Fight fire with fire.
That's what celebrity blogger
Wendy Cheng, also known as
Xiaxue, did when she was repeatedly flamed on Facebook over the past week.
Temasek Review (TR) had posted a series of Cheng's photos -- taken during the run-up to the
People's Action Party
(PAP) rallies with her fellow bloggers last May -- and asked its
readers to caption the pictures. Of three photos posted, two were taken
from her blog and one from fellow blogger,
Qiu Qiu.
In all,
the three posts garnered over 350 comments, of which many were insulting or downright derogatory.
Not taking it lying down, Cheng responded by writing her own blog post titled “
The Faces of Haters”
on Thursday, naming and shaming the eight men who left nasty comments
about her on TR’s Facebook page, which has over 10,000 followers.
Trawling
their public Facebook pages for information and photos, Cheng turned
the table on the men by posting their photos in her own blog,
accompanied by a short write-up of each. To one who called her a
“Geylang chicken”, she posted a photo of the man, seen posing with his
friends, with the accompanying note, “Are those ladies surrounding you
also Geylang chickens? Is your mother a Geylang chicken? See it isn’t
nice to assume.”
To another man who had commented, “pretty and
sexy girls, which part of geylang they work?”, she posted a photo of
him, his wife and young children, with the note, “He is married with two
cute kids. I wonder how he will feel like if in future men ask his
daughter which part of Geylang she works at?”
Cheng, a full-time
blogger who has been upfront and candid of her support for the PAP, said
she has received a lot of flak in the last year.
“I’ve blogged
for 10 years and I’ve covered the most controversial topics but
nothing, and I mean nothing, have gotten me more hate as me supporting
the PAP,” wrote Cheng, 28, who is married to the man she has been dating
for the last seven years.
“[The mean comments] lasted for a
whole year, got me several hate sites and hate parody accounts. People
wish death upon me and my family, threatening to hurt me if they ever
see me,” she said.
She explained in her blog that although she “detests men who write
s**t about girls online”, she would not have written about the men if
they didn’t bully her or her friends in the first place. She also said
she didn’t know why Temasek Review dragged up her photos from last year
since she knew nothing about the ongoing Hougang by-election.
Her gutsy post on Facebook has got 11,000 likes to date and sparked a major buzz in the Singapore blogosphere.
However, fellow bloggers Lee Kinmun (
@mrbrown) and Benjamin Lee (
@miyagi)
lauded her for standing up against her haters. “Remember when you were
young and your mother told you not to play with fire? Meet Fire,”
mrbrown tweeted.
Another blogger Pat Law (
@patlaw)
tweeted, “At the core of it all, @xiaxue stood up against cyberbullying
from GROWN UP MEN from Singapore & defended her friends. Thank you
@xiaxue.”
Others felt she also did the right thing.
Singapore
Management University student Chong Siew Yee told Yahoo! Singapore
that Cheng did a good job of outing the men who labelled her a
prostitute.
“Given that some of them are actually dads, [I am]
worried for their kids future because I wonder what values these dad
might bring to their kids,” Chong said.
“And insulting women in
such a distorted manner is a thing that all men should not even do in
the first place!” the economics student added.
Gender equality advocacy
AWARE Singapore also joined the conversation and praised her for waging a one-woman war against online misogyny.
But some felt that she crossed the line when she posted photos of her detractors’ family and friends.
Shawn Lim (
@mediumshawn)
tweeted, “Doing what she did to those who flamed her, Xiaxue has
stooped even lower than them. She doesn't even realise it. Shows how low
her IQ is.”
One of the eight men featured, Isaac, 23, said that
he didn’t mind taking a few hits from her since he started by commenting
on her photo.
“But what makes my blood boil her is her putting
up a photo of my friend, who has nothing to do with the situation and
knows absolutely nothing about her. She should have cropped my friend
out of the picture,” Isaac told
Yahoo! Singapore.
Hong
Xing, one of the guys Cheng exposed, said, “We should be responsible for
our harsh, nasty comments. We are responsible for it but we didn’t
expect our family photo [to be included] as they are innocent. Put
yourself in our [shoes] and you will know.”
PS：
I am no fan of Xiaxue, neither did I read her blog before.
But when I read about this on the news.
(This was the topic on radio fm93.8's morning show on 31may2011)
As from what I see, all these started with the photo above.
The photo was posted on Temasek Review's facebook page asking for comment.
The reason I see why this whole thing started was because of her politic party alignment.
Well, if they never gone too far with their insults...all these won't happened.
Those insults really were too much.
They expected her not to do anything.
But they were dead wrong.
She hit them back hard.
I said that she had all the rights to do so.
I really wonder why Temasek Review want people to comment on this photo for?
So much talk on their side about freedom and democracy.
Those people forgotten that Xiaxue has the right to choose whom she believe.
They want people to respect their choice...than respect her choice.
If you all want to reason with her, go ahead.
But please don't do personal insults.
You all won't like if it was done on you.
If you think you are safe on the internet...you are dead wrong.
