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Are We Raising a Generation of Heteropessimists? The cumulative effect of social media leads many boys and girls to speak in what are essentially different dialects.
I wonder what changed. I'm an elderly millennial and as a kid, it was absolutely a "girls rule and boys drool" dynamic (and vice versa). By high school, there were certainly competitive sports, and classes that would be more popular with one gender or another, but I recall at least at my school, mixed-gender friendships were still common. My high school group was mixed boys and girls, so were other groups and cliques in the same school.
I would actually say that really shifted for me in university. Dorm life meant I was mostly socializing with other women, and I was in a female-dominated major. I did have male friends, but they were mostly guys my female friends were dating.
But this person describes the inverse - easygoing mixed groups of friends in elementary school, then segregation in high school and beyond. Did something change?
It’s absolutely social media. Algorithms target people and restrict them to extreme micro bubbles. There’s whole tiny worlds on Facebook groups and discords, twitch streams, YouTube channels and Twitter you’ll never know exists unless your algorithm decides you belong there. So people and often young teens and teens, are developing a culture, language, world view etc in these bubbles and then are unable to interact with people who exist outside of them,
The extreme part of the micro bubbles can't be emphasized enough.
It's not like the issue is that the girls are getting sorted into skincare influencer videos and the guys are getting sorted into sports-focused videos.
A lot of guys are getting sorted into a micro-bubble that is filled with awful content that glorifies and encourages awful behavior.
All I know is my parents' groups and I did actively push our young sons to socialize with girls, like this author says. But once the playdates were out of our hands, the mix changed.
I don't have kids myself, but my nephew and niece are teenagers and now I think about it, it's the same as you and the author mention: she has girl friends, he has guy friends, neither of them seem to date as far as I know. They're only about a year apart in age too, so they could theoretically socialize with each other's friends, but I don't think they do. (FWIW, school dances seem to no longer be a thing where I live either, I think for a few reasons.)
It's odd to think Gen A are more gender segregated than Silent Gen and Boomer seemed to be in their youth.
Not around here these days. Not for quite a few years now. I think on the school end, they were struggling to manage drinking, fights, or other poor behaviour at the dances (I remember that being an issue even when I was in school). But it also sounds like kids these days just aren't as interested in those kinds of events and prefer different activities.
"I have long thought of female friendship as a magical protection against pretty much everything bad that can happen to, or be enacted by, my sons. I don’t think girls are responsible for civilizing boys, but I do think that boys and girls who are comfortable together have an easier time, in general, moving through life. Friendship across genders is a skeleton key that makes the world feel less mysterious and hostile, but the tricky part is that you can’t force it to happen. I’ve been thinking lately about what inhibits friendship across genders and what encourages it."
"It was easy when my sons were tiny: Toddlers will play with whomever they are plopped down next to, at least for a little while. As they got older, my friends and I continued to contrive opportunities for gender-agnostic hangs: a day trip to the apple orchard, a picnic at the park, a trip to the movies. It felt for a little while like we were creating a utopian environment for them — everyone all together, no questions asked. All the way through primary school, my sons hung out with girls pretty regularly.
By high school, though, the typical path for college-bound kids seems to lead to gender segregation. The enormous time demands of competitive sports are a big part of why this happens, but there’s also the generally wrenching process of status sorting in high school that both girls and boys endure, which tends to isolate them from each other except in certain contexts like homecoming (happy hoco to all who celebrate, by the way) and group projects at school."
My youngest son had a few good female friends right through his preteen years. But yup, by his teens he had none. He's a young adult now and comfortable enough around women, but there are none in his closest friends groups.
I’m glad I grew up doing swimming, cross country and track, which depending on age and type of league are either co-ed teams or are defacto co-ed teams wrt practice and travel. My sports friends were mixed. (And I had male friends in math class and orchestra too).
My husband is a college proff and he just told me that age group seems to hang out and socialize across genders just as much as they ever did. So maybe the situation is better than we imagine.
Anecdotally, my son is a senior in college and rents a house off campus with 4 roommates. There’s 3 girls and 2 guys in the house. He’s also in a co-ed honors fraternity.
this article reads very strangely tbh, and that's the lightest term i could use. positioning it as a response to the cornell 7 case and what jane doe went through leaves an awful, awful taste in my mouth.
how are girls supposed build friendship with the little podcast quoting boys in their schools that are being groomed to hate girls?
I really appreciate men as friends, but if they were listening to Andrew Tate and acting like Ibwas subhuman, they wouldn't be my friends and wouldn't like my daughter to hang out with kids like that.
It's sad, but who can blame those girls. But it's bad if they do, bad if they don't.
In my life I was more friends with girls than boys. Honestly, it just depends on the boy. Find ones where there is a common interest. Plenty of boys aren’t into weird podcasts and like things beyond sports. Clubs with common interests help. I bonded with a lot of female friends over literature, film, leftist politics, and martial arts.
Btw, to be clear, I don’t believe the articles thesis that friendship ends rape culture. I believe accountability and ending entitlement do, and no those guys were never her friends.
As a queer adult woman I have dropped many of my queer and straight man friends because they are emotional vampires who refuse to get therapy, and as a result are incapable of reciprocating friendship or emotional support. I have had enough of men saying "that sounds hard bud" when I talk about a hard work issue I'm facing, after spending months/years meaningfully supporting them through their own shit.
That sounds depressingly accurate just from hearing about my husband's guy friends. I have some guy friends, but I definitely keep them at a distance. It's enough supporting the mental health needs of the guys in my family!
Is it so easy to find a therapist where you live that "just go to therapy" is useful advice? Here in Germany its basically impossible to find one on public health insurance unless you can afford to pay 150€ a session yourself. I've been searching for a therapist for 3 years now lol
I definitely agree that most men's emotional skills are underdeveloped though. It would be cool if there were academies or something for that, like etiquette schools back in the day but for teaching guys to be more emotionally and socially aware.
A lot of people in North America conflate therapy with counseling. It's relatively easy to find a counselor here in Canada (usually some kind of licensed social worker, but I don't think even that qualification is required), and in my city there are even "walk-in" counseling services if you're troubled by a specific problem and could use a one-off session.
Therapy is far harder to access here, very expensive and with long wait lists. So if you wait a year+ to finally see someone and they're a bad therapist or just a poor fit for you, you're kinda screwed. It's too bad because in my experience, counseling can be helpful but doesn't go nearly as "deep" as therapy. Counseling tends to be more about immediate issues you're having in the moment and working out solutions or coping mechanisms. Therapy tends to go deeper into patterns and root causes of things.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of boys and men would benefit from therapy, which is harder to find. And increasingly the manosphere is critical of therapy, insisting that it's either *feminine" or that therapists don't take men's problems seriously. Which basically shows the ass of the entire industry - happy, well-adjusted men have no time for the manosphere.
I'm in Germany too and it's not impossible. There's the 'terminstelle' where you get an appointment. and if you get rejected in your regular search, there are rules where it's possible to get the private practice paid by health insurance.
Is it hard to find one who is a good fit and doesn't have a 1 or 2 year wait time ? Yes. But it's not impossible.
And if a man really wants to change, there are enough resources online to be more empathetic, a good listener and to give back in relationships. I mean you talk about etiquette school but like ...women also didn't get a lecture about this stuff lol.
This article has very little to do with heteropessimism.
It's my understanding that heteropessimism basically straight people complaining being straight. Stuff like "ugh, men/women suck. I wish I wasn't interested in them." Endless complaining about the other, how there are no good women/men left, how being in a relationship or marrying is dumb, etc. Even heterosexual people lamenting how much more fun or cool non-heteronormativity and non-heteronormative people are. AFAIK, this is a pretty new phenomenon.
I see and hear that stuff everywhere, even as a middle-aged married guy.
Meanwhile, people have always been debating whether straight men and women can truly be friends or whether "the friendzone" is a real thing.
Simple the answer to the question of "Are We Raising a Generation of Heteropessimists?" is "yes" if they're constantly hearing or consuming content involving complaining about or belittling a particular gender. Kids pick up on that.
In particular, the author seems to worried about straight boys. They're simultaneously getting the message that women don't like them (whether intended or not) AND that they shouldn't like women in return. How does a boy reconcile that against his sexuality?
I have to admit that I actually believe that there should be more sex-segregated opportunities for guys and gals (of any age) to have structured or unstructured, real-world interactions, and the younger those activities are geared towards, the more that some level of defined “cross-sex” education needs to happen. (For instance, men pointedly teaching pre-teen boys age-appropriate content about sexual consent, physical boundaries, “if you meet a girl in college who agrees to a threesome you do not ply her with ketamine and then message your Snapchat group to say there’s free pussy in the frat house” conversations scaled to the intended audience.)
I think part of the problem is we think healthy cross-sex interaction is something that will just happen naturally if we force it, and I’m not sure I agree, especially in an era where younger and younger kids are getting hooked on social media spaces where they can retreat from the real world and learn whatever kind of sociopathic lessons are getting taught out there online. (This is more than just “redpilled manosphere” spaces, by the way.)
It’s the “islands of competence” idea of social interaction. In education and youth formation, you want children and learners to have areas of strength they can fall back on so that when they hit struggles elsewhere in their formation, they have an area of their life where they feel competent, in control, and purpose-driven. That’s why, for example, it can lead to worse behavior or school performance if, say, you tell the head cheerleader or the champion wrestler that they’re going to have to sit out a competition if they don’t pass that chemistry exam.
I think that we need to remember that, because it’s natural for boys to want to socialize with boys and girls with girls, being intentional about wholesome and meaningful spaces for them to do that means they are better socializers, communicators, and peer leaders when they’re also outside of their comfort zone.
I know “safe spaces” is a loaded term, but we really do need safe spaces where boys can be boys and girls can be girls, but where they also are challenged and formed into a responsible and mature version of what that looks like. Without that piece of the equation, I don’t think that just forcing boys and girls to spend more time together is necessarily going to produce better results.
86throwthrowthrow1 | 5 hours ago
I wonder what changed. I'm an elderly millennial and as a kid, it was absolutely a "girls rule and boys drool" dynamic (and vice versa). By high school, there were certainly competitive sports, and classes that would be more popular with one gender or another, but I recall at least at my school, mixed-gender friendships were still common. My high school group was mixed boys and girls, so were other groups and cliques in the same school.
I would actually say that really shifted for me in university. Dorm life meant I was mostly socializing with other women, and I was in a female-dominated major. I did have male friends, but they were mostly guys my female friends were dating.
But this person describes the inverse - easygoing mixed groups of friends in elementary school, then segregation in high school and beyond. Did something change?
gina_scooter | 4 hours ago
It’s absolutely social media. Algorithms target people and restrict them to extreme micro bubbles. There’s whole tiny worlds on Facebook groups and discords, twitch streams, YouTube channels and Twitter you’ll never know exists unless your algorithm decides you belong there. So people and often young teens and teens, are developing a culture, language, world view etc in these bubbles and then are unable to interact with people who exist outside of them,
ReverendDizzle | an hour ago
The extreme part of the micro bubbles can't be emphasized enough.
It's not like the issue is that the girls are getting sorted into skincare influencer videos and the guys are getting sorted into sports-focused videos.
A lot of guys are getting sorted into a micro-bubble that is filled with awful content that glorifies and encourages awful behavior.
[OP] Gladyskravitz99 | 5 hours ago
All I know is my parents' groups and I did actively push our young sons to socialize with girls, like this author says. But once the playdates were out of our hands, the mix changed.
86throwthrowthrow1 | 4 hours ago
I don't have kids myself, but my nephew and niece are teenagers and now I think about it, it's the same as you and the author mention: she has girl friends, he has guy friends, neither of them seem to date as far as I know. They're only about a year apart in age too, so they could theoretically socialize with each other's friends, but I don't think they do. (FWIW, school dances seem to no longer be a thing where I live either, I think for a few reasons.)
It's odd to think Gen A are more gender segregated than Silent Gen and Boomer seemed to be in their youth.
Latter_Example8604 | 3 hours ago
School dances aren’t a thing?
86throwthrowthrow1 | 3 hours ago
Not around here these days. Not for quite a few years now. I think on the school end, they were struggling to manage drinking, fights, or other poor behaviour at the dances (I remember that being an issue even when I was in school). But it also sounds like kids these days just aren't as interested in those kinds of events and prefer different activities.
[OP] Gladyskravitz99 | 5 hours ago
"I have long thought of female friendship as a magical protection against pretty much everything bad that can happen to, or be enacted by, my sons. I don’t think girls are responsible for civilizing boys, but I do think that boys and girls who are comfortable together have an easier time, in general, moving through life. Friendship across genders is a skeleton key that makes the world feel less mysterious and hostile, but the tricky part is that you can’t force it to happen. I’ve been thinking lately about what inhibits friendship across genders and what encourages it."
[OP] Gladyskravitz99 | 5 hours ago
"It was easy when my sons were tiny: Toddlers will play with whomever they are plopped down next to, at least for a little while. As they got older, my friends and I continued to contrive opportunities for gender-agnostic hangs: a day trip to the apple orchard, a picnic at the park, a trip to the movies. It felt for a little while like we were creating a utopian environment for them — everyone all together, no questions asked. All the way through primary school, my sons hung out with girls pretty regularly.
By high school, though, the typical path for college-bound kids seems to lead to gender segregation. The enormous time demands of competitive sports are a big part of why this happens, but there’s also the generally wrenching process of status sorting in high school that both girls and boys endure, which tends to isolate them from each other except in certain contexts like homecoming (happy hoco to all who celebrate, by the way) and group projects at school."
My youngest son had a few good female friends right through his preteen years. But yup, by his teens he had none. He's a young adult now and comfortable enough around women, but there are none in his closest friends groups.
hc600 | 5 hours ago
I’m glad I grew up doing swimming, cross country and track, which depending on age and type of league are either co-ed teams or are defacto co-ed teams wrt practice and travel. My sports friends were mixed. (And I had male friends in math class and orchestra too).
[OP] Gladyskravitz99 | 5 hours ago
My husband is a college proff and he just told me that age group seems to hang out and socialize across genders just as much as they ever did. So maybe the situation is better than we imagine.
Mother-Pen | 2 hours ago
Anecdotally, my son is a senior in college and rents a house off campus with 4 roommates. There’s 3 girls and 2 guys in the house. He’s also in a co-ed honors fraternity.
lesbian__overlord | 5 hours ago
this article reads very strangely tbh, and that's the lightest term i could use. positioning it as a response to the cornell 7 case and what jane doe went through leaves an awful, awful taste in my mouth.
how are girls supposed build friendship with the little podcast quoting boys in their schools that are being groomed to hate girls?
Astralglamour | 5 hours ago
It’s just another example of girls being expected to fix problems they can’t actually fix by accepting shit behavior from men.
macmcdonald | 4 hours ago
Exactly lol it's acting as if girls behaviour isn't a reaction to boys getting more rightwing\misogynistic
DeadWishUpon | 3 hours ago
I really appreciate men as friends, but if they were listening to Andrew Tate and acting like Ibwas subhuman, they wouldn't be my friends and wouldn't like my daughter to hang out with kids like that.
It's sad, but who can blame those girls. But it's bad if they do, bad if they don't.
LadybugGirltheFirst | 4 hours ago
The title talks about two different things, too.
ChessDriver45 | an hour ago
In my life I was more friends with girls than boys. Honestly, it just depends on the boy. Find ones where there is a common interest. Plenty of boys aren’t into weird podcasts and like things beyond sports. Clubs with common interests help. I bonded with a lot of female friends over literature, film, leftist politics, and martial arts.
Btw, to be clear, I don’t believe the articles thesis that friendship ends rape culture. I believe accountability and ending entitlement do, and no those guys were never her friends.
i_amtheice | 3 hours ago
The reverse happens, too. Girls are taught to simultaneously fear, not trust and look down on men.
Edit: Enjoy hating with God on your side, Reddit.
LuxAgaetes | 2 hours ago
This is a gross minimisation and I don't need to ask what gender lens you've experienced life through based off that comment
Harriet_M_Welsch | an hour ago
Where?
yes-no-maybe-so-so | 5 hours ago
As a queer adult woman I have dropped many of my queer and straight man friends because they are emotional vampires who refuse to get therapy, and as a result are incapable of reciprocating friendship or emotional support. I have had enough of men saying "that sounds hard bud" when I talk about a hard work issue I'm facing, after spending months/years meaningfully supporting them through their own shit.
[OP] Gladyskravitz99 | 4 hours ago
That sounds depressingly accurate just from hearing about my husband's guy friends. I have some guy friends, but I definitely keep them at a distance. It's enough supporting the mental health needs of the guys in my family!
Kachimushi | 4 hours ago
Is it so easy to find a therapist where you live that "just go to therapy" is useful advice? Here in Germany its basically impossible to find one on public health insurance unless you can afford to pay 150€ a session yourself. I've been searching for a therapist for 3 years now lol
I definitely agree that most men's emotional skills are underdeveloped though. It would be cool if there were academies or something for that, like etiquette schools back in the day but for teaching guys to be more emotionally and socially aware.
86throwthrowthrow1 | 3 hours ago
A lot of people in North America conflate therapy with counseling. It's relatively easy to find a counselor here in Canada (usually some kind of licensed social worker, but I don't think even that qualification is required), and in my city there are even "walk-in" counseling services if you're troubled by a specific problem and could use a one-off session.
Therapy is far harder to access here, very expensive and with long wait lists. So if you wait a year+ to finally see someone and they're a bad therapist or just a poor fit for you, you're kinda screwed. It's too bad because in my experience, counseling can be helpful but doesn't go nearly as "deep" as therapy. Counseling tends to be more about immediate issues you're having in the moment and working out solutions or coping mechanisms. Therapy tends to go deeper into patterns and root causes of things.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of boys and men would benefit from therapy, which is harder to find. And increasingly the manosphere is critical of therapy, insisting that it's either *feminine" or that therapists don't take men's problems seriously. Which basically shows the ass of the entire industry - happy, well-adjusted men have no time for the manosphere.
macmcdonald | 3 hours ago
I'm in Germany too and it's not impossible. There's the 'terminstelle' where you get an appointment. and if you get rejected in your regular search, there are rules where it's possible to get the private practice paid by health insurance.
Is it hard to find one who is a good fit and doesn't have a 1 or 2 year wait time ? Yes. But it's not impossible.
And if a man really wants to change, there are enough resources online to be more empathetic, a good listener and to give back in relationships. I mean you talk about etiquette school but like ...women also didn't get a lecture about this stuff lol.
twelvis | 35 minutes ago
This article has very little to do with heteropessimism.
It's my understanding that heteropessimism basically straight people complaining being straight. Stuff like "ugh, men/women suck. I wish I wasn't interested in them." Endless complaining about the other, how there are no good women/men left, how being in a relationship or marrying is dumb, etc. Even heterosexual people lamenting how much more fun or cool non-heteronormativity and non-heteronormative people are. AFAIK, this is a pretty new phenomenon.
I see and hear that stuff everywhere, even as a middle-aged married guy.
Meanwhile, people have always been debating whether straight men and women can truly be friends or whether "the friendzone" is a real thing.
Simple the answer to the question of "Are We Raising a Generation of Heteropessimists?" is "yes" if they're constantly hearing or consuming content involving complaining about or belittling a particular gender. Kids pick up on that.
In particular, the author seems to worried about straight boys. They're simultaneously getting the message that women don't like them (whether intended or not) AND that they shouldn't like women in return. How does a boy reconcile that against his sexuality?
radiocreature | 4 hours ago
because boys hate girls and men hate women.
etherealsmog | 4 hours ago
I have to admit that I actually believe that there should be more sex-segregated opportunities for guys and gals (of any age) to have structured or unstructured, real-world interactions, and the younger those activities are geared towards, the more that some level of defined “cross-sex” education needs to happen. (For instance, men pointedly teaching pre-teen boys age-appropriate content about sexual consent, physical boundaries, “if you meet a girl in college who agrees to a threesome you do not ply her with ketamine and then message your Snapchat group to say there’s free pussy in the frat house” conversations scaled to the intended audience.)
I think part of the problem is we think healthy cross-sex interaction is something that will just happen naturally if we force it, and I’m not sure I agree, especially in an era where younger and younger kids are getting hooked on social media spaces where they can retreat from the real world and learn whatever kind of sociopathic lessons are getting taught out there online. (This is more than just “redpilled manosphere” spaces, by the way.)
It’s the “islands of competence” idea of social interaction. In education and youth formation, you want children and learners to have areas of strength they can fall back on so that when they hit struggles elsewhere in their formation, they have an area of their life where they feel competent, in control, and purpose-driven. That’s why, for example, it can lead to worse behavior or school performance if, say, you tell the head cheerleader or the champion wrestler that they’re going to have to sit out a competition if they don’t pass that chemistry exam.
I think that we need to remember that, because it’s natural for boys to want to socialize with boys and girls with girls, being intentional about wholesome and meaningful spaces for them to do that means they are better socializers, communicators, and peer leaders when they’re also outside of their comfort zone.
I know “safe spaces” is a loaded term, but we really do need safe spaces where boys can be boys and girls can be girls, but where they also are challenged and formed into a responsible and mature version of what that looks like. Without that piece of the equation, I don’t think that just forcing boys and girls to spend more time together is necessarily going to produce better results.
[OP] Gladyskravitz99 | 4 hours ago
That sounds like a good point, actually. We definitely have to change something.
Frumiosa | 26 minutes ago
No. We're raising a generation of squibs, Janelle!