“Boys expect us to be like the Bop House”

“Boys expect us to be like the Bop House.”

This is a comment from a Year 7 girl - so aged 12ish.

I hadn’t heard of the Bop House until a couple of hours ago. If you’re in the same position, it’s a place where a dozen or so young women make videos together … [yep, your brain probably went to the right place] …

There’s a lot to unpack in this, but I want to focus on how it starts with TikTok. Millions of views are generated by videos that could be regarded as relatively harmless - silly dances, cuddly toys, that sort of thing … but are actually a form of grooming.

TikTok users skew young. Watching content from channels like the Bop House, girls are learning that only their bodies count, and boys are learning that girls are objects.

[There is also a recruitment pipeline that leads from TikTok to some other parts of the ‘platform economy’. Again, you can probably guess which parts - but that’s for another day].

I’m pretty sure the time will come when social media is age restricted, the way that cigarettes, alcohol and gambling are restricted.

But we’re not there yet.

If there’s a tone of moral outrage in this post - well, maybe there should be?

Maybe we should be more outraged that our young people are being taken advantage of like this?

NB I’ve consciously toned the language down in this post for algo-related reasons. I hope that hasn’t undermined the seriousness of the issue.

What to do?

• The webinar I attended was organised by CEASE UK - they have some interesting projects on the go.
• Other organisations working in this space include Center for Humane Technology, Mothers Against Media Addiction and Collective Shout.
• Jonathan Haidt is also worth following. He suggests one of the simplest things we can do is ask schools to consider banning smartphones.
• The grooming of young people on social media is a symptom of the perverse incentives that underpin the metacrisis.

Image is three ‘Newsies’, taken in 1910 by Lewis Wickes Hine.