Perhaps the aspect of the modern internet that I hate the most is influencer culture.
There are legitimate influencers, people with real skill and knowledge worth watching.
Unfortunately, as Miguel said, sex sells. So beng attractive and vapid on the internet is often enough to get a person noticed and monetized.
What has happened is that this sort of influencer has pushed the knowledgeable and skilled out of the market.
Why invest years in gaining experience and knowledge, and putting hours into creating detailed content when the money is going to go to Ms. Yogapants for jiggle clips?
I’ve seen it myself in shooting. I knew one female shooter. She’s not good (USPSA C class) But she’s got a very nice ass in very tight pants and an ammo sponsorship from a distributor and they love to record her shooting from behind in slow motion.
It’s killing gaming. Look at the complaints about eThots who play video games in lingerie with the camera on them and the game streaming in a corner of the screen vs. actual (often male) gamers streaming the game.
The cosplay community for years has been bitching how cosplayers who make their own costumes have taken back seats to hot chicks who wear only the skimpiest costumes, which are largely store bought.
And it is most definitely killing STEM.
Holy shit, the amount of posts by young woman “I fucking love science, look at this thing at the Air and Space museum I’m at” while in a short skirt and tits coming out of the top of her shirt like a Leg Avenue Sexy Scientist costume is fucking infuriating.
Spend a lifetime doing research and have your CV passed over for fun bags in a skin tight NASA t-shirt.
I don’t want to come off sounding like a misogynist, but what we’ve done is create a culture that tells young people, especially young women, that investing time and effort into something has a much lower return on investment than having a cursory interest and the willingness to show a lot of skin.
All it does is create a superficial culture which sours people.
It’s not just curvaceous chicks; in general, aptitude for self-promotion is far more important than subject-matter expertise or any other qualification.
Not to mention names, but… few years back, two guys on YouTube did vids on nitrogen triiodide. One was a small-timer, who went made a small quantity of the product and explained in great detail the necessary precautions. The other was a flamboyant Big Name, with a metric gazillion subscribers; he made an absurdly large batch, with cheerful disregard for safety, and proceeded to demonstrate (in characteristic fashion) fun and totally irresponsible ways to use it.
Guess which one had his channel deleted.
In my own small world doing chemistry for the past decade, I’ve seen attractive women get a lot more “help” when it comes to on the job training. Sure, a new hire fresh out of school might need extra supervision, but someone with 5-10 years experience? Time to sink or swim.
It’s down right comical watching a 50+ year old man feigning interest in 20-something THOT’s weekend plans.
Lab coats are science burkas. They prevent more fires than protect you from them. Change my mind.
In high school I was preparing for a career in computer science. I took a “personal typing” course in order to improve my typing speed. I took personal short hand because I needed to be able to take notes in collage.
None of my female classmates that were collage bound took typing or short hand because “then they would be a secretary for the rest of their lives.”
In collage, there were about 10-25% females in the STEM classes. Fewer still in the engineering courses. Most of the women in those classes used their charms to latch on to the male that was most likely to get them a high grade in the course.
All female teams on projects consistently did worse than mixed or all male teams.
And the sad thing is that every one of those women that I dealt with were smart. They just didn’t have the same drive or background as their male counterparts.
For all the noise about “males keeping females out of the STEM courses” that I heard, we were freaking begging for more women in those classes.
Of course, I know that some of them quit when their ego’s got bruised. It is hard to stay in some of those courses when everybody else is making it look easy and you are struggling.
And there were too many I met that were working diligently to earn their MRS.
Once I left university, I saw the exact same lack of females in the engineering and hard science work that we were doing. We had two female computer nerds out of 40? I don’t think there was a single female scientist that was doing ground breaking work on post, those were all males. There were maybe 10 in leadership roles out of 100.
And again we were screaming for ANY good females to join the team.
When I was hiring I needed a good chemist. I interviewed 20 people and only one was female. We hired her because it looked good on our Equal Opportunity Employer numbers when bidding out to the government. Was she the best candidate? Nope. We were paying her more than she asked for because she under bid so badly.
Of the clients I have, there is only one that has *a* female developer. There are a number that have females in leadership roles (One is damn good, another is the bosses daughter (and all that implies)). The female developer needs more hand holding than any of the other developers. To the point where she’s been moved more into a customer contact person and away from doing actual development.
And we are screaming for more good female developers. They just aren’t applying.
But I can go to tik-tok, instragram, youtube and find dozens of “sexy” women showing that they don’t know half of what their male counter parts know with 10 or 100 times more followers.
I want competent first, sexy way way way down the list.
Universities teaching ‘selling your body on the internet is empowering and not exploitation/demeaning’ and ‘math is racist’.
Enough said.
“I don’t want to come off sounding like a misogynist, but what we’ve done is create a culture that tells young people, especially young women, that investing time and effort into something has a much lower return on investment than having a cursory interest and the willingness to show a lot of skin.”
No, we did not “create” that culture. That culture existed long before you are I were born, and it will continue to exist long after we are a forgotten blip in the annals of history. Pretty much every achievement in human society can be directly traced to men wanting to get a piece. And the more desirable the woman, the harder the man will work to get it.
You can rail against it, talk about how it is damaging, about how it is false advertising, etc… But it is here, it always has been here, and it will never go away. In fact, the harder the “establishment” fights against it (ala pink haired dyke is no the face of a lingerie company), the more “bunny” culture you will see.
However, there is a valid take away. Looks, youth, beauty is fleeting. There is an expiration date. Hot babe holding a gun and showing lots of skin has a career of a few years at best. On the other hand, hot babe with skills, training, and experience in her field that also does some “bunny” type of pics is capitalizing on reality, instead of trying to fight against it.
I don’t want to come off sounding like a misogynist, but what we’ve done is create a culture that tells young people, especially young women, that investing time and effort into something has a much lower return on investment than having a cursory interest and the willingness to show a lot of skin.
It’s not misogynistic to call out a culture that sends the wrong messages to young women. Uber-feminists will surely disagree (you are a man, therefore you are “mansplaining”), but I firmly believe: Constructive criticism is necessary for growth.
We do want this generation of young women to grow, personally and professionally, right?
I’d see it as more misogynistic to allow the current state of things to continue. Calling online sex work “empowering” doesn’t help women; it just makes “objectification” — which used to be the Ultimate Misogyny Evil — socially acceptable and profitable. In the same vein, hiring women who are less-skilled or less confident in their skills, just to fill a quota, also doesn’t help women; it puts women into a position in which they’ll forever be an “understudy”, never standing on their own.
This crap doesn’t just need to be called out. It needs to be “cancelled”, good and hard.
Saying so is not misogynistic — quite the opposite; I can’t think of a more pro-women stance to take, given the directions our culture is heading.
Where our culture is headed, is into the crapper. When society falls apart, and I think it will happen sooner rather than later, the women will go back to the times where they were in the past. As in middle ages past.
For right now, let’s call it the “Kardashian Culture” where some are looking at attaining riches and fame by making themselves famous on-line. All one needs to do is put themselves on-line and be outrageously slutty.
They know what they are doing and if we all just agreed and acknowledged it openly, we’d all be better off for it.