You may have read about the heartbreaking story of Amanda Todd, a Canadian teenager who recently posted a much-watched YouTube video (posted below) detailing the bullying and harassment she’d endured online and in real life. This past Wednesday, she was found dead, the apparent victim of suicide.
Here, from the Vancouver Sun, is the basic outline of Amanda’s story:
Amanda was 12 years old when she made a mistake that would haunt her until her death three years later.
Her ordeal started while she was fooling around online with friends. She probably didn’t think it was risky behaviour when she lifted her top to flash the person who was flattering her at the other end of the webcam.
Amanda’s moment of indiscretion was not unusual for someone her age: Sexting and using webcams to share sexual photos is a growing trend among children, some so young they are still in grade school.
“The Internet stalker she flashed kept stalking her,” said Carol. “Every time she moved schools he would go undercover and become a Facebook friend. What the guy did was he went online to the kids who went to (the new school) and said that he was going to be a new student — that he was starting school the following week and that he wanted some friends and could they friend him on Facebook.”
“He eventually gathered people’s names and sent Amanda’s video to her new school.”
The video and photos went to teachers, to parents, to Facebook friends, which lead to repeated taunts: “Oh, there’s the porn star.” …
Amanda was the victim of unrelenting blackmail. And the cyberspace stalker was aided by people in Amanda’s real-world life — kids who would share the photos on their cellphones, kids who would gang up to hurl first verbal abuse and then fists at her.
Amanda’s story illustrates what can happen to young girls when sexualized images of them floating around online, whether they’ve put these pictures up themselves in a moment of poor judgement or whether someone has stolen them from password-locked private photo albums, or whether someone has surreptitiously taken an “upskirt” or “down-the-blouse” or some other compromising picture of them in public. This is the sort of damage that things like the Jailbait and Creepshots subreddits can do to young girls. This is why it’s so important that things like these subreddits be shut the fuck down.
Sadly, even after her suicide, Amanda remains the target of bullies and assholes online.
One of these assholes? The MRA and atheist videoblogger and all-around terrible person known to the world as The Amazing Atheist, whom we first met when he had a Reddit meltdown and started spewing misogynistic abuse at his detractors. Now he’s spitting on Amanda’s memory.
Mocking the format of Amanda’s video, in which told her story by holding up sheets of paper to the camera describing the abuse she’s endured, The Amazing Atheist posted this picture to his Tumblr blog earlier today:
I simply can’t comprehend the mind of someone whose response to Amanda’s story is this. Beyond awful.
Here’s Amanda’s video:
This story is also why I despise half of my friends from high school, more than half of them are almost guaranteed to bash her because she was being a “slut”, if I weren’t such a coward, I’d call my irl friends out on their bullshit more often, but alas, fear gets the better of me. Fucking /b/.
Oh, and Kiwi girl, congratulations!
Really, come to think of it, I find the views of most of my generation to be absolutely contemptible. It’s like they *want* to be horrible people, like it’s funny somehow.
Internet hugs to Lauralot, and glad you’re doing better; congrats to Kiwi girl; princess Bonbon, I believe that Murkin the dog is an example to us all of patience, compassion, and love. And now I have the strangest craving for red velvet cake…
Um, I should add that TJ’s identity is public information, it’s not like I’m doxxing him. He had a public Facebook profile under his real name.
Aworld, it’s hard to call someone out on their bullshit. About the only thing I’m able to do is say something mild like “now don’t be a hater” so that at least they know I don’t think like they do. (I hear a ton of racism.) But it’s not your responsibility to change people’s minds.
@ aworld
Please keep in mind the fact that (and this is the case even if some of the friends you’re talking about are women) that if you as a man were to speak up and condemn the gendered slutshaming then that would be far more likely to make an impact than anything coming from outside the group, or anything any of the women in the group say. The way to fix this stuff is for more men to openly condemn the double standard within their own social groups. I know it can be hard, but it’s important.
I’ve been reading through some Captain Awkward threads that I missed, and this one is a really good example of why it’s important to do that, especially if you read the comments.
http://captainawkward.com/2012/08/08/324-my-friend-the-rapist/
Oooo.. ,,more yummy frosting/icing suggestions. 🙂 Thanks @clairedammit, I’m so happy I have all these options now, whereas earlier I was wondering just what I was going to do. I now just need to check why my cake top cracks but there’s still some not-completely-cooked-but-not-uncooked bits in the cake.
@aworldanonymous, just remember to keep yourself physically and/or psychologically safe, oftentimes it can be unsafe to call out bullies. It’s *not* cowardice when you’re protecting yourself, it’s called *being sensible*. 🙂 Trust me on this. 🙂 :)When this type of thing happens to me (not often), I will say something quietly to the person concerned, without making a big deal out of it. But it can be hard to be diplomatic when one is upset, and also sometimes one can’t get the person alone to talk to within a reasonable time period. And some people don’t take quiet, gentle constructive comments well…
I am like the prototypical white person (pale, blonde, blue eyes), and I’ve found that people seem comfortable saying the most racist things imaginable in front of me — my “go to” response has been “What made you think I was a racist?” said in a curious tone. For some reason, it seems to embarrass them. LOVE that Captain Awkward thread.
I know I should speak out, but these are /b/ users we’re talking about, they revel in being shitty people, really I just want to find some outlet for my anger that my friends haven’t grown out of that mentality, I dunno, I just feel like I’m the only person who thinks “trolling” is getting old.
My response at that point would be to stop being friends with those people, honestly. Maybe check back in once in a few years to see if it really was just immaturity and they’ve grown out of it, but if you’re looking at your friends and thinking they’re shitty people? That’s usually a sign that you should be asking yourself if you really want to hang out with them any more.
@CassandraSays, I’m with you on that advice. @aworldanonymous if your friends are that upsetting, are you staying friends with them because of history or because these are people you like to be around and you’re happy for others to think that you’re like them (because people tend to view anyone as being the same as the people one associates with)?
Putting on much older person hat here, part of what seems to be happening to you, aworldanon, is that you’ve hit a developmental stage where you’ve changed, but the people around you either haven’t hit that stage yet or they’re never going to. It’s worth checking back in later to see if those people have experienced the same change you have and you can be close again, but it’s a fact of getting older that sometimes you just outgrow certain friends/groups of friends. It can suck sometimes, but it’s a reality.
I guess, It’s weird, I’m actually more comfortable around the group of LGBT people I’ve just met at university in the past few months than I remember ever being with my extended group of friends I had in high school.
I just generally feel more comfortable around my more recent friends who I just met, whom by sheer coincidence all happen to be LGBT is probably a better way of wording that.
And actually, the SRSrecovery subreddit just brought up a really good idea, to start using Socratic method to question why my high school friends find such horrible things funny.
You can’t go wrong with Socrates. (Except for all the times you can go wrong with Socrates.)
That poor girl. Nobody deserves that kind of treatment, and I hope whoever caused it goes to jail.
I’m wondering how the Agonizing Asswipe managed to get anything up his rectum with his head already so firmly wedged in it.
I found this brain bleach. Let me share it with you:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/expresident/pictures-that-will-restore-your-faith-in-humanity
Er, just wanted to clarify that there’s one picture that has a slightly negative tone to it that the other very positive and uplifting pictures don’t have, so maybe it’s only 20 pictures that will restore your faith in humanity.
(No trigger warnings, though. It’s just a poll where more people didn’t care what Snooki named her kid than people who did.)
What a great guy he is, spitting on the grave of a girl who killed herself. Asshole. Does he really think that people shouldn’t care about Amanda Todd’s suicide? or that he isn’t going to get shit for posting…that? Tch…poor kid never deserved any of that shit, and she certainly doesn’t deserve THIS shit. Fuck you TAA, you sad excuse for a man.
For someone who claims the mantle of “reason and evidence” the amazing asshole couldn’t be more off the mark. For starters he’s not anyone who died today, he’s still breathing oxygen and dancing on the graves of better people then him!
@drashizu, thank you for posting that link. That was a really, really good, and necessary, antidote.
I see a smaller version of the Chicago parade group in action on the way to work. The background is the rantings of the The Australian Christian Lobby, a nasty mob of homophobes of the gay-marriage-leads-to-bestiality and homosexuality-is-more-dangerous-than-smoking line of crap. The thing I see every morning is an A4 poster outside a church, and it says
We are Christians
and
The Australian Christian Lobby
Does Not Speak For Us
I feel like rushing in and shaking someone’s hand when I see it.
Though it doesn’t make me tear up the way those pictures did. 🙂
@kittehhelp
Is that a Uniting church? There’s a poster like that on a little Uniting chapel thingo at my uni. It’s a nice change from church signs that take bits of scripture that subtly references differences of theology they have from other churches or posters spinning everything in the Middle East as being all about the poor Copts (who do get a shit deal, but framing it as part of a global oppression of Christians seems to be the common next step and is pretty insulting).
Wallace & co. are scum. So many otherwise nice people I know can’t bring themselves to feel too strongly about them because of some idea that they’re expressing some legitimate if dated religious view rather than just garbage. Sydney dioceses being among the most reactionary for both Anglicans and Catholics doesn’t help either.
Oh and more thanks to drashizu for that link.