Mary Wollstonecraft on an iPhone.
Please do burn this book: Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, the instant #1 New York Times bestseller. It’s still spreading not just debunked lies but a panic about female chastity and popular entertainment that Mary Wollstonecraft expertly exposed sexist gibberish two-hundred and fifty years ago in A Vindication of the Rights of Women. For years now, Haidt has been trying to influence policy and lawmakers in the name of protecting virgin minds from popular media. What could go wrong?
Better questions:
What if social media didn’t pose a particular threat to girls?
What if the foundations of social media—freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and a free press—were no more dangerous for girls than boys, and just as fundamental in a liberal democracy?
Moreover, what if social media is morally and medically neutral?
What if social media weren’t constantly framed as the royal road to moral and psychological ruin for girls?
And finally, what if prurient and totalizing indictments social media as a destroyer of girlish chastity, purity, and virtue are just a rehash of all sermons about about social life and media as destroyers of girlish chastity, purity, and virtue, e.g. the ones in James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (1766)?
Here’s Fordyce on racy novels that turn you into a whore, an actual whore, if you so much as look at them:
What shall we say of certain books, which…contain such rank treason against the royalty of Virtue, such horrible violation of all decorum, that she who can bear to peruse them must in her soul be a prostitute. Can it be true, that any young woman, pretending to decency, should endure for a moment to look on this infernal brood of futility and lewdness? — Fordyce’s Sermons
Here’s Jonathan Haidt on racy Facebook that has turned millions of girls into (showy!) whores because they looked at it:
Facebook’s products have probably harmed millions of girls…The toxicity comes from the very nature of a platform that girls use to post photographs of themselves and await the public judgments of others. The wrong photo can lead to school-wide or even national infamy, cyberbullying from strangers, and a permanent scarlet letter. — Jonathan Haidt, “The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls”
This is the first of three posts about digitization as a feminist issue.
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Sometimes one wishes for censorship ... if only for the misinformed and wrong-headed.
Haidt has always been a concern troll, with a focus on “purity”. He used to associate this with Republicans until they all started cheering for Trump