After my tutoring with David, I realised that I had been taking a personal approach to understanding the cyberbullying faced by people with facial disfigurement. All my sources of understanding came from academic articles or news interviews, I hadn’t really had a conversation with the facially disfigured and therefore I didn’t understand their real needs. Do they really need facial adornment to hide their scars? Do they think their scars are ugly? I may have started from a good point of view, but I hadn’t actually approached the target group to find out what they really wanted.
After this, I contacted a video site blogger Luli Scar who had a birthmark on her face. and conducted a brief interview with her. As we used text for the Q&A to protect her privacy, I have reproduced a translation of our interview Q&A below.
Q1: Can you tell us about the origin of your scars and how you feel in the daily life? (e.g. Can someone have a bad comment or attack you on social media? Will you be impacted in reality?
A1: My scars come from a fire. I think it’s inevitable that receive negative comments or attacks, my scars are very ugly and scary, I don’t deny it. In real life my main job is as a cosplayer so the scars doesn’t bother me at work, but it’s hard to avoid in daily life.
Q2: In your videos you recreate your scars through make up, do you think you are beautifying/hiding your scars in this way?
A2: NO. Just like in makeup, you choose colours that suit your skin and amplify some of your features like your eyes or mouth. My scars are the same for me as any other part of my body, I just chose my own way of doing my makeup and shared it.
Q3:Do you think you need facial adornment to beautify or cover up your scars?
A3: If I was asked to wear facial adornments, it would make me feel very offended and uncomfortable. I’m happy to show my scars on social media, it’s not my fault or guilt, it’s part of who I am. Scars caused by accidents or birth have already caused trauma in our minds and I do not want to accept the influence of the outside world again.
After this interview, I realised that the direction I had chosen was not really helping the facially disfigured and might even be harming them. Unfortunately, this was a failed attempt. I redirected my attention to the original intention of wanting to change cyberbullying at the beginning.
The beginning about my friend’s cyberbullying stemmed from her breakup with her ex-boyfriend. Her ex-boyfriend was a minor internet celebrity and after the breakup spread rumours on social media that she was cheating on him. The boy’s fans started using this to attack my friend on social media. I wanted to change the direction of the question earlier because I did not want to cause her secondary harm because of my research. But jumping out from that, we can see that the internet is full of such comments about women. When a woman behaves sexually in a way that is not in line with public expectations, people will always start to criticise her, whether this is true or not. All things in this category can be classified as Slut-shaming.
I was reminded that in my everyday browsing of the internet, the vocabulary of cursing in either language includes some female sexual organs. There are also specific vicious words used to abuse women. Especially with the rapid development of internet technology, a huge amount of information is rapidly transmitted to us every day from all over the world. Due to the overwhelming amount of information, it is difficult for people to take the time to understand the full extent of an event and often react extremely quickly in the moment. I wanted to change this and in my research I learned about the ethics of care. And in the article on Individual and collective moral influences on intervention in cyberbullying, the social experiments presented made me realise the power inherent in the ethics of care.
What I want to focus on now is reducing sexualisation of women in the internet and creating a caring ethical online environment. I started doing research on the idea and found a movement called Pussyhat that fits with my view as a reference.
A pussyhat is a pink, crafted hat, created in large numbers by women involved with the United States 2017 Women’s March. They are the result of the Pussyhat Project, a nationwide effort initiated by Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman, a screenwriter and architect located in Los Angeles, to create pink hats to be worn at the march. Donald Trump’s comments about women and “grabbing them by the pussy” have spurred many women into action and led to the creation of hand-knitted pink pussy hats.
By making Pussyhats, the organizers also look to reclaim two elements that are traditionally associated with femininity and womanhood—and derided precisely because of those reasons. “Pink is considered a very female color representing caring, compassion, and love – all qualities that have been derided as weak but are actually STRONG,” the intro continues. “Wearing pink together is a powerful statement that we are unapologetically feminine and we unapologetically stand for women’s rights.”The fact that Suh and Zweiman didn’t just ask women to go buy a pink hat and send it in was also deliberate: They wanted to celebrate knitting and crochet precisely because they’re traditionally women’s crafts—and skills passed from generation to generation: “Knitting circles are sometimes scoffed at as frivolous ‘gossiping circles,’ when really, these circles are powerful gatherings of women, a safe space to talk, a place where women support women.”
I also hope to form such communities to help women express their bodies and minds freely. This is what I will be aiming to do in my next research.
Reference:
1.Slut-shaming
2.26 English Swear Words That You Should Use Very Very Carefully
3.Ethics of care
4.Applying a ‘digital ethics of care’ philosophy to understand adolescents’ sense of responsibility on social media
5.Individual and collective moral influences on intervention in cyberbullying
6.Here’s the Powerful Story Behind the Pussyhats at the Women’s March
7.Pussyhat
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/pink-pussyhats-will-be-making-statement-womens-march-washington-1601088