My Story: February 2017

My name is Bobby Mayberry. This is what happened to me and should NEVER happen to anybody at all.

In February 2017 a friend of mine shared the collage of "Nice Guy Valentines" from a page called Bye Fellipe. I was shocked to realize it was my face! 

I don't normally wear hats so my friend didn't recognize me. 

I began reading comments from women and men about how ugly my face is, how they believed somebody that looks like me would say such horrendous and mysogynistic things. How women would instantly reject a guy with a face like mine. 

Out of all those comments only 3 strangers said this was wrong. One only because she said it looks like I have Down Syndrome.

I then did a Google search for these and discovered they were everywhere. All over the internet spreading from Tumblr to Reddit, Imgur, and even on this Feminist Blog where it was tagged as "Male Virginity" as well as being hailed as "Brilliant". 

Then I discovered these had even made Buzzfeed! It was by blind luck I never came across them before.

There were so many variants, and there must have been around 20 different singular versions of these memes.

 Thanks to a friend contacting the maker of the memes through Instagram I finally found out why and how my face was used, and this first apology helped bring me back from the brink of suicide. Another friend got it taken off the Bye Fellipe page that day too. I only just recently got it off Buzzfeed. More on that in another post.

This was the second apology. 

I'll go into these in more detail in another post but I made an attempt to reclaim my face by putting my actual real Facebook post quotes on these instead of the made up evil messages she wrote. She posted one with a public apology.

I have been in therapy ever since I found out about these. I realized early on that people locally had been recognizing me in public from these for years...they were viral online from 2014 to even now. 

I was afraid to go out in public after this. I still suffer anxiety just getting groceries or going to the laundromat. Unfortunately, people online started to upload them again this year this very month while I was already dealing with the anniversary.

I got many to take them down but 3 pages on Facebook have not responded. Reporting them to Facebook did nothing. Between two pages is over 4,300 views or comments. I have been suicidal all month but I'm trying to fight back instead of kill myself to end this. 

The original finding out had destroyed most of my coping mechanisms. 

My message is don't use real people's photos in memes. These are real people with real feelings and real lives you're destroying by doing this. Every share and every comment not against this is perpetuating bullying and harassment on a large scale. It's overwhelming.

#bullying #onlinebullying #suicidal