April 6, 2021
Juli Fraga
THE WASHINGTON POST – Imagine this scenario: You discover a degrading remark about your daughter on her Instagram account that said, “You’re disgusting. No one wants to see your ugly face.” Suddenly, you’re worried that someone is cyberbullying your tween. But when you ask your daughter about the online jab, she admits that she set up a fake account and posted the comment herself.
Though it may sound far-fetched to parents who didn’t grow up on social media, social scientists are now devoting research to the practice they’re calling “self-cyberbullying” or “digital self-harm”, in which social media users set up fake accounts and use those accounts to post mean comments about themselves.
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Becoming a Parent During the Pandemic Was the Hardest Thing I’ve Ever Done Sophie Gilbert
Image above: The photographer Rose Marie Cromwell documented her experience giving birth and her growing child during the pandemic, in a series called
Eclipse.
In early March last year, I was heading home from a work happy hour on the subway when I realized that a woman was staring at my belly. She looked at my waist, where my coat was belted, and then at the floor, and then at my waist again, and then she very tentatively offered me her seat. I was four months pregnant. (I’d also eaten a lot of fried food at happy hour, in lieu of drinking.) I felt pitifully grateful to this woman at the time, and I ended up thinking about her a lot in the following months. She was really the only person apart from my husband, my obstetrician, some nurses, and my doormen who ever saw me pregnant. My mother didn’t. My siblings didn’t. My best friends didn’t either, or my co-worker