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My great-grandmother had 8 kids, my grandmother had 4, my mother had 2, and mine will likely be even fewer, or none. Why is nobody eager to have kids now? Birth rates are at historic lows, and the future seems bleak. Elon Musk warns us of “population collapse”. Trump aims to be the “fertilisation president” and “wants more babies”. Simone and Malcolm Collins, viral pronatalists, pursue having children relentlessly, even though Simone has to get a C-section since she can’t give birth naturally now, and says she’ll keep having children until her ‘Uterus Is Removed’. Before examining the looming question of extinction or population collapse, let’s consider the reasons birth rates have been declining.

1)Choice

This is an important one. Previously, women did not have much choice per se; getting married and birthing a child was their “destiny”. Now women have a choice. Many want to pursue a career and achieve some finite goals before settling down, many don’t want to settle at all. Contraceptives have played a big role in giving women control over when they want to become pregnant or how many kids they want to have. Teen pregnancies have gone down drastically. And these are good developments that we should be proud of.

2)Economy

Many couples who wish to have children simply cannot afford it. In South Korea, most people interviewed said cost was their main barrier. Housing prices have been rising everywhere, childcare and hospital bills are mounting, and unemployment is on the rise. People are barely surviving, and children represent a financial burden that even fewer can afford to manage.

3)Marriage (patriarchy)

While it goes without saying that a lot of babies are also born out of marriage, marriage traditionally is the first pillar before childbirth. But nobody is willing to get married, either. But aren’t families now progressive and supportive? Nobody is still stuck on the man is the sole bread-winner model. What more do you want? Well, working women are supported because 2 financial sources mean more stability, but the responsibility for the woman increases. Now she has to juggle a full-time job and household responsibilities along with kids. Many women quit their jobs after a few years of marriage, mostly after a child, because balancing work and home life becomes even more difficult once a kid is added to the equation. In-laws are also a big source of worry; it is very common for them to meddle in the relationship, they berate and dictate their daughter-in-law constantly. Despite the expectation that the daughter-in-law should be a superhuman, the traditions still value sons more; it is not something that laws can fix, it is culturally inbuilt. On your next family gathering, notice how the men are lounging on the sofas watching the TV or talking politics, while the women are immediately in the kitchen. There is a word for it- mankeeping; the invisible, unpaid emotional and social labor women disproportionately perform to manage their male partners’ lives.

The other day, I was watching a video essay on this topic, and she said that most people wouldn’t even know their mother’s favorite food, and the fact is, she wouldn’t know either, because she is always expected to keep others before her, to cook everyone’s favorite meals, but never hers. This caught me by surprise. Surely I should know my mom’s favorite food; I know my dad’s and sister’s, but I didn’t. I went and asked her what her favorite food was, you guessed it, she didn’t know either.

While there are exceptions to all the cases I listed above, sadly, these are very common at the end of the day, and the aunties “gossiping” to each other about their horrifying everyday events as if its funny or normal, just proves my point more. In many cultures, divorce is still not an option for many women; societally it’s unacceptable, so these women end up being “trapped”. The gender pay gap increases after marriage, and last but not the least, weddings are expensive.

4)Other factors

Several other factors might be: the rise of infertility because of modern lifestyle changes that aren’t good for health; the loss of community- grandparents want kids but aren’t around to take care of them, nor are other relatives or friends anymore. “It takes a village to grow a child.” There is no village anymore, but nobody can be blamed; the rise of costs force older people in this generation to work for a longer time. This is a cultural one; the shaming of single mothers. All it takes is for a man is to leave after you give birth, and now you have yourself and a child to fend for. Not only are single mothers not supported enough, but they are also culturally looked down on, and women just don’t want to place themselves in that position anymore. On TikTok, you would see how the tone towards motherhood is changing; now it’s not seen through rose-colored glasses that every girl saw it with before. Mothers are coming out and sharing their struggles of motherhood, showing the sleepless nights and the stressful side of it. And there is nothing wrong with that; most of them don’t regret their kids, but why is a mother’s mental health a taboo? Yes, children are a blessing, but why are the struggles surrounding them muted?

The 2 extreme sides the internet is bordering on are deeply concerning- I either hate kids with my whole being, or I love kids and if you don’t have them you are not fulfilling your “biological” role. Why isn’t there a middle ground? Having kids or not is a personal choice; having a kid or not doesn’t make you better than others, and you shouldn’t hate kids with your whole being. We need to coexist peacefully as a society, yeah? Several people pull up with their surveys of who is happier among- the unmarried woman who is childless or the married woman with children. Yet the results always vary, because different people have different choices that are suitable for them.

Nevertheless, dismantling the old cat lady/spinster role, a few ladies are showing their lives without a child, and they didn’t end up being lonely and bitter like the media suggests! This honest conversation around motherhood and “spinster” lady is letting girls see they don’t have to be bound by the societal standards or ingrained expectations of motherhood. None is better than the other; it depends on YOU and your choice.

While I was doing research, trying to find what might be the reasons for South Korea’s declining birth-rates, one interesting reason that I didn’t see anywhere being mentioned is the academic pressure. While this may sound stereotypical, many Asian kids feel immense academic pressure from school and parents. They grow up in environments of such high competition, which mentally affects them. As Papiens quoted in “My country is choosing extinction”; “We end up with people who are masters of competition but strangers to unconditional love.”

“Out of 10000 people who reported having children, 39 percent reported that financial limitations were a factor that had affected or would affect their ability to realize their desired family size. The second most commonly reported at 21 percent was unemployment or job insecurity. The third, at 19 percent, was housing concerns, such as lack of space or high cost…”

“About 1 in 8 women (13 percent) say that they will have fewer children than they want because their male partner is not sufficiently contributing to the added domestic labour children bring to a household. The research conducted for this report finds that barriers to avoiding an unintended pregnancy and barriers to starting a family are often ultimately the same: economic precarity, gender discrimination, lack of support from partners and communities, low-quality sexual and reproductive healthcare, lack of access to services like affordable childcare or education, and pessimism about the future.”

-UNFPA, The Real Fertility Crisis

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Would we go extinct?

I saw a lot of different opinions, and previously I believed that we would eventually go extinct…but now I’m leaning towards the idea that probably won’t happen. While our population may decline if the replacement rate keeps declining, we wouldn’t go extinct, and I think this study sums it up perfectly: https://populationconnection.org/blog/the-truth-about-baby-busts-and-population-decline/

Philosophy Tube in “You’re wrong about Birth Rates and Aging Populations” presents the argument that birth-rate fluctuation is nothing new. In the 1930s, everybody had their panties twisted up because of the declining birth rate. But after the economic conditions got better, the baby boom happened, after which Paul Ehrlich wrote “The Population Bomb” in 1968, talking about how we all will eventually die from resource depletion due to overpopulation. Now we are back at square one, and the birth rates are going down again. Who knows? If conditions are better, there might be a baby boom again.

“With respect to economic growth, research shows that a population’s productive characteristics are more important than its size.”

“That is, it’s not the sheer number of total people as much as it is the number of healthy and well-educated people that determine productivity.”

-David Bloom, Harvard T.H.Chan

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You’ll see many manosphere podcast bros or conservatives talking about how this is happening due to women being available only to “high-value men,” that snatching bodily autonomy is the only solution, or that women are not having kids under the “biological clock” (which applies to guys too if you didn’t know). You can’t solve this problem with misogyny or xenophobia. Xenophobia in bold because white supremacists are beating the drum about the “great replacement theory”, how the population of European, or more specifically white people, is declining and would be replaced by people of other races. This ideology is racist, fascist, and supports eugenics. Glorifying “the old days” where women had no freedom whatsoever isn’t going to cut it either. The government providing funds to couples after they give birth just slows down the birth rate decline, because it doesn’t fix many of the root causes, and frankly, it is a very small amount that wouldn’t last very long. Or a South Korean governor proposing to “import Sri Lankan and Vietnamese virgins” to help stem the population decline in provincial areas, real-world “Handmaid’s Tale” production right here if you ask me.

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/lifestyle-culture/article/3342471/outrage-south-korea-over-importing-virgins-proposal-raise-birth-rate

“There is no need to pressure young people into wanting more kids. We need to make it easier for people to have the children that they want to have.”

“There are clear barriers to having children in the United States that revolve around economics, around child care, around health insurance.”

-Sarah Hayford, The Ohio State University

According to me, we would never go back to the birth rates we had previously. Even if we fix everything in our society culturally and economically, the birth-rates will increase, yes, but contraception and women’s freedom have given women a choice, and we shouldn’t strive to go back to an era where women were nothing more than a reproductive machine.

It shouldn’t be expected of a woman to give birth by “default”, like she owes the man a child. I saw a video the other day of a happy couple who didn’t have children, and the comment section was filled with strangers pitying the man; his wife didn’t “give” him a child, she is selfish and “you can see the despair in his eyes..?” She isn’t selfish. But it is selfish to bring a child into this world when you aren’t ready to. That baby did not ask to be here and shouldn’t be a band-aid for your relationship; that baby deserves the best life with parents who are ready to give love and support him/her in any condition. If you have a baby just for the sake of it, well, THAT is selfish.

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𝒮𝓊𝒷𝓈𝒸𝓇𝒾𝒷ℯ!!

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I have a love-hate relationship with Substack. What I love about it is how it has given me a platform to start writing my essays, and while I know I am not even remotely perfect at it, it feels good to finally write after years of jotting down essays in my diary, to share the work that was once meant only for my eyes.

BUT, with that being said, I also hate how everybody here seems...snobbish? Every other note is about; thank god I quit social media, I LOVE SUBTACK!! Honey, Substack is a social media, and you are posting this in notes, not even in longform, it’s a tweet, but on Substack. Substack, just like TikTok, places short and easily consumable pieces on its feed among several other notes asking for “connection”, and while there is nothing inherently wrong with that, there is a sense of superiority not only here, but also in book communities and AI haters.

While I hate AI too, and know how it is slowly but surely replacing humans in work and creative fields, people are not judging AI anymore. People are being put into categories; those who are using AI are “intellectually inferior” to those who don’t. Their potential and existence as a whole are a waste.

Suddenly, everybody is on Substack, including Lily Allen, Rosalia, Charli XCX, Patti Smith, and The Playboy Reader. Not only are celebrities hopping on the Substack train, but they are also taking part in the book club culture, with Oprah Winfrey, Witherspoon, and Laufey (The Laufey Book Club). Kaia Gerber is backstage reading Didon, Duras, and Camus, and Dua Lipa’s online literary salon, Service 95. This is where a greater question emerges: Is anybody actually reading, or is it performative?

During the early 2000s, the popular kids and nerds were in different “leagues”. Now the popular kid is the nerd, glamour and intelligence are flirting hard. Don’t misunderstand though, intelligence without being attractive is still not “cool”. Trends like “thought girl”, “hot girl hobbies,” and “disgustingly well educated” are popping off. Logging off is cool now, with people sharing their journal ecosystems and analog bags. The “IT girl” is now the “Lit girl”. This is the new cool girl. But the performative conversation is still not over, the art of “appearing” as an intellect. With everybody holding a Dostoevsky, Murakami, or Nietzsche, even if they don’t actually read it.

Books are the new accessories in the fashion world, with Vogue featuring models holding books and posing in their April 2026 issue. Book trinkets are everywhere, luxury brands like DIOR making bags with classic book prints. Books as props are the new way to look sophisticated, to scream silently; look at me, you dumb fucks, I am smarter than you!

Books before technology came into the picture were reserved for the upper class. Knowledge was not accessible to everyone; reading a book meant that you had leisure time that the working class (mostly factory workers) did not have. Reading was a privilege. But then everybody got access to it, and then came technology that was the new cool. Most didn’t have access to it and didn’t know how it worked. Fast forward to 2010, when the internet started becoming an important part of everyday life, and everybody had a phone by the end of it.

Now the cycle repeats, being offline is the new cool, and the chronically online is the underclass. Phrases like “critical thinking”, “media literacy,” and “anti-intellectualism” are gaining popularity with the rise of AI-slop content. People are shifting to long-form content platforms like Substack to avoid doomscrolling. Everybody and their mother has a podcast right now, and movies adapted from literature like Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice are going viral, with people picking the books back up and having conversations about them. In the pre-COVID TikTok era, the feeds were filled with dance compilations and POV trends. Now, it is filled with commentaries and discussions, with substack article recommendations; real human content is a counter-attack to the algorithm or AI slop that is deteriorating everybody’s mental health at a fast pace.

“Maybe the technology changes- social media like BookTok amplifies reach- but the book and fashion worlds have long been in conversation. The former has the intellectual cachet, the latter has the broader cultural reach, and they both have something that they want from each other.”

“There has been a lot of backlash against this (trend): the usual literary gatekeepers evincing shock and disbelief that people who make their living based on their looks, most of the time, a young woman, might also have a deep abiding interest in reading literature.”

“I actually consider the OG Lit Girl to be Marilyn Monroe, who was famously photographed reading Ulysses by James Joyce. A lot of people accused her of what we would now call ‘performative reading’, but why is it so hard to believe that she just loved literature? She had a personal library of over 400 books.”

“She was no doubt aware of how she was seen as one of the most beautiful women in the world. So, if she was reading performatively, she was using the power of her image to make a point.”

-Olivia Ho, @ohomatopoeia, straitstimes.com

Circling back to the performative conversation now, it goes hand in hand with consumerism. You need a journal with a premium leather quality and a trinket hanging from it. Your analog bag needs to be from this company. Add these products to the cart, TikTok shop in bio. Even hobbies are commodified. Brands have been quick to catch on and have been marketing analog bag must-haves. People are hoarding books just for the sake of it.

The reading community is a big part of this conversation. It’s a whole other fight over here. Readers can be broadly classified as 3 types;

1. Booktok community

2. Pinterest community

3. “Real” readers

Booktok community reads just trashy young adult crap that is not intellectually stimulating; they aren’t real readers and are just performative. The Pinterest community is the Sylvia Plath “thought girls” club that says they read “real books”, but are just reading the books based on the aesthetic, hence they are performative too. Last is the “real” readers, they read the hard text, think critically, like to think of themselves as superior beings, but guess what..they are performative too, since the act of not being performative is actually performative.

This is the book community summarised. The truth is, people cannot be put into these distinct compartments. I read 50 books last year (there is another conversation entirely on if you read “too much”, you are unemployed and need to get a life, but also it’s upper-class relations?), and they were all from different genres. I can read Shatter Me one day, The Virgin Suicides the next, and Simone De Beauvoir’s feminist literature the day after that. Yes, reading difficult texts is intellectually stimulating, but wanting to read just for entertainment is also not a crime.

“All genres are scorned by literary types, but none more so than romance....But then, it’s a genre written by women for women. Unless a guy writes one and they call it something else. And it gets reviewed and made into a movie. A woman writes, and it’s just one of those.”

-Nora Roberts

The other day I saw a video on how to spot if somebody is authentic or is being performative. According to me, though, you will never know. You can’t know if somebody is just holding Sylvia Plath just as an accessory or prop, or if they are actually reading it. And why does it even matter, really? This trend is just putting a limitation on people; our culture has become so judgmental of everything that we do not even think twice before recording a random stranger reading a book on the subway and calling them performative. Cringe culture will never let people to get out of their comfort zones. I believe this judgment might also stem form insecurity. Not every guy reading feminist literature on the subway is performative. Not everybody’s analog bag or offline hobbies are curated; in fact, I think it is great that people are finally stepping away from the internet and “touching grass”. The fact is, we are all performative, people on social media acting to be authentic are also performative since they also want validation for likes and views. People who leave Instagram and join Substack also forget that we also crave our work to be seen, crave for likes and views. Even people who don’t have social media perform for their social surroundings.

And there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that I hate more than people with a superiority complex.

Source- michaella.evelyn, instagram

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𝒮𝓊𝒷𝓈𝒸𝓇𝒾𝒷ℯ!!

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So your canthal tilt is negative? Damn, bro, you’re chopped.

The first time I ever heard of looksmaxxing was when most of my male peers suddenly started to chew gum to define jawline, or participate in the new “mewing” trend that was going around. Another instance was when I was scrolling one day and randomly stumbled upon an ad of an app that would rate your current features and tell ways to improve it to your maximum potential, I thought what is the harm in trying and decided to check it out, but eventually decided against it since I wasn’t sure if this random app was safe enough, that and the fact that it was behind a paywall.

Looksmaxxing has now taken all over social media, with “Clavicular”, a looksmaxxing coach, being the first to make it mainstream and become such an idol for teen boys. Looksmaxxing, in simple terms, is conforming to the beauty standards, but the masculine version. Its suffix is inspired by role-playing games; to “max” means to ‘fully develop a single character trait, like strength’. There are broadly two categories looksmaxxing can be divided into:

1. Softmaxxing; methods to look better without surgery or extreme drugs, for example, mewing, gym, diet, skincare, etc.

2. Hardmaxxing; inclusion of surgery, drugs, or extreme methods to “look good”, for example, steroids, growth hormone, bonesmashing, etc.

There is also testosteronemaxxing, eyelash maxxing, sleepmaxxing, scleramaxxing, musicmaxxing, eyebrowmaxxing, voicemaxxing, gutmaxxing, starvemaxxing, etc. But none of this is new to me or to other women and girls. Terms like “starvemaxxing” echo eating disorders, “perfect ratios” is just the golden ratio trend in a new form, and the perfect skincare routines from unlicensed looksmaxxing gurus are already everywhere—in every grwm or Sephora kid’s vanity. These are old pressures, simply rebranded in a masculine package. I remember following a fatphobic influencer who insisted that being skinny is the standard, which harmed my relationship with food and led me to lose a lot of weight. Even now, eating junk food occasionally makes me feel guilty. Social media taught us that button nose, fair skin, high cheekbones, flawless skin and plump lips are the definition of beauty. We’ve grown up scrutinizing our faces, and seeing this new trend just makes me believe patriarchy is starting to bite its own tail.

“Advertisers have done about as much as they can do to make women feel bad about themselves- and profit off of it. Now they have turned to men.”

-Mike Parent, Ph.D, Associate Professor at the University of Texas

Clavicular’s government name is Braden Peters, who joined Looksmaxxing.org when he was just 14. He isolated himself from everyone, confessing to wearing a hoodie to the gym so he wouldn’t have to interact with others. He dedicated himself to looksmaxxing, and apparently even found his best friend on the forum. He said once that his parents gave up trying to intervene when they realized “there was nothing that they could do to stop my ascension”. He was later expelled from college after somebody doxxed and shared his information with the university, and they found testosterone in his dorm. He calls his life a “fucking horror story” and confesses to regretting being expelled from college. “I wish I had that experience...I will never get to live the normal life of a normal kid, so I’m going to try to mog.” He first went viral on Reddit after he posted this picture;

But he mainly gained popularity after saying this in an interview with right-wing podcaster Michael Knowles: “JD Vance is subhuman and Gavin Newsom mogs” and almost killed his stalker with his car on live footage, all he had to say after that was; hopefully he is dead. He also injected filler on his underage girlfriend’s face on a livestream and called himself “Dr.Clav” after that.

Clavicular’s daily doses of drugs for looksmaxxing are: Testosterone, Accutane, Retatritutide, Nebivolol, Melatonin, L-Glutathione, NAD+, Anavar, Minoxidil, Dutasteride, Crystal Methamphetamine, IGF1, HGH and BPC157. He is currently planning for a jaw surgery after taking a college loan for it. He didn’t tell his followers that higher levels of testosterone intake than normal increase aggressiveness, develop high-risk behaviour, antisociality, and infidelity.

What makes Clavicular and looksmaxxing gain traction, as “Hidden AmuraKa” pointed out in his video essay, is the quantification of beauty. That attraction is irrelevant, and desire must submit to measurement. The human eye is wrong unless it agrees with the metric. Beauty ceases to be aesthetic or cultural and becomes engineering compliance. But attraction cannot be reduced to skull ratios. The crisis is not one man’s obsession with image; it is a society that no longer looks beyond itself.

He frequently calls his community subhuman to their face, and it is heartbreaking, because it is obvious that a “looksmaxxing influencer” is going to attract a lot of young boys or guys that are insecure of their looks and by the end of this want to fit in the societal standards and have more romantic prospects, just like Clavicular, who was 14 when he started out.

So, where did looksmaxxers evolve from?

First, there was a website called PUAhate.com, which was supposed to be a hate thread for pick-up artists that are a part of the manosphere, but turned into something completely different because it started breeding users like Elliot Rodger, who pulled an open fire because of his hatred against women. Then obviously it shut down, but Sluthate.com was their next website, after which they migrated to Lookism.net. This is where PSL stems from.

• PUAhate.com; P

• Sluthate.com ;S

• Lookism.net ;L

What is the PSL, you ask? PSL is a scale that ranks attractiveness from a higher to lower order as follows;

1. Peak Adam

2. Reg Adam

3. Light Adam

4. Peak Chad

5. Reg Chad

6. Low Chad

7. Peak Normie

8. Reg Normie

9. Low Normie

10. Peak Subhuman

11. Reg Subhuman

12. Low Subhuman

Currently, the main websites running are looksmax.org, which is for guys only, and Looksmaxxing Forum; it mostly has male users, but there are some female looksmaxxers too, though most of the time they are fighting about how the other gender has such high standards and which one is worse, you know...the normal conversations.

I mainly surfaced on the guys-only restricted community, since it was the main website, and while online searches say that they are slightly connected to the incel community, after surfing hours on it, I can say that this community is HEAVILY associated with the manosphere. They are homophobic, fatphobic, transphobic, misogynistic and racist. And the racism is BAD, you have skinmaxxing that tells people how to achieve that golden tan that Rihanna has, and some thread also discusses what to do if you are ethnically at a “disadvantage”.

One post wrote; “Use Betacarotene for skinmaxxing. Apparently, it can lighten and change pigment in darker, heavily melanated skin to a lighter and brighter color, but I don’t know for sure.”

Why are you advising a bunch of adolescents or young adults if you aren’t sure, Chad?

They randomly tagged a YouTuber and started ridiculing him and calling him “straight up ugly”. It is clear that looksmaxxing puts an emphasis on eugenic beauty standards (Eurocentric features), more openly than the current beauty industry already does.

The N word is used commonly, the C word is thrown around casually as an insult to asian men and women, and indians are curry cells or pajeets. In the rating section, if you are anything other than white, people will ask you to “ropemax” (SH), but if you are attractive, people will still tear down your confidence and be like “nah bro, you are not all that” or give you a list of things you got to work more on as if they are medical professionals. It is evident that everybody here is projecting. There are threads of people discussing what surgeries they would like to get. This is DANGEROUS.

Many of them refer to women as “foids” (female humanoid) or use the female PSL scale for reference, with Becky being the unattractive woman and Stacey being the desirable one that most men seek. Most of the advice threads on relationships frankly appeared like manipulation 101 to me, basically a to-do list so that greedy bitches don’t cheat on you with a man that mogs you to oblivion or has more money, because women are goldigger sluts.

Oh, and there is always a banner at the top, “Ascend Labs” skincare, because guess what; these influencers, websites and “self-help” industries only want to capitalize on people’s insecurities.

While some of it can be genuienly helpful like advice on how to be more social or about skincare, gym, healthy diet, fashion sense or heck even makeup, go ahead and curl your eyelashes and apply waterline pencil, you are not gay bro, but most of it is lists and lists of drugs or harmful advices like bonesmashing your zygos so that they have multiple minor fractures and heal over time, becoming stronger and more defined, which is completely false, medically not approved and looks a lot like self-harm to me.

What is sad is that this community recognized these issues in society and chose to strengthen it, rather than tearing it down. Their concern isn’t about the existence of these systems but about their lack of access to the benefits such systems provide.

credits: jessicadefino, instagram

“Mewing” might appear to be harmless, but it doesn’t actually work. The trend started with Dr.Mike Mew, a controversial British orthodontist with a strikingly square jaw. His dad was John Mew, who was also an orthodontist and was the first to make these claims and term it “orthotropics”. Though he later lost his license after making unsupported claims, Mike too had the same fate as his father and had to shut his clinic down after his insurance company dropped him.

Though I honestly just feel bad, it doesn’t deny their racism or misogyny, nor is it a justification of it, but in a world that is starting to feel out of control, it was bound to happen that we turn on ourselves. If we can’t control our external environment, we can always mold ourselves to stand out. And while I might deny and say that beauty lies on the inside, you and I both know that pretty privilege is real, just like fatphobia is. The Halo effect is real. Pretty privilege is the only privilege that we criticize while actively chasing it.

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𝒮𝓊𝒷𝓈𝒸𝓇𝒾𝒷ℯ!!

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Virginia Giuffre was assaulted by her dad, dad’s friend (Forrest), an unknown construction worker in a motel, Ron Eppinger, Epstein, and by several of his associates who sit at the top of the food chain in our world. Virginia finally thought she had her happy ending when she fell in love and married Robert Giuffre, but that also ended her in an abusive relationship, which would take her several more years to finally realise. We lost Virginia on 25 April 2025, who gave up her life after fighting constantly for justice. Nobody’s Girl is Virginia’s memoir, where she talks about her life filled with sadness; she was constantly let down by society.

“I had been trafficked to dozens of men by this point, and I remembered their faces clearly. There were old men and even older men; nerdy, shy men and boorish, arrogant men. There were men who wanted me to wear outfits, men who wanted to see me naked, and men who didn’t notice if I was clothed, as long as I touched them. There were men who couldn’t get or maintain erections. There were men who behaved as if I were lucky to be with them. There was at least one man who ignored me as I served him sexually, preferring instead to focus his eyes upon, and even to fondle, Epstein. Some men seemed grateful for my attention, particularly the septuagenarians, many of whom thanked me afterward, calling me a “good girl.” While I appreciated that these ancient men were less brutish than the others, I still felt sick when they said that. Their words made it undeniably clear that my childlike appearance was a part of my sexual appeal. It is truly impossible to say how many men there were, in part because I didn’t keep count, and in part because my interactions with them were so similar. Still, I was expected to make all the men happy, even though doing so made me miserable.”

You must have heard so many important names like: Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Michael Wolff, Deepak Chopra, Peter Thiel, and Andrew(former prince), linked to the files. But have you heard names like: Liz Stein, Marina Lacerda, Rachel Benavidez, Anouska De Georgiou, Michelle Licata, Maria Farmer, Annie Farmer, Courtney Wild, Danielle Bensky, Jess Michaels, Shawna Riviera? The victims who were so brave to speak out, who wanted to be seen and make other victims feel seen, these were women with lives, lives that were robbed of a light and future when Epstein decided to prey on them; they aren’t just a herd of women who were trafficked (media desensitizes us to victims). These women made the change and kept going even as the higher officials pressed on them.

My question is, why are we making these files a political scandal? Releasing the names linked to the case seems less like trying to hold them accountable and more like a way for people to treat it like a “scandal”. This is not right-wing or left-wing politics, nor should it be gossip; it’s a question of humanity. Men’s violence against women isn’t an elitist crime or some “cult” that only the rich are part of. I think it’s high time we acknowledge and support victims everywhere and stop victim-blaming. Point the finger at yourself and ask; what can I do today to make somebody’s life better? Virginia wanted us to make the world a safer space for victims; it shouldn’t matter if the perpetrator is a prince or homeless, the law should hold everybody accountable.

Lately, there has been chaos going on TikTok regarding Lifetouch (a photography company). Leon Black (former CEO of Apollo Global Management) was mentioned thousands of times in the Epstein files. His firm, Apollo, acquired Shutterfly in 2019, which is the parent company of Lifetouch. While Lifetouch itself was not mentioned in the Epstein Files, people are panicking over the fact that their school pictures might have been accessed by Epstein to find new victims, and that everybody is suddenly a part of the Epstein Files. I think Leon Black should be investigated, but just because you had your school picture taken does not mean that you are a part of the files or that Epstein was looking to recruit you. Let’s keep the conversation centered around the victims, not create panic among people, or make this situation about you or me.

The other day, I was scrolling on X, and I stumbled upon a tweet that said that “women from their race (I’m not mentioning which one) are not there in the files, even Epstein doesn’t find them attractive,” and somebody commented, “we should be happy our women aren’t in it”. Since when did we start making trafficking crimes about a specific race? I don’t understand how these people don’t feel an ounce of shame. VICTIMS ARE VICTIMS NO MATTER THEIR RACE. (To the people who don’t know, black victims were also involved.)

Brands like: The Limited, Limited Too, Justice, Victoria’s Secret (Les Wexner), Abercrombie and Fitch, Bath and Body Works, Peter Thomas Roth, Estee Lauder(and subsequent brands), and Allergan Aesthetics(Botox company) are some companies that have surfaced. linked with Epstein. I mean, is it really surprising that the beauty industry is and has always been handled by predatory men? Why do you think the beauty standard might be a literal child? These men love little girls and want to normalise that by making teenage girls sexualise, and women infantilise themselves. I have already taken a deep dive on this topic in another essay: https://open.substack.com/pub/princesspearlxoxo/p/girlhood-seualised?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web.

Models are largely exploited, they are recruited young, from rural areas, and called in foreign country for a “job opportunity”. They are isolated and stranded in a foreign country with no money, and that makes them easily exploitable, which these predators benefit from. Epstein was linked to several of these “model recruits”. Virginia wrote: “The other girls all seemed and appeared to be under the age of eighteen and didn’t really speak English. Epstein laughed about how they couldn’t really communicate, saying they are the easiest girls to get along with.”

The female suffering is a spectacle. Society only ever wants to hear the young, broken girl. We only ever see the representation of the young girl, because that is what draws us. But when the victim becomes old and sexually unattractive to the male gaze, what then? Do we hear her pleas when she lives long enough to tell the tale, or do we have empathy for her only when she is young, beautiful, and suffering?

Breaking the cycle of injustice is imperative. Virginia’s decision to speak out after seeing her newborn daughter’s face exemplifies the courage needed to drive change. This text calls for collective action to address the societal failures that allow such cycles to persist.

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𝒮𝓊𝒷𝓈𝒸𝓇𝒾𝒷ℯ!!

❥・・ ┈┈┈༚༅༚˳ . ୨୧ . ˳༚༅༚┈┈ ・・❥

Lolita, written by Vladimir Nabokov in 1955 by Olympia Press, was banned in France, England, Argentina, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa shortly after being published. But after its release in America, it became an instant bestseller. Now it has gained traction in pop-culture with Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die album, and its song “Lolita” or Sabrina Carpenter’s “photoshoots” or the Tumblr “soft-grunge/ pale-grunge” fans turned “coquette”. One look at red heart-shaped sunglasses and red lollipops, and you are instantly reminded of Lolita (fun fact: it wasn’t even a part of the book or movie, it was a poster and got so popular it became the official book cover). But how did we label Lolita as a “temptress” when she was groomed by Humbert Humbert? How did we turn Lolita into a forbidden love story when she was only 12?

Lolita was first adapted into a movie by Stanley Kubrick in 1962 and then Adrian Lyne in 1997. Kubrick tried to adapt it into a “dark comedy”, changed the plot, and tried to depict Lolita as more mature and a “temptress”. While Adrian Lyne’s adaptation was more true to the book, and more aesthetically and visually pleasing to look at, he directs it with an objectifying lens lingering on the underage actress’s body longer than necessary, playing into the old-man-couldn’t-help-himself trope; the male gaze is evident in the movie. Both the directors failed since it was never a “love story” (as Adrian said in an interview).

“We knew we must make her a sex object [..] where everyone in the audience could understand why everyone would want to jump on her.”

“We made sure when we cast her that she was a definitive sex object, not something that could be interpreted as being perverse. We wanted it to come off as a love story and to feel very sympathetic towards Humbert.”

-James B. Harris

The most important aspect of the book is its unreliable narrator. Humbert has two identities: the real one, doing the crimes (we still don’t know what actually happened), and the latter is the fake facade of a charming, helpless man he showcases in his manifesto; this reflects in his name, “Humbert Humbert”. He calls himself a “nympholept”, a fancier word for paedophile. His “diary” is a manipulative manuscript to justify his crimes to the jury. Not only is he a murderer and predator, but he was also in the psychiatry ward for a while and confesses to “tricking doctors” and having an “incomplete and unorthodox memory”. He manipulates readers by trying to flatter us, calls us learned readers, patient and meek in comparison to Lolita and ridicules the jurors as a wink to us.

Infact “Lolita” isn’t real. “Lolita” is a nickname that Humbert assigned her that shooes her real identity away, it dehumanises and objectifies her. We never really see Dolores’s real thoughts and personality as Humbert confesses her mind being “forbidden” to him.

“I do not know a thing about my darling’s mind”.

Yet we do see the cracks in his lies: when he metaphorically “kills her” after he assaulted her, ignores her crying every night after he feigns sleep, she tells him to “call it off,” which he interprets as jealousy, when she was just trying to protect other kids. We never really hear directly from Dolores; her words are always distorted by Humbert, even when they fought, she “said unspeakable things”. His damage on her becomes clear when we hear from the school that she is ”antagonistic, dissatisfied, cagey” and “obsessed with sexual thoughts for which she finds no outlet”.

“Nabokov plays a game with the reader to see how far we are willing to tolerate Humbert and whether we ever see it his way: a grand romance between an older man and a willing “nymphet”. It is rape all right, but Nabokov is testing us. Do we believe Humbert when he assures us that Dolores’s cries of no are followed by sighs of pleasure?”

“Do we believe that Humbert’s disparaging comments about adult female bodies (“polluted”, “big-bodied creatures” with “goose-flesh”) are enough to justify his kidnapping and rape of a 12-year-old-girl?”

- MC Easton, The Fetishization of Girlhood

Although he calls her a “nymphet” (some other worldly being; this is not a child, he would never assault a child!), he is often annoyed by her childish antics, calling her a “normal” child in many instances. He instructs the printer to write her name repeatedly; ”repeat till page is full, printer”, trying to deceive the jurors and readers into believing that he “truly loved her”. He disguises lust as love.

Dolores is a lonely child, with no relatives left after her mother passed away, and Humbert uses that as an advantage. He isolates her, tells her their relationship is normal, and if she ever asks for help from anybody, she would end up worse. This becomes horrifyingly clear in these lines: ”At the hotel, we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she comes sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”

“Lolita isn’t a perverse young girl. She is a poor child who has been debauched...It is equally interesting to dwell, as journalists say, on the problem of the inept degradation that the character of the nymphet Lolita, whom I invented in 1955, has undergone in the mind of the broad public.”

“Not only has the perversion of this poor child been grotesquely exaggerated, but her physical appearance, her age, everything has been transformed by the illustrations in foreign publications...”

“In reality, Lolita is a little girl of twelve, whereas Humbert Humbert is a mature man, and it is the abyss between this age and that of the little girl that produces the vacuum, the vertigo, the seduction of mortal danger.”

“Secondly, it’s the imagination of the sad satyr that makes a magic creature of this little American schoolgirl...outside the maniacal gaze of Humbert, there is no nymphet.”

“Lolita the nymphet exists only through the obsession that destroys Humbert. Herein is an essential aspect of a unique book that has been betrayed by a factitious popularity.”

-Vladimir Nabokov, 1975

Nabokov was one of the most famous synesthetes, and that is evident in the book. Colours are used repeatedly to display emotion. Some colours that appear are: pink, purple, blue and red. Blue and red are evident most of the book, and are also used in juxtaposition.

1. Blue represents melancholy/nostalgia/aching for release: for example- Dolores is under “Dr Blue’s” care when she goes missing.

2. Red represents lust/hate: for example- fire of his loins, romantic red candles, tantalising scarlet lips, the blood-red armchair she sits in at the hotel, Eden red apple, Lolita’s frock with red apple and scratches like tiny dotted lines of coagulated rubies (she is the object of his desire).

Nabokov was obsessed with butterflies from a young age, and even though he refused that it had any influence on Lolita, to me it seems as if Lolita is a taxidermy; pretty enough to pin and look at, but is never set free and able to fly. Humbert is the scientist, and Lolita is his object of fascination. Lolita is a “nymphet” and coincidentally “nymph” is a larva of an insect with incomplete metamorphosis.

Humbert writes “She it was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster”, highlighting how society caters to women in the consumerist culture, to the point where everything, including hobbies, makeup, fashion, etc, is commodified: she is the ideal consumer.

Now comes the main argument: Is this book morally ethical? Should it have been published in the first place?

Some people argue that art plays a big role in society, and people should not be able to write their disturbing fantasies out for consumption for their even more deranged audience, because that shapes society and fuels predators and preverts. Others argue that censoring and corrupting art is what actually corrupts man to beast by giving access only to the bleakest aspects of humanity. I stand somewhere between this spectrum. I believe books like “Daddy’s Little Toy” by Lauren Tesselin shouldn’t exist; that is a plain disturbing pedophilic fantasy. However, for Lolita, Elizabeth Janeway put it best in the New York Times:

“As for its pornographic content, I can think of few volumes more likely to quench the flames of lust than this exact immediate description of its consequences.”

Shying away from topics of abuse doesn’t make them vanish. We don’t want to hear anything that might be out of our comfort zone, but the victims still exist, and their voices must be heard, however uncomfortable it may be. The media doesn’t owe us a moral obligation, and we should have the critical ability to interpret it responsibly. While Nabokov clearly said Lolita has no moral, I feel there is one, and I would like to finish this essay with it:

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𝒮𝓊𝒷𝓈𝒸𝓇𝒾𝒷ℯ!!

❥・・ ┈┈┈༚༅༚˳ . ୨୧ . ˳༚༅༚┈┈ ・・❥

“Girl” within a misogynistic culture implies: immaturity, frivolity, innocence and irresponsibility.

Trends like “girl-math”, ”girl-dinner” and ”I’m just a girl” might have started as a coping mechanism for women to reclaim their girlhood, but now they have reconstructed themselves into the misogynistic meaning of “girl”: immaturity, frivolity and irresponsibility.

Trends like “girl-math” are often recorded with a male relative or counterpart, who is shown to be absolutely distressed and flabbergasted while the woman tries to explain “girl-math”, indicating that men are the financially literate and educated ones, while the women who are trying to justify their consumerism are seen as frivolous and “Im just a girl”: which is basically infantilisation of women, that for some reason is found desirable in our culture.

While we used to play with Barbies, little girls now play with Bratz, which are highly sexualised. They wear mini skirts, leather tops, heeled boots, have the perfect body: tiny waist, big hips, full lips, excessive makeup, “siren” eyes and button nose. Their faces are reconstructed, and measurements that are even worse and more unrealistic than Barbie’s.

Girls internalise the “male gaze” (introduced by Laura Mulvey) and start objectifying themselves from a young age. They start partaking in the society’s “beauty standards” early on: low-cut clothes, anti-ageing skincare, makeup and shaving. Wearing bras earlier because budding breasts are the utmost blasphemy! They mould themselves into a version that men want them to be, because it is not acceptable otherwise. Susan Sontag in “The Double Standards of Ageing” wrote:

“Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible, who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women, they can become women much earlier- and remain active adults, enjoying the long, erotic career of which women are capable, far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.”

Women are scared of ageing; one single wrinkle? Botox appointment booked. Our beauty standard is a child: not a single hair in sight, frail bodies, flawless skin. One Google search and you find that “a good feminine woman’s” traits are- receptivity (docility), flowing emotions and innocence; which, wait a minute, are the same traits of a good child! I missed one more trait: hygiene.

In this context, hygiene is actually associated with hair. That somehow having hair is not “hygienic”, but who cares if men don’t shave! Travisha Sood, in “The Infantilization of Women in Mainstream Media and Society”, wrote:

“The idea of a hairless body being feminine is inherently infantilising since it imitates the body of a prepubescent girl and directly ties femininity to physical appearance.”

“Body hair is a marker that signals the very difference between a woman and a girl, much like periods would.”

“Therefore, when society makes this same body marker ‘ugly’ or ‘anti-feminine’, it automatically marks womanhood ‘ugly’; it rejects womanhood and embraces girlhood.”

If that is your personal preference, then sure, but if you are going around policing other women on how they should keep themselves prim and proper, then respectfully, mind your own business.

Media plays a big role in sexualising children: trying to make it appealing and acceptable to the masses: Britney Spears in Rolling Stone(1999) with a teletubby and suggestive pose, Love Cosmetics (1975) magazine and an ad that announced “there is one person nobody can resist and that’s a baby”, Vogue (2010) with their “femme fatale” photoshoots of young girls and several others.

Being presented with this ideology constantly can desensitise us to the victimisation of girls. The media constantly objectifies women and girls, serving as decorative objects. But self-objectification is not always gratifying; it eventually leads to low self-esteem, ED, appearance anxiety, mental-health issues, etc. Many women smoke cigarettes as a way to lose weight (it’s an appetite suppressant) or abuse other substances to cope with the constant self-objectification and the suffocating “beauty standards”.

I think it is time that we start pondering why society is so fixated with youth, and any woman over the age of 25 suddenly becomes “expired” (I’m eyeing you, X users).

❥・・ ┈┈┈༚༅༚˳ . ୨୧ . ˳༚༅༚┈┈ ・・❥

𝒮𝓊𝒷𝓈𝒸𝓇𝒾𝒷ℯ!!

“Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?” by Chante Joseph is a culture think-piece on Vogue that talks about how it might be “uncool” now to declare you have a boyfriend on social media. The rise of soft-launch culture is to curate the image of an independent woman. Soft-launch, so they can still reap the benefits that come with being partnered, without making it their whole personality and getting ostracised for it.

Many people supported her, including me at first, considering the real-world problems. It’s a brewing fight, with 4B movement in South Korea, #MeToo, gender pay gaps, male-dominated politics, online red-pill culture and misogyny. In an era where gender-based violence is so normalised, women might be developing a defence mechanism, since heterosexuality feels so politically fragile right now.

Is it “traditional” in a sense? No, not in most third-world countries. “Marriage” is considered more traditional. But it is the same text in a different font, a burden.

But as I dug deeper, I realised she never touched on the subject, whether having a boyfriend off social media is embarrassing or not. What she talked about was how to PR better, but it does not resonate with you at all if you don’t use social media at all or keep it private. Could it be self-branding under platform capitalism repackaged as “feminism”?

But the question still stands, since it created such nuance on tik-tok and substack, my answer is: having a boyfriend is embarrassing if your boyfriend is embarrassing. Kate Milett quotes-

“The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity.”

While this may be true, love still stands timeless, because real love elevates, doesn’t suppress. It sets you free; it’s not supposed to shackle you as patriarchy does. Love take vulnerabilty, it is messy. And while I haven’t forgotten about the points I made earlier, which is what a lot of the public feels about the Vogue article, I wouldn’t judge somebody if they did choose to have a boyfriend.

❥・・ ┈┈┈༚༅༚˳ . ୨୧ . ˳༚༅༚┈┈ ・・❥

𝒮𝓊𝒷𝓈𝒸𝓇𝒾𝒷ℯ!!

❥・・ ┈┈┈༚༅༚˳ . ୨୧ . ˳༚༅༚┈┈ ・・❥

When does the line between actual struggle and a curated one mix?

How do you know if your sadness stems from the rocks life is throwing your way, or if you got influenced by the Tumblr “sad coquette girly depression” core? The comments under those sad 4 hour playlist you see and relate to, that would be alarming for any psychologist to read, but you reason with them anyway, is that what makes you go down a rabbit hole? Or is it the sheer negativity you consume that makes you want to become one of them, a part of a community, doesn’t matter, that they would eventually tug you down until you gradually drown, but the thought is comforting nonetheless, the thought of finally belonging.

Depression, especially for young girls, has always been something we romanticise as a society. Since the early era of Hollywood, we have seen aesthetics like cocaine-chic gain traction. Kate Moss was an icon. But what she needed in reality was help, and so did all the models and young girls who looked up to them and fell prey to substance abuse because it was “trendy”. In reality, it has always been about manipulation. In Sophie Gilbert’s “Girl on Girl”, she highlights how pop culture never got rid of its exploitation. It didn’t embrace “feminism”. It fooled us and made us comply. Dressing down and promiscuity were suddenly empowering, but guess who benefited from that, men.

Jia Tolentino in Trick Mirror wrote-

“The timidity in mainstream feminism to admit that women’s choices- not just our problems are, in the end, political has led to a vision of ”women’s empowerment” that often feels brutally disempowering in the end. The root of this trouble is the fact that mainstream feminism has led to conform patriarchy and capitalism to become mainstream in the first place. Old requirements, instead of being overthrown, are rebranded. Beauty work is labelled as “self-care” to make it sound progressive.”

“In 2017, Taffy Brodesser- Akner wrote a story for The New York Times Magazine about the new vocabulary for weight loss, noting the way women’s magazines replaced cover lines like “Get lean! Control your eating!” with ”Be your healthiest! GET STRONG!”

People started “fasting and eating clean and cleansing and making lifestyle changes.”

“Brodesser-Akner wrote, “which, by all available evidence, is exactly like dieting.” It sometimes seems that feminism can imagine no more satisfying progress than this current situation, one in which, instead of being counselled by mid-century magazines to spend time and money trying to be more radiant for our husbands , we can now counsel one another to do all the same things but for ourselves.”

“Virgin Suicides” by Jeffrey Eugenides showed us how five teenage girls suffered with self-image and depression after they lost one of their younger sisters to suicide. We see how all 4 sisters cope in their different ways, and instead of helping them out, the neighbour boys are fascinated by their state and invade their privacy by stalking them, then a popular high school jock uses Lux(one of the sisters)for his pastime and then abandons her, and their parents shun them from going out. Society whispered, created scenarios, it felt like some sort of an obsession or fascination, to ridicule and speculate on the victim even in death.

The story ends with all 4 of the sisters committing suicide.

But what is shocking is that Sofia Coppola is the one who brings this story to life by directing the movie so beautifully; she tried to show the story from the girls’ perspective. The original author, Jeffrey Eugenides, was somehow deluded that the neighbour boys he created, who kept a pillow and imagined it to be the girls’, even when they were middle-aged, beer-bellied and balding, were somehow innocent and did not in fact metaphorically represent society’s bizarre obsession with young girls and mental health issues.

Leslie Jaminson wrote in the “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” -

“How do we represent female pain without producing a culture in which this pain has been fetishized to the point of fantasy or imperative? Fetishize, to be excessively or irrationally devoted to.”

If a beautiful woman dies young, it would be a tragedy, she would lament herself as everlasting, her beauty never fading away. It is romanticised in stories like Hamlet (Ophelia), or in the real world, like Marilyn Monroe. “Frozen-in-death” is the ultimate thing to plot your story into, so the male lead finally has an arc as Aoka Matsuda wrote in “The Woman Dies”.

Many disturbing aesthetics on Tumblr and Pinterest need to be looked into, because young teens are romanticising stories like Lolita, Virgin suicides, and Lana Del Rey. There is nothing wrong with Lana Del Rey, but you can’t deny she romanticises abusive relationships in her songs. The internet has romanticised a “sad girl-core” for a very long time, and it is dangerous, not only from a mental health perspective but also from a physical health perspective, since women’s issues in healthcare are often not taken seriously or not researched much. Susan Sontag, in “Illness as a metaphor”, wrote:

“(Sickness was) a becoming fraility... symbolised as an appealing vulnerability, a superior sensitivity, became more and more the ideal look for women.”

I want to finish this essay with a quote from a pretty famous movie (directed by James Mangold) and book (by Susanna Kaysen) “Girl, Interrupted” where the author (Susanna) navigates a new chapter of her life in a mental asylum as she battles BPD.

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𝒮𝓊𝒷𝓈𝒸𝓇𝒾𝒷ℯ!!

❥・・ ┈┈┈༚༅༚˳ . ୨୧ . ˳༚༅༚┈┈ ・・❥

Declaring yourself “feminist” is the new social suicide.

When I was in high school, everybody hated my English teacher. She wasn’t a bad teacher per se, but she often talked about women’s rights and declared herself a “feminist”. So, people called her too uptight, victim-minded, a “feminist” as if that is a sin. But everybody grew to love her by the end of the year. The problem I realised was the preconceived notions we are forming about feminists, especially teenagers, because social media and red-pill culture play a big part.

Recently, I read: “Men Who Hate Women” by Laura Bates. While she does make some points I disagree with, she sheds light on this really well.

Manosphere is a place where often lonely and mentally distressed men go to seek sanctuary, because a sense of community helps them feel loved and belong; they feel like they are a part of something bigger, but the toxic masculinity that they are clinging to is the very reason why many men become distressed. Men’s mental health is not taken seriously, with a higher chance of them abusing substances and a 3 times higher ratio of men committing suicide.

Manosphere is definitely related to white supremacy and right-wing, but that’s a talk for another day. There are many communities in the manosphere, some being: Incels, PUA (Pick-up artists), MGTOW (Men going their own way), IBMOR (Introspective Black men of reform), MRM (Men’s Rights Activism), AVFM (A Voice for Men), trolls, etc.

Manosphere riles up crimes against women, and several open fires happened previously- in a sorority house, a spa, a university, etc, most of its victims were women.

Manosphere bleeds into the everyday world. One post of stereotypical “WOMEN” is shits and giggles. But constantly seeing these memes with underlying ridicule of women and people supporting it turns into an actual women-hating mindset. This is why it’s even more dangerous for young teenage boys, since they get easily peer- pressured and influenced into thinking a certain way, which is why awareness is required. “Adolescence” directed by Philip Barantini, is a great series highlighting exactly how red-pill culture is affecting kids.

We need to start regulating social media, educating boys early, not letting media downplay violence, model healthy masculinity and defend feminism since the manosphere thrives on lying about true feminism and discussing only toxic feminsm that is riled up by that 1% of influencers that post “ We hate all men, we wish you didnt exist!” for ragebait content and more views.

So to conclude, yes, I am a feminist, and I fight for EQUALITY FOR EVERYONE, and yes, that does not make me a misandrist, nor do I stand for women who do something wrong just because they are women too. And even though it took me some time to get here, I am finally not scared to declare it.

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𝒮𝓊𝒷𝓈𝒸𝓇𝒾𝒷ℯ!!