How often do you see or hear “male” used without any of the descriptors attached in casual contexts?

Honestly, only in the context of plugs, sockets & input/output cables in nerd circles, or in wildlife documentaries when describing animals in nature, to the point where I cannot read the word without hearing it in David Attenborough’s voice.

That’s besides the point though. I gave an example of men referring to themselves as males. If you couldn’t already tell by my use of “lean six ligma”, I’m kinda taking the piss out of the manosphere and its influencers like Andrew Tate.

But the common use of the word “female” in informal contexts, without any other descriptors attached, does exactly what the article author says it does and isn’t nearly as pervasive for men or boys.

TIL that Strong Bad is a misogynist.

This is the earliest example online I can find of a woman being referred to as a female, dating back to 2003. And it was literally from a Flash animated web series 23 years ago where the word was deliberately used as a rhyme to “email.”

It’s a weird term to use other than “woman” or even “girl” (but apparently that’s problematic now, even though it’s everywhere in pop music.) But honestly the red pill, incel and MGTOW circles have come up with a whole lot worse which I won’t even repeat here.

Requiring large social media platforms to regulate and moderate hateful speech would be a start. Big tech has been largely dropping the ball in this regard.

Cases-in-point, Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads), X Corp (the App Formerly Known As Twitter) and Alphabet (YouTube.)

Meta changed their guidelines in the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election to allow trans and non-binary people to be called “it”, and for posts/comments branding them mentally ill.

X’s Grok AI has been used to generate millions of sexualised images. Sometimes women get objectified and undressed without their knowledge nor consent by people promoting Grok. Sometimes the victims are minors. The fact that X hasn’t been shut down speaks volumes about how much billionaires have been able to get away with crap that would land anybody else behind bars for a long time.

YouTube… Have you also noticed more hateful content being posted to the platform. This isn’t an example that I think I can link to here, but there is a far-right ragtime musician called Foundring who was previously banned from the platform years ago for hate speech. Either due to ban evasion or his ban being lifted, he came back two years ago and recently started posting piano covers of old vintage ragtime and folk music from the late 18th Century. One of his videos, which contained the word “N*****” in the title (yes, hard-R) got catapulted by the YouTube algorithm and is currently sitting at 1.2 million views. It’s 37 days old and still up.

Consider the use of the word “female” in these posts. It is not a neutral term here, it is a term of abuse. It’s used by teenage boys to degrade us and equate us to animals. Boys are never described as “males”, but girls are always “females” – the equivalent of sows or calves, creatures that are less than human.

Erm… Alpha male? Beta male? Sigma male? Lean six ligma male?

Literally Spez right now…

(I’d post the uncensored image but IIRC Lemmy World is German-based and have strict laws against Nazi iconography)

He’s wilfully given the data of users who have criticized Trump and ICE, AND he looks like a spitting image of Tintin…

Why does he look like Steve Carrell playing a sociopathic big tech asshole?

Kids back in the eighties were coding in BASIC, running command line prompts and using home computers like the ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC 464 and Commodore 64. The most I did in terms of coursework for my IT classes during my secondary school days was make a personal webpage about my hobbies & interests using Microsoft Frontpage. Sixth form (where I did A Level Computing, basically 11th & 12th Grade equivalents) was even worse, It was 2010 and they were still fucking teaching us Visual Basic 6 and the Waterfall Model of system development!

Something like an introduction to unix and programming should be mandatory. They seem to think that kids need to “learn to use a computer and the internet.” It’s a fucking point-and-click interface. What is there to learn? The software industry is very skilled at making it all so easy that a chimpanzee can use it.

This may be infuriating or sad for you to read, but very young kids who have been brought up on smartphones, TikTok and YouTube Kids these days can’t even do basic shit like this. Like, I’ve genuinely heard about kids starting kindergarten and reception who cannot even turn pages on a book and try to swipe left/right on them like they’re a touchscreen. Some even struggle to work with a physical keyboard or a gamepad that actually has tactile inputs.

The only other group where I’ve personally seen such ineptitude with technology is in old people. I used to work in customer support for a major right-wing British newspaper, and it was mainly things like website account access issues, basic tablet/smartphone tech support, and promotion enquiries I dealt with. I genuinely hated that job for a lot of reasons, but a big part of it is that trying to guide a senile 75+ year old pensioner through a basic password reset or explain how to redeem an e-voucher.

My dad is 80 years old and as the younger autistic one in the family who got economically screwed and is still living with my parents, I’m left with having to continually explain how to do basic email or phone tasks to him.

We didn’t have graphing calculators in school. The most we used were scientific ones which had sine, cosine, factorials, that kind of stuff.

This may be the millennial in me talking but I’ve generally found schools to be fucking dire when it comes to implementing technology in the classroom.

During Year 10 (equivalent to 9th Grade for any Yanks here), our school enrolled in a government programme to start using PDAs in the classroom. So they offered every kid in our year a Pocket LOOX 720 at a heavily subsidized price.

They were never used in lessons.

Pupils instead used them as music/video playback devices and to play games, since it was 2007, smartphones weren’t yet a thing and YouTube was just in its infancy.

Maybe things have improved since I left secondary school.

If National Rally were in any position of power, this easily could have become France’s Reichstag Fire moment.

The Machiavellian part of me thinks Ring screwed up by not raising the stakes. Search Party and the way they advertised it makes you go "awww’ when you see the golden retriever and then “wait, WHAT?” when they show all their Ring doorbells going full surveillance mode in locating the missing dog.

A lengthier ad showing a pedophile being tracked down and arrested by law enforcement mid-abduction, their victim rescued, then the nonce being served justice may have had a more positive response.

I mean, “think of the children” has been the perfect strawman argument to justify mass surveillance, after all…

Oh no!

Anyway…

The app is literally called Tea, as in “spilling the tea.”

Let’s say a vile, manipulative, entitled woman went on a Tinder date with a guy. He insists on splitting the bill rather than paying for her food. She feels insulted.

She then takes to Tea and her local Are We Dating The Same Guy Facebook group, slanders him with false accusations that he tried to sexually assault her, then posts his Tinder, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn profiles online. Suddenly he’s being ostracized, receiving nasty messages and even loses his job from women bombarding his employer with negative phone calls, emails and comments about him.

Men have had their lives ruined by false allegations posted to AWDTSG communities before. But opposing the existence of these platforms is “misogyny”, apparently.