Oneitiscel
Failed Jestermaxxx LDAR Extraordinaire
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This 1 Big Concern About Raising Boys Didn't Really Exist 30 Years Ago
Parents who raised kids in the '90s are "surprised by how young boys are when they first encounter it," one mom said.
The words “incels,” “alpha” and “manosphere” never crossed Abby Eckel’s mind when she was pregnant with her two sons. Now that the boys are 8 and 10 ― on the cusp of their teenage years ― keeping them away from the manosphere is sometimes all she and her husband can think about.
“It’s literally the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, because I have to be, I feel like, ready 24/7,” Eckel, an online content creator, told HuffPost. “I have to remain vigilant every moment I’m around my sons.”
Countering all of these outside influences is “exhausting on a scale that I was never prepared for in raising sons,” Eckel said.
“I never considered any of this would be a possibility when I was pregnant with either of them,” she said.
Payal Desai’s sons are even younger ― 5 and 9 years old ― but she’s already worried about one of them stumbling down the pipeline of misogyny or equally dark views through TikTok, YouTube shorts or a seemingly innocuous gaming chat.
“When I talk to older parents, including my own, they’re pretty shocked by all this incel and red pill stuff,” Desai, who runs a parenting blog, told HuffPost. “Not because misogyny is new, it is not, but because the delivery system is so targeted and constant. It is engineered.”
Eckel, the mom of 8- and 10-year-old boys, gave a good example of how important nonjudgmental open communication is when dealing with issues like this. A few months back, her older son called his younger brother a “*****” after hearing the word from a friend.
“And so I had to explain that, OK, ***** is another word for vagina, and vagina is seen as weak by some, and who has vaginas? Mostly female-born people have vaginas. So therefore, it’s equating women to being weak because they have *******. That started a much larger conversation of, why?”
For Desai and her husband, that latter point means dispelling traditional gender roles and norms that box boys into unreasonable “rules,” she said. (“If my son wants to paint his nails, he is free to do so,” she explained.)
Well, no shit the incel epidemic "didn't really exist" at the end of last century. There was no hypergamy, no misandry, & no algorithms promoting certain masculinity aspects as more desirable than others to foids worldwide, like the amount that there is now. If you are so worried about your kids being molded online, then you might as well just take away their internet access completely. Most of these scenarios that you all fear so greatly are influenced by IRL interactions in crucial years of development, rather than the former. That's a fact.





