Digital Purdah as a Solution to Female Internet Brain

Women have been driven insane by social media. Could the answer be as simple as banning selfies?

The psychic breakdown of the young Western female has been the defining political phenomenon of the twenty-first century. Women are suffering from depression, anxiety, neurosis, and dysphoria as never before, they’re drugged to the gills to deal with it, and they’ve got the SSREyes to prove it.

This isn’t only a problem for young women. Their suffering is everyone’s suffering. The romantic paranoia engendered by MeToo, a mass hysteria that has grown directly out of this plague of neurosis, has destroyed courtship among the young. As a result a shocking fraction of young men are virgin incels, while their femcel counterparts are contemplating a future where 45% of them will be childless. Driven by their neglected ovaries to latch on to surrogate children in the form of migrants and minorities, and entering into lesbian civil unions with the Mammy State, childless women overwhelmingly vote left – as always, the party of the psychically distressed thrives to whatever degree it cultivates psychic distress. The political derangement is downstream of their emotional derangement, and the two feed on one another in a vicious spiral of crazed minds pushing crazed policies that craze minds yet further, a cycle that threatens to break civilization, either gradually through steady demographic deflation and spiritual demoralization, or perhaps – if the young men alienated by a society that has ruined their women cease stupefying themselves with porn, and cohere as an army – more catastrophically.

There’s no real mystery as to why this has happened.

Eddie Mendoza

Jonathan Haidt

has demonstrated at length and in extraordinary empirical detail that the rise in emotional disturbance among young women correlates precisely with the introduction of the smart phone, and the mass migration of social lives onto social media that immediately followed. The slot machine engineers of Silicon Valley trapped the world’s young women in a Skinner box by hacking their instinctive sexual competition strategies. Suddenly every young girl in the world was measuring herself against every other young woman, all viewing one another through the distorting filters of flattering camera angles, ruthlessly curated digital photographs, makeup, plastic surgery, and AI filters that smoothed wrinkles, removed blemishes, and reduced unwelcome poundage. On the Internet no girl is ever the prettiest girl in the room, or even the second or third prettiest. Meanwhile they’re flooded with a relentless barrage of that most intoxicating of drugs: male attention.

Eddie Mendoza

Of course they went mad.

They’re all wandering around in a state of selfie-shock.

In A Partial Explanation of Zoomer Girl Derangement,

zinnia

provided a zoomer’s-eye view of what this looks like from the inside: some girls adapt by becoming narcissistic InstaThots experiencing the world entirely through their phones, growing skilled in the art of cultivating hornt and luring simps down the sales funnel to their OnlyFans; others by giving up entirely, embracing aggressive obesity and aposematic hair, swallowing fistfuls of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and getting their tits chopped off. Most end up somewhere between, unwilling to go as far as the troons, reluctant to embrace electric whoredom, yet with their psyches pinned to the ground by the omnipresent male gaze that lives in their head, always judging them, always finding them wanting compared to the girl one swipe to the left.

The girls who ‘win’ the social media game are casualties, too. No one knows better than they do that the face they’re presenting to the world has almost nothing to do with reality. Their followers might be fooled, but they know full well that they take fifty pictures to get that one perfect shot from the most flattering angle with that ideal pose and the flawless facial expression. They know how much time they spent applying makeup, and they know how many times they passed the image through an AI filter to remove every imperfection. They’re acutely conscious of the stark contrast between the real human girl holding the phone, and the mocking hyperself reflected back in the smoking obsidian of her black vanity mirror. They, too, are driven mad by this.

Mark Akopov

So what do?

It seems unlikely that there are technological solutions to this problem created by the intersection of technology and sexual psychology. In fact, we’ve tried that. The mountains of psychoactive pharmaceuticals swallowed by Western women are that attempt at a technological fix. It hasn’t worked.

Another answer might be regulatory. One might envision laws that treat social media like tobacco or alcohol, prohibiting teenagers from using social media until they hit the age of majority. Perhaps social media might also be accompanied with lurid warning labels – USE OF THIS PLATFORM HAS BEEN SHOWN TO BE ASSOCIATED WITH DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY – which users must click through every time they want to log in, or which appear periodically as they scroll through their timelines. If they don’t work at first, the warning labels can be made more frequent, more garish, more annoying. If that still doesn’t work, maybe the amount of time people spend on social media should be restricted, with users being automatically rate-limited after an hour or so.

If such measures fail to do the trick, as they will – teenagers will find ways to get around age restrictions (for example, by lying, which as everyone knows is a very difficult thing to do online), while users can easily maintain multiple accounts to get around rate-limiting – the newly established regulatory authority might become a bit more ambitiously invasive. Regulators could start looking into the guts of Big Social’s code bases, pawing through the user interfaces and timeline algorithms that have been so lovingly crafted, with their little heart buttons and notification bells and engagement-tracking data, to make their products as seamlessly addictive as possible.

We’ve already had something of a preview of what it looks like when political actors start mucking about with the inner workings of social media platforms over the past several years, as the regime has tried desperately to quiet dissent by deamplifying, deboosting, shadowbanning, siloing, or otherwise attempting to algorithmically set the parameters of public discourse. Instead of addressing the core issues leading to public dissatisfaction, the regime has doubled down on its policies, while in effect attempting to solve the problems arising from those bad policies by demanding that everyone ignore them. It hasn’t really worked all that well. If anything, the people are angrier and more vocal than ever, with frustration over their platforms having been broken by meddling theatre kids added to their already extensive list of grievances.

While it achieved some short-term victories, such as suppressing the Biden Junior laptop story just long enough to get Biden Senior elected, the vast social media censorship apparatus that was set up over the last several years was singularly unsuccessful in achieving its long-term goal of controlling the discourse. It was, however, very successful at providing employment for an army of communications majors. Right up until times started getting tight and tech companies realized they didn’t actually need the 90% of employees they were paying to take long lunches, enjoy complimentary hot yoga, and police the retrograde memes of PatriotMeeMa1776 and IncelGroyper88.

The point is, regulatory solutions to the social media-driven derangement of young women aren’t likely to work, because they don’t actually address the underlying sexual psychology driving that derangement: the tendency of girls to seek attention from boys, and compare themselves to other girls in their ability to do so. Even if they did work, do you really want the regime to help itself to an excuse to interfere even more deeply in the Internet’s operation? Regulating how much time you spend online? Demanding every account be registered to a real name, phone number, address, and social security number in order to prevent minors from using social media? Does that sound like a good idea?

Maybe it’s better if we handle this ourselves, and deprive them of a handy excuse.

What’s needed is a cultural solution – one that can be implemented from the bottom up, without building an intrusive and expensive regulatory body, without relying on the good will of social media companies, without further damaging the neurobiology of young women, and one which directly addresses the problem at its psychosexual root.

The answer is actually pretty obvious.

Digital Purdah.

This doesn’t mean banning women from the Internet.

All it means is this:

Men may show their faces on the Internet; women may not.

That’s it.

No more selfies. No more Instagram filters. No more profile pics mooning up into the camera. No more baking videos in low-cut halter tops. None of it. Keep your faces hidden behind a digital veil, such that men have no idea what you look like, women have no idea what you look like, and most importantly, you have no idea what other women look like.

If you all do that, you’ll all be much happier.

This isn’t about sexual prudishness. There’s no need to enforce Saudi Arabian standards of modesty in real life; if anything, street fashion could stand to be a bit more immodest, these days.

It isn’t about misogyny or whatever: the point here is protecting women, not hurting them.

It definitely isn’t about policing a fuzzy boundary between selfies and soft-core pornography. The purpose is to interrupt the competitive cycle of female attention-seeking which, when supercharged by the instantaneous feedback of social media’s hungry collective gaze, we now know from direct and agonizing experience is essentially guaranteed to produce ubiquitous ego damage in young women, with ugly consequences for our entire society. Insofar as any personal photographs are likely to initiate this arms race, all personal photographs have to go, whether the intent is sexual provocation or not.

That might seem extreme, but it would solve a lot of problems.

At a stroke, women would be relieved from the pressure of comparing their looks to an entire planet full of other women. They could continue to participate in the global information commons, but without the immense psychic pressure of millions of preternaturally pretty girls pressing down on their egos like ice pics on their temples.

Digital purdah would mean renunciation of the ocean of low-quality male attention social media offers women. For girls with advanced cases of Internet Brain, this would be a bitter medicine. They’re hooked on the constant stream of fleeting dopamine spikes they get when their selfies catch compliment cascades, much of which would dry up without the easy bait of their smiling faces gazing alluringly into the camera lens. This is, of course, a feature, not a bug. No longer capable of farming simps for likes, they would have to return to the real world for male sexual attention, an arena in which they compete only with those women in their immediate vicinity, and in which there is the possibility of something meaningful and durable emerging from those more organic, personal interactions.

So how could this be enforced? It’s a classic collective action problem. One girl choosing to use a Cinderella cartoon as her pfp instead of her own face will just be hobbling herself in the competition for male attention, while still being barraged with all the pictures posted by all of the other girls; the result will just be that she feels even worse about herself. Do we need an Online Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Thirst, scrolling through social media accounts and banning every girl who uses her face in a profile pic?

We do not. Open source, community slut shaming would almost certainly suffice to enact this cultural shift. It works like this: if a girl shows her face on social media, it is be assumed that she’s doing so in order to thirst-farm; her mentions then fill up with people pointing this out; soon enough, she stops. Most women want attention, but they also want the plausible deniability of being able to pretend they aren’t trying to get attention. Take that deniability away by forcing the motivation to the forefront of everyone’s attention, and they’ll stop.

Ideally, it would primarily be other women enforcing this new social norm. There’s nothing stopping men from joining in on the cyberbullying, of course, but men are far too thirsty for this to be reliable. There would be too many defectors. Women suffer from no such temperamental weakness.

There are already signs of this starting to happen organically. Women are happy to accuse one another of thirst-trapping, for example, and e-girls called out on this invariably become defensive because they know, at a certain level, that it’s true, that’s exactly what they’re doing. Meanwhile it seems that there are more women hiding their identities behind artistic representations of one sort or another, using flowers or anime avatars or paintings in place of photographs, than was the case a few years ago. You see this mostly within the online right, of course – girls with illegal opinions have just as much reason to hide their identities behind pseudonyms as boys do, after all. Yet the behaviour of these girls often seems markedly more sane than that of their sisters. Perhaps in this, as in so many other things, the dissident right is an early adopter, cultural pioneers on the frontiers of the zeitgeist.

Digital purdah won’t be universally effective. Some girls will be quite happy to fess up to being de facto online sex workers – and that’s fine, there’s a place for that. As Augustine said, “Prostitution in the towns is like the cesspool in the palace; take away the cesspool and the palace will become an unclean and evil smelling-place.” The purpose of digital purdah isn’t to stamp out e-girls entirely, which is impossible. It’s to discourage the majority of young women from playing that game, inadvertently exposing their souls to the bruising bellum omnia contra omnes that online female sexual competition invariably turns into, and thereby preserve and even recover a modicum of their sanity.

Alena Aenami

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone.

Yeah, weird Valentine’s message, I know.

And yes, talking about this today was quite deliberate. Tone aside, our culture needs to try something to fix the twin problems of female misery and male ennui. Maybe the fix is as simple as girls all changing their profile pics, en masse? Only one way to find out, and it’s a cheap experiment to run.

Anyhow, if you think this could work, you could always

to spread the word.

And if you’d like to get more of my crazy ideas, you should definitely

I write about all sorts of things; some of my favourite essays are collected here.

As always, my deepest gratitude to everyone who’s signed up as a paid supporter. Your support keeps these essays available for everyone to read, for free. It wouldn’t be possible without you guys.