got a little angry on twitter
“And then some days I’m like, wow, tumblr is like middle school only
without discovering algebra, which is the only part of middle school I
remember enjoying.” – Yes. It literally is like middle school. Because you are literally an adult talking to children, many of whom are in middle school. It is not their responsibility to make you, as an adult, feel like you’re interacting with adult peers.Tumblr has a demographic that skews young, and the young people who use this site do not have to try to appease adults who are in their space. I’m old for Tumblr. I’m 28. There are things that happen here all the time that I think are “so middle school” or “so high school” and sometimes, yes: they hurt my feelings or whatever, or they really REALLY annoy me, because I’m still a human despite my age, but you know what would be a lot more harmful than one adult’s annoyance? The continued villainization of teenagers, mostly teenage girls, for acting like who, and what, they are.
Stop asking teenagers – especially teenage girls – to act like adults. They are not.
As adults, we have the freedom to enter or exit whatever spaces we want. Teenagers don’t. Their time is almost wholly consumed by being herded into adult-led spaces where they are judged, ridiculed, and trained like assembly line thinkers (I almost wrote ‘trained like velociraptors’ but no, that’s not real) for the appeasement of adult society. Like, yes, learning not to be dillholes and how to think synthetically and, sure, “algebra” are important things that are necessary for adult life. But that is a long way off for teens. They do not need to police their behavior around their own peers to act like adults.
(And this isn’t even getting into the monumentally disgusting problem our society has with acting like teenage girls [and some tweenage girls] are already women and therefore can be sexualized like adult women. Fucking stop that. As a society. As a culture. Fucking stop, society. It’s gross. And harmful. And irreparable in its gross harm. Stop it.)
Tumblr is one of the spaces, even though it is a digital space, where teenagers can exist outside of the behavioral and psychological constraints that adults foist on them. As an adult in this space: you fucking deal with, and respect the hell out of, that. Or you go to Facebook. Or like, a coffee shop.
You can’t support and validate teenagers (and tweens!) with slogans about how awesome they are and then demonize them for acting their age when it becomes inconvenient for you.