I’ve been focusing on a lot of stranger topics lately, so I thought with this post I’d bring things back to a classic feminist issue: slut shaming and victim blaming.
Slut shaming and victim blaming are not always linked, but tend to overlap frequently. Slut shaming is the act of insulting, belittling, or otherwise harassing women for expressing their sexuality. Some common examples of slut shaming are insulting women for how they dress, how many people they’ve had sex with, or how often they go to parties. Victim blaming is exactly what it sounds like: blaming the victim of something for what happened to them.
Both slut shaming and victim blaming are part of the larger concept of “rape culture”, described in this TIME article as a “culture in which sexual violence is the norm and victims are blamed for their own assaults.” While I won’t go too much into rape culture, the broader concept that can be drawn from this is that because of rape culture, women who are abused are blamed for their abuse, be it rape, violence, or other kinds of manipulation.
This gives us some understanding for something I encountered a little while ago that left me with a bad taste in my mouth. A couple years ago, a Canadian teen named Amanda Todd committed suicide after she was ruthlessly bullied. The bullying stemmed from a video chat in which Todd flashed her breasts to a man she met over the Internet. That man then tried to use her nude pictures to blackmail her into more explicit video chats and, when she refused, later sent those nude pictures to her friends and classmates. Todd made a Youtube video outlining her ordeal and killed herself shortly after.
While the video gained significant online traction for what it said about cyberbullying, the Amanda Todd incident interested me for other reasons. When I initially found out about Todd’s death, it was from a site I regularly visit that is usually devoted to humor and relies mostly on user-generated content. A page about Todd’s suicide, which I expected to be fairly light on content, was filled with pictures joking about her suicide and comments mocking her for being a “slut” and a “whore”. Others said Todd deserved to die for being foolish enough to expose herself to a random man over the internet.
Quite frankly, I was appalled by this. I understand that Todd made some bad decisions, but that does not make her any less a victim of cyberbullying, any less a way to educate people about the harm cyberbullying can do, and it certainly does not make her bullies or the man who exploited her any less culpable. The fact that so many people on the internet were outraged at Todd for being a “whore” rather than being outraged at her abusers for abusing her was just depressing. It shows how Internet culture is just as influenced by rape culture as culture outside the web, if not more so.
More than anything though, it revels one of the worst aspects of Internet culture: that harassment and cruelty are trivialized to a dangerous extent. After all, it’s a lot easier to call someone a slut or a whore when you’re not saying it to their face.
Sexuality And Internet Culture 
This is a shame, but unfortunately not rare. It seems like many girls who commit suicide after extreme bullying and shaming still don’t have much sympathy even after death.