The opinions expressed on this article are the author’s personal and don’t replicate the views of Her Campus.
This text is written by a scholar author from the Her Campus at Kenyon chapter.
“If every physique counted for one greenback, what would you purchase along with your physique depend?” asks one type gentleman to a lady standing on a bustling nighttime avenue stuffed with partygoers; a scene showing in a video on my Snapchat discovery web page. After a brief break from social media, I got here again to seek out my Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram had turn out to be, sadly, flooded with movies of sweaty 30-ish-year-old males shoving a microphone within the face of feminine members, asking invasive questions on their intercourse lives or testing them on their geographical data to find out whether or not or not girls are sensible.
Interviewing girls on the road is an odd and surprisingly fashionable style of media content material that has turn out to be inescapable and ubiquitous. Although these movies seem on many various channels based by these males, every has typically the identical construction. This content material sometimes tends to make use of girls, their sexualities, or doubts of their intelligence as clickbait or as a hook for viewers to proceed watching. Different questions embrace asking what they may charge themselves on a scale from 1-10, what number of world nations or presidents they know, how a lot cash they’ve and whether or not that cash comes from OnlyFans, and so forth. The united purpose, it appears, is to embarrass girls based mostly on how they reply the query.
In fact, I acknowledge this kind of content material to be condescending and misogynistic, however much more so, I discover it silly. There’s typically nothing fascinating about these movies or the folks conducting them. The questions requested in these movies should not solely meant to disgrace girls, however additionally they lack a way of emotional and mental depth that enables nearly any feminist to low cost their meant hurt and acknowledge their lack of ability to chop very deep.
Nonetheless, what I acknowledge to be the best and most grave problem with releasing this kind of messaging into the world is the hazard of portray girls in a patronizing, restricted, and edited gentle. What this content material goals to attain is to play on current stereotypes with a purpose to affirm folks’s deeply ingrained notions about girls and their talents. Additional, these movies and concepts clearly attain an immensely massive and eclectic viewers, a lot of which embrace younger boys who haven’t fairly developed concepts about girls but. This sort of content material tends to lie on the very starting of a form of anti-feminist pipeline that younger adolescent males can fall into on the web. When stereotypical strategies are made a couple of small pattern of girls and despatched out into the world, they’re exacerbated and enlarged by the web and those that use it. Thus, although these movies appear shallow and ridiculous to those that know higher, they are often taken critically by those that don’t.
It’s tough to gauge the potential results of social media content material when there may be an immeasurable plethora of it to discover. Once we turn out to be desensitized to social media, how are we to really decide which facets of it are innocent, silly, or harmful? In such an age the place media literacy turns into more difficult to nurture, the one factor we may be positive of is to steer clear of folks holding tiny microphones.
