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Wanker
Guest
“Let me know if you think I’m pretty or ugly.”
https://www.thestar.com/news/articl...retty-or-ugly-brings-out-the-ugly-online?bn=1
“Let me know if you think I’m pretty or ugly.”
When a trusting 13-year-old girl in Denver named Faye posts https://www.newser.com/story/140360/bullied-girl-pleads-on-youtube-am-i-pretty-or-ugly.html" target="_blank">a YouTube video asking this question because she is being bullied in school — and you know what the response from anonymous online commenters mostly was — then two things are proved.
One, that online commenting is indeed what lies beneath a failed scab, the moral equivalent of a drive-by shooting, the intellectual equal of graffiti.
Two, that young people are not sophisticated and hard. They are just young.
And hard as it is to believe, Faye isn’t the only one going online to ask for an evaluation of their looks from a savage anonymous world. These online requests are now “a thing.” A 14-year-old named Kendal has more than four million views, and other teens are following her lead. Pre-teens are doing this now, even though YouTube claims it doesn’t allow videos from kids under 13.
Even boys are doing it, open about their misery and hoping for praise.
It’s hard to fathom. For Faye Louisie Ruth Gibson is as pretty as a snowdrop after a hard freeze. She looks like Bambi. You’d pay in banknotes to look like her if you didn’t know that her very freshness is what brings out the venom in people, at which point you’d pay in gold bricks not to look like her.
Now that her video and its aftermath have made the news, I don’t know if things are better or worse for Faye. “It hurts me to see those comments about my daughter,” says her mother, Naomi, who wants the video taken down and the vicious comments removed. But she’s out of luck. The online world does not erase itself.
“Deep down inside, all girls know that other people’s opinions don’t matter, but we still go to other people for help because we don’t believe what people say,” says Faye, who now must alert her mother when she goes online.
And hell is other people. Jean-Paul Sartre said that in Huis Clos (No Exit) and he should know, having been a hellish person himself, particularly when it came to young girls.
So where do you turn? This is the dilemma in the bullied-for-beauty phenomenon, made possible by new technology available to girls like Faye, who think “bestfriend” is one word and who litter their language with the word “like” as they struggle to hold back their tears.
To analyze the tragedy of Faye’s feelings as she learned that she was “a waste of sperm and egg” from someone online who declined to provide a name and photograph, maybe we need to express some of the more unattractive truths.
Whether girls are more vulnerable than boys to remarks about their talent at being feminine/masculine, it does appear that a strong relationship with a father is an emotional suit of armour for a girl. Even tiny girls reveal this. When you praise one daughter, the other asks, “Am I pretty too, Daddy?”
When Faye typed these words on her video, “My dad left me and my mom. He didn’t fight to have custody of me,” she was expressing her own truth.
Women are not solely to blame for their eternal insecurity. Both fathers and mothers have a responsibility to build up their daughters’ self-esteem. Faye didn’t mess up. Faye’s father messed up. Faye is so young that she is still relying on the kindness of strangers, the same way insecure, beautiful, frighteningly rich movie stars do. And then you see them on the cover of The National Enquirer, leaving an admittedly good-looking corpse, and you wonder why they didn’t just rely on their mother for compliments, not fans or Bobby Browns.
Beauty doesn’t save you. Indifference to beauty does.
And of course, beautiful people should not be bullied into regretting their beauty. Enjoy. It is a problem that time and nature will take care of.
None of the students in the Rutgers bullying trial that opened Friday in New Jersey were beautiful. Dharun Ravi, the 19-year-old student who cyber-bullied his gay roommate Tyler Clementi — who then threw himself off a bridge — is regular-looking, as was Clementi. Ravi didn’t like Clementi because he was gay and his online information gave off the taint of having parents who were “poor.”
Clementi’s family was profoundly loving. It didn’t save him.
Ravi, on the other hand, had parents who took out an ad in his 2010 high school graduation yearbook saying this: “Dear Dharun, It has been a pleasure watching you grow into a caring and responsible person. You are a wonderful son and brother . . . Keep up your good work. Hold on to your dreams and always strive to achieve your goals. We know that you will succeed.”
There’s a downside to parental adoration of the not terribly adorable, and Ravi’s self-love is it.
Parental love is insufficient. Excessive love harms more than it helps. Not that Faye couldn’t do with a boatload of love from her father. She is having an absolutely rotten time and I, a stranger, cannot find any words that would make up for her father’s silent slide away
https://www.thestar.com/news/articl...retty-or-ugly-brings-out-the-ugly-online?bn=1
“Let me know if you think I’m pretty or ugly.”
When a trusting 13-year-old girl in Denver named Faye posts https://www.newser.com/story/140360/bullied-girl-pleads-on-youtube-am-i-pretty-or-ugly.html" target="_blank">a YouTube video asking this question because she is being bullied in school — and you know what the response from anonymous online commenters mostly was — then two things are proved.
One, that online commenting is indeed what lies beneath a failed scab, the moral equivalent of a drive-by shooting, the intellectual equal of graffiti.
Two, that young people are not sophisticated and hard. They are just young.
And hard as it is to believe, Faye isn’t the only one going online to ask for an evaluation of their looks from a savage anonymous world. These online requests are now “a thing.” A 14-year-old named Kendal has more than four million views, and other teens are following her lead. Pre-teens are doing this now, even though YouTube claims it doesn’t allow videos from kids under 13.
Even boys are doing it, open about their misery and hoping for praise.
It’s hard to fathom. For Faye Louisie Ruth Gibson is as pretty as a snowdrop after a hard freeze. She looks like Bambi. You’d pay in banknotes to look like her if you didn’t know that her very freshness is what brings out the venom in people, at which point you’d pay in gold bricks not to look like her.
Now that her video and its aftermath have made the news, I don’t know if things are better or worse for Faye. “It hurts me to see those comments about my daughter,” says her mother, Naomi, who wants the video taken down and the vicious comments removed. But she’s out of luck. The online world does not erase itself.
“Deep down inside, all girls know that other people’s opinions don’t matter, but we still go to other people for help because we don’t believe what people say,” says Faye, who now must alert her mother when she goes online.
And hell is other people. Jean-Paul Sartre said that in Huis Clos (No Exit) and he should know, having been a hellish person himself, particularly when it came to young girls.
So where do you turn? This is the dilemma in the bullied-for-beauty phenomenon, made possible by new technology available to girls like Faye, who think “bestfriend” is one word and who litter their language with the word “like” as they struggle to hold back their tears.
To analyze the tragedy of Faye’s feelings as she learned that she was “a waste of sperm and egg” from someone online who declined to provide a name and photograph, maybe we need to express some of the more unattractive truths.
Whether girls are more vulnerable than boys to remarks about their talent at being feminine/masculine, it does appear that a strong relationship with a father is an emotional suit of armour for a girl. Even tiny girls reveal this. When you praise one daughter, the other asks, “Am I pretty too, Daddy?”
When Faye typed these words on her video, “My dad left me and my mom. He didn’t fight to have custody of me,” she was expressing her own truth.
Women are not solely to blame for their eternal insecurity. Both fathers and mothers have a responsibility to build up their daughters’ self-esteem. Faye didn’t mess up. Faye’s father messed up. Faye is so young that she is still relying on the kindness of strangers, the same way insecure, beautiful, frighteningly rich movie stars do. And then you see them on the cover of The National Enquirer, leaving an admittedly good-looking corpse, and you wonder why they didn’t just rely on their mother for compliments, not fans or Bobby Browns.
Beauty doesn’t save you. Indifference to beauty does.
And of course, beautiful people should not be bullied into regretting their beauty. Enjoy. It is a problem that time and nature will take care of.
None of the students in the Rutgers bullying trial that opened Friday in New Jersey were beautiful. Dharun Ravi, the 19-year-old student who cyber-bullied his gay roommate Tyler Clementi — who then threw himself off a bridge — is regular-looking, as was Clementi. Ravi didn’t like Clementi because he was gay and his online information gave off the taint of having parents who were “poor.”
Clementi’s family was profoundly loving. It didn’t save him.
Ravi, on the other hand, had parents who took out an ad in his 2010 high school graduation yearbook saying this: “Dear Dharun, It has been a pleasure watching you grow into a caring and responsible person. You are a wonderful son and brother . . . Keep up your good work. Hold on to your dreams and always strive to achieve your goals. We know that you will succeed.”
There’s a downside to parental adoration of the not terribly adorable, and Ravi’s self-love is it.
Parental love is insufficient. Excessive love harms more than it helps. Not that Faye couldn’t do with a boatload of love from her father. She is having an absolutely rotten time and I, a stranger, cannot find any words that would make up for her father’s silent slide away
