While we know the outside world is a dangerous place, the online world is just as unsafe. As a female who has a presence online, my experience has been far from positive as I hoped it could have been.
Ever since making my presence online through Instagram and YouTube, I always had this mentality that it would be a safe space to be creative and potentially make a career out of it.
While it all started out as fun and games, it soon turned into something that I would never had expected, nor anyone really tells you about while working on social media.
Females are not only attacked on the streets, verbally and physically, the online abuse is there and just because it is behind a screen does not make it less harmful.
My first major break on YouTube was a simple clothing haul, reviewing and talking about swimmers. That video blew up to 4 million views, but the comments were not what I had expected to come.
“whore”
“This is why females get paid less”
“your parents must be proud”
“find a real job”
“slut”
“prostitute”
“you are the reason why females don’t get far”
“Do the drapes match the carpets”
To sum up the few 2,840, misogynistic, anti-feminist, sexual harassment comments I received by posting a harmless video that many other females do.
No one ever tells you; no one ever expects to be cyber bullied about their body, life, environment, harmless actions, doing something that they love and want to do as a career on a platform that is aired to the whole world.
You would think that people would be supportive of each other online, you would hope that your following would be of the same gender and demographic, that they would be the ones pushing you to reach your goals. Yet what you get instead, is 30+ men, single or married degrading woman in order to make them feel better about themselves.
While we protest about how “all lives matter” we should have been from the very beginning, since the very start of social media supporting one another and being open minded to the idea that as the years change and we advance so do hobbies and careers.
No one goes to a person who is wearing swimmers on the beach and tells them that they are the reason females get paid less. That they are the reason they attract the wrong crowd. So why does it make it ok for those comments to be shared online? You wouldn’t say that to your wife, partner, mum, sister, friend, girlfriend, or daughter. So why do you say it to a complete stranger, why do you think it is ok to message a complete stranger to tell them you belong together?
So if someone could to me why we are still living in a world that makes females, and males feel unsafe in the comfort of their own homes and on the streets, I’ll give you a shout out.