I wonder if that was the secret sauce. Just kidding, I don’t remember that happening at all. There were plenty of girls on the internet back in the day. Maybe not as far back as the 90s but definitely starting 2000. That’s how I met most of them!
That being said, as a male I was on the receiving end of the same kind of garbage back then. I had a guy who was sending my mother very creepy emails with her real information just to screw with me, and this was in 98. It affected me worse than it did her, I thought he was going to ruin my life as a kid. Another guy got my email account deleted when I was 14 because I drew a picture that made fun of his art as a joke. I knew it was him because he emailed me saying he was going to do it.
I still would rather trade this internet for that one. It’s too Orwellian now.
I don’t think it’s correct to claim a sense of victimhood over your sex. Shitty people are going to be a problem for you one way or another.
I also found many more great positive experiences back then with people online than more recently. You had downs but a lot of ups. People you meet online these days tend to be more busy, edgy, creepy, or too arrogant to grace you with acknowledgement. There’s also a noticeable degree of mental illness, which lines up with the statistical trends. Which is fine but you really never know what kind of mental illness it is until it’s too late (can be genuinely dangerous). The good people are around but mostly keep to themselves.
The secret sauce was not having five monopolistic megacorporations running all our communications. The toxic assholes have always been here, but Facebook and Twitter is extremely good at platforming them and profiting off of them. This is why Facebook and Twitter had "world leaders policies" intended to keep Trump on their platforms - because Trump's fascist rhetoric made them money.
As for the standard pop-feminist take, I should point out that it's not so much a matter of gender or victimhood, it's a matter of how people are conditioned to respond to hostility. If your culture socializes boys[0] to respond to toxicity with more toxicity, then they will naturally push everyone else not so socialized out of the space. This creates "male spaces" that are just where the most toxic people happen to concentrate. The interests they concentrate around do not matter aside from them happening to be the color of the tile on the floor being stepped on.
That being said, as a male I was on the receiving end of the same kind of garbage back then. I had a guy who was sending my mother very creepy emails with her real information just to screw with me, and this was in 98. It affected me worse than it did her, I thought he was going to ruin my life as a kid. Another guy got my email account deleted when I was 14 because I drew a picture that made fun of his art as a joke. I knew it was him because he emailed me saying he was going to do it.
I still would rather trade this internet for that one. It’s too Orwellian now.
I don’t think it’s correct to claim a sense of victimhood over your sex. Shitty people are going to be a problem for you one way or another.
I also found many more great positive experiences back then with people online than more recently. You had downs but a lot of ups. People you meet online these days tend to be more busy, edgy, creepy, or too arrogant to grace you with acknowledgement. There’s also a noticeable degree of mental illness, which lines up with the statistical trends. Which is fine but you really never know what kind of mental illness it is until it’s too late (can be genuinely dangerous). The good people are around but mostly keep to themselves.