If you've been interested in radical feminism for any amount of time, you've probably become aware of more liberal feminism and the way violence towards girls and women as a class is normalized. Since the new internet age and the dawn of the 21st century, violent content has become much more easily accessible to the common man. If you'd like to see a video of a person disemboweled and the contents of her corpse strewn across a motorway, you only have to type that into a search box and you can find it on any number of gore sites. We can now see images and videos we didn't have access to before, causing a really dangerous epidemic of readily available death content. I'm not at all for censorship, but something in me wonders how this could be affecting the next generation, all the children born after 2010 with an iPad thrust into their hands and easy access to graphic content. Of course, a lot of the aftermath of these crimes people, even young children are viewing are incredibly pornographic in nature. Murdering women with a motive of misogyny is nothing new. After these crimes are committed, the victims are posed in disgustingly explicit manners, adding a degree of sexuality to the content these people are viewing.
Considering how normal it is for men to pleasure themselves with basically anything available to them, necrophilia isn't even that far of a stretch for this generation's men. By the time our little sisters have grown into teenagers, the boys around them will be desensitized and even turned on to this material. This sounds insane, but within my lifetime, I have watched the boys around me grow sick due to the violent nature of so much readily available internet pornography. Gore sites and shock sites have been around since the 90s, but the really sick part of pornography has existed for longer. Now, it has become nearly unavoidable.
I remember being only ten or eleven when I first took an interest in Japanese cartoons. I'd watch stuff like Bleach and Sailor Moon on my crappy laptop. On the sides of my shows, there would be disgusting advertisements designed to entice boys and men also consuming this content. There were truly disgusting and demeaning things on full display. Sometimes the ads would have subtitles as though spoken by the female characters shown begging for the person hurting them to stop.
I was 14 when I got into my first relationship. The boy I had fallen for was the same age as me. He'd started watching this stuff when he was only seven. This amount of violent content being shown to young boys is likely what influenced him to become as violent as he did. I had been choked, even when I begged for it to end. Hit across the face. Called a 'slut' by my first ever boyfriend. I broke up with him after less than two months, even though I'd had a crush on this boy from afar since he transferred to my middle school in seventh grade. I pursued rape charges over a year later after my doctor mandatorily reported the situation to the police. Cops showed up at his house and managed to scare him pretty well, and he transferred out of my high school.
I was not the only one I knew that had gone through this, or something similar. A lot of the young girls I knew would share stories of their boyfriend choking them, or pulling their hair, or even slapping them across the face. I realized at some point how sad this was. My first boyfriend had given me a 'facial' without waiting for my say on the matter, and I was not the only one.
These demeaning practices are often considered just a part of sex for my generation. If you don't want this, you're called a prude, or vanilla. I found myself wondering, what was wrong with being vanilla?
This is another tool of the patriarchy and our pornified culture to keep down young women. We as Generation Z need to reject this, and set an example for Alpha.