the circle jerk of sadness to grooming pipeline
how growing up during internet's wild west era arrested the sexual development of a generation
First, let’s set the scene. *Clears throat and shifts into narrator voice*
Picture this: It’s 2001. A 12-year-old girl sits in her 6th grade elementary school “modular classroom” (literally a trailer) in front of a “Bondi Blue” iMac G3 computer immersed in the rabbit hole of the internet.
This young rascal’s site of choice?
You guessed it: Tumblr.com.
That girl I’m describing? She’s me. Yes, I am truly an OG Tumblr girl. Guilty. As. Charged.
Looking back, it was those early days of Tumblr where you could really feel the “sad-girl aesthetic” taking off.
I grew up in a small town in the middle of Wyoming. Yes, the state that inspired these t-shirts:
Access to the internet felt incredibly exciting. A whole new world opened for a generation of tweens who desperately wanted to connect. To feel a part of something. To feel seen. I was no different.
THINSPIRATION AND THIGH GAPS
It was around this same time that I found myself immersed in the “pro-ana” (pro-anorexia) and “pro-mia” (pro-bulimia) subcultures on Tumblr, which in retrospect feel like early examples of how internet subcultures morphed into forms of social contagion and began to romanticize and promote dysfunctional attitudes toward food and dangerous levels of groupthink.
The pro-ana and pro-mia movements promoted and celebrated anorexia and bulimia as lifestyle choices. In these communities, this stuff was discussed with the casual nonchalance of deciding to simply “go vegan,” rather than recognizing starvation and purging as potentially life-threatening behaviors.
Anyone deep enough in the pro-ana and pro-mia movements in the early days of Tumblr will remember the floods of “thinspiration” posts (images and text that glorified being unhealthily thin.) The ultimate goal was to achieve the ever elusive “thigh gap.”
Users egged one another on by sharing tips on how to best suppress appetite, lose weight, or hide evidence of vomiting and purging from their loved ones. This was normal behavior in these communities. Taking part - even passively - felt like being a member of some kind of ultra-elite secret society. That was what made it so addictive (and so toxic.)
I was a super-late bloomer as a young teen and a bit (okay, a lot) socially awkward and emotionally intense. I didn’t get my period until I was 16. I had not a trace of breast tissue (I still don’t, tbh.)
I had an obsessive and grasping desire to be liked. To be beautiful. To fit in.
The sense of belonging in these internet communities and the beauty ideals they promoted drew me in like a moth to a flame.
I was profoundly influenced by this content as a young girl growing up in the early 00’s. It was just so irresistibly aesthetically appealing and alluring. Thinness was the idealized beauty standard for women at the time. Thinness was equated with success, popularity, and desirability.
Girls my age were barraged with tabloid articles hyper-analyzing even the slightest weight gain of teen heartthrobs of the day like Jessica Simpson and Britney Spears.
Girls my age picked up on this and nitpicked one another’s weight.
Monkey see, monkey do.
I can still remember the whispers of girls in junior high between 2003 and 2005:
“Oh my god. Doesn’t (girl in class) look a little… big?”
Insert gasps from the horrified lemmings, going along with whatever (likely normal weight) the head b*tch in charge deemed “too fat to be pretty anymore.”
This is the toxic soup in which many millennial girls were forced to form our fragile psyches. No wonder we hated ourselves (and each other.)
THE WILD WEST OF THE INTERNET
I was around eleven or twelve when I first accessed porn online.
My parents were practicing for a church volleyball league at a local elementary school gymnasium. Us kids were left to our own devices and were expected to entertain ourselves.
I often found myself in the “ringleader”/ “bad influence” role in any group of children – always seeking to push buttons (and boundaries).
A group of us decided to venture off into one of the classrooms to play on the computers. I had the bright idea to search for something “bad” on Yahoo.
While the other kids egged me on (but were simultaneously happy it wasn’t them who would get in trouble for “doing the thing”) I nervously typed in whatever naughty words my immature child brain could piece together:
“Sex”
“Boobs”
“Penis”
All I remember is staring in a mix of horror and curiosity at the images that came up. But we didn’t stop. With me at the helm (mouse), we scrolled through the images in silence for what felt like an eternity (probably about twenty minutes.)
Mind you, there were no firewall protections back then that actually worked.
Kids could literally surf hardcore pornographic images in their elementary school classrooms. I know because I saw it happen all the time. And the adults had no fucking clue.
THE HOT GIRL BOX
This was the beginning of the end, if I really think about it.
At that point, I was no longer in control of my own sexual development. I was robbed of the opportunity for my sexuality to unfold naturally alongside peers who were at a similar developmental level.
I opened up about this on Instagram and in an episode of my podcast, and received hundreds of comments, emails and voicemails from others who felt they had been impacted in a similar way but had never been able to put these feelings into words or feel safe to speak about it publicly.
In the early aughts, my peers and I were flooded with images of stunning video vixens and celebrities in low slung jeans, spray tans, and perfect bodies.
This was the era of “Genie in a Bottle” by Christina. Of “I’m a Slave for You” by Britney Spears.
To be sexy was to be seen.
Being desired by men was the goal. To achieve this, one had to shove oneself into what I call “The Hot Girl Box.”
We were all doing it. Like fucking hamsters, unaware that we were on a wheel in a cage, running to a finish line that didn’t exist. In this pursuit, we were forced to forego a natural process of unfolding over time and instead fast-track the process of growing up.
Instead of a strong sense of inner guidance directing me toward a more mature future version of myself that aligned with what *I* felt being beautiful meant to *me*, I was encouraged to outsource my own free will and identity development to an invisible internet overlord that was also poisoning and contorting the minds of my peers.
If that’s not some Orwellian/Black Mirror type of shit, I don’t know what is.
I see now that I was robbed of my girlhood. We all were. My heart breaks for the little girls we once were.
I don’t blame my parents for this. As I said, these were the Wild West days of the internet. Most parents had legitimately zero idea of what was going on. And how could they have really known the gravity of the dangers or risks? We were all guinea pigs in this bizarre social experiment.
And you know how it goes with teenagers, anyway. If you’d have told me anything back then about the risks involved with my online behavior, I’d have fought you on it tooth and nail.
I truly believed I knew what was best for myself. I felt invincible. The dopamine hits and instant validation were just as addictive as any drug. I was blind to the harm being done to my psyche and sense of self.
However, the intense levels of emotional neglect and dysfunction in my household meant that I was primed to be an incredibly easy target for nefarious characters online (as well as offline.)
But more about that later…
SPAGHETTI STRAPS
As a young teen, the toxic ways I was taught to view my body didn’t stop with what I experienced on TV and the internet; it dribbled out into the real world too, perpetuated by the adults that were meant to be molding my mind in a positive way. This included my teachers.
I distinctly remember being sent home in High School for wearing “spaghetti strap” tops (an absolute staple of any Y2K girlie’s wardrobe.)
At my school, if you were flagged for a “dress code violation,” (“showing too much skin”), you’d be – often in front of your entire class – sent to the administration office to select a shirt to wear out of the lost and found bin.
Anyone who saw you for the rest of the day would know exactly why you were wearing some oversized, stained (and stinky as hell) shirt that was different from the one you came to school in. The shaming nature of this was the point. They may as well have had us pin a fucking scarlet letter to our chests.
This would happen to girls even on days where the air conditioning was broken in our classrooms, with temperatures in the warmer months easily rising into the 80s and 90s.
Girls were told to “cover up” to avoid being “distracting.”
The message was clear: your female body is arousing and shameful. It must be hidden away. If you don’t properly hide your body, you only have yourself to blame for whatever might happen to you because boys and men can’t (and won’t) be expected to not fly into some kind of horny psychosis at the sight of a teen girl’s décolletage.
Teenage boys certainly didn’t escape unscathed by this stuff, either. Imagine what it felt like to be a soft-tempered and empathetic teen boy and being told you were some kind of uncontrollable caveman incapable of basic human decency.
I am still horrified that the “adults in the room” allowed this toxic public shaming ritual to occur to an entire generation of women and girls.
And you didn’t complain. You couldn’t. No one was going to write a think-piece in the New York Times about what happened to you back then. A journalist wouldn’t have even taken up the story. There was no talk of “rape culture” yet. There was no one to complain to.
It just was what it was.
Young girls were expected to somehow grin and bear the unnecessary burden of being responsible for the sexual urges of men because “boys will be boys.” This was just a baked-in assumption.
Girls were taught to be submissive and desirable. But not too sexy, and definitely not a “slut.” Boys were taught not to discuss their feelings and to “man up,” while using aggression and power to rise above their peers.
These same boys grew up watching shows like “Girls Gone Wild” on TV and having instant access to extremely violent hardcore porn online. The ideal was sexual dominance, wealth, and power at all costs.
The repressed psychological shadow material of the young men of this generation began to quickly play out (and still is) in the form of things like school shootings, gamergate, and the incel subculture.
THE MAN IN THE VAN
Girls of my generation were taught that the typical sexual predator presented in the following manner:
Creepy. Ugly. Old.
(Bonus points if he pulls up in a van asking if you want to see his puppy.)
Back then, I knew the drill. I could spot those freaks a mile away. I mean, it would be pretty obvious if some dude was a predator… right?
Wrong.
Also on the rise during the early aughts were AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) and MySpace. These online spaces were the perfect environments for older men to prey on vulnerable teen girls.
But here’s the thing: the men that ended up grooming me didn’t fit the archetype I was told to look out for. I never saw it coming.
Almost immediately after creating my first MySpace account when I was 15, I began to receive “friend requests” from extremely attractive men in their late 20s – late 30s.
When you’re a young teen desperate for attention and validation, you don’t see hot older dudes as predators.
The boys my own age were pimply, skinny, broke, and would rather make fun of me than court me. What emotionally neglected and insecure teen girl wouldn’t be wooed by a sexy man with a “real job,” his own apartment, fully developed body, and who always seemed to know exactly the right things to say?
I ended up taking a few of these relationships offline, which led to multiple instances of sexual abuse, violation, and rape. All of which I shoved to the back of my psyche, only to have this toxic shame and self-hatred manifest in chronic physical (and mental) health issues that nearly killed me in my late twenties.
After all, it was my own fault, right?
I went along with it. I liked it.
Right?
I WAS A CHILD
The deeply fucked-up nature of what happened to me as a teen didn’t really properly sink in until last year (2022) at a dinner with my friend’s family, while I was having a conversation with her fourteen-year-old son.
Midway through our chat, I was hit with a realization:
This young boy was just one year younger than I was when I was being sexually pursued by men in their 30s.
In that instant, I felt like I temporarily left my body. I was hit with a wave of nausea.
I took a long look at this boy and tried as hard as I could to understand how anyone could see him for anything other than what he truly was: an innocent child. I tried to understand how someone could see him in a sexual way.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t do it. At the mere thought, I was filled with disgust. He was a CHILD.
It was then that I realized: I had been a child, too. I was a victim. And all these years, I’d blamed myself. I’d convinced myself that I was the outlier who actually had “asked for it.”
THE RECLAMATION
I wish I could say that I’ve reached a place of healing from the damage done, but I haven’t.
I’m still reconciling with the nature of my own self-brainwashing which was aided and abetted by the completely unsupervised and unregulated internet culture of the early 00’s.
I still have an extremely complicated relationship with sex and intimacy, that I’m only just beginning to unravel. When sex has always felt like a performative exercise to be seen and desired, it makes sense that the road to recovery will be a long and arduous process.
For the longest time, I intellectualized my healing process and wondered why I wasn’t “getting better.”
I visited the doctor, I read every book, listened to every podcast episode. I knew exactly why I felt sexually frozen, but knowing and understanding wasn’t helping. It almost felt worse because nothing seemed to be changing.
What was wrong with me?
Then I discovered Somatic Experiencing (SE).
Created by Dr. Peter Levine after experiencing how wild animals recover from repeated traumatic experiences (like attacks by predators), SE is a relatively new trauma-informed therapeutic modality that aims to resolve symptoms of stress, shock, and trauma that accumulate in the body.
Working closely with a therapist experienced in SE, I learned that my issue was that I wasn’t present in my body. I began to realize that I spent nearly a decade or more of my life in an activated and dissociated state.
Somatic Experiencing has been the only thing that has helped me get out of my head and back into my body. I’m finally learning how to listen to it and trust it again, and it’s starting to trust me back.
Something else that’s helped was my decision to move away from pop-psychology, Instagram infographics, and mainstream medicalized mental health advice that continues to push the narrative of disorder and dysfunction labels. Instead I dove into depth psychology.
The work of Carl Jung and other Jungian analysts like Marion Woodman, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, James Hillman, and mythologist Joseph Campbell – to name a few – have helped me reparent myself.
These writers have become the spiritual teachers and caring elders I never had access to growing up. They helped me understand the nature of much of my suffering.
Through absorbing myself in their work, I realized how many in my generation missed out on vital initiatory experiences that would have helped us develop psychologically.
Without elders to guide us through initiatory rites, it’s understandable why generations of youth would feel lost and empty. Through this lens, the signs of suffering and psychological distress that are so often labeled as “mental illness” start to look more like perfectly understandable reactions to growing up in a supremely fucked up society devoid of myth and meaning.
This realization alone helped free me of much of my toxic shame and self-blame.
LEAVING THE CIRCLE JERK OF SADNESS
I’ve been seeing a lot of throwing-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater style discourse over the last few years stating that social media is “bad” and the only solution is to do away with it entirely.
I’m not so sure this is a sustainable approach in our ultra-connected culture (however I still do fantasize about it.)
With the tools and information we have now, I believe it’s possible to cultivate a healthier relationship with our online spaces.
Reclaiming the tools and formats used to harm us looks like developing our critical thinking skills and maintaining a healthy level of skepticism when we’re online, rather than just mindlessly consuming and being so easily swayed by anyone with a large following who happens to share our exact point of view.
Doing so will require us to collectively develop the capacity to listen to, and maybe even (*gasp*) embrace people that think differently than we do, have more life experience than we do, or who have the courage to say the unpopular thing that goes against the ideological framework du jour that’s promising to fix everything that’s “wrong” with us (and learning to recognize stuff like this as a potentially massive red flag.)
For now, it seems we’ve learned very little since the pro-ana / pro-mia movements of the early aughts.
It's vital that we begin to develop a collective awareness of how easily internet subcultures and online platforms can start out with good intentions (creating community around peer support and validation) but then quickly morph into social contagion. We must learn to spot when these “safe spaces” and “communities” are headed in the direction of lemming-style groupthink, creating what I call on the podcast a “circle jerk of sadness.”
Even the phrase “safe space” has been co-opted to a certain extent.
There are many people who only consider an online community or creator’s content “safe” if it aligns perfectly with their currently held worldview, which was often created in a virtual echo-chamber devoid of any real-life experience or critical thinking skills where harmful advice is offered under the guise of “support.”
It feels like it’s time to start flipping the script on what’s safe and what’s not safe.
I would argue that limiting all your online interactions to participation in “communities” that exist solely to validate and cheer on your current beliefs may be one of the most un-safe things to do for your mental health and psychological development.
We need to start taking ownership of our algorithms as best we can. If that means starting an entirely new account, do that.
Leave online communities that feel like circle jerks of sadness. Read a book written by someone older than you with more life experience. Learn from elders who have walked the path of individuation before you. Follow critical thinkers online that speak and create from a place of depth and nuance.
GENERATIONS OF BABY BORDERLINES
My podcast initially started out as an exploration of borderline personality disorder – although it has since taken a very different direction.
One of the “symptoms” of BPD is “splitting countertransference” (often referred to simply as, “splitting.”)
Splitting is a general tendency to characterize people, objects, beliefs, or situations as either “all good” or “all bad.” Viewing the world in this way is an attempt to shield oneself from the anxiety caused by potential abandonment, loss of trust, or betrayal.
What makes splitting so maddening is that people still do it, even when intellectually, they know that the world is complex and that good and bad can exist simultaneously.
They know that two things can be true at once. That good and bad exist in all of us, all the time.
As I began to learn more about splitting, I started to see signs and symptoms of it everywhere in our current culture.
As my exploration of the field of psychiatry (and its discontents) deepened, I began seeing other “signs and symptoms” of what is known as BPD in the collective consciousness – not just in individuals with an official diagnosis (or the droves of TikTok tweens who armchair diagnose themselves.)
It doesn’t surprise me that so many members of the Millennial and Gen-Z generations find themselves being drawn to my podcast. However, I don’t believe my listeners have disordered personalities.
I believe they’ve been forced to grow up in extremely disordered and dysfunctional environments (families and societies) and have been seeking treatment from a mental health system that tries to convince them the problem is individual, rather than collective.
Once I began to uncover the deeply corrupt nature of the creation of the DSM (psychiatry’s diagnosis “bible”) and after learning that researchers from the UK and New Zealand are fighting for borderline personality disorder to be completely removed as a diagnostic category, I archived all of my earliest podcast episodes about recovering from “BPD.” I was done.
Don’t get me wrong, I still identify with some of the symptoms of BPD. But I think if we’re being honest with ourselves, many of us do.
Just look at the below symptom list and tell me that the majority of (primarily young) people today aren’t showing signs of:
· Unstable relationships
· Fear of abandonment
· Unclear or shifting self-image
· Impulsive self-harming behaviors (including body modification + sex)
· Chronic feelings of emptiness
And you’re telling me the best we can do is tell entire generations of young people that their personalities are incurably disordered and just… call it a day?
No. Not good enough. Not anymore.
I’m not buying it.
If this was “working” and the medical model of mental health was actually onto something, we’d be seeing mental health outcomes improving, instead of declining rapidly.
All the while, the DSM taskforce continues to add to the ever-growing list of various dysfunction and disorder labels in each new edition (which they profit off handsomely, might I add.)
As they say, “follow the money.”
This is why I pivoted my approach. My content is now aimed to help my listeners and readers perform emotional alchemy.
The idea of alchemy is to reduce something with fire – burning it down so that something new can rise from the ashes. We can do this with our personalities, too.
I try my best to help those who consume my content to begin to see their symptoms as saviors - as alerts from their bodies and minds that want to let them know when they’re no longer in alignment with the deepest yearnings of their souls.
This is how we begin to work with our bodies, rather than against them.
On my Instagram, I still try my best to harness the nostalgic “YES, that’s so me” feeling of Tumblr, but I infuse the posts I share with critical thinking and nuance, and the message that no one is inherently disordered or dysfunctional – and that anyone can come back from the borderline.
It’s time for us to begin to reclaim the tools and formats that were used to harm us. It’s time for us to take back our adolescence once and for all. To speak our truth, so that future generations don’t have to experience what we did.
The other day, I felt the rage, resentment and anger of what I’ve been through boil up inside of me. This happens a lot.
Instead of doing what I usually do (pushing it down and distracting myself by scrolling on my phone or taking another edible), I decided to write a poem to release some of my millennial rage.
It feels appropriate to end this post with that poem.
“Millenni-null”
by Mollie Adler
That anger you feel? It’s justified. That’s how it feels to wake up to the lifetime of lies you’ve been sold.
And we bought them all, didn’t we?
We fell for every one of them.
Hook line and sinker.
And why wouldn’t we?
We were children.
We have every right to stare into the faces of those who were meant to protect us and speak to the reality of where things stand.
And to them, I say this:
You hypnotized us like the snake in The Jungle Book with your velvety promises of wealth, security, happiness, and perfection.
So then why do we all feel so fucking empty?
That dream of never-ending “progress” you talked so much about?
Ran campaigns about?
That “never-ending progress” we read about in our college textbooks while on our second Vyvanse of the day while we racked up student loan debt we could never pay off so we could (maybe?) get a job selling shit that nobody wants or needs while pretending to care about this Truman Show shit long enough to retire(?) while watching the world around us collapse into a steaming dumpster fire?
Tell us.
Where is your “never ending progress” now?
Show us.
We did what you told us to do.
We followed the script.
We read the lines you wrote for characters you cast us to play in the movie you’re producing.
We even paid you to help us pick ourselves apart and put the pieces back together in a way you said would make us feel better.
In a way that would make the loneliness go away.
We hoped you could help us find the rot you said lived inside us.
Maybe then, we’d feel free.
We stared into the pocket-sized touch screen pacifiers you made for us while we blindly trusted that you’d care about the fact that we have to live in this world after you turn to dust.
You were the adults in the room.
Instead, you chose to spend your careers profiteering, skewing data, and shoving your heads further into the sand while everything fell apart.
But at least your little graphs are going up. 📈
Right?
But at least you own that vacation home in Malibu.
Right?
I guess now you can die happy while the rest of us stare into the void and eat avocado toast.
Everything is fine.
and now, for the links for my paid readers.
In each of my posts, I provide additional resources for my paid Substack readers. These will include both paid and free extras (books, podcast episodes, YouTube videos) that are providing insight and fuel for growth in my own recovery journey.
Un-paid readers won’t see anything below this point. If you’d like to upgrade to paid, click the button below and sign up for just $5/month. Paid subs also unlock access to my private Discord community. After upgrading, simply email your payment confirmation to help@backfromtheborderline.com for your unique access link.
◘ Listen to Back from the Borderline
◘ Listen to Night Night Bitch (my second esoteric bedtime story podcast)
◘ Follow me on Instagram
Alright, onto the links! 🪄 ✨
sh*t that has me spellbound
Now that it’s just you and me, here’s what I’ve been binging/learning about this month (while of course leaving time for surrender and being in-the-flow 🙃.) Save a few of the freebies that sound interesting and listen to them throughout the month until the next post.
On the topics discussed in this article:
◘ Mass Psychosis - How An Entire Population Becomes Mentally Ill
◘ The Evolution of the Tumblr Girl
◘ "toxic" femininity: what's up with girlbloggers, female manipulators, and femcels?
◘ “I was groomed at 17 years old”
◘ Peter Levine’s 10 Hour Workshop on Sexuality (YES, ALL TEN HOURS)
◘ Your Highest Technique: Relaxing Behind Your Inner Disturbance
◘ Somatic Experiencing Founder, Peter A. Levine, PhD on Sexual Abuse Trauma
◘ Fawning and sexual fawning as a response to sexual trauma
Other goodies:
◘ The Misinformation Age: How The Internet Killed Critical Thinking
◘ The Hidden Cost of Doomscrolling
◘ The Downside of Being an Attractive Woman — An Analysis of “Pretty Privilege”
◘ Growing Up in an Environment Where You’re Not Valued
◘ For From Thy Shadow Shineth Light
