I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet by Leora Tanenbaum Page A

stopped scribbling notes on my legal pad, flabbergasted. “Why on earth would anyone choose to have a Formspring?” I asked. Yet Sharon was the one dumbfounded by my middle-aged obtuseness. “The entire high school was involved in it!” she replied. “How can you not be curious to see what it was all about?”
    In her insightful exploration of bullying, Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy , the author Emily Bazelon notes that a million people joined Formspring in the six weeksafter the site went live; over the next few years, it had enlisted twenty-five million users, one-third of them seventeen or younger. “The whole point of Formspring,” she observes, “seemed to be that it was risky and public—like walking on a tightrope.” One fourteen-year-old girl told her, “It’s like an interview where you find out how other people really see you. It’s just honest. Even if what you find out about yourself is bad, you think you want to know.” 42
    Sharon echoed this obsessive desire to know what everyone is saying about you, even if it’s abusive. “Does anyone ask neutral or nice questions, or is it all mean stuff?” I wondered.
    “All mean stuff,” Sharon answered, “because that’s more fun.”
    “And why does anyone answer and post mean questions?” Sharon looked me right in the eye. “Girls want attention,” she replied. She paused. “But we have to start playing smarter.”
    Abusive comments on Formspring have preceded—and even followed—a number of teens’ suicides. In fact, Formspring ceased being a well-known secret among teens when the word got out in March 2010 that it was linked with the suicide of a seventeen-year-old girl, Alexis Pilkington from Long Island. Although her parents did not believe that abusive online messages caused her to take her own life, Suffolk County police officers investigated graphic, lewd images that were posted after news had spread about her death. On Formspring and Facebook, people posted photos of Pilkington doctored to look as though she had a noose around her neck. 43
    Since Pilkington’s suicide, Formspring has been replaced in popularity among teenagers by Ask.fm, founded in 2010.The company says it has fifty-seven million users in 150 countries, with half its users under the age of eighteen. The site adds an additional two hundred thousand new users each day. The average visitor spends one hundred minutes a month on the site. 44 In 2013, a fourteen-year-old British girl committed suicide after receiving abusive messages from Ask.fm users such as “drink bleach,” “go get cancer,” and “go die.” A mother of a teenage girl from Irvine, California, who was bullied on the site told the Los Angeles Times , “For teens, this is a feeding frenzy in shark-infested waters without a cage.” 45 A twelve-year-old girl from central Florida, Rebecca Sedwick, also killed herself after receiving hate-filled messages from fifteen middle school children on Ask.fm as well as the messaging apps Kik and Voxer. The harassers wrote, “Why are you still alive?” and “Can you die please?” 46
    Stephanie, the fifteen-year-old girl from New York City, explains, “People can ask you questions anonymously—really personal questions. You can post video responses also. People feel obligated to answer what other people ask you. You could ignore the questions, but then people will give you a hard time: ‘Why are you on Ask.fm if you’re not going to answer the questions?’ Then you’re not relevant. People won’t go to your page anymore, and no one will ask you questions anymore.”
    Kaitlyn adds, “If you’re a girl, the questions are 100 percent are about sex. ‘How many guys have you hooked up with?’ ‘How far have you gone?’ ‘How many blow jobs have you given?’ These questions start in the seventh grade.”
    “What do guys get asked?” I wondered.
    “Their questions are also