So much of today’s social reengineering has focused on stopping bullying, but only in certain areas of society. In many areas, including the media’s infatuation with castigating famous young women, it is condoned as the right thing to do. How are people really supposed to act? Society does not know, it only pretends to.
What is bullying? Is it purely physical, or is it purely emotional?
For this instance let us focus on the non-personal level, but on a social level of bullying, and the purpose it fills.
Societies are defined by what they allow, and what they do not allow. On one side of society there is the law, which punishes people who break one or more of the social contracts that have been codified into an enforceable will of society. These can and have varied through place and time.
Beyond laws, there is the other ways that societal norms are enforced, and that is with public shaming. Today this has been termed bullying, or cyber-bullying, if it is with social media. Take the instances where teenagers and young adults get caught in a sexually compromised position, and then it gets spread through their social peer groups, which at that point those social peer groups make fun of them.
This happens to ensure that most people obide by the established norms. The shaming can lead to embarrassment, which is what society wants, because it will ensure that social norms will be followed. Unfortunately, it also leads to suicide.
With the spread of information, society is becoming more aware of these suicides, and the reasons why a person chose to commit suicide. This has led to the bullying of bullies, which is how society is saying that it is not good to bully.
But then you see the same parents and the same people, who are against bullying, go to social media to bully Hanna Montana, oh sorry, Miley Cyrus, for her VMA performance. This was a disgusting view of the hypocrisy of today’s society, and Cyrus is not the only victims of this. Examples include Lady Gaga, Madonna, Vanilla Ice (think about it, white guy doing rap), Lindsay Lohan, and many others.
While some stars, like Madonna, have overcome bad press (aka bullying by the media), can it be said that societies need for conformity led to some of the bad decisions that some of these stars made. Especially when/if someone commits suicide due to bullying, and it is then the bully’s fault that that person is dead. Do those who prey on a celebrities misadventures not also get the blame for that person’s downfall? I say they do. What say you?