Feminists
In reply to the discussion: Rest in peace Amanda. Bullied Teen Commits Suicide After Posting Last-Ditch Cry for Help on YouTube [View all]LadyHawkAZ
(6,199 posts)(and the teenagers on her feed) why it was wrong to blame the poor girl for the actions of other people, and equally wrong to hold the single mistake she made at 12 to a higher standard than the long, repeated mistakes her peers knowingly inflicted on her. My head aches now.
Awful, awful situation all the way around.
ETA this just crossed my path right after I got out of that discussion, and it hits on all the relevant points:
http://www.vancouverobserver.com/blogs/feminista/why-isnt-anyone-talking-about-misogyny-involved-amanda-todds-life-and-death
There was no discussion of the pressure girls like Amanda experience to measure their worth through their sexual desirability. From her story it sounds like this man had the hallmarks of a predatorhe tried to use her photos to blackmail her and yet she's the one who got blamed. This comes from the idea that it's up to girls and women to protect their purity at the same time as all their role models in the media say that you need to get a man to be a complete person, that you need to be sexually attractive to be liked, appreciated, and valued. She said the guy she showed off to was telling her how beautiful she was. Given our culture that can be really tempting for a girl.
Ah yes, context. In a context in which women are told in manifold ways that everything about them is wrong their emotions, their bodies, their fat, their lack of fat, their developing, their agingwhen someone comes along and tells you that you are perfect and beautiful, thats some powerful stuff.
This mans intention, when he threatened Todd with exposure of the coercive images, was to make Todd feel like a whore. The weapon that this man was able to rely on was the judgment of our society. Under our unequal social and economic conditions, the stakes are higher when a woman falls out of favour with her community. For a girl or woman, falling out of favour with her community can mean a sentence to a nightmarish cycle of distress.
If we diffuse the judgment, and look at the behaviour of the attacker, we can weaken the attack. We need less focus on the mistake and more on the sexism in our society that this man wieldedsuccessfullyto rid the planet of another young woman.
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