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Generally, I try to avoid advertiser-created viral videos like the plague. Created by corporations, they tend to make me feel duped into watching them, whether they're any good or not. But I found a new series of viral videos by Tampax to be unusually amusing and surprisingly endearing.
At Zack16.com, 16-year-old Zack Johnson wakes up to find his penis has disappeared and been replaced by a vagina. Quelle horror!... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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On the occasion of a zillion geeks descending on Austin for SXSW, the Austin Chronicle considers the so-called "perils of being a female blogger." According to the article, while the blogosphere is rife with chicks everywhere you click, the "professional blogging sphere" raises the question: "Where are all the women?" From the ranks of the purportedly underrepresented, Mediabistro's Rebecca Fox and the Daily Beast's Rachel Sklar step forward to helm a SXSW panel: "Why Is Professional Blogging Bloodsport for Women?"
To wit: "For professional female bloggers, writing online can get painfully personal—and so can the criticism. Oversharing, sex-blogging, fameballs, Tumblettes, Jezebelism—why is it (still) so difficult to be a woman online?" Who's to blame for making lady bloggers online lives so miserable? The patriarchy and Christianity, of course! Or, as Fox puts it, "keeping your mouth shut has long been tantamount to being 'good,' and the virgin/whore complex is alive and well both online and off." In the end, they conclude, it's (gasp) "dangerous to be a female blogger."
Dangerous to blog if you have a vagina? Blogging while female a "bloodsport"? "There are endless examples of female bloggers coming under the knife for being bitches or media whores, while male bloggers' gender is either ignored or heralded," the Chronicle's Sofia Resnick writes. Really? If there was ever an equal opportunity attack forum, the Internet is it. Mostly upper-middle class, well-educated, by-and-large Caucasian women who seek to publish their words on the Web get what everyone else gets online: a free, uncensored platform with a roving pack of readers who have the right to say whatever they want as part of the "conversation." Get over yourselves, and get on with it, ladies.
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Not sure what we should or could do about baby-brained grown-ups who suffer from a total lack of sense, Emily. But you are so right to point out that cyber-strega Lori Drew didn't "cause'' that poor girl to kill herself. Not to give this horror show of malignant, helicopter mommying a pass, but these arguments over who or what ever "make'' someone do such a thing always seem to undermine the most important thing we know about suicide, which is that the culprit is pretty reliably the disease of depression. (I was reminded of this a few years ago when a friend took his life. Oh no, I told another friend; he called me last week, and I never returned the call! Gee, don't think that's why he lost hope, she answered--snap.) And I also agree that we cannot criminalize every invitation to "Oh, go jump off a cliff!''--whether issued on the Internet or nose-to-nose.
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News from the trial of Lori Drew, the mother whose MySpace hoax allegedly led her 13-year-old daughter's friend Megan Meier to commit suicide: Drew was convicted of three misdemeanor charges of accessing computers without authorization but not the more serious charge of conspiracy.
Drew apparently set up the fictional "Josh" profile that became a conduit through which her daughter, a teenage employee, and others sent cruel messages to Megan, including one that said, "The world would be a better place without you." That final message, which apparently directly preceded Megan's suicide, is said to have been typed by Drew's employee Ashley Grills.
I'm not familiar enough with the laws to know whether this trial should have happened in the first place or ended appropriately—though it does seem like a slightly overreaching attempt to wring justice out of a heartbreaking scenario. But Drew is without a doubt guilty of stupendous, mind-boggling stupidity and poor judgment. She was apparently inspired to set up the profile out of a desire to protect her daughter, who had a sometimes-friend, sometimes-enemy relationship with Megan. Though it contradicts the morals of the innumerable trend articles, news segments, and cautionary Law & Order: SVU story lines, maybe it's best to leave the Wild West of social networking to the kids. Obviously, some controls on kids' Internet use are important. But attempting to co-opt their means of communication and socializing without understanding the rules and the potential for abuse can be disastrous. Drew gave her daughter, her daughter's friends, and Grills the means to torture a depressed girl. They could've done it without Drew (I'm sure "Josh" isn't the first fake profile ever set up to toy with targeted girl's emotions), but having a mother involved legitimized behavior that most kids try to hide from the parental units.
I am eternally grateful that the pinnacle of Internet communication was IMing when I was in high school.
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