Teenagers today are weak

[mrlolicon93]

Is it just me or does it seem like teenagers today are weak compared to the teenagers from the last couple decades or even way back in the day?

Like teenagers in the early 1900s were already starting families going to war buying homes and becoming adults and even when the concept of teenhood came about during the post world war two period people were smart enough to recognize that once you hit adolescence you were no longer a child.

Heck if you compare the teenagers of the 90s and early 2000s to the teenagers of today they are completely different.

Even in those days many teens willingly got into relationships with older people and made the choice to do so and nobody cared back then and most non-pedo people still were smart enough to recognize that yeah these girls are hot even though they are legally off limits i am sure every Gen X or millennial map will remember the days of teenagers being referred to as Jailbait and countdown clocks.

What i see today however is late Gen Z and early Gen Alpha teenagers getting into relationships with older guys on places like Discord and then after sometime they snitch and go tell a YouTuber about the older guy they were with or put them on blast and leak all the conversations and then play the victim.

I also see really stupid shit like if a guy is dating a woman shorter than him then he is a pedophile or if a 17-year old is dating an 18-year old that's pedophilia or if a 15-year old is dating an 18-year old the 18-year old is a child predator.

This is stupid shit that modern teenagers actually believe because they are being brainwashed by modern feminism and identity politics to hate men and reading the comments on the video Danielle's advocacy made about that one lolicon game from teenagers saying they are scared of men and even boys their own age makes me sad.

I guess these are the consequences of infantilizing physically mature young people.

In the cancel culture pc era being 8-years old is the new toddler being 14-years old is the new child and being 22 is the new teenager or at least it seems that way.

[Not Forever]

I believe that people tend to adapt to expectations: Treat teenagers as incapable of understanding or making decisions, and you’ll have teenagers who consider themselves incapable of acting; give a teenager a gun in their hands, and they’ll take pride in their own genocide. (And just to be clear, this applies to adults too. In fact, we’re talking about adults—young adults.)

Of course, I’m speaking in general terms, and let’s say this is one of the reasons why I dislike standardization in education. I believe it tends to flatten the population, benefiting people with certain mindsets at the expense of everyone else, who won’t be able to develop in the way they would have preferred.

It’s also worth noting that the tendency to form groups has always existed. I’m not surprised that today groups form around YouTubers rather than the most charismatic classmate or the slightly older peer. These groups end up becoming a cross between activists and police, trying to “cleanse” the internet of the ‘rotten’.

[Bookshelf]

There are more restrictions on youth than ever before, from not being able to hang out with friends without supervision until absurd ages to not being allowed to watch movies just because their parents don't like it, even if it's considered appropriate. I once read an anecdote of a mother who proudly said she and her family only ever "consume media as a family", so her kids don't watch movies, YouTube videos, play video games etc unless it's part of a family evening, literally stripping them of all of their agency.

That sort of stuff is bound to have some nasty after effects. The complete absence of freedom that youth have today is why teenagers seem weak. They (sometimes literally) have the free will to go against societal norms beaten out of them as children.

[quitterature]

Hey, I'm 19, so I want to give some personal insight. I’ll go through things in the order you brought them up.

Yeah, this generation feels weaker. There’s a pretty clear historical pattern where one “strong” generation works their ass off so their kids can have an easier life. Using the U.S. as an example, the Silent Generation grinded so boomers could live comfortably. The side effect is that every generation after the “strong” one looks softer, because the hard problems already got fixed. That keeps repeating until some major event, like war, recession, or whatever, forces a new generation to toughen up.

Teenagers now vs the 90s are totally different, and the internet is the main reason. 90s and early 2000s teens didn’t grow up online. They had tech, but they still had to talk to people face-to-face. For me (born in 2006), my entire childhood and teen years were practically molded with tech. Even in elementary school, my classes were using computers constantly. By middle school, everything my friends and I did was online. We used social media and gaming to hang-out after school. We still talked at lunch, sure, but most of my social life happened behind a screen.

The internet shaped who I am. That sounds dramatic, but it’s true. My mom never monitored anything, so I had full freedom to interact with whoever and whatever. I don’t regret that, but not everyone my age handles that kind of freedom well. A lot of us basically grew up in an environment with zero filters, which is odd, as millennials specifically bring up how their version of the internet was all fucked-up. Weird how they knew this but didn't aim to protect their kids, regardless, onto the next topic...

Grooming. I wasn’t groomed, but I knew people who were. This is where the generational divide hits hard. Gen Z is hyper-focused on power dynamics, being age gaps, manipulation, all of that. This is especially seen in a way older generations didn't comprehend it. Since so many Gen Z relationships start online, people became more alert to abuse. It’s not most teens, but it’s definitely more common than it used to be.

Since we’re MAPs, our views differ from mainstream opinions, but for most teens, “adult with a teen” automatically means “someone taking advantage.” They end up condemning every age gap because they think it’ll prevent real abusive situations. It’s an overcorrection, but it’s rooted in wanting to protect people, not malice.

As for Zoomers calling everything “pedo,” that annoys me too. They’ve blended “pedophile” with “predator,” so when someone calls a guy a pedo for liking a short 18-year-old, what they actually mean is, “You’re into someone who looks young, and that feels predatory.” It waters down the word and makes conversations way harder.

I don’t get the feminism/identity-politics rant you did. If the idea is that Zoomers are “too progressive,” that doesn’t really hold up when Zoomer men were the most pro-Trump demographic in 2024. Zoomer Men lean conservative, mostly as a reaction to the millennial culture-war stuff from 2020, while Zoomer Women skew more progressive. I consider myself a progressive myself, so I don't think I can really respond to this without being biased.

But your point about infantilization is fair. Both Millennials and Zoomers treat themselves like children for way too long. I do think 18-19 feels different from someone in their 20s in how “adult” they act, but they’re still adults either way.

Overall, yeah, my generation is soft. Though, a lot of that comes from being raised almost fully online, plus all the cultural war stuff we grew up during. I don’t know what the fix is, but I wanted to throw in my two cents.

[Not Forever]

[...] Grooming. I wasn’t groomed, but I knew people who were. This is where the generational divide hits hard. Gen Z is hyper-focused on power dynamics, being age gaps, manipulation, all of that. This is especially seen in a way older generations didn't comprehend it. Since so many Gen Z relationships start online, people became more alert to abuse. It’s not most teens, but it’s definitely more common than it used to be.

[...]

I don’t get the feminism/identity-politics rant you did. If the idea is that Zoomers are “too progressive,” that doesn’t really hold up when Zoomer men were the most pro-Trump demographic in 2024. Zoomer Men lean conservative, mostly as a reaction to the millennial culture-war stuff from 2020, while Zoomer Women skew more progressive. I consider myself a progressive myself, so I don't think I can really respond to this without being biased. [...]

I believe that when many people talk about feminism, they’re referring to the kinds of rhetoric that have been spread within that environment. For example, for me the whole discussion around power dynamics is very much a feminist discussion, one that originally arose primarily in relation to relationships between men and women (with the man always having an implicitly greater amount of power). And then… well, honestly, where I am, MAP discussions aren’t very common, so these ideas are almost always applied only to male–female dynamics, not to those between adults and minors.

Whether one is progressive or not might be a different issue altogether; I think the rhetoric being used is more important. For instance, I see that it’s becoming fashionable to use rhetoric that used to be considered progressive (in a more nuanced way, since there’s less literature on it) to conduct trials of intent on works of art—over-analyzing them to see whether they’re spreading an ideology people dislike. Instead of the healthier approach: everyone can do whatever they want with their own work; at worst, it just won’t sell.

In short, from a certain point of view even the political right is becoming feminist. (Then someone could argue that it’s actually the left that has adopted a way of doing politics very similar to the right, and that the two sides are simply chasing each other in a far-from-virtuous cycle.)