Francis Lapointe, known as Frank Wolf, was a man inspired by aesthetic beauty. He was a model. He spent a lot of time decorating his body. He shattered conventions of style, and of gender, in an attempt to convey his perception of the corporeal.
On the Internet, including his facebook page, he put himself on display. He made himself vulnerable to critique, to objectification, to the poring eyes of countless strangers. Regardless of the obstacles he would have known he would face, it was something that he found meaning in. He was courageous enough to put himself out on the Internet for this vision.
He was harassed. He committed suicide. He was 31 days older than me. He died at the age of 20.
I don't have much to say about his gorgeous sense of erotic creativity. All in all, I don't really have much to say about the way it came to pass.
I empathize with him. I understand what he went through. I'm highly cognizant of the way in which he suffered. Whatever his complex personal reasons for ending his life, they were undoubtedly outside of his control. He was an innocent man who brought joy to people in a niche community, but the abnormality of his taste was widely scorned.
Let's shift away from the passive voice.
People expended energy to tarnish his image and ruin his experience with artistic expression. They sullied his aspirations and his creativity with hatred. Individuals who felt indifferent towards him, who had no business interacting with him and no desire to have anything to do with him, touched him with their ideas. The frothy spittle of their careless trolling touched him in a way that is more profound than a thoughtless person is capable of comprehending. Somebody who does not go out of their way with empathy can't wrap their heart around what happened.
Holding your tongue, whether in person or online, is easy. Not saying anything is easy. So when a person has not the restraint to hold back a degrading joke or a trivial pejorative, the impact is far greater than they would have expected.
People need social interaction. The Internet is a good place to find communities for marginalized interests. So people open up in a way that would have been really hard to do in earlier times (before the Internet, it was presumably more difficult to find niche communities). When they open up, people who aren't members of those niche communities defile their space of interaction.
That leads to negative social experiences, which lead a person to seek out more positive social experiences. At a certain point, those negative experiences have an increasingly painful effect, and it becomes a vicious cycle. For a person who's had their [virtual or real] social space defiled by harassment, they'll need more meaningful interactions to overcome their social starvation. For an unconventional person like Frank, that would be the kind of thing that is unconventional and genuine--which only gathered more hate.
The Internet does not confer upon you special privileges to abuse people. Anonymity doesn't give you an excuse to do whatever you want. When you relinquish responsibility for your actions under a pseudonym, you relinquish the possibility of being genuinely connected with other people. You give up that profoundly animal experience of love for your neighbors.
When you trespass on somebody's space, you are responsible for respecting that space. You must follow their rules. You obey their customs. Either you pay heed of your environment, or it's not your business being there. Our Internet is more than a source of information and amusement for You. Our Internet is a world where people can interact with like-minded individuals, and to explore.
Children of my generation and onward have all heard that our Internet is a dangerous place. It's true. There are ideas and emotions floating around that damage sensitive people. But at the same time, our Internet is the only resource that many people have to find the social space where they belong. Some people simply have no feasible hope of finding, IRL, communities of like-minded eccentrics.
It is the moral duty of a human being to be cognizant of what their words do to other human beings. There's no moral distinction between doing it while anonymous and doing it to somebody's face. You might not see the effects of what you're doing, but the effects happen. You might not know about the suffering you're personally responsible for, but you're still personally responsible for suffering.
It bothers me so much when people are treated as worthless. I am so bothered by disrespect towards other conscious beings. I can't stand seeing people suffer because of others' carelessness and bigotry. I know what it feels like, and I don't want to feel it again. I don't want other people to go through it. I don't want it to exist anywhere, in any form. It's so little to ask, that people weigh their lust for humor with some empathy for the people they're talking to and about.
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