•We teach girls from an early age not to publish anything in social media they wouldn’t want us or their employers to see decades later, and that nothing is ever really erased, even when deleted. Girls know a pretty face on the internet can hide a monster. Girls are warned about these issues far more often than boys are, and so boys are more apt to be victims.
•Girls experience as much when prepubescent facial pics are photoshopped onto more mature female bodies and exposed first in porn sites, then worldwide. They are offered no agency at all, yet few kill themselves over it. I suppose boys embarrass girls so often, they soon learn to laugh about “dying of embarrassment.”
•Boys grow up thinking they’re invincible because both nature & nurture teach them that. Either they’re reduced to nothing over not much at all when the pretense of invincibility fails, or they become toxic in how they treat women. The worst become both. Some middle ground is desperately needed, here. Teach boys the same self-protections we teach girls; give them that solidarity with girls. Teach empathy and resilience instead of dominance and preening. Teach him it’s better to be embarrassed and live, than literally to die of it.
•Change the culture that shames the human body and sexuality. No boy in Sweden, say, would be mortified to death merely by a nude photo—he might even be proud.
•And why on earth do parents continue to leave unsecured guns around the house, when more than 60% of gun deaths are suicides, almost all of them boys? (And with so many going dark and shooting up their schools! Thank goodness we’re beginning to prosecute criminal neglect.) So much in suicide by sextortion is due to lack of parental foresight.
•Finally, how ridiculous it is to ask an arse like Zuckerberg to apologize after the fact, for children he has never known or cared about, when the adults at home fail their children first.
•We teach girls from an early age not to publish anything in social media they wouldn’t want us or their employers to see decades later, and that nothing is ever really erased, even when deleted. Girls know a pretty face on the internet can hide a monster. Girls are warned about these issues far more often than boys are, and so boys are more apt to be victims.
•Girls experience as much when prepubescent facial pics are photoshopped onto more mature female bodies and exposed first in porn sites, then worldwide. They are offered no agency at all, yet few kill themselves over it. I suppose boys embarrass girls so often, they soon learn to laugh about “dying of embarrassment.”
•Boys grow up thinking they’re invincible because both nature & nurture teach them that. Either they’re reduced to nothing over not much at all when the pretense of invincibility fails, or they become toxic in how they treat women. The worst become both. Some middle ground is desperately needed, here. Teach boys the same self-protections we teach girls; give them that solidarity with girls. Teach empathy and resilience instead of dominance and preening. Teach him it’s better to be embarrassed and live, than literally to die of it.
•Change the culture that shames the human body and sexuality. No boy in Sweden, say, would be mortified to death merely by a nude photo—he might even be proud.
•And why on earth do parents continue to leave unsecured guns around the house, when more than 60% of gun deaths are suicides, almost all of them boys? (And with so many going dark and shooting up their schools! Thank goodness we’re beginning to prosecute criminal neglect.) So much in suicide by sextortion is due to lack of parental foresight.
•Finally, how ridiculous it is to ask an arse like Zuckerberg to apologize after the fact, for children he has never known or cared about, when the adults at home fail their children first.