Bully for you

Am I a bully? I'm asking rhetorically, so don't feel the need to write in and answer. But it's a question I've been asking myself in light of a number of related stories which have been dominating YouTube traffic in the last seven days.

One clip that quickly became an overnight sensation, saw an overweight Australian fifteen year-old called Casey Heynes getting all Howard Beale on his pint-sized tormentor. After three years of relentless bullying and harassment, Casey said to himself "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!". Pushed over the edge by a schoolmate, he gave the spiteful little shit the kind of smack-down that used to be a Saturday afternoon staple, back when Shirley Crabtree was still a household name. Although both boys were subsequently suspended from Chifley College in Sydney, four Facebook pages have already been set up in honour of the beleaguered battler, with 200,000 fans signing up in support.

Students in California also found themselves on the receiving end of verbal sticks and stones last week, when Alexandra Wallace took to YouTube to berate all the Asian students at UCLA for talking on their mobile phones in the college library. Every time the hard-working undergraduate was about to reach an "epiphany" in her preparations for finals week, she was disturbed by the sound of “Ooooh Ching Chong Ling Long Ting Tong, Ooohhhhh.” The phone users in question were, of course, waiting for news from Japan about their friends and family.

As Alexandra explained in her video, "So being the polite, nice American girl that my momma raised me to be, I kinda just gave him what anybody else would do that kinda like, [puts finger up to lips in a "shh" motion]. 'You know it’s a library, like, we’re trying to study, thanks!' And then it’s the same thing five minutes later. But it’s somebody else, you know — I swear they’re going through their whole families, just checking on everybody from the tsunami thing." The inconsiderate shits. Several hundred thousand views, and a bunch of angry videoed replies later, Wallace issued a formal mea culpa (which translates into Californian as "My bad") and announced that she was leaving the university.

But the biggest bullying story in the online world this week, concerned a wannabe popstar and a song that comes dangerously close to breaching the Geneva convention. In just seven days, Rebecca Black's 'Friday' scored an astonishing 25 million views on YouTube and rocketed the thirteen year-old into the top 20 in several territories. But they say fame comes at a price, and for Rebecca, that meant having the world's scorn heaped upon her. Like everyone else with access to a keyboard and an internet connection, I went off on one about the horrors of a song that made St Winifred's School Choir sound like Radiohead. The main focus of my ire was the awfulness of the record itself, but I couldn't stop myself from chucking a few underarm blows in Rebecca's direction.

A week after its debut, the conspiracy theories were finally put to rest, as the story behind the song was finally revealed. As many of us suspected, it was a vanity project bankrolled by an overindulgent parent, with little thought for the consequences. Apparently, $2,000 buys you an original song, studio and post-production, plus a video shoot, courtesy of the cut-price Svengalis at Ark Music Factory. Speaking exclusively to Good Morning America, Black seemed conflicted by the bittersweet nature of her success. In particular, she spoke about the fact that one commenter had advised her to start cutting herself and develop an eating disorder to make her prettier.

Now, just to play devil's advocate for a moment, Rebecca was happy enough for her Mum to spend $2,000 on something that must have seemed about as sound an investment as a Ponzi scheme. I'm guessing she figured it'd be, like, totally OMG, to have a video she could show to her friends. She never, for a moment, thought that her dreams of celebrity might actually come true. But as Pete and Dud discovered in Bedazzled, when you make a deal with Beelzebub, keep in mind that he has a better grasp of irony than Alanis Morissette.

She wasn't to know what would happen once the video was uploaded. Like all viral phenomena, there's little rhyme or reason (much like the song itself) to how these things take off. That zeitgeist is a slippery little fucker.

The internet has given us all a chance to weigh in on any topic and give a complete stranger a verbal wedgie. When my article on Rebecca Black first appeared on Sabotage Times, one commenter took me to task for my criticism of a 13 year-old girl, although even he couldn't resist taking a pop-shot at my profile picture. I learned two things from this experience - avoid ad hominem attacks, and stop shopping for T-shirts at BabyGap.

So what happened to us? When did we decide to hang out behind the internet bikesheds and start menacing other people for their iTunes money? Our online life might give us more opportunity than ever before to reach out and touch people, but sometimes it seems that we can't resist giving them a Chinese burn while we're doing it. Are we getting meaner, or is just human nature? Answers on a piece of hate-mail, please. 

From bad to worse

Regular readers of this blog will know that p0pvulture has something of a love-hate relationship with the Daily Mail. I love the fact that it aggregates a whole host of celebrity and entertainment stories, but lament the sneery, bullying tone it adopts when reporting them.

It's the paper's innate sense of superiority that troubles me, even more than its loathsome xenophobia or fanatical dedication to a Britain that only ever existed in Enid Blyton's most halucinogenic cheese dreams.

Thankfully though, there's a delicious irony in the fact that its tone seems to be growing ever more supercilious, even as the quality of its reporting spirals irrevocably down the drain. Three examples in today's edition really caught my eye.

The first was a story about Gemma Arterton who has spoken out about the way Brits love to build up home-grown talent, only to knock it down at the first sign of success. Let's be honest, the woman has a point. So how does the Mail trail the feature in its margin?


Not getting off to the best of starts then. Addressing Gemma's claims, the Mail says "According to her, we simply don't like pretty girls who do well." Perhaps they're going to disprove her theory with an even-handed approach to the subject? "Obviously being a woman of both beauty and ability can be a burden. But Miss Arterton, it seems, is confident she can handle the pressure."

I'd say that was a 'no'.

OK, so Gemma's young and hot - she can take care of herself. What about Sylvester Stallone? The 63-year old film-maker recently broke his neck while filming the action movie The Expendables. He told FHM Magazine "Actually, my fight with Stone Cold Steve Austin was so vicious that I ended up getting a hairline fracture in my neck. I'm not joking...I had to have a very serious operation afterwards. I now have a metal plate in my neck."

That all sounds pretty painful. The Mail's headline?


But it's not all just snide remarks and holier-than-thou editorial. Sometimes it's just the laziest journalism on record. Today's finest non-story is a 'before they were famous' piece about everyone's favourite spinster songbird Susan Boyle. Prepare yourself now, this is some exciting stuff...

In a Daily Mail showbiz exclusive, the paper breathlessly announced that a woman called Tori Graham found half of someone who may have been Susan Boyle, in a photo that was taken at Edinburgh Waverley station in 2002. This is what the Pulitzer was invented for.


To paraphrase Oscar Wilde - we are all in the gutter press, but some of us are looking up the skirts of the stars.

You can't beat a bit of bully

OK, so writing a post in defense of Heather Mills feels rather counter-intuitive, like shepherding children back into a burning orphanage. But why exactly is there so much antipathy to one of the richest ex-wives in England?

Most of the blame clearly lies with the press, who were quick to portray her as the kind of wicked stepmother that even the Brothers Grimm would find outlandish. Then again, if you were put in the unenviable position of being stepmother to Stella McCartney, you'd be speed-dialling the bearded huntsman or pointing her in the direction of the nearest gingerbread cottage before the wedding breakfast was over.

Of course, Heather didn't help matters, having breakdowns on breakfast TV and turning the divorce court hearings into outtakes from Dynasty, minus the clip-on earrings. As a consequence, she's now fair game for anyone with a spare joke about prosthetic limbs.

So we shouldn't really be surprised that Baroness Blackheart, AKA Amanda Platell, saw the chance for a few lazy digs at Heather's expense, once she got her withered claws on some nefarious pictures of the ex-Mrs McCartney in training for Dancing on Ice. 

Platell's article claimed that Heather was 'desperate' to get on the show, and had recruited a trainer to help her - as though adequate preparation was something to be sniffed at. But the real ugliness came in the form of the Mail's now obligatory rhetorical questions: "Why does she roll up one trouser leg to show her prosthetic limb, yet leaves the other leg covered? Not still milking the sympathy vote, are we pet?"

Unsurprisingly, Heather's not too chuffed with Amanda's spiteful snippery, taking to Twitter to voice her disgust. "She said I kept my trouser leg rolled up to show off my prosthetic, UNTRUE. It was rolled up so Bob Watts the prosthetist could see the alignment and work out why I could not do crossovers without catching my blade and falling over."

The thing is, there's nothing new about Amanda Platell's uninformed, open-ended cruelty. The Daily Mail has been busy developing its signature bullying tone over time, and it's becoming more and more prevalent. Just take a look at the stories from the last week, and how they were headlined:

Can't remember your own songs Leona? 

If Cheryl Cole spends £200,000 a year on her appearance... who was responsible for this Halloween horror?
Get a bra, Britney!  

Mariah squeezes her voluptuous figure into a revealing leotard for new video (but only just)
Isn't it a bit cold for that Lady GaGa?

The snippy, supercilious tone that runs through all of these lines clearly positions the Mail as the journalistic equivalent of the immaculately dressed bitches that figure in most American high school dramas. They spot a weakness or insecurity and exploit it with little or no understanding of the context.

The cruel irony is that today's Daily Mail cover laments the tragic death of a woman who died in a house-fire, whilst trying to save her son, who had been teased for his learning difficulties. It seems that bullying is only ugly and cruel when someone else is doing it.

Catfights and spotlights

Since the dawn of time mankind has been troubled by certain unanswerable questions - why does toast always fall butter-side down, if a tree falls in the forest when no-one's around does it make a sound, and does Boris Johnson own a mirror?

But the one true mystery which continues to elude our smartest thinkers, is why do women hate each other so much? The internet is littered with psychology articles attempting to deduce why sisters are happier doing it for themselves, rather than with each other. But although many of them propose a number of hypotheses, none of them have come close to solving this age-old conundrum. Perhaps what's needed is a case study that can be observed closely, and I can't think of a better bunch of lab-rats than the Sugababes.

When they launched onto the music scene in 2000, they were a breath of fresh air to an increasingly stale pop music industry and an antidote to the manufactured girl bands that were clogging the charts like hair in a drain. The Spice Girls and B*Witched were thankfully on their way out, whilst the recently formed Atomic Kitten were providing the soundtrack to a million Lambrini-fuelled hen nights with their disco trash.

In contrast, the Sugagbabes were gritty, urban and unusual - having formed the band themselves at the precocious age of 13. When their debut album One Touch was released in November of 2000, the music critics were delighted to have finally discovered a girl band that it was OK to like. Fusing R&B and soul, the album produced several singles and won rave reviews, but didn't sell particularly well, partly because it had a cover so ugly that it looked as though it had simply been left to steep in a pot of tea, rather than art directed.

But the music industry is a business, and critical acclaim only gets you so far. So no-one was too surprised when the girls were dropped by London Records. To make matters worse, they not only had to find a new record label, they also needed to find a new 'babe, following the sudden departure of Siobhán Donaghy during a Japanese promotional tour. It soon emerged that Donaghy was suffering from clinical depression as a result of bullying and in-fighting within the group.

Still, the girls soldiered on, signed to Island records and returned with a new album, a new sound, and a pretty new member - one-time Atomic Kitten Heidi Range. Showing considerable bravery and determination, Range stepped into the vipers' nest and made the role her own, although the rumours of bullying continued. This was, in part, because unlike their more glamorous, eager-to-please counterparts, the Sugababes maintained a tougher, less-approachable persona. In fact, with her pierced lip, tattoos and drawn-on eyebrows, founding member Mutya Buena looked as though she'd be more at home spitting at pensioners in a bus-stop than hanging out at the Brits Awards.

By the time album four came around, it was Buena's time to leave the band citing 'personal reasons'. Given that most people, perhaps unfairly, thought that Buena was the ringleader (since she seemed to be staging a smiling boycott for political reasons) it was assumed that the girls had put their reputation for in-fighting behind them.

However, album six's title 'Catfights and Spotlights' suggested that maybe that wasn't the case. New member Amelle Berrabah may have taken to the singing and sultry poses with aplomb, but the group continued to be dogged by stories of internal friction. These rumours came to a head last week when concerns were raised that Berrabah had been kidnapped, following a fight with founding member Keisha Buchanan. After the least exhaustive police investigation of all time, it turned out that Amelle was simply hiding out at home, but it was clear that there were major problems in the group.

Today it was reported that, once again, the Sugababes are looking for a new recruit, further sealing their reputation for going through more members than Paris Hilton on a long weekend. But before the ink had even dried on the press reports, it emerged that the latest Sugababe had already been signed.

Jade Ewen, the UK's toothy representative in this year's Eurovision, is all set to stick her head in the lion's mouth and join the group, despite the fact that her big follow-up single to her turgid Euroballad is due to be released on Monday. Jade's people hastily issued a statement to say that "Due to unforeseen circumstances beyond our control, we regret to inform you that Jade Ewen will be taking time off from all promotional activity for the foreseeable future."

What this means for the girls' new album (due in the next couple of months) remains to be seen. But it's clear that as long as there are Sugababes, there'll be eyes to scratch out and backs to knife. It just goes to show, you can choose your friends but you can't choose your bandmates.