Welcome to Planet A-Hole

[marmar]

from In These Times:


Welcome to Planet A-Hole
In case being a 7th-grade girl wasn’t traumatic enough, now there’s a ‘12-year-old sluts’ Facebook page.

BY Sady Doyle


The thing to know about being a 12-year-old girl is this: You live with the awareness that other people's eyes are always trained on you. The moment you pass from childhood into young womanhood, someone is always looking. You are subject to a massive amount of conflicting social pressure—you know you must sexualize yourself to be deemed worthwhile, but the burden is also on you avoid unwanted attention from the creeps who are suddenly cat-calling you, the nasty kids who sit atop the social hierarchy or, worse yet, the predators who may be trolling your social media profiles. And you know that if those gazes fix on you, single you out, your whole existence will become a barrage of insults and a daily gauntlet of intense emotional pain.

What I'm trying to convey here is that, although the Facebook page for “12-Year Old Slut Meme's” has recently been tagged “Controversial Humor” in lieu of taking it down, the children whose names and images are culled for mockery are very, very unlikely to see it as a joke. Instead, it's likely their worst nightmares come to life.

The posts are from various sources around the Internet, including Facebook; the “humor” is entirely based on the idea that child abuse is hilarious. Under the picture of a 15-year-old who said she had sex for a can of soda, for example, we get knee-slappers such as “she is soooooooooooo FUCKING UGLY HIDEOUS BITCH,” from Joules Bryce of New York Mills, New York. Or there's the high road, taken by Damien Arvidson: “Do people really have so few morals as to prostitute themselves for a drink? Bitch needs a bullet.” You know what your mother always told you; sex is for someone you love, but death threats are a sweet gesture on any occasion.

Violence is an underpinning of the page—and its perverse stance as an arbiter of public morality. James Silverwood and Dom Terry, the men who run the page, have a very clear idea of parental responsibility: “Honestly, ask yourself, if you had a daughter and she was dressed like a 2 cent, cock thirty whore, would it make an ounce of difference whether or not she was 12 or 14? No, you'd be ashamed to the point of beating her regardless,” reads one post. Shawn Smith, a supporter of the page, notes in a BuzzFeed comment that “until the people as parents step up and smack the shit out of their slutty daughters instead of letting them get away with whoreish (sic) 'Jersey Shore' behavior then things ike (sic) this will never go away.” .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13949/welcome_to_planet_a_hole