Subtitled: “An epidemic of high-profile trolling is a testament to how pathological misogyny is — and how early it begins,” you can read the entire piece by Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon.
…. And if you require any further proof, read Soraya Chemaly’s nausea-inducing Huffington Post piece on “The 12-Year-Old Slut Meme and Facebook’s Misogyny Problem.” In it, she takes on Facebook’s famously blind eye to pages that intimidate and exploit underage girls, notably the “12-Year-Old Slut Memes” page that’s so chock-full of hilarity about pubes and virginity that it gives new meaning to the word “gag.” It’s the brainchild of two self-described 19-year-old males, and to get a sense of the tone, consider a post from last month declaring “Fuck all you people that had a cry and reported us because we put your slutty fucking photos up, got fucking banned from facebook for a while you cunts, had to make a new account. If you post slutty fucking shit on facebook expect your photo to end up on here, then tagged in, then ripped to shreds by 120 thousand people. Chaos will continue. Go die.” There you go, girls. Doesn’t get clearer than “go die.”
What is it about young girls that’s so incendiary? That could make “Jailbait” for a time the second most popular search on Reddit, that would ever put the words “12-year-old” and “slut” together? This BS – this dehumanizing crap – can’t just be chalked up to the inherent budding attractiveness of youth and freshness. This goes way, way beyond that particular can of worms. I think it has a whole lot to do with just how deeply engrained the hatred of women is in our culture.
It’s not a coincidence that it’s right around the age of 12 that a girl begins to come to an understanding of her potential for power. Not just her sexual power. But her intellectual and physical mettle as well. She’s still very much a child – a child in need of support and protection – but early adolescence is the beginning of a girl coming into her own as an independent person. With a brain and a body she’s going to control. How terrifying that is for the hateful, misogynistic jerks of the world. (And I’m not letting sabotaging, self-hating females off the hook here for their bullying and divisiveness either; they’re a huge part of the problem too.) They pick on girls because it’s easier than dealing with adult women; that’s how weak they are.
I look at my own 12-year-old daughter and I see so much possibility in her. So much strength and wisdom and beauty. And some days, I feel like apologizing to her for everything on the Internet that doesn’t involve tiny pigs. I wish I could write off the likes of Michael Brutsch as one isolated, disturbed individual. And he’s exceptional; a king among trolls, to be sure. But he exists because there is a strong and vocal community of little creeps who are simultaneously aroused and hateful and scared to death of everything that a young girl represents. Who look at her and feel so bad about their own pathetic selves they want nothing more than to tear her down and make her feel ever worse about herself. My dear daughter, I am so sorry these morons are out there, and that you and your friends are in their cross hairs. That they don’t see you as a person but a threat. …
