TikTok algorithm shifting toward suppression of women / pushing gender roles

[lostnfound]

I have a few people i follow on TikTok; and yes i know it is an awful app. But it sure has changed lately. It has been pushing trad-wife / man-in-charge-of-the-family videos a whole lot now. I move on quickly so i don’t think it requires much engagement but it is upsetting to know this is getting pushed out to a lot of people with a lot less decades of life than i have.

I mean, i personally can judge for myself what it was like for women to NOT be allowed to have careers, to consider themselves equal partners or free to choose to remain single, etc. because I’ve lived a life of doing that, and known plenty of other women doing the same. The men in my life have been treasured friends, allies, partner-in-parenting, great loves…but my parents gave me freedom to choose a career and a sense of the importance of taking care of your own self financially in some way. When i was growing up, Mary Tyler Moore was on TV, portraying a career woman, and my teachers told us we could be engineers or doctors or whatever a man could be.

But now the opposite is being pushed in a very concentrated manner, insidiously — and not in a “trad-wife-having lots of Christian babies” but more in a “wouldn’t you be happier if you just supported your man, weren’t fighting your way through a work world”, etc. kind of way.

The videos have either a man or a woman talking about ‘restoring polarity’ between men and women in couples. It is insidious social engineering by the technobrats and authoritarians. Ugh.

[SheltieLover]

1. Shocking

[EllieBC]

2. It's not new. Gen Z women have been

embracing “traditional” roles more than their millennial and Gen X and Boomer women would ever.

There’s a whole ass mess of them talking about dating for marriage. Most of them are terribly bothered by what they view as unnecessary amounts of smut in books or in movies (they don’t mind violence though).

And many of them are very fucking into stereotypes of what a woman is and what a man is. And unfortunately, that has boiled over into LGBTQ communities because now you have tomboy women or a feminine men who really dislike the fact that people think that they are eggs.

Their love for gender stereotypes, the concept of being kept women, and their extreme prudish behaviour is really fucking up fandom spaces too, but that’s another discussion. It’s been bad though ever since the pandemic.

[AZJonnie]

3. I'm not on there but I know others who've said similar things about the change in what they're 'fed'

by the algorithms. I'm not sure it if being engineered this way with the express purpose of changing people's minds about such things, or whether it's just something they see as a smart way to curry favor with the current crop of fascists who hold their business's fate in their hands.

If still being run by the Chinese, it's not particularly a message I'd imagine they are purposefully promoting. Reason being, I think their government LOVES women working. They love EVERYONE working. They might want women to have more children as the 'one child' policy they had for many years has skewed their age demographics upward quite a bit, but that won't make them discourage women from working. They'll say "women, you need to do both, and also take care of your aging parents".