So, I get this petition email about helping South African children who are being sexually abused/mutilated. It is even premised with, “Don’t open the attachments, they are very disturbing!” Okay, I won’t. But the email is very touching, and knowing how much my family loves this stuff, I decide to forward it along. Because they do that to me all the damn time.
The problem? My email automatically opened the pictures. They look more like muti sacrifices then anything, and they are indeed of children. Graphic, disturbing and totally burned into the brain. WHY, WHY, WHY did you send me this? I can’t forward it because that would require looking at the photos again.
My co-worker once got an email for kiddy porn, but with a title line that looked like someone wanted information about our business, so he opened the email. There were pictures - actual kiddy porn pictures of prepubescent children performing sexual acts with one another - in the body of the email itself. He said, “Oh, my god!” and so, of course, I looked over at his computer (next to mine) to see what provoked the reaction. It was horrible, really it was. I’ve never been able to get the image of a 6 year old boy’s erection in the mouth of a little preschool girl while an adult watched in the backgroundout of my mind.
Not as bad as decapitated babies, of course. But definitely in the realm of things I want brain bleach for. I feel filthy just having seen it by accident.
I certainly hope the person who sent the email was reported. That’s vile.
My boss is South African and didn’t realize that I wouldn’t have a choice about opening the email. He was apologetic about it when I told him. Doesn’t erase the nasty images in my head, but I know it wasn’t on purpose. And the point is valid. Horrible things are going on and no one is doing anything about it.
In a related pitting that I have been wanting to make for a while but haven’t…
I’m a member of the message boards at fertilityfriend.com. I find charting my cycles very useful, and I like surfing the boards from time to time to see people celebrating over positive pregnancy tests and the like.
The signatures on this message board allow images, and some people’s are huge. And some very special people have suffered stillbirths. Horrible, I know–the grief would probably kill me. But as much as the grief would kill me, I would not PUT PICTURES OF MY DEAD BABY IN MY SIGNATURE. Seriously, if this person posts in a thread there, I’m forced to see their dead baby. I can be skimming lah-dee-dah through a thread and suddenly SMACK DEAD BABY! What the hell is wrong with people that they think that everyone needs to share in their grief? I can understand taking pictures of a dead baby. I can understand making a website for the dead baby and putting the pictures on it. I can understand linking to that website in your signature with maybe something that says WARNING, IF YOU CLICK ON THIS YOU’RE GONNA SEE A DEAD BABY in 20 point font. I cannot understand putting the pictures of the dead baby directly in your signature. I want to put pictures of graphic hardcore porn in mine, and then when people complain I can say BUT THIS IS HOW BABIES ARE MADE AND IT’S BEAUTIFUL.
Drain Bead, I am not registered over there so I have no idea what type of message board s/w they use, but I have the same problem with huge sigs at another board I post to (that don’t involve dead kids - they just involve stupid graphics and sparkly shit and sometimes - shudder - wedding pictures) and they have an option for you to turn off signatures - you can set your profile up so that you don’t have to look at 'em. It’s in the user profile where you can select not to view others avatars or signatures. Is that an option?
While this was certainly shocking, it was also a very fascinating thing to learn about. Even more interesting, I found an example of someone who lived to adulthood with this condition. He has to eat 7,500 calories a day and slather himself with skin cream every few hours, just to survive.
I can only imagine how people in, say, medieval times reacted to this. They probably killed the children outright, assuming they were hellspawn.
There was a special on TLC about this too. The couple had one harlequin girl and then took the 25% chance of having another, and the second one was harlequin too. They bathe and lotion themselves for a couple of hours morning and night. They were sweet girls for the trouble they had to go through, and were living much longer than expected.