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Because my nitpick topic is the intersection between politics and gender/sex, in the last months since 7 October I began a very unscientific analysis of the social media content, especially on Instagram, of my friends, acquaintances and other people I follow. (Context as always, European middle-upper class, intra-national environment, very EU-based)
I cannot emphatise enough how much the driven behind pro-Palestinian content is driven exclusively by women. Between the thousands of people I follow, there is a core of around 50 people, all women apart one anarchist guy, who are hard Palestinian-posters (And remember, there is a lot of interests in politics in my environment, it is normal to see all these people interested in stuff like this). And I am not talking about random posting, I am talking of months and months of posting, all inserted in a moral framework of "do not touch the children" or "Israelis are racists". Having followed the process since the beginning, it was fun to see how it took at least one month until the start of the pro-Palestinian posting, as if they were checking where it was the consensus in their group before beginning to post.
The question I ask the community here, why a topic that is so far from our location and interests (again, we are no Columbia University or Middle East, we are far away both ideologically and physically) is so interesting for women, that makes them post about id dozens of times every week, for months straight? And I am talking about a very intense interest, is not rare to see online meltdown of suffering, death menaces or simply histrionics directed towards obscure metaphysical forces.
Again, my observation are reinforced from what I saw in the US and Europe about the universities and campus protests; the protestors are overwhelmingly women, and the most desperate are women.
For me the question rotates around two different forces;
Thinking about the past, it makes me smile how much it was common to hear, until twenty years ago, that women are very uninterested in politics, unlike men. For my generation, this idea looks absurd. Men do not care about politics at all.
I've experienced much the same, most of the really active Palestine posters are women. Maybe a part of the explanation is this poem from the 70s that the local ones like to quote (translated by me from Finnish):
When someone has been born a mother
Who has once been born as a mother,
is a mother to all children,
and all the children of the world
she has held to her chest.
And the cry of the children of the world,
she has started to hear in her ears,
as all the children of the world,
speak with her own child's mouth.
This particular war has really featured a lot of pictures of dead or seriously hurt Palestinian children and babies. If you're even vaguely affliated to lefty people on social media you'll be bombarded with dozens of them every week unless you start hiding or blocking. I'm not particularly emotional (well, duh, I post here), but some of them really get to me, too. They must be playing a particularly merry havoc on maternal instincts, even with women who don't have kids themselves.
One reason why it might have taken a bit of time for this effect to start working was that during the first month or so there were equivalent pics of Israeli kids being killed or having been kidnapped, but that petered out since it was related to one dramatic one-time event, not a continuous supply of new examples.
It's compounded by social network effects, of course.
The pictures of dead jewish kids and rapes being circulated in Arab telegram don't seem to have inspired any maternal or feminine sympathy in progressive women. Mothers (I lead a baking workshop so I deal with women quite often) generally have mutual sympathy for dead kids, with more professional mothers understanding Palestines less than innocent role in fomenting violence. It is only childless women who are Extremely Online that spout pro-palestine platitudes mindlessly, and from there comes the simps who pretend to care about Palestine just in the hope of getting into some young naive girls pants.
...do you think those women are in those Telegrams?
Like /u/Armin said, it took some time for the actual pro-Palestine mill to start really functioning after Oct 7, and the reason for this was probably that there was a large amount of grisly material from those attacks circulating. The amount of new material on that front eventually tapered out, but the "grisly Palestine material" keeps chugging on and on.
Also, anecdotally, the most insistent pro-Palestine social media activists I know are mothers with exactly one child, though this just might reflect my age class.
True, progressives would not have looked for evidence of their pet palestinians having done any wrong. However some of my proggy friends did ask me if the Palestine stuff was true, and I shared with them the shit gazanow and (weird arabic script) was sharing gleefully till the admins realized it was a bad look and nuked the chats. Your point about mothers on social media being virulently progressive is an interesting one and I wonder if it is the 'social media' rather than the 'mother' bit that is the determining variable. My maternal circles largely abandoned social media, so I am lost here.
My wife (who has cut back on her social media quite radically recently) said that especially mothers with young children are suspectible to social media, since they are so attached to their children 24/7 that when they get a little break they have little time or energy to do anything else than browse a bit of Instagram.
I guess thats the difference. It is better for young mothers to get onto live shopping. Not nearly as inane and more gratifying, if potentially financially onerous.
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