Why Do Dudes Put Women on a Pedestal? Blame Social Media

Onyx Contributor:  H.T. (@517NightHawk), Podcast:  Lansing Anti-Hero

One of the things I often hear on social media is how this generation of men seem to have a bad tendency to “put the pussy on a pedestal” by constantly posting memes and videos of the like that constantly pump up women’s egos to unrealistic levels.  Fact is, if we want to learn where this started, look no further than the dawn of social media.

If we’re being technical, the first form of social media were chat rooms.  But as time, technology and HTML evolved, we ended up with sites like Black Planet and Myspace.  If anyone wants to truly trace how we got here, it all started on sites like that.  Fact was, the site opened up with simple gestures like liking pics, placing people in your top 8 spaces, or even just constantly sending women friend requests.  But it was figures like Tila Tequila that started the trend that people could become famous in real life solely off fame from social media.  Despite the path that she’s gone down nowadays, I have to admit it was a truly an astonishing sight to see that someone could build an entire career off just talking to people on the internet.  But this, I’m afraid, was only the surface of a bigger movement going on in society that social media benefited from and in ways kept going,

Growing up during the years when social media was big, I can tell you that my generation quite literally was destined for being one of mass social awkwardness.  Schools enacted zero tolerance policies for harassment that lacked a bit of nuance, sex ed programs were cut out of schools en mass due to paranoid parents that didn’t understand that actually teaching kids about sex and the responsibility of it is better than just scaring them from it.  And of course, there was the usual awkwardness of going through your preteen to teen years discovering the wonders of the opposite sex, not understanding your body and seeing what or if anyone won the genetic lottery in puberty.  Social media played into this by essentially taking everyone regardless of geographical location and putting them in a social space where in terms of looks, everyone had to essentially compete against the world.

This is how we got to the stage of women on social media that make a living off just being attractive on it.  Myspace hoes, IG girls, Twitter Honeys, it’s all the same.  Hell, even nerds have their own social media idols to fawn after such as Nana Bear, Ivydoom Kitty, Momokun, and Alychu.  Fact is, since the beginning of time, men have always been pursuing women that they’re attracted to, but what kept us level was that if you tried to meet women in the real world, you could essentially just take your rejection and keep it rolling.  Social media complicates things as you could literally see and talk to a woman everyday at a job or at school, but even if you asked for her number or some way to stay in contact outside of that place, you’d likely be pointed towards her social media profile.  And this is where shit begins towards desperation.

First, even if you send her the friend request, there’s no real guarantee she’ll reply or even accept it as if you become too pesky about adding you, you can easily be labeled a creep.  Second, even if you get added on social media by her, there still no real chance at being more than just another face in the crowd for her.  And I don’t even mean just the Lala Anthony looking women.  social media like Facebook and Twitter quite literally make it easy for you if you have multiple people trying to win your affections that you can (even publicly) play with people’s emotions to whatever ends you wish.  Third, as I mentioned before, social media quite literally makes people have their looks judged against the world.  Fact is, the beauty standards that people have come to love are essentially a hodgepodge of features from women from different parts of the world, which might explain the fetishization of women on social media that have a very racially ambiguous look about them.

Fact is, as a man, social media unevens the playing field for everybody, but for guys who don’t fit into the beauty standards for men in some way, you really are dicked in a way.  I mean, I kinda agree with Jason Black in that the only reason that Derrick Jaxn gets away with at the very least making very generalized statements that lack nuance is that he’s very attractive.  For all I hate about all the “male feminists” on social media like Jeremy D. Johnson and the like, I can at least recognize WHY guys like him are the wave really.  For every video vixen looking girl who clearly only wants a guy who’s over 6’, has tattoos, and is probably a drug dealer, there’s a bunch of very attractive yet odd looking women out there that want to change the dynamics of how men treat women.  And because these are men who have no real idea where to meet women who would like them just for who they are and not force them to meet an ideal, so things like this happen.

So why do men of today tend to put women on a pedestal?  Well for millennials, we’re at our youngest reaching our mid 20s, so many of us are getting hip to the game.  Generation Y however might just be screwed as this is all they know.  Gen-Y young people grew up learning to decipher if the girl they like actually likes them by certain small patterns that one would say constitutes a sign of schizophrenia.  Women grow up with inflated egos about how attractive they actually are because men will basically scramble high and low for sex or at least a woman’s affections because well, that’s just how we are.  Men grow up putting women on a pedestal because social media ultimately hands every woman a platform.  Guys might not even like the woman they’re sprung over, but they know getting seen on social media with a pretty girl gets you likes and comments talking about how much of a pimp he is, and maybe even gets the attention of another pretty girl as she sees that you’re actually desirable to other women.

I liken it to gambling:  the average person can see when they’re losing and just walk away from the game, but there’s also plenty of people who refuse to give up despite taking massive losses.  What’s more, some men will hold on to a “losing machine” just to hope another guy doesn’t show up and win with it.  This explains side chicks.  Men will have a perfectly good relationship with a woman but lust and only lust after one woman and ruin their relationship and far more over not wanting to possibly see the object of their assumed affection with another man.  This goes back to social media.  Many a men have grown up watching the girl that they were madly infatuated with pop up on Facebook with a whole ass family with another man.  And this behavior and need to not have to go through that pain again has created a generation of men who have no problem letting their dicks talk them into ruining their lives and reputations over essentially pussy.

If I can offer really any sort of solution for this, it’s that there really isn’t one.  This is a war of attrition that you can’t really win as the forces that keep this sort of mentality going are interwoven into how our everyday lives operate.  In the end, the best I can offer as advice would be to address it when you see it, but also know many more men won’t be saved, but many hoes will.