What is up with all the cyber bullying these days? Can’t we all just get along?

As a blogger, I’ve been through it. Anonymous people heaping on the negativity as if what they say doesn’t hurt. Luckily, I write about health for the most part, so my writing is less polarizing and the comments are less dramatic. The majority of people are in fact delightful, but there are those shining few who leave a stain on your day. Are these anonymous comments an acceptable form of cyber bullying?

A Pew Research Study found that 25 percent of people admit to posting comments online anonymously and one researcher out of the University of Houston found that such anonymity contributes to less civil discourse.

I acquaint it to when you’re sitting in traffic and in a heat of road rage, you lay on the horn for the elderly women who just pulled out in front of you. You wouldn’t scream at a grandma if you were face to face, but somehow the anonymity of your car makes losing your temper acceptable. It’s similar online. In fact, one study found that 53 percent of comments were uncivil if newspapers allowed commenters anonymity. When newspapers required names or links to Facebook or other social networks, that number dropped to 29 percent.

“I think people are also much more inclined to comment about something if they have a complaint. Sometimes it’s the only way you feel that you can be heard, so it winds up feeling like online comment sections are filled with negativity,” said Shayla Thiel-Stern, a professor of new media and culture at the University of Minnesota on CBSLocal.

Negative comments generally come from a small group with a loud voice.

“I don’t think we’re getting meaner as a society,” Thiel-Stern said. “I think social media emphasizes some of that meanness.”

Anonymous comments tend to be angrier, according to another study, which found that frequent venting on the internet leads to subsequent increases in anger, rather than decreases. Those who frequently rant online are significantly more angry than the norm and those who read the rants are also less happy.

According to vlogger ZE Frank, it takes more potential energy to leave comments and as a result, those comments are often laced with polarizing opinion.

Have you ever left a vicious anonymous comment online? Would you?

Related on EcoSalon

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We’re All Mean Girls Sometimes

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Image: FHKE

The post Acceptable Cyber Bullying: Why Are Anonymous Commenters So Vicious? appeared first on EcoSalon.

Five girls pushing boundaries and effecting change.

Although women still lag behind men when it comes to pay and presence in the boardroom, an emerging generation of girls sees only possibility. They have a wealth of opportunities open to them, and are breaking new ground.

ShopGirls Design Fuel Efficient Car

The ShopGirls team from Washington State garnered a lot of attention when they were the first all-girls team to compete in the 2010 Shell Eco-marathon competition. Each year, students across the Americas compete to see who can design a car that travels the farthest on the least amount of energy.

The girls range in age from high school freshmen to seniors and manage all aspects of the project, from designing the prototype to racing the cars. When problems arise, it is their job to identify and fix each one. The original goal wasn’t to win, but to create a car that runs efficiently, and they far exceeded their own expectations, by taking first place in their energy class for Diesel Vehicles and an additional third place in Safety. The majority of the 42 teams in the competition were in college. U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, specifically praised the team in his speech about career and technology education.

Five of the six girls in the original ShopGirls teams returned to the 2011 competition, this time competing against 61 teams. They again took first place in the Diesel Energy category, and were one of three teams honored for safety.

Teen Feminist Creates the FBomb

Outspoken Ohio teen feminist Julie Zeilinger created the FBomb website to give other teenage feminists a place to be heard. Zeilinger encourages girls to speak their minds and explore issues facing teen girls today. “All young feminists who are just a little bit pissed off and very outspoken are more than welcome here. The FBomb.org is for girls who have enough social awareness to be angry and who want to verbalize that feeling. The FBomb.org is loud, proud, sarcastic…everything teenage feminists are today.”

Zeilinger first learned about women’s issues in 8th grade while researching a school project. She tried to find a feminist community, as opposed to just a blog, for teenage feminists, but couldn’t find one, so she created the FBomb in 2009. The idea caught fire and the FBomb and its creator have been featured in various publications, including Bitch Magazine, Mother Jones, Jezebel, and Salon.

At first, the very definition of “feminist” as seen by adult women versus this new generation of girls caused friction, but the FBomb community has redefined the term for themselves. Teen girls and boys contribute to the site about many different topics. Recently Zeilinger gave an impassioned speech at Endangered Species Summit: Our Generation and Body Image (NY), about body image, self-hatred, and how creating the FBomb helped her work through these issues. She cites body image issues as perhaps the most written-about topic on the FBomb, but sees each post as a positive chance for discussion, and for more girls to rise above body image issues.

Former Victim Battles Cyberbullying

After a girl she considered a friend posted, “I hate Sarah Ball and I don’t care who knows,” on Facebook, the Florida sophomore was devastated. She told the St. Petersburg Times, “You see other people reading these things and they’re so hurtful, and you have no idea what to say,” Sarah said. “I was in so much pain.” Her first instinct was to keep quiet, but after she researched other cases of cyberbullying, she discovered how many other teens had been victims and that some had even taken their own lives. Ball resolved to speak up.

In 2011, she decided to launch a local initiative called Hernando Unbreakable to raise awareness about cyberbullying. The group is growing steadily welcoming other victims, and gaining support from the school administration and a local sheriff. Ball has also teamed up with high-profile philanthropy Do Something to spread the word and hopes that Unbreakable groups will form in other high schools.

Ball contacted her school principal with printouts of offending Facebook pages and was instrumental in getting them taken down, although more crop up all the time. Her goals include lobbying Facebook to make it more difficult to take someone else’s pictures from their page, and encouraging the company to display a definition of cyberbullying prominently on the site. Due to these actions, Ball has again become the target of cyberbullying, but she remains determined.

Ball’s principle, Ken Pritz, says that the biggest benefit of an effort like Ball’s is simple awareness. “What’s neat about this is it’s a student movement,” Pritz said. “If the students are aware and they care, hopefully you’ll see less of [the cyberbullying].”

Girls Scouts Work to Save the Rainforest

Two dedicated Michigan Girl Scouts have been lobbying Girl Scouts USA for more than five years to change the ingredients in Girl Scout cookies. Rhiannon Tomtishen and Madison Vorva learned that a major ingredient in the cookies, palm oil, was harmful to the environment. Palm oil has been associated with rainforest destruction, slave labor, and climate change.

The girls wrote to the Girl Scouts head office, but were brushed off. In five years, they were only able to secure one meeting with the organization in 2008, but nothing has changed. All but one of the seventeen cookie varieties uses palm oil, but Girl Scouts USA claims that they can do nothing to influence the baker.

Not to be deterred, the girls joined forces with the Rainforest Action Network and Change.org in April 2011 to bring their campaign public and put more pressure on the national headquarters to pay attention. So far, 58,210 people (as of this writing) have signed the petition and thousands have inundated the organization’s Facebook page and Twitter account with requests for change. In response, Girl Scouts USA censored the Facebook comments, still refuses to meet with the girls, and palm oil remains in the recipes.

In their Rainforest Action Network video, Tomtishen points out, “You would think that an organization whose key mission is to empower girls to make a positive impact on the world would have addressed our concerns by now.”

In 2012, Girl Scouts will celebrate 100 years of empowering girls and teaching leadership. Vorva, Tomtishen, the Rainforest Action Network, and Change.org all hope that before their centennial cookie season, Girl Scouts USA will show that they really embrace their core mission by rewarding the girls’ perseverance and eliminating palm oil from their cookies.

College Student Runs for School Board Seat

Nineteen-year-old Samantha Smith is running for the school board in her hometown, challenging two incumbents for one of two available seats. Smith is a recent graduate of Harborfield High School on Long Island, and now attends New York University, majoring in entrepreneurship and government.

Smith contends that she understands what it’s like to be a student in the current educational climate, and has ideas about how to “optimize” the learning experience. She proposes to bring in speakers and conduct workshops during the free hour students now have because an elective was cut due to budget constraints. She also wants to work toward better use of community resources and more hands-on experiences for students to enhance learning. She told the Times Beacon Record, that “Instead of constantly looking to cut, cut, cut,” the board should focus on “How can we take care of what we have already invested in.” The elections are on May 17, 2011.

image: Amanda Venner, Stephen Cummings

The post Amazing Girls: Five Stories of Ingenuity, Creativity and Perseverance appeared first on EcoSalon.

Sexting and cyberbullying have harsher consequences for girls.

A recent instance of cyberbullying involved a slut list that was initially mass forwarded amongst students using Blackberry Messenger until one New York teen said he was tired of requests to forward it and decided to create a “smut list” Facebook group (the name was evidently changed to avoid flagging). Only a few months prior, a girl on the other side of the country took a full-frontal nude photo of herself and sent it to her new boyfriend. A series of events and bad decisions resulted in that photo going viral throughout her school, community and beyond. In both instances, girls were painted with the equivalent of a cyber scarlet letter.

Bad girl directory

The list contained over 100 girls’ first and last names (some as young as 14), ranked them according to their alleged sexual encounters and what they were willing to do, and included anonymous commentary. All boys’ names were omitted. The girls are from seven different high schools in the Westchester, New York and Greenwich, Connecticut areas. The group attracted more than 7,000 “likes” overnight.

The good news is that the schools and the authorities are taking it seriously, investigating, and discussing some severe punishment. The bad news is that, like all digital content, it most likely still exists somewhere. There is no way to unring this particular bell. In a time where college admissions personnel and job recruiters admit to Googling prospective applicants, inclusion on the list could have long-lasting consequences.

Clearly both boys and girls participated in creating, expanding, commenting on, and distributing this list, but it is no surprise that it only contains girls’ names. The underlying principle never changes – society perceives sexually active boys to be studs, and sexually active girls to be sluts. It’s such a tired double standard it would be laughable if it weren’t so damaging. In this case, the larger problem with this list is that it could be a complete fabrication. True or not, this list tars the reputations of all the girls who are even mentioned in association with it.

Take nude photo, send nude photo, lose control of nude photo, live with nude photo forever

The New York Times recently told the story of an eighth-grade girl in Washington state who took a nude photo of herself and sent it to her boyfriend. Her boyfriend soon became her ex-boyfriend and she had a falling out with a friend. Her ex-boyfriend forwarded the photo to her ex-friend, who forwarded it to her entire contact list. In just one day, it had spread to hundreds of students in her hometown. After that, there is no way to tell how many people have seen it, or where it went next. When she tried to change schools, she was recognized, pointed at and whispered about.

The ex-friend and ex-boyfriend faced criminal charges, but ultimately their punishment was to educate other students on the dangers of sexting. The girl who took the photo of herself faced no charges, but her lifelong punishment is clear. Despite the dangers, sexting has become popular with both teens and adults.

How common is sexting?

According to a 2008 study commissioned by The National Campaign to Prevent Teenage and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com, 20 percent of teens overall have electronically sent, or posted online, nude or semi-nude pictures or video of themselves (22 percent of teen girls, 18 percent of teen boys, and 11 percent of young girls 13-16). The numbers go up for young adults 20-26 (33 percent overall, 36 percent of women and 31 percent of men). When you count only suggestive messages (sans images), the numbers nearly double in both categories.

Sexting begins with one bad decision, but it could stop there if the recipient did not forward it on. Do teens and young adults just think it’s no big deal? Do they really think the messages and images they send will remain private? Especially once the relationship ends?

I believe dissemination requires malice. This generation of teens and young adults have grown up with the Internet and viral videos on YouTube. It’s hard to believe that they don’t understand the consequences of forwarding a nude photo or posting a slut list rooted in viciousness.

No matter what, girls are the most negatively affected. The NYT reports that a boy who sends pictures of himself might be considered an idiot or boastful, but girls are labeled sluts. “Photos of girls tend to go viral more often, because boys and girls will circulate girls’ photos in part to shame them.” However, when a boy sends a sexy photo to a girl, she usually does not forward it to the masses. Boys do not  forward photos of other boys, because they don’t want to admit to having photos like that. Not only is sexting a bad idea, but it’s an especially bad idea for girls.

Girls and Sex – Disrespect, Pressure, and Dehumanization

The reason that girls are more negatively affected when it comes to bullying related to sex is found in sexual attitudes toward girls and women that have not improved with the passing of time, and in fact, seem to have gotten worse.

A fraternity at Yale lines up and yells, “No means yes! Yes means anal!” and sends out its own version of a slut list, ranking incoming freshman girls by how many beers the authors thought it would take to have sex with them. At USC, a fraternity member sent out a disgustingly detailed email designed to identify “sorostitutes” willing to have sex, calling girls “targets” and saying that girls “are not actual people like us men…consequently, giving them a certain name or distinction is pointless.” It’s easy to see how treacherous the sexual climate surrounding girls these days really is.

Recent findings by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) suggests that sexual intercourse rates are down, but there is always a risk of teens lying on the questionnaire and questions not distinguishing between intercourse and oral sex. Conflicting reports have participation in oral sex from only 7 percent to over 50 percent of teens, but it’s possible that oral sex is on the rise as a hedge against unplanned pregnancy (the U.S. teen birth rate fell to a record low in 2009), and a way for girls to remain “technical virgins” longer.

Despite being bombarded with media messages, pressured to have sex younger and younger, and being the target of cyberbullying or objectifying attitudes – ultimately, it’s up to girls themselves to navigate this sexual minefield. No one else can make decisions for them about sending out sext messages of themselves or others, participating in creating a slut list of their peers, or deciding to when and how to have sex. We need to redouble our efforts to encourage girls to have respect for themselves and their bodies, resist peer pressure, and become educated on the consequences of all types of sex.

As for some boys’ and men’s attitudes about girls and women? Will they ever change? If not, these are the attitudes that the next generation of men will take to work with their female colleagues and bring home to their wives and daughters.

Photo Credit: modenadude

The post Sexting and the Slut List: The Double Standard Is Alive and Thriving appeared first on EcoSalon.