The online abuse of a young girl caught in a sexual act suggests "slut shaming" is still in full force. But do we just see trolling and online abuse as "women's problems"?
I don't know. Sometimes it all feels a bit futile. A circle. Like we're all just talking to each other, and all just talking about each other, and nothing will ever change, and what's the point, and. Some stories make me feel like this harder than others; Slane Girl was one of those stories. This is what happened: two Saturdays ago, during an Eminem gig at Slane Castle 40 miles outside Dublin, a 17-year-old girl gave a guy a blow job. Someone took a picture. There's a white sky. A topless boy stands against a wall of corrugated metal, and he's wearing a green rimmed hat and raising his arms up in the air in a double thumbs up, and a girl kneels in front of him. Off to his right a man is watching with a plastic cup of beer and a face of complicated disgust. By Sunday afternoon, the picture had gone viral, because of course it had. The hashtag #slanegirl was trending globally on Twitter by Monday morning; a Slane Girl Facebook page received 8,000 likes before being shut down. By this time, a number of sites had tracked the girl down, publishing her full name and age. When it was revealed she was under 18, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram quickly began to delete the original image from their sites (a cropped version is still illustrating most news articles), banning accounts that had posted it. Not before, though, a flood of responses were published, calling her a "vile slut", a "whore", "rotten". The boy has not been named, apart from being called "hero". Soon after it was trending, the girl was reported to be in hospital, sedated.
And the difficult thing for me is that I can't even muster any anger. Of course someone took photos, of course they put them online, of course the girl is blamed, of course her life will now forever be altered, a sad coffee stain on the map of her future. A thousand "of courses", trailing into the distance like traffic after six. The damage didn't happen at Slane Castle; it happened later, on the internet. In 2013 women aren't allowed to make mistakes. Not even at a bloody Eminem concert, surely the most mistake-ridden square mile in Europe. Not even if documenting and sharing the mistake was a mistake itself. Not even if it was 10 years ago and they're a different person now. Not even if the only person hurt is them, their pride, the way their mum can no longer make eye contact over tea.
This kind of female-focused public humiliation, whether on a schoolwide or international scale, has become so common now that all the responses feel tired, worn through at the elbows. The flimsy barriers between the way commenters act online and offline, the way we act in a virtual crowd, masked, when there is little to lose, is well documented today. It's been a summer sweaty with discussion of trolling and misogyny, with words that are accurate descriptions for the Slane story. Like "slut shaming". But these, in turn, make me weary. These terms that only people like me are aware of, that only we discuss, endlessly, as if set to music. Does it have any impact? Why, in a time when women are being heard more than ever before, women who are broadcasting their experiences, joining together to change the way we respond to girls who have drunkenly made mistakes, does it feel like nothing is changing? Why will this happen again and again and again? Is it because these are seen as women's problems, like ingrown armpit hairs and getting your period on the Tube? Is it because these conversations, framed as feminism, are yet to be taken seriously by men?
These things have always happened – a girl humiliated by boys and gossip – but one benefit of it happening now so publicly is that the hurt and consequences are laid out for grown-ups to see: the hate directed at a young girl for having sex, the widespread judgement and misogyny. There's power in this painful transparency. Or there would be if we learned how to use it.Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk. Follow Eva on Twitter @EvaWiseman Reported by guardian.co.uk 7 hours ago.
I don't know. Sometimes it all feels a bit futile. A circle. Like we're all just talking to each other, and all just talking about each other, and nothing will ever change, and what's the point, and. Some stories make me feel like this harder than others; Slane Girl was one of those stories. This is what happened: two Saturdays ago, during an Eminem gig at Slane Castle 40 miles outside Dublin, a 17-year-old girl gave a guy a blow job. Someone took a picture. There's a white sky. A topless boy stands against a wall of corrugated metal, and he's wearing a green rimmed hat and raising his arms up in the air in a double thumbs up, and a girl kneels in front of him. Off to his right a man is watching with a plastic cup of beer and a face of complicated disgust. By Sunday afternoon, the picture had gone viral, because of course it had. The hashtag #slanegirl was trending globally on Twitter by Monday morning; a Slane Girl Facebook page received 8,000 likes before being shut down. By this time, a number of sites had tracked the girl down, publishing her full name and age. When it was revealed she was under 18, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram quickly began to delete the original image from their sites (a cropped version is still illustrating most news articles), banning accounts that had posted it. Not before, though, a flood of responses were published, calling her a "vile slut", a "whore", "rotten". The boy has not been named, apart from being called "hero". Soon after it was trending, the girl was reported to be in hospital, sedated.
And the difficult thing for me is that I can't even muster any anger. Of course someone took photos, of course they put them online, of course the girl is blamed, of course her life will now forever be altered, a sad coffee stain on the map of her future. A thousand "of courses", trailing into the distance like traffic after six. The damage didn't happen at Slane Castle; it happened later, on the internet. In 2013 women aren't allowed to make mistakes. Not even at a bloody Eminem concert, surely the most mistake-ridden square mile in Europe. Not even if documenting and sharing the mistake was a mistake itself. Not even if it was 10 years ago and they're a different person now. Not even if the only person hurt is them, their pride, the way their mum can no longer make eye contact over tea.
This kind of female-focused public humiliation, whether on a schoolwide or international scale, has become so common now that all the responses feel tired, worn through at the elbows. The flimsy barriers between the way commenters act online and offline, the way we act in a virtual crowd, masked, when there is little to lose, is well documented today. It's been a summer sweaty with discussion of trolling and misogyny, with words that are accurate descriptions for the Slane story. Like "slut shaming". But these, in turn, make me weary. These terms that only people like me are aware of, that only we discuss, endlessly, as if set to music. Does it have any impact? Why, in a time when women are being heard more than ever before, women who are broadcasting their experiences, joining together to change the way we respond to girls who have drunkenly made mistakes, does it feel like nothing is changing? Why will this happen again and again and again? Is it because these are seen as women's problems, like ingrown armpit hairs and getting your period on the Tube? Is it because these conversations, framed as feminism, are yet to be taken seriously by men?
These things have always happened – a girl humiliated by boys and gossip – but one benefit of it happening now so publicly is that the hurt and consequences are laid out for grown-ups to see: the hate directed at a young girl for having sex, the widespread judgement and misogyny. There's power in this painful transparency. Or there would be if we learned how to use it.Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk. Follow Eva on Twitter @EvaWiseman Reported by guardian.co.uk 7 hours ago.