It’s said — and often reinforced — that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Cross a lady and there’s no chance you’ll get off easy.
More often than not, this always-relevant phrase is directed toward the opposite sex: No woman stands alone, right? Girls stick together, right?
Apparently, not so much.
Consider one lovely creation: She's A Homewrecker, a website offering women a place to freely bash the “home-wrecking succubus” who tempted or seduced their “innocent” significant others away from their girl.
The website encourages users to expose and defame these women by posting their names, locations and scandalous photos, if they can get their hands on them.
Revenge has a line, and it’s safe to say these ladies have crossed it.
Online shaming has become somewhat of a social norm. It’s hard to believe grown men and woman are taking part in such activity, while adolescents can be expelled for online bullying and people are losing jobs based upon photos they were tagged in on Facebook.
This past Halloween was not a good time for dark humorists and the Internet — such as Alicia Ann Lynch, the woman who dressed as a Boston Marathon victim for her office on Halloween and posted a photo.
To say this was “too soon” is a severe understatement. Most of us can agree that mocking the victims of such a tragedy is never going to be OK, especially in the form of a Halloween costume.
When the photo went viral, so did Lynch’s entire life. People found out her address, threatened her life as well as her family’s lives and spread risqué images of Lynch around the web.
Is it really the Internet’s job to be the moral police? Sure, these acts aren’t what we like to see fellow humans committing, but we all carry the potential to screw up. I love to see justice be served, but man, when do you stop kicking someone who’s already down? When do you have to keep your composure and let it be?
Sometimes, however, the human race prevails in pointing out some real societal flaws. This past summer a site went up claiming to be a “Vegan Sellout List” that proudly “called out ex-vegans by name.”
It had everything you could ask for from a shame-site: encouraging hate mail, providing detailed descriptions of those blasphemous “sellouts ” — including their names and whereabouts — and was complete with an interactive infographic of the U.S. for those curious whether your town is highly saturated with vegan frauds. What commitment.
Luckily for humanity, this site was meant to be satire but was taken at face value by the not-so-trustworthy New York Post and many other news platforms as well. Animal rights activist Peter Young was using the story as a tool to trick the public into watching a disturbing film on animal cruelty as a result of the meat industry. Well played, sir.
While this scenario might be a little less damaging to a person’s name than adding “homewrecker” to their special skills or proudly pointing out your so very clearly offensive Halloween costume, it’s still saying something out about what we’ve come to in our society.
When we steep to putting someone’s personal information on the Internet for the purposes of shaming them, you’re doing more than getting revenge. You’re potentially ruining a life for, more often than not, petty reasons.
Meat may be murder, sluts may have it coming and some people are so dead wrong it hurts more to see them get off easy, but perhaps it’s time to let the universe and a little old-fashioned karma take their shots at these people.
Reach the columnist at haley.tonetti@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter @haleytonetti
