Have you heard of the site juicycampus.com? Apparently it is all in the news and whatnot. It’s basically a slam site where students can, completely anonymously, post any damn thing they want to say about each other (or, for that matter, about their professors, but it doesn’t work like Rate My Professors at all and in fact it makes RMP look like a love-in — most of the hatin’ is student-on-student). And all of it happens without fear of any repercussions.
I checked it out today, and looked at the postings for a school very much like Wordsmith in terms of location and student demographics. I’m sad to say that, when they know no one will find out, students say things about each other that are both utterly predictable and completely appalling. Here are the top three kinds of posts on the site:
3. Accusations that either a specific guy or the members of a specific fraternity is/are gay. These come complete with imaginative descriptions of sexual acts the accused person(s) is/are alleged to have committed. Just for fun, look up the phrase “elephant walk.”
2. Accusations that either a specific girl or the members of a specific sorority is/are sluts. These also come complete with graphic descriptions. Interestingly enough, though, the assumption of the posters seems to be that girls service guys and guys do not have to reciprocate. So not only are the accused girls “sluts” but also, one assumes, unsatisfied ones.
1. Extremely racially offensive remarks. By far, these outnumber all other comments on the site, and let me tell you there were some racial epithets on there that I had neither seen nor imagined before. The operating assumption here is that black men are out to steal white men’s women. Just take a moment to unpack the previous sentence and examine the horrifying belief system underpinning it. I’ll wait.
The entire site is truly disgusting, and yet I can’t claim to be too shocked. I suppose it just isn’t surprising that when people expose themselves in this way — in a forum designed to promote hatefulness and to protect it under cover of anonymity — they reveal the absolute worst versions of themselves. And the best part about that anonymity, by the way, can be found on the privacy policy page: “Your privacy is important to us. It’s a major part of the value of this site, so we take it very seriously.” Yes, “value,” he said. Value.
Interesting post - I confess that I got sidetracked around the part where you mentioned the large numbers of unsatisfied women…but, uh, yeah! That’s a rather tragic aspect of humanity. I fail to see the “entertainment value” associated with this type of behaviour. Perhaps it is possible to take comfort in the fact that only people possessed of truly vacuous minds take pleasure in such nonsense.
Despite the claims of “anonymity”, I would think that there are records of IP addresses and someone could, in principle, take legal action for libel if so inclined.
Yeah, the site is pretty depressing, and I suppose it’s worthwhile to try to remember that it is probably only a small portion of students who are participating in it.
Also, yeah, I’m sure they have a log of the IPs of the posters/commenters. I know I have the IP address logged for every comment on this site, and that’s not even via a stats application — WordPress does that all by itself. Since they do use people’s names on that website, I am sure someone down the line will wind up suing them. They should, anyway.
Speaking of the stats gadgets that you have running, do you still get any interesting Google searches that direct your way? I had a little webpage running for a time from that IP of mine you have logged (didn’t last long - I got port scanned for PHPadmin about 5 times an hour) and I got people directed to my site via the most bizarre searches…I swear the Interweb is one big den of iniquitous perversion…
I used to have all manner of crazy searches when this blog was on typepad and got a lot more traffic in general. These days its just people looking for me, searching “zemblan grammar” or something tepid like that. Bo-ring!
I confess it is I who does the “zemblan grammar” searches. I can never remember the URL (simple as it may be) and/or am too lazy to type it into my little URL browser box.