Ironically, I think that generation may have been more or less right about the imagery being a negative, but wrong about the mechanism by which it works on us negatively.
Sexualized imagery does not turn boys into rapists. But it does seem to promote body image insecurity, social status worries, and general anxiety, in those who see it, particularly those of the same sex, and where the person is seen as desirable to emulate. Violence in the media, also, probably doesn't make us violent. But it may well skew how accurately we estimate the likelihood of interpersonal violence. Quite a few studies hint at a link between how terrified someone is of being murdered and how much gory TV they watch, basically.
t;ldr: instead of turning us into sex-crazed impulsives like feared, it turned us into sex-hating neurotics.
Putting female people into certain position doesn't turn them automatically into liberal challengers of the status quo, who rationally question the things they learned their whole life, certain kinds of pressure comes in the worst forms from other women (mother, grandmother, aunts, colleagues, etc).
E.g. if you are a girl in a typical family in Italy cutting your hair short, getting a tattoo, or not wearing a bra is something your relatives definitly will mention negatively to you. The only reason being that they have an idealized image of what a woman must look like to be a "propper woman". If you don't look like that they might think you are a lesbian, have psychological problems or similar silly causal connections.
I'd say the critical part wrt suicides is not that people are competing for attention from the opposite sex, because that has been around for a million years. The critical new aspect is that people are now grossly underestimating their relative standing. And that's because social media makes the one pretty outlier actress from the other side of the globe feel personal and acessible, which tricks us into treating them like a valid comparison point even though most high school girls will never need to compete against a Hollywood actress on looks, because the latter one is unavailable to all of her male classmates anyway.
Is this actually true?
Just because the hollywood access (or porn star) is unavailable doesn’t mean the male classmates are behaving that way.
Regardless of gender, the people that rise to the top tend to be sociopathic…
The insinuation that anyone who rises to the top of an organisation must be sociopathic is dillusional.
Yes, there is a higher incidence at the CEO level, traits that help you in a role also help you get there, go figure, but the idea all leaders are sociopaths is a huge stretch based off nothing but your own bias and distain for anyone high up in a power structure, that seems to be going around right now.
Citation needed, as well as a fully qualified definition of "organisation". It's not fair to equate the leader of the local farming co-op with the editorial head of a major newsgathering (or in present-times: news-aggregation) corporation.
Now take the world of a teenager, which is already small, and blast it at them 24/7 full force. Imagine the insane bullshit you see from adults on social media trying to distort reality... now imagine how extreme a child could be imitating those same adults. The big difference being we (adults) don’t then have to go spend eight hours around some crazy asshole. These kids do. It’s haunting.
Social media seems less social the long we have it. I think “petty media” would have been a better term and communicated its relative importance in our lives much better.
I assume the fear was girls would sexualize themselves because of what they saw was popular on MTV, which they believed would make them popular as well. I guess the big difference is that girls that sexualized themselves at that time never had an access to large audiences without perceived consequences like girls do on social media today.
I don't think depicting violence in video games is similar because I would say the violent aspect of games isn't the defining aspect of the content that people want to emulate. For example all the video game streamers and influencers, like girls who sexualize themselves, generally want the popularity, and the popularity is derived from being good at the games (or being the entertainer), not by being violent or emulating the violence from games, whereas the popularity of sex symbols is inherently their sexuality. It was starting with internet chat rooms, but there was really no way to broadcast your sexuality to thousands of people back then without exposing yourself to risks like doing it in the public. Social media both removed these risks by creating a physical separation between the audience and the person sexualizing themselves, and provided an audience that provides the attention that those sexualizing themselves desire. It sort of created the missing pieces for the incentive structures that reinforce the behaviors.
It isn't just sexualization too, social media has allowed many communities that were either too niche or 'undesirable' to thrive in offline communities to flourish and become normalized over time.
There's a reason that the execs at most of those social media companies don't let their kids use their own product. Something we've seen from tobacco execs in the past.
The problem with social media is that it is not a game. It's real life.
Ordinary but attractive humans curate, stage, and edit snippets of perfect lives. Bleeding edge algorithms inject these false realities into our subconscious.
My friends 16-year-old daughter posts photos from a completely different reality if you didn't know her personally.
She posts glamour shots of her and her friends doing all the silly Instagram model stuff you see, in locations like beaches, in front of Disneyland (She just took a picture in front of it, it wasn't even OPEN) etc. And somehow she always looks thin.
The reality is, her family was pretty hard hit financially by COVID-- and that she's a kinda dumpy teenager whose flunking out of High school. Literally a D and F student.
But she has 700 followers on instagram.
EDIT: I just remembered I have a friend whose a minor fitness celebrity and its the same thing with him. He posts photos of him doing all this wonderful stuff, driving an expensive car (which I know is a rental). I help him with his website sometimes and he questions me about his hosting costs (less than $200/yr) and asks if its necessary it cost that much. So he can't really have much money or glamour in his life.
The new buzzword in private school now is "resilience", which I feel like is tacit acknowledgement that kids need to deal with things sucking in the future.
Self esteem (1990 - 2000s) = denial: "I don't feel bad!" Resilience (2010 -) = anger: "I feel bad, but I'll fight and come back stronger!"
Maybe the future pattern will be as follows:
"Solution-driven" = bargaining: "I feel bad and here's what you can do so I feel better" "Pragmatic" = depression: "I feel bad and I should feel bad" "Peaceful warrior" = acceptance: "I feel bad and that's normal when the world is a post-apocalyptic nightmare in 2060"
But I would posit that it is possible that constant exposure to people in your network's achievements (or appearances thereof) can elicit emotions that have negative consequences over long periods of time. I think tribal species probably have an innate function of trying to sort and rank members for various purposes, and maybe that program can get overloaded.
In my schooling experience I don't think I remember there being a correlation between household wealth and mental health issues. There were poor kids who didn't engage at all with the stress of preparing for the future and therefore had a great time in middle / high school (their suffering came later...) and many kids with richer parents who put them through grueling schooling regimens, with very high standards and conditional love, which led to lots of problems with anxiety / depression.
I think a lot of problems came from the remote schooling being really bad for time management. Kids got bad grades, felt like their lives were ruined. This is something I think is happening a lot.
It also coincided with the post-2009 financial crisis. Could be more financially unstable households. Could be a feeling if being left behind as pressure to excel academically and socially increased due to a desire to get into better schools for some financial security. I don’t know. Just throwing out other hypotheses.