A New York City teen girl had her head bashed on the sidewalk for the crime of refusing to give her number to a fellow teen who asked for it — a sickening symptom of the perceived gender war being waged on social media between young men and women.
The horrific (and horrifically viral) video, taken Monday in East Harlem, shows a 14-year-old boy body-slamming a 15-year-old girl and stomping on her head after she rejected his advances, sending her to the hospital with a concussion.
According to the victim’s mother, the boy had been harassing the girl for attention for weeks before he turned violent. “This is not even bullying, this is outright assault — and he could have killed her,” Lucinda Arroyo told The Post this week of the assailant, who was jailed on assault charges.
It also shows just how romantically stunted a generation raised online can be when they interact in the flesh — and how the manosphere foments an us-versus-them mentality for boys and girls.
Before they even go through puberty or have their first kiss, young men are bombarded with claims that women are too choosy, that they have no chance in love and that their loneliness is women’s fault.
Take, for example, the following quote from manosphere icon Andrew Tate: Women “are given to the man and belong to the man.” Or the popular discourse on sites like Reddit claiming that average women consider the vast majority of men unattractive.
These aren’t fringe views among Gen Z men. A recent poll from the United Kingdom found that 80% of 16- and 17-year-old British boys had watched Andrew Tate content, while only 60% had heard of the British prime minister.
The claim that women have unrealistic standards and are unfairly choosy about partners is pervasive. In a recent interview with controversial streamer Sneako, he told me that boys are “black pilled” because they don’t know who “they are going to have a real relationship with” or who they “are going to get married to,” while girls, in his view, have options far more open to them.
“As long as a girl can make an Instagram account, she’s getting DMed by athletes, by celebrities, by streamers, by wealthy people,” he said. “She’s getting offers to be flown out everywhere … Every girl now sees the opportunities in front of her.”
There’s a grain of truth here, to be sure. A classic 2019 study of Tinder activity found that straight men liked 61.9% of profiles presented to them, while women liked only 4.5%.
There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that women do tend to be choosier, or with young men being frustrated by rejection. But bombarding inexperienced teen boys with disempowering romantic doomerism breeds hostility and rage, directed towards young women.
While we don’t know social-media diet of the boy in Monday’s attack, such encounters can be fueled by the attitude that young men are entitled to young women — to their attention, to their bodies, to their submission.
In the age of the manosphere and online dating, gender relations are regressing at an alarming rate. A March 2026 international survey found that Gen Z men were more likely (31%) than any generation up through Boomers (13%) to believe a wife should be subservient to her husband.
That’s a shocking transformation, and proof that growing up steeped in online dating discourse has unleashed a gender war that reframes love as a battle of the sexes.
But this harrowing attack is also proof of a second way that the internet age has taught us to treat each other with a lack of humanity.
While the girl’s head was being stomped into the cement, nobody intervened. In fact, someone stood by and recorded instead of coming to the defense of a helpless teen being abused for holding the line.
Yes, this is an extreme incident. But it’s also a real-life manifestation of our attitudes towards one another online. Consider this a warning: Digital natives are bringing the toxic rage of the internet age into the real world.
