wyll?

By Audrey Hwang

wyll? The horrific acronym that plenty of teenage girls can relate to. It’s a clear sign that a boy only cares about what you look like and not much beyond that. Because when society has boiled down to asking for pictures of what you look like when meeting someone for the first time online, rather than starting a genuine conversation, you know something has been messed up.

We talk about extreme standards for the way girls look all the time, but no one knows where they are truly derived from. The root of the problem is ingrained in something that has become so normalized in our country: social media. When today's society normalizes the addiction to the internet, the way people perceive day-to-day life is altered.

But how does this widespread use and addiction to the internet mutilate the minds of young boys? In recent years, social media has become a breeding ground for people to get their 5 minutes of fame. However with the development of new platforms, not all of these 5 minutes have been good. Take for example OnlyFans, a subscription service that promotes pornography. With high numbers of content creators that are only on the rise, the effects of such programs go beyond their origins, and infect other apps and programs with disgusting and graphic visuals of women who are half naked, showing off their body for the entire world to see. When boys see women with bodies that seem too good to be true and display sexual intercouse as something that isn't intimate and personal, it only fosters toxic masculinity. Sure, some may argue that these are people who are in desperate need of money, but my problem with OnlyFans isn't the fact that people are choosing to sell their bodies. It's the fact that online prostitution has become normalized and viewed by so many teenagers. Because the inevitable result is immature boys who only want girls for their looks and their bodies.

However for girls, all of these videos of people who seem unreal only exacerbate comparison and unrealistic standards. Everyone wants to be pretty, it's human nature. But social media has made this issue exponentially worse with the rise of standards that can be observed in today's society. When you feel confident, you feel happier about yourself. But this becomes more difficult when you're comparing yourself to the people you see online, especially as filters and plastic surgery are on the rise. Girls will literally go to the extent to starve themselves, only to look appealing to the male gaze because of the standards created and normalized on the internet. The problem becomes large when the link between social media and suicide is clear today.  

To solve this problem, we can start by making sure that apps with teenagers have stricter restrictions on adult content. There's nothing we can do about pretty people posting on social media, but the largest issue at hand are the gross thoughts that are fueled by pornographic content on the internet. When you stop normalizing hypersexualization and make graphic content harder to come by, you make sure that boys don't expect all girls to be perfect. Because the reality is, everyone is different, and fueling one-size-fits-all standards on the internet is far from the way our society should be growing.