During an interview for a podcast about my new book, Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism, I asked a young college student what he thought parents should know about kids’ online lives. “I think parents should be very cognizant,” he warned, “of what percentage of the content their child is consuming is from sources that they actively chose to watch.”
It isn’t news to teens that an increasing percentage of their feeds is from content they never asked for or expected to see. But I chose this excerpt to share with Teen Vogue readers because of that podcast interview comment and how important it is that we all pay more attention to the issue. It’s hard to understate the ways in which promoted and recommended content — from sources that we did not subscribe to — are subtly normalizing and legitimizing very harmful ideas and beliefs. And as you scroll and scroll past that content, sometimes clicking through to rabbit holes of other harmful ideas, we can collectively begin to fully see the effects in declining mental health, rising eating disorders, self-harm, rampant misogyny, and other negative outcomes.
Perhaps one of the most poorly understood dimensions of social media usage is how much of the content we consume is gendered, as it’s been algorithmically tailored by the platforms to increase our engagement and keep us endlessly watching. But that gendered content, as I demonstrate in Man Up, is shaping destructive views among teens and young adults about their bodies, what it means to be a woman or a man, and what healthy and intimate relationships look like. Understanding these consequences is the first step toward making change.
There’s lots of talk among adults about the dangers to teen boys from influencers like Andrew Tate, who promote harmful views of women under the guise of coaching boys and young men a narrow view of what success looks like as “real men” — dominant, aggressive, wealthy, and holding power over women.
But boys aren’t the only ones who encounter gendered influences online. Across online spaces like TikTok, there are plenty of people who are trying to do the same thing — telling girls and young women how to be a good woman or a real woman. Girls and young women may encounter online influencers who encourage women to embrace roles as submissive homemakers and mothers, decked out in 1950s housewife heels and dresses — or they may follow false self-help or spiritual influencers who promise wellness or success in business or relationships but instead lure women into harmful exploitation.
The first and best known among these types of messages online comes from the Tradwife movement — which calls on women to embrace traditional gender roles by eschewing paid work outside the home, dedicating their lives to domestic fulfillment through the care of household, submission to husbands, and rearing of children. In Tradwife and adjacent spaces, women are encouraged to reject feminism, embrace “sovereign midwifery,” and reject hospital birth in favor of having babies “outside the system” in ways that are often linked to ideas about a purer, traditional, back-to-nature lifestyle that is free from government influence. These ideas sometimes bleed into conspiracies like QAnon as well as support for authoritarian discipline and the exclusion of women from voting rights in favor of a sole, male head-of-household vote. Some influencers present a Tradwife life as one choice among many, but others directly criticize women who work, feminists, and others as unnatural and destined for an unhappy life.
Tradwives intentionally adopt submissive roles while valorizing white men’s roles and “sense of great importance” as the forgers and center of Western civilization — and framing gendered roles as biblical, biological, and natural. This valorization of tradition, heritage, and a romanticized past against a seemingly chaotic and unnatural present is sold as empowering for women who find modern feminism and the constraints of balancing work and motherhood impossible and who should return to a simpler, more fulfilling life. Tradwife feeds are full of images of a happy, nostalgic embrace of tradition and motherhood — while making it clear that this requires an explicitly heterosexual frame and exclusion of gender-diverse, trans, and same-sex marriages in favor of promotion of “traditional” family values.
Tradwife spaces can easily bleed into more dangerous, racist ideas, especially related to white birth rates and the call to have more white babies. Some online forums promise discussions of contraception, pregnancy, and motherhood 8 but then also blend anti-multiculturalism or white ethnonationalism ideas in ways that can provide a “softer face” for extreme ideas. One of the best known examples is a blog run by Ayla Stewart, also known as “Wife With a Purpose."
Stewart’s original interest in feminist, pagan, raw foodist-vegan spaces evolved into a militant belief in women’s obligations as homemakers and mothers, and finally into a “virulent strain of white nationalism.” She eventually issued a “white baby challenge” to encourage white women to have at least as many white babies as she had had — six — in order to compensate for the threat to white civilizations supposedly posed by falling birth rates and demographic shifts.
It's not just Tradwife content that pushes particular views of womanhood to girls and young women. A second way that girls are women are told what “real women” look like is through disinformation and false claims about trans women, often spread by other women. Some of these women call themselves feminists, arguing transgender women are not legitimate as women and therefore not worthy of inclusion in the fight for women’s rights, and that women’s liberation can only take place through men’s absence or removal. They also position transgender women as a physical threat, depicting trans women as disguised male predators who pose a threat in bathrooms and locker rooms.
Proponents often cloak anti-trans views with softer language, using terms like “gender critical” feminism. Anti-trans feminism became well known to the public through the controversy surrounding Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling, who has regularly made transphobic statements while insisting they are about protecting children from harmful hormone treatment, protecting “real” women in bathrooms from the predatory threat to safety that trans women supposedly represent, or claiming that trans activists are “erasing” the concept of biological sex. Rowling personally funded a new domestic violence support center in Scotland which explicitly excludes trans women, arguing that the center offers “woman-centered and woman-delivered care.”
Meanwhile, trans women and especially trans women of color are at a much greater risk of intimate partner violence and sexual assault compared to cisgender women. Transgender women experience violent victimization at a rate of 86.1 incidents per 1,000 people, compared to cisgender women’s 23.7 for every 1,000 people.
It's not just what people say online that matters. Images, jokes, and memes play a big role in communicating ideas about “ideal” womanhood too, especially through memes focused on issues of purity, morality and immorality, and sexual promiscuity. Online spaces are rife with jokes and memes related to issues of consent and virginity, along with male supremacy memes (e.g., comments or jokes about differences in brain size between men and women) and memes conveying anti-abortion and antifeminist content.
One common set of memes depict a slender “trad girl” dressed in demure clothing with long, blond hair and light makeup and compare her, invariably, to a “lefty woman” (unkempt, unhinged), a “slut” (provocatively dressed, heavily made up), or a “liberated feminist” (tattooed, dyed hair, tight clothing). In one well-known meme comparing a “liberated feminist” to a “Tradwife,” margin text describes the tattooed, heavily made-up feminist with phrases like “sleeps around to improve her self esteem but it only makes her feel worse,” while the “Trad wife” is described as having a “slim figure from her healthy homemade meals and active lifestyle.” White supremacist and nationalist text often accompanies the images by describing the liberated feminist as “only attracted to black men” or having “aborted her black baby last year” while the Tradwife “loves her family, race, and country in that order.”
Finally, body image plays a huge role in this too, especially through algorithms that drive harmful content praising extreme thinness through eating disorder content and pro-anorexia channels, or promotes self-harm. This includes videos that showcase extreme calorie restriction by showing the daily eating habits of people with eating disorders or promote “anorexia boot camp,” a 30-day extreme calorie restriction diet, or thinspo and skeletal imagery featuring emaciated bodies. One study showed that one in three videos recommended to young girls by YouTube promoted eating disorder content. TikTok’s algorithm, meanwhile, recommended suicidal content to girls in less than three minutes of their joining the app.
