Before things would go from innocent and trying to get as much fun out of life as possible, to the Nightmare Beginning, we'd enjoy hanging out with our friends and talking about our interests. Mass media was a commonly uniting factor, and a very prominent thing in our daily lives.
I keep bringing up mixed messages, so here I can explain a few. We were told, "never judge a book by its cover". Fair enough. That one's kinda context-sensitive IRL.
Remember the teacher having to do the "discrimination day" thing? Where the brown-eyed and blue-eyed students would be separated, and one day the Browneyes would be supreme and the blue-eyed students would be the untermensch, and the next day it would switch? And in my experience, my rather suspicious, "looks like a boy pretending to be a 40yo woman" teacher for that grade, was really dramatic and hammy about hammering in that message. However, I don't recall anybody cared, and a teacher might not be able to get away with "refusing to address particular students" after a certain amount of time.
I've heard of "pretend to be a ghost days", but I don't recall any school I went to, doing that. Heard it was a thing in other regions, though. Something about some "attached story" (that's a thing... does it have a name?) where "a drunk driver killed a family, and in that family was this student oooOOOooo~". And the "ghost students" would wear all white, and just be silent all day, and people would play along ("kayfabe") and pretend the ghost-student wasn't there. Something about popular baffo students being picked for this. But I was assuming that it'd be an opt-in at will kinda thing.
I do recall a "Day of Silence", something to do with LGBT somethingorother, and the participants would refuse to say anything voluntarily. Like just being silent all day was a message or something. But the teachers would still call on them. Then, because one day of silence wasn't enough, there was "Day of Truth", in which conservative / red-lodge / beardo / tradstrat type students would... Not say anything. Because it was "protesting" the "Day of Silence" that was about Trans something, the day before. But on this day of supposed "truth", the participants... say nothing. How fitting. These days, I understand. The beardos and trads hate the blue-lodge detransitioners and open homos, but they're both baffo groups. Neither of them are truly normal. One's obsessed with keeping up an illusion, the other is open with their weird insanity and lusts.
We weren't usually divided into "boys against girls", and any aforementioned vagboys would DESTROY the dickgirl competition. Which itself sent mixed messages to actual girls, that "yes, "girls" (with lanky, gangly, long, knobby proportions) can in fact beat up people with pathetic micros", but also "so why can't I measure up? Why can't I be as strong, fast, hard as the tall girls?" The he-students seldom had to wonder why one single boy in class was completely different from the rest.
Media often had strong themes of "boys vs girls", but media isn't like real life. IRL, actual women are a majority, and vagboys are a minority. Real men are the smallest minority of all. We'd be told constantly, "don't be sexist! Grrl powaaaarrr!!", but we didn't see real women in media. We'd see IRL guys all the time, though. This lack of representation certainly messed with people's heads.
Barbie, the toy from Mattel, came under fire a lot for "promoting unrealistic beauty standards". The cover story as to why Barbie's so long and gangly, is for the purposes of wearing 4 layers of doll clothes. But that's just a convenient excuse. You may have noticed that obnoxious "princess neon pink" color that's on all princess type characters and products. "Princesses" has a very, very dark undertone to it. In Vidya Type Thoughts, I mention stuff about the way "Princesses" behave, and I've already alluded to really dark stuff here. From a very early, EARLY age, the "Princesses" know that they're different from normal people, and they develop sexual behaviors, "MK Ultra Beta Sex Kitten" personality modes, and tend to have massive meltdown chimpouts (chimps are fake, but you know) when they don't get their way.
Sometimes, real women complain about how there's "no real women on TV", those words exactly, but then they get weird about the topic of "real men". That part, they don't want to talk about. Real women will sell out their own kind, to support this baphomet shit, to their own detriment. Never swear oaths, folks. That is what happens to people who swear oaths and "keep secrets" and join secret clubs. They lose their souls and become pawns that don't even get to make their own decisions.
The bleached fake blonde hair that Barbie and many other popular characters exhibit, symbolizes being freshly programmed. MK Ultra was disclosed a while ago. Fracturing psyches is a real and very common thing. Many people are wrecks, because of trendy little, commonplace MK Ultra instances, done by members of the common populace. Bleached blonde, is visual shorthand for "head/mind bleached".
When people complained about Barbie's "unrealistic beauty standards", and criticized fashion models for being "too thin", they only talked about the body fat percentage aspect, and no other aspect. They didn't talk about arm length, spine curvature, pelvis shape and size, nope. Only BFP, no other angles. One "model" had attributed to "her", a clearly ghostwritten article about becoming anorexic and feeling bad about giving fans false advice. The article mentioned the "model being severely underweight, and having period cramps". If you're a girl reading this, you can spot the error.
Oh yeah, we got shown videos about baffos "going through puberty", playing roles as actors do, playing pretend they'll have puberty. I already covered how that's not really the case.
At around the time my generation was going to middle school, that's when things just had a very rough and bumpy, massive change in public consciousness. In our childhood, technology was rapidly, exponentially growing, and readily becoming more accessible to people of lower income. Oftentimes, poorer people would get discount previous-gen consumer electronics, whenever some grand new rich person product came out.
It's common knowledge that after 2007, there was a MASSIVE dive in the quality of original Internet content spaces. Wannabe elitist gatekeepers blamed this on ree normies get out, but there was a push from TPTB to get everyone as connected to the "shrek porn superhighway" as possible. This would mean, that there'd be some good along with the bad. But after 2007, a LOT!! more BAD was just pumped online, obscuring and drowning out what little good there was.
But before then, there was a lot of good for the common pleb! And there still is today, but there's been a mass demoralization campaign against regular people, to make them feel like there's no options and no point in trying to get a personal message out. Vanity publishing is an option, because no normal person's gonna get a book about real people published. Discussed this over here. But home printers and vanity publishing, as well as the WWW now for regular folk, those were options of rapidly increasing availability! There was less censorship on the web, and people still had IRL friends, with which to pool resources and collaborate on projects with.
Today, people just forgot that these things are options. But TPTB wanted people to forget those things.