[trieste92]

> Social media in and of itself is really just an accelerant for the particular set of social expectations we stack on girls and women around appearance and how that relates to self-worth. Boys have more capacity to transcend social media's focus on image and beauty by finding other ways to be valued as human beings.

Sounds like one of those truisms that people love to repeat. Like all other instances, this one likely isn't grounded in anything concrete

[josephg]

I just think the gender norms for men are different. Traditionally, women are valued more for their beauty and (later) their capacity to raise children. Men are traditionally valued for their capacity to be bread winners. “Women are valued for what they are. Men are valued for what they do.”

I think both ideas can be pretty toxic to their respective genders. The problems just show up differently. Social media, online bullying and body shaming hurt girls more than boys. And video game addiction, desperation due to purposelessness and suicide seem to hurt men more than women.

Every human deserves to have a life in which they flourish. We should, as much as we can, work to tackle all of these problems.

[trieste92]

> The problems just show up differently. Social media, online bullying and body shaming hurt girls more than boys. And video game addiction, desperation due to purposelessness and suicide seem to hurt men more than women.

Idk. I feel like this is just culture trying to make up stories for each gender to define what deviance is supposed to look like

It reminds me of how some people gravitate towards mbti types or enneagram even though they're obviously pseudoscience

Are gender norms different though? Yes. But I don't think they should be. And the first step to overcoming them is disregarding the stupid stories that sound true

[josephg]

> Idk. I feel like this is just culture trying to make up stories for each gender to define what deviance is supposed to look like

Regardless of how much the differences are cultural or innate, gender specific outcomes certainly show up in the data. Eg, this chart from the linked article:

https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/8...

> the first step to overcoming them is disregarding the stupid stories that sound true

Yeah; it would help immensely if we could teach everybody that they're essentially healthy and worthy of love. Good, consistent parenting acts as an inoculation against these problems. When we're talking about the kids with the worst mental health outcomes, they're probably disproportionally poor, and more often than not come from single parent households. I suspect more support for struggling families would make more of a difference to the mental health outcomes of kids than somehow overcoming gender norms. It seems like a much more tractable solution, too.

Convincing regular people to not buy into the expectations of their own gender sounds like a borderline impossible task.