Destroying girlhood
The race to the bottom to corrupt young girls via social media has reached a new low through the advent of TikTok. Trendy dances are created and widely disseminated in a matter of hours, and millions of girls desperately create their own versions of them in an effort to be seen and liked. They sacrifice innocence and mental stability for attention from strangers that is at best meaningless, and at worst, debauched.
Since TikTok took off in 2019, teenage girls compulsively perform sexy new dances, propping up their iPhones, filming themselves with exaggerated motions and smiles, peppered with practiced smoldering and outright raunchy moves. In between takes they watch and scrutinize themselves until they get “the one,” finally publishing it into the abyss of the internet, hoping it will pop up on enough strangers’ FYPs (For You Pages) to get a decent amount of likes and attention.
This trend has become normalized so quickly that we don’t see it with any clarity. Teenagers are possessed by the mind-numbing activity of scrolling through TikTok, whose brief videos have nuked attention spans. The average American user spends about an hour a day on the site; younger users—as young as 4—spend much more time. …
The innocence and mental stability of our teens is corroding with every new sexy dance or trendy innuendo. All that time practicing, filming, scrutinizing, and publishing confirms to them the agenda that women are nothing more than their bodies. The feminist movement claims to want to end the alleged rape culture and misogyny of American men, but is silent on the sexual exploitation of girls’ bodies in TikTok videos.
Earlier this year we described the West’s tragic neglect of its young people:
The result is a culture that treats all kinds of sexual practices as normal—even for teenagers. When victims report receiving nude pictures or being groped, authorities laugh it off. When a girl is asked for nude images, she doesn’t run away. Instead, she allows herself to be pestered into handing them over—and before she knows it, they’ve been sent to all the boys in the school.
Dealing with online pornography is an important step. It’s a problem in the United States too. A 2018 survey found that 98 percent of men and 73 percent of women reported Internet porn use in the previous six months. The average child is just 11 years old when he or she first encounters it. The world’s top porn sites get as many visitors in one day that cnn gets in a month.
One in four of America’s teenage girls deliberately harm themselves, according to a 2018 study. This usually involves cutting themselves with knives or deliberately burning themselves. The suicide rate for teen girls is at a record high. It is no exaggeration to say that our child rearing is deadly. And no one is really doing anything about it.
We have failed our young people on so many levels.
“[T]he whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint”—that is God’s description of today’s society (Isaiah 1:5). “From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment” (verse 6).
God tells us: “You burn with lust among the oaks and under every spreading tree; you sacrifice your children in the ravines and under the overhanging crags” (Isaiah 57:5; New International Version). We adults have created a sex-obsessed culture. We’ve gotten rid of most of the moral restraints on previous generations. Lust is lauded and displayed constantly and publicly. It is destroying our children.
