How Social Media Feminised Us All

It turned us into teenage girls

Something feels painfully familiar about the way we act and communicate online lately. Things feel more petty, catty, anxious, adolescent, as though everyone is more immature, more prone to emotional outbursts. I left my all-girls school years ago. I open X and I’m back.

Helen Andrews recently argued that society has gone through The Great Feminisation, and there’s something to this. I agree that social justice culture has stereotypically feminine attributes, that there has in many ways been a feminisation of the workplace. But I think some of the behaviour changes she describes, especially a rise in emotional reasoning and covert competition, are the result of something else. The problem is not that women entered the workforce or certain professions. More than that, in the early 2010s, we all entered social media.

For years I’ve written about how these platforms exploit girls’ and young women’s vulnerabilities for profit. And how they exploit our vices too: passive-aggression, reputation-destruction, social exclusion, vanity. I argue that social media rewards stereotypically feminine traits, that features on apps like Instagram and TikTok tap into and amplify them. For a long time, I thought this was a problem for girls.

But now I think things are worse than that. These platforms encourage everyone to act this way, tempt us all toward this behaviour. More than wokeness, more than left-wing or right-wing, something is happening in all online circles, in every direction, to all different types of people, to every kind of influencer. It’s happening, in short, to people who use these platforms.