Stop Blaming Social Media for Patriarchy’s Evils

The entire world is organized in a way that makes teen girls feel bad about their bodies. Instagram is not the problem.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

“I believe that Facebook’s products harm children,” said whistleblower Frances Haugen, as she testified before a Senate panel earlier this week. She claims to have inside information proving that Facebook’s social media products, which also include Instagram and WhatsApp, are “generating self-harm and self-hate — especially for vulnerable groups, like teenage girls.” Unsurprisingly, folks latched onto this story quickly. We all love to hate social media, almost as much as we love a good damsel-in-distress fairy tale.

We all love to hate social media, almost as much as we love a good damsel-in-distress fairy tale.

Everyone knows that researchers have been looking at the relationship between digital media and teen well-being for decades. A few high profile, celebrity psychologists have repeatedly claimed — with little evidence — that smartphones are causing an adolescent mental health epidemic. Many parents buy into a form of technophobia that’s grounded in nostalgia for the good ol’ days. But most experts agree that the evidence we have so far remains inconclusive, contradictory, and unreliable. Facebook’s internal marketing data, leaked by Haugen, is even less dependable.

So, why is everyone talking about it? What makes the “Facebook Files” worthy of a major newspaper story and a televised Senate panel? It’s a lot easier to scapegoat social media than it is to acknowledge that our ongoing commitment to outdated cultural and family conventions reinforces and maintains exploitative misogynist attitudes about beauty, sex, consent, and gender. We can click the ‘like’ icon, share fear-mongering click-bait, avoid self-reflection, and assuage our collective guilt!

Feminist writers and psychologists have been telling us for decades that the entire world is organized in a way that makes teen girls internalize the male gaze and feel bad about their bodies. Shifting the blame onto Instagram will do nothing to address the negative ways patriarchal male entitlement affects teen girls’…