While casually scrolling through Instagram on Tuesday, I was confronted by one of the most disrespectful and misogynistic forms of cyberbullying that I’ve ever witnessed: an Instagram account, using the name and bracket of this month’s famous college basketball tournament, to rank girls at our school based on attractiveness.  

As a member of the female population, I wasn’t shocked to see such an event happen on my radar. Although it’s the type of cruelty you’d expect out of a teenage rom-com—because life’s injustices don’t seem to show their face—it all boils down to the most cruel reflection of the real world’s animosity in film. While I could never truly imagine how it feels, my heart goes out to all the girls involved and every female at Dominion because this behavior is just part of a larger problem that should have been fixed long ago.  

Whether it was the dress code or the misconceptions about scholastic capability, women have a long history of doubt and disproportionate treatment in the educational environment against them. No matter one’s gender, outward appearance should never define our true selves; nonetheless deserve to be put into a box and pitted against one another for amusement. We are high schoolers, despite whatever external body parts we may possess, who are simply trying to earn a diploma and make it through largely unscathed. 

After all, when we shoulder past the walls that divide us, human beings are all that’s left. And, as one of these human beings, I am severely disappointed in the lack of respect that we hold for one another at this school and throughout the county. The lack of surprise I had after seeing this account was even more disappointing: an exemplary symbol of the normalization and numbness we have developed after such long-term exposure to this belligerent hatred and its  allowance of these wrongs to run wildly unchecked. 

In fact, the institutionalized standards of today, especially in consideration of gender and its role in the scholastic environment, have simply manifested themselves in the form of this anonymous account and others just like it in high schools across Loudoun County. 

This poor treatment is just further proof of the growing toxicity of social media, where the plague of self-doubt and tendency to spur hatred has utterly changed the social dynamics of our generation and those to come. To finally end this vicious cycle, and the horrific treatment of each other as human beings and peers, we as a school and a community must pledge to make real change. 

No empty promises. No false comfort or hand-holding. We need real, steadfast solutions.