ETA: NSFW (language) or for people who’ve been bullied (you already know)
Context, from Petula Dvorak at the Washington Post:
… Fairfax County firefighter Nicole Mittendorff, 31, killed herself in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, the state medical examiner concluded. But even after the search for her was over, her body was identified and memorial candles began to burn, the cyberbullies — who claimed they were her fellow firefighters — kept scorching away at Mittendorff online.
There is an investigation at Mittendorff’s firehouse to find out who posted the vicious online attacks and whether they played a role in her suicide…
Online harassment gets directed at public-facing women on social media and by online commenters all the time… I know. I am on the receiving end of the onslaught daily.
Here’s a gem I got during a week when I wrote about a neighborhood bone marrow drive and Planned Parenthood:
“Hey Petula, you [profanity] ugly [profanity],” he wrote in a Facebook message. “Too bad your mother did not have an abortion.”
I Googled him. He’s an older income tax specialist living on Long Island who likes to post inspirational quotes and pictures of himself on his Facebook page.
He’s not a co-worker, just a foul-mouthed jerk trying to humiliate me for what I do for a living…
Men, part of the burden of cleaning up this kind of anti-social behavior has to be on you. Middle-aged tax specialists and nitwit stans on barstools alike don’t just do this for their own pitiful gratification — they think it makes them look manly in the eyes of their peers. I’ve seen for fifty years, starting when my younger brothers were forming friend-packs, that Y-chromosome carriers are every bit as susceptible to peer pressure as junior high girls; there’s always one trailing street ape who wants to push the mutual social displays a step too far, and it’s only his personal street ape cohort that can smack him back into line.
Twenty years after Anita Hill exposed the ugly realities of workplace sexual harassment, even the dumbest office workers have learned that Everybody does it and besides it was just a joke is no longer a free pass. Plenty of ugly stuff still happens, but persistent pressure has weeded out all but the real sickos (and even they’ve learned to be more furtive about it). And the anti-bullying school campaigns are giving the rising generation tools their elders don’t always have for calling out bad online behavior. Right now, it’s time for those of you who’ve finished puberty to call out your fellows who slide into this kind of anti-social behavior, if only because these guys are giving all men a bad name as would-be molesters and enablers.