I appreciate your counter points, but passively aggressively snipping a post that had a lot of thought put into it and labelling it a "wall of text" isn't the best way to start a conversation. When the forum software snips quotes more than a few sentences long automatically, it just comes across as a lazy dismissal. I suspect that wasn't your intention, but probably something to consider next time.
I have previously commented on the influence of social media and the general lack of shame in modern culture
here and
here (wall of text warning). I think that the framing of all insults as a social pathology rather than corrective social forces is part of the problem with the lack of shame, and the anti-bullying movements have created more problems than they have solved. Tinkering with evolved behaviors always has unintended consequences. Moreover, the helicopter / participation parenting methods of the last few decades have created a narcissism crisis such that many young people are just incapable of undergoing the process of introspection and behavioral adjustment that corrective social forces are supposed to initiate. I agree with you that social media is a cause, but I don't think it's the
root cause. If we imagine a scale of current year craziness of arbitrary length, say 1-5, where we are currently at step 4, I would place social media at step 2 or 3. The ideas at the root of the current year craziness already existed in academia long before the advent of social media, which simply acted as the conduit for them to infect the news and entertainment media and subsequently the culture.
Imagine that a world war breaks out tomorrow with America up against an alliance of Russia and China -- a genuine existential threat. Do you believe that we will still be fretting about fraudulent pay gap statistics or which gender little Johnny wants to be tomorrow? Do you think that this will increase the demand for masculine protection as I defined it? Would the reduced supply of males who perished in providing the protection have flow-on effects that would influence the economics, both social and financial, of production and provision?