealing with a difference in outcomes along gender lines. Sex hormones as an factor for behavior is usual one of the first suspect, especially if the difference is found around or after puberty. There are historically a huge number of studies done on testosterone to demonstrate this leap done by both researcher and public opinion.
That said, much of those studies where later found to be mostly wrong, and testosterone tend to be a bad predictor and a very weak influence on behavior. It seems more that hormones have a stronger influence on shaping culture than it has on shaping behavior.
If blue spheres and red spheres both explode, but blue spheres explode 25% more often. Would you hypothesise, discuss and test whether or not it might be it's essential blueness or would you prefer to avoid the most obvious difference and shy away from discussing it? Does that sound reasonable to you? If it is blueness, you will arrive at an answer much faster if you're allowed to investigate and talk about that. Perhaps then they can explode with the same frequency.
There’s a great deal of evidence for innate sex differences in average social behavior, and those differences would readily explain the disparate impact.
It’s hardly fair to call that a “leap”, especially given the comparatively limited body of evidence in support of your preferred hypothesis.
This article makes repeated references to the hyper focus on women's bodies on social media, and repeatedly points to them as a causal factor.
Please, present reputable published evidence for "innate" biological causation for the female sex in relation to the mental health effects of social media use and its impact on suicidal ideation. The absence of evidence is the not the proof of some grand conspiracy.
I can't imagine why anyone would find it offensive to believe that women should not be valued equally with men. Oh wait, right, because that's inherently offensive.
The world can be more like Star Trek, and might move in that direction a bit more quickly if there weren't so many people premature playing a victim before they try to undermine the effort.
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.
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.
I could easily do the same and claim that men are undervalued. They are sacrificed in wars, make up the main portion of the homeless and they do the hardest and dirtiest work to provide the modern infrastructure of the world.
They have no support structure, can't fail and are constantly pissed on in culture and media.
At some level, humans are undervalued, seen only as grist for the mill, to be ground up and their value extracted, then discarded. Soldiers, homeless people, food service workers, child care workers, teachers, oil rig workers, and on and on and on. That is universal and a larger issue.
My point was to focus on the center of the venn diagram, where men and women do the same or similar jobs, especially jobs in which the balance has shifted over time, so that we can see that even in the midst of a general undervaluing of humans, separate from the extreme undervaluing that happens at the edges, women are undervalued even more than usual.
For some reason, many people find it hard to understand this.
No, it would mean not attributing innate value to maleness or femaleness, so to speak,, but to the relevant metrics.
One can still compute a mean afterward and potentially find that it differs, but that is no judgment of inherent value / not a causative factor for the value judgment being made.
And even then, there might sometimes be benefit to treating people more equally than they are on some metrics. Maximizing efficiency often means sacrificing resiliency, after all.
Given that there is clearly a difference in relative value produced across a non-trivial number of (often incomparable!) contexts, men and women cannot be equal, and the fiction that they are would not survive an afternoon spent watching the Olympics, or a brief visit to a maternity ward.
In my opinion, the only thing we should do with that information is accept that (1) men and women are different, (2) disparity of outcome may be the result of those differences, as opposed to systemic bias, and (3) insisting on equality of outcome will, invariably, produce grossly inequitable results in some contexts.
> 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.