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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33915 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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I recall a poster a while back talking about how non-Anglophone Western Europe has much lower rates of mental illness and higher life satisfaction among women, despite being even more sexual-revolution-y than the Anglosphere. I believe the sexual revolution is wrong, but not because it inherently makes women unhappy.

I think the far right has something to say about women’s unhappiness, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the sexual revolution.

It's the same thing when you look at stuff like suicide rates among the youths - if it's all Instagram and phones, then it's not showing up in various countries in Europe. There's something more, but the real reason isn't probably something as easy as "capitalism sucks" or "feminist and immigrations sucks."

But here in europe we do have the same problems, we are merely lagging a few years behind - in both social media usage and teen mental health issues. I agree that it's almost never just one thing, though. The social contagion theory also seems extremely hard to deny from our vantage point - we can literally watch how american social problems spill over here through the (american- dominated) media.

I can't speak to experience, but I've often wondered how the cultural milieu on the Internet differs for non-Anglophones. English as the default seems ubiquitous enough culturally that it seems like a bit of a "fish describing water" question to ask what everyone else sees.

Is the, say, Francophone Internet (or culture more broadly) quite as, um, gestures broadly at The Internet frenetic and self-hating? That alone seems like it might make people happier.

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