In October, I wrote an article about Amanda Todd, a Canadian teen who was so severely cyber-bullied that she committed suicide. Now, in a strange turn of events, I am being threatened in her name.

Someone claiming to be from the hacker group “Anonymous” sent an email recently, demanding I remove images created by Todd’s bullies from the piece. My intention in using these images was to condemn bullying by showing the horrors Todd experienced, so you can imagine my surprise on Sunday when I received this:

From: Anonymous <Redacted@redacted.com>

Message Body:

Whether or not this person is a hacker, and whether or not I should be “expecting” Anonymous on my site, outside my home, or for dinner is unclear. Seven days have passed, and though I feel safer now than I did yesterday, I still have no idea what to expect. However, regardless of the legitimacy of this threat, the email raises a number of ethical questions.

Am I being bullied by this alleged Anonymous, or am I the bully?

In the days since receiving it, this email has been pretty much all I think about. I have contacted my web host and searched the Twitterverse, trying to uncover my harasser to no avail. I have scoured the Internet for related hashtags and learned more about #Anonymous than intended, as I sit here contemplating my decision and its potential outcomes.

While I feel the use of images portraying the horrors of cyber-bullying is legitimate in the context of critical discussion, am I contributing to the problem by displaying them? Since Todd herself spoke out so publicly against her bullies through the YouTube video she made shortly before she hung herself, I imagine she would have wanted the discussion surrounding bullying and the Internet to continue, and discussion includes documentation.

I’m reminded of a recent article published in the Jewish Daily Forward in which a journalist writes of her hesitation to print graphic quotes from Veronique Pozner, a mother who chose to view the body of her son Noah, a student murdered at Sandy Hook elementary school. She told the reporter:

Pozner had nothing to gain by describing her son’s corpse; his murderer was already dead. She wanted only to shed light on the issue of gun violence.

The mother of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy who was beaten and shot to death in a racially based attack, changed history in 1955 when she decided to hold an open casket funeral for him and allow photographs of his body.

But I am not Amanda Todd’s mother, and since the images are part of a vicious meme that contributed to her death, one might say they are not the aftermath of a tragedy, but its manifestation. One friend of mine said that if Todd’s mother was behind the email, I had better take the images down. Another suggested fear-based capitulation and silence. A third person argued that repeating the meme in any form was lending it credence and that I was dumb not to see the hacker’s point.

A meme is like an echo. It’s a game of telephone. A meme births its own annihilation, as repetition and alteration gives way to meaninglessness and it becomes nothing more than a guttural sound, a blip, a sputter. A meme is what you make of it.

So, rather than removing the images, I decided to alter them.

On the Internet, where an image presented may be easily and instantly removed from its context and replicated endlessly, presenting it unaltered may be akin to presenting it without commentary at all. However, altering an image is hardly standard journalistic practice; journalism seeks to be objective and truthful. Journalists fight so that images will not be suppressed. But the memes that haunted Amanda Todd are part of a bigger story and alteration has now hopefully become part of its unfolding.

From a psychological perspective, the most insensitive memes might be viewed as ways in which society reclaims a tragic event and re-write it as comedy. Certain things are so tragic or violent that they defy explanation and all we can do is laugh to keep from crying. But all the theory and comedic nuance in the world doesn’t do much to help a bullied child, just like discussion of the email threat I received doesn’t make it any less disturbing. Showing the email to friends and colleagues and writing this article has in many ways made the threat more alive and present. It lives inside my head perhaps in the same way Todd’s tormentors lived inside hers, and like Todd, I am seeking solace and support online—the place where all my trouble began in the first place.

Ironically, if anyone believes that perpetrators of hate and bullying should be outed and their ways exposed, it would seem to be Anonymous. The entity was recently credited with releasing shocking footage in the Steubenville Ohio sex crime case. In the video, a college student is deriding and mocking the girl at the center of the case who, after drinking and becoming unconscious, was carried around to various football parties and sexually abused.

While my goal in using images created by Amanda Todd’s bullies (and my goal in writing this article) is not to allow the public to locate the bullies and exact retribution, like those who released the Steubenville video, I aim to shed light on a cruel situation. Both the images I used and the Steubenville video show the power of the Internet to inflict psychic pain in an instant. In the Steubenville sex crime case, tweets and images of the victim were posted on Twitter before she was even conscious to see them.

While it would be a better world if the Internet was purged of cyber-bullying, the people who should be held accountable are those responsible for it, not the journalists who report on its existence. Though it might be argued that sites that shed light on cyber-bullies also benefit from them in some way, since they create a fraction of our content, that is the same as saying the New York Times benefits directly from bombings and war– while possibly true, it borders on ridiculous.

Obviously Amanda Todd’s death is first and foremost a tragedy, not a lesson, but if I allow the horrors she experienced (contained in the images I published) to be forgotten or whitewashed by the Internet’s self-cleaning mechanism of deletion and new traffic flow, am I really helping? Further, if I adhere completely to my blackmailer’s demands, am I participating in censorship and fear-based limits on free speech?

In receiving my “Anonymous” email I was forced to come to terms with the dangers of the Internet. Late at night, I received a phone call from a 000000000 number. There was no message, but was it them? My site got shut down briefly last week and I was up panicking, was it them? I am experiencing a certain type of paranoia that only the Internet can engender, where every glitch has a meaning, where I both anticipate and fear being known. As if Facebook could suddenly look back at me and see me at home in my underwear. As if I will suddenly be unmasked and targeted specifically in a public space.

Like many Internet denizens, members of Anonymous pride themselves on lurking in the shadows. They don masks in public, in an act that conveys both fear and power: they are unknown so they are frightening, but they are masked so they must be afraid too. They are at once a product of the Internet and of our collective imagination, representing all the invisible justice and terror lurking out there in the world.

While many of the actions of Anonymous seem noble, if this is indeed an act on its behalf, it is far from noble. If it is not an affiliated act and rather a perversion of its goals, it shows how easy it is to pretend and frighten just with a simple email. I am reminded of how terrified Amanda Todd must have felt when she found out she had an Internet stalker: someone unknown, lurking in the shadows who, in many ways, we should all be “expecting.”

This email threat is in and of itself a good argument for enhanced Internet policing, which is, oddly, what this alleged Anonymous member wants for our site. However, the entity Anonymous seems to be against censorship, based upon its love of hacking and incredible use of free speech. It is therefore odd that someone would claim to be part of Anonymous in order to threaten a website that is ostensibly on its side.

Perhaps all this means is that when vigilante justice is exacted, it can turn into just as narrow-minded a regime as it sought to overthrow. Perhaps this means that one individual decided to do something impulsive and it shouldn’t be taken seriously, but more likely it means that in order to have real discussions online, we must all become more technologically sophisticated. We must think critically about the ways in which the Internet is different from the printed page and learn how to play with its strengths and weaknesses: “the medium is the message.” We must try to understand the consequences of our online actions, regardless of our intentions and must gain the technical skills to level the playing field to fight back against those seeking to limit free discourse, whoever they may be. In the words of Josh Kopstein and protesters everywhere: It is no longer OK not to know how the Internet works.

This article first appear on Alternet

However, in addition to taking a moment to dwell on the spellbinding nail polish FLOTUS was sporting (it was a lovely blue- grey, which we will be attempting to purchase later), we would like to highlight some problematic aspects of the evenings’ affairs.

The First Lady’s speech focused on Whitney Houston-esque “I believe the children are our future” rhetoric, which we have seen and heard so many times before, but in this particularly disturbing economic climate, her words (and the words of San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro who spoke before her) were earth-shatteringly depressing. Both Castro and Obama spoke of the sacrifices their parents and grandparents had made in order to create a better life for them. Castro talked about how his grandmother, an immigrant, worked all sorts of odd jobs so that his mother could get an education, and how his mother had made sacrifices that had afforded him the opportunities he had in life.

My grandmother’s generation and generations before always saw beyond the horizons of their own lives and their own circumstances, Castro said. “And that’s the middle class—the engine of our economic growth. With hard work, everybody ought to be able to get there. And with hard work, everybody ought to be able to stay there—and go beyond.

What about those of us who are not doing as well as our grandparents? Should we blame ourselves? It was as if Castro was saying that we should have modest dreams now, and have babies (sons?) who might someday be lucky enough to have a future. But how are we going to afford those adorable babies, and what if (God forbid) we don’t want to have them? It was as if he was saying that people who are dissatisfied with and focused on their current situations are just being short-sighted.

Mrs. Obama echoed a similar tale, discussing the life of Barack’s grandmother:

Barack’s grandmother started out as a secretary at a community bank…and she moved quickly up the ranks…but like so many women, she hit a glass ceiling.

And for years, men no more qualified than she was – men she had actually trained – were promoted up the ladder ahead of her, earning more and more money while Barack’s family continued to scrape by.

But day after day, she kept on waking up at dawn to catch the bus…arriving at work before anyone else…giving her best without complaint or regret.

And she would often tell Barack, “So long as you kids do well, Bar, that’s all that really matters.

No. What matters is that you, grandma, are being discriminated against! How can you teach your grandchildren to stand up for injustice if you don’t take up the fight?

In both of these instances, stories centered around women sacrificing all they had so that their children could succeed. Mrs. Obama consistently identified herself as a “Mom,” which is all well and good, but quite frankly, this type of self-sacrificing motherhood being celebrated as the norm is extremely problematic. It might be argued that Mrs. Obama herself has sacrificed (or rather altered) her own ambitions so that her husband could live out his dream. Granted, many women would happily quit jobs to be FLOTUS, still, seeing ones own identity defined by her husband’s job may give even the most liberated woman pause.

Of course the story about Barack’s grandmother was used to illustrate how personally important the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was to the President. Some day, the little boy raised by his grandmother will grow up to save womankind!

In other problematic ideas, Mrs. Obama shared some of the things she and her husband had learned.

“We learned about dignity and decency, that how hard you work matters more than how much you make…That the truth matters, that you don’t take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules.

It’s as if she was trying to slip some things by us! Dignity: awesome, decency, yes, “that how hard you work matters more than how much you make” wait, what? Tell that to unpaid interns. Tell that to minimum wage workers who earn $7.25 per hour in New York City. Tell that to the unemployed who have full-time jobs looking for work!

Then, she reels us back in again with “Truth matters,” yes, something we all agree on. “You don’t take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules,” she slips in. We should totally play by the rules we have right now, because they are obviously working so well and so fast!

Couldn’t it be argued that many entrepreneurial ventures or even civil rights struggles were the direct result of people playing by their own sets of rules? This idea that ‘government rule makers know what is best’ casts President Obama as the father who reads letters everyday from 10 Americans (his children) and then wisely decides what is best for us. While we can only hope this will be what happens, Mrs. Obama’s trust in Government seemed to be in direct contrast with the campaign Obama waged four years ago with his almost revolutionary focus on “change.”

While it was nice to see the Obamas try to cast themselves in stark contrast to wealthy Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the contrast may not have been stark enough. Mrs. Obama may have been a touch too deferent, portraying her family as too accepting of the great injustices that have created the class divide in America. As Mrs.Obama frighteningly said of her family:

They didn’t begrudge anyone else’s success or care that others had much more than they did…in fact, they admired it.

Image: First Lady Michelle Obama addresses the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., on Tuesday, Sept. 4, 2012. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

I have no interest in sports and perhaps, even more specifically, no interest in hurdling. However, after reading New York Times writer Jere Longman’s scathing indictment of US Olympic hurdler Lolo Jones, I became Jones’ fan—nay, dare I say, champion.

Few things bother me more than seeing a woman of achievement maligned by a man who doesn’t like her outfit. However, it is possible that Longman thought his attack on Jones was in someway feminist—as if what he was really saying was that women should be respected for their achievements, not their appearance. If this was what he meant to say, his words surely failed him.

Not to worry, because a few days later, another man, this time from Fox News, came to Jones’ rescue. Dr. Keith Ablow, a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team, wrote:

Longman’s column, however, may say more about him—and those hostile to all trappings of true gender identity…”

The good doctor would know about things like hostility to “true gender identity,” will we next read his case study on hysteria?

Ablow didn’t stop his ill-conceived defense of Jones there, he continued:

Mr. Longman objecting to a beautiful athlete posing in sensual photographs, while remaining silent about female boxers who look androgenous, beating up one another in a boxing ring, until they fall down, is worth noting.”

Someone thought the above section was particularly good, as it was used for a pull quote. Ablow seems to be saying that the real problem (as usual) is women who do not conform to gender roles, not pretty girls like Jones who show a bit of well-toned flesh.

Ablow ends his article with a particularly astute observation, his emphasis, not mine:

Mr. Longman has gone long on trying to turn Lolo Jones into a man.  I’m not his psychiatrist, but to me, that sounds like it merits a few sessions.”

I will now give you a few moments to digest this ridiculousness.

Done?

I will now ascend to my soapbox.

It’s been said once, and I will say it again. If you are an older white man, nine times out of 10, you aren’t helping a woman when you come to her defense.

I am not trying to racial profile here, but if it works for New York City cops in high-crime areas, maybe we should try it on journalists?*

Not only do these public debates about the place of a woman and the role of a woman’s identity smack of sexism, but to hear this kind of trash from fellow writers drives the smite of these malformed arguments even deeper.

I am reminded that women must be as good (if not better) than men, while remaining “feminine,” but not too feminine so as to seem weak, but not too strong so as to avoid being seen as bitchy or “androgynous.” We must do all this for a fraction of the salary and sometimes twice the work. We are not allowed in the NFL, we do not play Major League Baseball and we have never been President or Vice President of the country.

If we are young, we are inexperienced and if we are old, we are used up. We are the ones with the delightful task of childbirth and the associated costs of femininity–just think of all the toilet paper we use in a lifetime.

Women’s haircuts cost more and so does health insurance, dry cleaning– you name it. On top of all this, men are apparently still paid to opine on our status and behavior in widely read publications that even the most talented among us (ahem, me) can’t get a job at.

This would all be too much to bear if we didn’t run the world, like Beyonce says.

Jere Longman, of NYT and Dr. Keith Ablow of Fox News; Lolo Jones Courtesy KD Sanders

*we do not support racial profiling.

… was based not on achievement but on her exotic beauty and on a sad and cynical marketing campaign. Essentially, Jones has decided she will be whatever anyone wants her to be — vixen, virgin, victim — to draw attention to herself and the many products she endorses.

Funny, because in most of the coverage of Jones that we have seen, commentators aren’t focusing on her virginity or vixen-ness, but rather remarking upon the fact that Jones was in the lead in the 2008 Bejing Olympics, but tripped, causing her to finish in seventh place. I don’t follow hurdling regularly, but even I know this.

Longman goes on to write that he personally disapproved of a bathing suit Jones wore on the cover of “Outside Magazine, ” calling it ”nothing but strategically placed ribbon.” Jones’ red bathing suit seems to tell Longman that her claims to be a “virgin” and a “Christian” were obviously false. Again, why do we care who she sleeps with or worships? Is Longman secretly Jones’ father? Now THAT could be a story.

How dare this man attack a US Olympian for her bathing suit– which by the way, is about as much as many competing Olympians wear these days.

Has Mr. Longman watched beach volleyball? He might have a stroke from the exposed flesh of Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings, who just won a gold medal for the USA.

Part of the reason we watch the Olympics is to marvel at the bodies of superhuman sportsmen and women, and as a sportswriter, surely Longman knows that Olympic contests were initially held in the buff. But apparently none of this matters, since he is determined to hate a US Olympian for being sexy.

Longman goes on to admit that male athletes, like swimmer Ryan Lochte, have often been praised for good looks. But in Lochte’s case, Longman seems to argue that it’s totally cool, because he’s a medalist. So if Jones won a medal, would it be ok for her to be sexy?

In his infinite journalistic wisdom, the sportswriter decides he needs to have quotes from other people (rather than just his own opinions) to substantiate his attacks on Jones. He taps Janice Forsyth, director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies at the University of Western Ontario who laments female athletes who feel they must sell themselves as sex objects, but then goes on to say:

“I don’t know if this is Lolo being Lolo or part of a marketing scheme to remain relevant in an Olympic industry where if you are not the Olympic champion, you are nothing.”

Hmm…very interesting. So a) this could just be the way Lolo is and b) she is in an industry where if you are not a champion you are nothing. It’s so awesome that Longman decided to challenge that notion in his article and encourage women to try sports by affording female athletes fair and unbiased news coverage. Oh wait, HE DIDN’T. Longman writes that Jones struggles with doubts, but rather than try to assuage them, he gives Jones something to really be worried about: not the race, but her image.

As if he hadn’t maligned Jones enough, Longman gets her teammate Dawn Harper for her take, pitting one female athlete against another in the court of public opinion, not the track.

Harper conceded that like Jones, she only became a hurdler so that she could pose scantily clad on the covers of niche magazines and get free shoes and earn money from endorsements. Nope. She didn’t say that, because no one becomes a hurdler for that reason!

Since Jones is such a lame athlete, we challenge Longman to a race against her. We challenge Longman to jump as high and run as fast as this woman who has been jumping and running as the bar is raised not just by fellow athletes, but by people like Longman: a person who clearly does a terrible job at what he is allegedly good at, yet continues to be read in the preeminent English-language paper of our time. Does he only have his job because of his sex appeal?

Jere Longman, Image Source: St. Vincent’s College;

Lolo Jones by KD Sanders

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

On The Today Show, Jones cried about her treatment in the New York Times.

The Times’ Ombudsman also criticized the viciousness of  Longman’s article, writing that he had received many letters from readers who were upset by it. Longman’s editor apparently defended the article. Many other writers have since weighed in, and we will be continuing to cover new developments as they occur.