Hedonistic consumerism is the bane of our existence. These kids are constantly bombard with these short cuts to happiness. Be rich, be pretty (ie “sexy”), and internet famous and you’ll be someone worthy of love and respect. These poor kids had nothing but the internet to fall back on during the pandemic, and they were sold a pipe dream.
Let's not forget the millennial parents who were suckered in a bit themselves - not to blame them per-se as much as point out the trend germinated within us, as adults, to some degree. No, I don't have kids, I'm scared shitless at the thought of having to protect a kid against the system as it exists.
Consider all these pre-teen and teenage girls running around it skimpy outfits. The media they consume taught them that sexuality equates to maturity, and maturity equates to acceptability. Yeah, we’ve all tried to dress mature when we were younger, but we didn’t have fucking predators whispering in our ears.
You hit the nail on the head with a damn nuke. You're supposed to explore things and grow up and make mistakes and learn as you go, as a teenager,
with other actual true and honest teenagers, like we did, instead of being a plaything for a creepy adult. As you said, we've denied kids space to be kids, so we've denied the opportunity to be kids and not just immature, deficient adults, so they're online being groomed and hypersexualized by fucked up adults who needed their own interventions 15 years ago. I ran across a bit of that myself, but given my particular childhood, I don't know how diagnostic it is for the general population.
And here's my followup nuke: look at how boys are sexualizing themselves. "Femboy" this and that, this feminization as a means to be appealing - it's like we collectively decided "let's make kids into fuckthings like ancient fucking history!" for some reason and I'm all but waiting on WPATH to talk about catamite, by name, as a fucking identity now.
I'm not fucking kidding. They already did that shit with eunuch!
It isn’t like back in the chatroom and forums days where you knew not to go along with any randos bs. We all assumed we were pretending to be someone else. For god sake we had to catch a predator and mandatory internet safety lessons to tell us to watch our backs online. These kids don’t even know the difference until they’re in too deep. Let alone that your supposed to be anonymous online.
Looking at the zoomer-opinions of KF or the notion of free speech and anonymity is a fucking shock. They're so used to overbearing teachers and "adult supervision", overbearing mods on big forums, reddit, and even petty faggot dictator discord mods, that the notion of not having controlled speech, disagreements with authority, or even at all, is alien to them. Of course they can't fucking set boundaries, are easy to bully, and melt down if they deal with confrontation.
Fuck me, I had a 19 year-old tell me that every girl he knew was groomed online. I was literally the same age as their eldest sibling. He was envious of how fun the internet was for us. And all I could tell him we only had spaces for ppl our ages and places to go to play games and watch videos. You knew exactly who your friends were and who wasn’t it.
Shit, I'm pushing 40 and at 18 I was manipulated into a lot of dumb shit, but just went "meh" because all the other shit in my life makes it hard to evaluate what's "eh shit happens" and "wait this is remarkable" until you jogged my memory. At least it's not technically grooming if I wasn't a minor.
Fuck my life and this gay earth. This entire fucking year so far has been OH HEY GUESS WHAT ELSE YOU FORGOT UNTIL NOW YOU WALKING TALKING FUCKING PSYCHIC DISASTER LOL.
I didn't realize a lot of how bad it was until you put it down so clearly. Mother fuck. I would add to it that it started with our generation, just not so open and flagrant as it is now, if only because you weren't stuck on a fucking grooming device all day.