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Pornstar August Ames was found dead on December 5, 2017 in an apparent suicide. She was 23 years old.

Leading up to her death, she received a lot of backlash on Twitter after making the claim that she would never preform a porn scene with a man who has previously preformed in gay porn, leading many to believe that she was homophobic. She defended herself by stating that she herself was bisexual and explaining her reasoning to refuse shooting a scene with a gay man, believing it would put her body and health at risk and that it was her body, her choice at the end of the day.

One Twitter user even went as far as to say the "world is awaiting your apology or for you to swallow a cyanide pill. Either or we’ll take it." And even her colleagues started to call her out on the situation.

News.com.au

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This really pisses me off. Yes, her choice to refuse having sex with a man who performed in Gay scenes may have came off as homophobic, but she obviously gave her reasons as to why, which was fine by me. And in the end of the day, it was her choice as to how she'd take care of her body. But people still berated her about it even after she tried to be rational and explained her reasons.

I don't care what your beliefs are, you should never wish harm upon someone just because their beliefs are different from yours.

FFS
Can a mod do me a favor and change "American" in the title to "Canadian"? Thanks in advanced.

Well ain't this just sweet.

Every little thing about this is fucked to the hilt. She made a series of tweets saying she doesn't want to star in a video with a guy who was done gay porn, she gave damn good reasoning as to why, and yet she got bullied to the point of suicide.

I just need to see one of her bullies tweet something like "Gay people get bullied and commit suicide too!" or "Althought I don't agree with her comments I fell bad about her death." (pretending to feel bad only after getting backlash) for the icing on the cake.

She did not commit suicide for just being called a homophobe on twitter. She was cyber bullied by a group of psychotic narcissist telling her things that I wont repeat (Don't worry. I know they don't represent the entire LGBT community), and quite a few of them were people with ten of thousand of followers.

But anyways, I started looking into this but I now have to stop. The more I learn about this the worse it gets.

What I said in my last comment "I just need to see one of her bullies tweet something like “Gay people get bullied and commit suicide too!” or “Althought I don’t agree with her comments I fell bad about her death.” (pretending to feel bad only after getting backlash) for the icing on the cake."

How stupid and naive I was…

What I'm seeing now that her bullies are saying is actually way more disgusting, WAY MORE DISGUSTING, than what I imagined. Look into it at your own risk but have a stress ball ready.

This seems pretty fucked yeah. As far as I can tell she was bullied by mainly gay pornstars themselves, as it seems everyone who replied to her on twitter was also in the porn industry. what a bunch of garbage

"She was a porn actress. What exactly could someone do to her over the internet that’s more degrading than what she already did."

I'm not gunna lie, despite it being two sentences this actually got under my skin.

She is still a human being regardless of her being a porn actress. Even if she was also circus clown or dressed up in a costume spinning one of those advertisement signs at the side of the road living with her parents, I wouldn't think that was her degrading herself or made the attacks on her excusable in any way especially because of her job.

Let's turn the tables here for a sec. Here's the scenario: A gay woman killed herself due to cyberbulling on twitter similar to what August Ames had to deal with and someone says, "She was gay. What exactly could someone do to her over the internet that's more degrading than what she already did." There are real homophobes out there that see gay people the way you're seeing August Ames. I'm not saying being a porn actress is in the same category as being gay, I'm saying they're not degrading themselves because of their job, lifestyle choice, sexual preference, religion, or whatever. Hell, replace "a porn actress" with any kind of person that has a hate group targeting them, so basically replace "a porn actress" with any kind of person.

She didn't commit a violent act against someone.
She didn't steal anything.
She wasn't a drug dealer.
She didn't drink and drive.
She didn't murder anyone.
She didn't rape anyone.
She didn't kidnap someone.
She wasn't a nazi.
She wasn't part of the KKK.
She wasn't a terrorist.
She didn't do anything illegal.
She was a porn actress, which was more degrading than anything that anyone could do to her over the internet. ?

I've known a few people that have gone through something like this and about once a week on r/news on reddit there a story about at kid year old killing themselves due to cyber bulling or any bulling. I've seen countless forums dedicated to e-stalking and cyber-bullying people online usually attacking them over things they should never be ashamed of. These places are filled with absolutely beyond pathetic people who spends their entire lives finding ways to affect people's personal lives and enjoys it when they see how emotionally wrecked their victims are. I've seen internet celebrates have their, not just their online presence, but their real lives downright destroyed by stalkers and cyber bullies. They either had to take a break months long, take drastic security measures, leave social media, or leave the internet altogether not because of anything they did wrong but because what other people did to them because of something they didn't agree with or for the lols. So I'll go ahead and admit that I see estalkers and cyberbullies as beyond filth and that fact does make me bias when it comes to them. Would you be willing to admit you have some kind of porn actor/actress bias? And would that come with examples of porn stars doing things similar to what estalkers and cyberbullies do?

(And don't give me that dumbass argument that "they make porn, and porn and all things sexual influence people to do bad things and make people go mental" or however that argument goes.)

I did read a few tweets made by her friends that I was going to quote here to show that – like all human beings – she had friends and family who cared for her, but I just can't. I've less heated then I was before and I'm not gunna look into that again. Their final memory of her is someone driven to suicide due to cyber bulling because she said something that a group of psychos didn't agree with. And you're over here saying "She was a porn actress. What exactly could someone do to her over the internet that’s more degrading than what she already did."

I was going to end this saying something like "But hey, if that's how you see porn actresses, than more power too you. I respect your opinion. To each his own." or some other garbage like that which would be an attempt to be the better person, but screw being the better person one this kind of thing. I'll gladly take the title of a bias, triggered sjw, someone obsessed with winning internet arguments, to say what you said was fucking pathetic and completely clueless.

Where's the Tylenol?

I wonder if those responsible for this feel any kind of remorse.

You already know the answer is no.

That fucking sucks. Poor girl.

Alright my man. If that's what your views are set on then ok. Disregard my response. I know when someones made up their mind and nothing said would change it.

So filming porn is degrading, hands down. I've learned that now. I admit you're right.

You can continue to say what you're saying here in other places or not and it wouldn't affect me at all. I gain nothing in real life from you learning anything, or if whether or not you change the way you address things like this is the future, or if I won a debate by proving anything right or wrong.

People who are disrespectful or even condescending to someone to was bullied to suicide or use their suicide for their own gain are basically nothing. I wouldn't even consider them psychotic for stooping that low. No affect on my life if someone willingly wanted to be in this group.

Against my better judgement I checked on the bullies' twitter to see what they're saying and what I said before, “Gay people get bullied and commit suicide too!” was the understatement of the century.

They are actually retweeting articles about someone in the LGBTQ community committing suicide and still calling her homophobic, implying that what she said is among the things that caused them to commit suicide.

I seriously feel like the last shred of hope for humanity in my soul is forever gone.

Keep the opinion if you want, but leave the slurs out of it.

Don't go into the how "queer" is used by LGBTQ people. You obviously meant it in a derogatory manner.

This is very unfortunate, because someone waa bullied and because someone committed suicide. Nothing good happened here. But it does raise a burgeoning public health matter that does need to be discussed and researched.

It is fine and good to be gay or to just simply have sex with men if you're a male (men who have sex with men or MSM…Not "mainstream media".) I don't think she was placing or reinforcing an unfair stigma on gay men. In fact, I don't think she talked about gay men or MSM in the general population. I think she just meant guys who did gay porn.

Because there is, without a doubt, due to the nature of porn and gay sex, a much higher risk of transmitting STIs including HIV from people in porn AND from MSM.

In porn, condoms aren't usually used. And you have all kinds of sex including anal with a lot of different actors.

So

• Sex with a lot of different partners
• Sex with partners who have sex with a lot of different partners
• Vigorous, penetrative anal sex
• Sex without condoms (how many scenes have you seen or imagine shows the guy putting on a rubber?)

Each of those increases your risk of contracting an STI.

Add

• Sex with men who have had sex with other men

…And the risk increases when further:

While CDC estimates that four percent of men in the United States are MSM, the rate of new HIV diagnoses among
them is more than 44 times that of other men (rate ranges from 522 to 989 per 100,000 MSM compared to
12 per 100,000 other men).

You can find that stat among others in the fact sheets on this CDC page.

So basically, the high risk you already have working in porn increases up to 44-fold in you include MSM (and perhaps more, because MSM in porn are likely more promiscuous than MSM in the population at large.)

It'd be different if it increase in risk was small, like a 5% increase. But 44 times is a 4400% increase in risk.

Just because you get paid for having risky sex on camera doesn't mean the risk is minimized any. And even though there is an inherent risk to porn in terms of STIs, that doesn't mean you accept every risk or don't try to minimize the risk in the ways you can afford.

So this is a matter of public health,

That conflicts with potentially reinforcing a stigma of a minority group.

So if you can choose who you can work with for reasons of public health backed by CDC statistics, then why in the world wouldn't you if you could afford it?

Or let's take it further:

I read an article that there is a stigma for men who work with black men.

According to this, Alexis Texas is a well-known actress who has done at least 100 films but never with a black man. And she gets no drawback (so maybe you protect yourself by having preferences or even prerequisites but never making a Twitter post about it, not that it excuses bullying.)

So if someone like her can have sex with people based on the reasons she has not based in personal health

Then I understand why she would avoid sex with MSM, especially with no condom.

"I don’t think she was placing or reinforcing an unfair stigma on gay men."

What should this even mean? She just shared her personal preference and your beloved LGwhatever_it_is people driven her to suicide.

If it raises any questions then it's about cyberbullying. And I would personally question how vocal minority opresses majority.

She did absolutely nothing wrong and there is nothing to discuss.

I understand that you did not read the post. It's a lot of information. But I can tl;dr:

1. Don't use slurs.
2. I didn't disagree with her preference/prerequisite.
3. I did not approve of the bullying.

I read everything you written, don't project your intelligence on me. You began steering original discussion away. You see, it ABSOLUTELY doesn't matter why she refuses to sleep with gay men. This is her choice and she don't needs to explain it.

You know what's funny? Those people who expect their views to be tolerated can't tolerate views of others.

You didn't disagree, but you wrote excuses for her point of view. This is your fatal mistake: she needs no excuses. And I haven't said you approve the bullying.

Again, she needs no excuses because she did nothing wrong. There is NOTHING to discuss.

I would say something about that being disrespectful but I really doubt you would care so…

Yeah yeah I already knew you would say that, well be it I guess.

@verbose I largely agree with your assessment.

@poochyena

If a person killed themselves, that means they felt they were so worthless and terrible that they shouldn't even exist. Can you imagine how that feeling would be? Imagine her panic at the fact she could stop getting work due to the controversy as well. We're social animals dude, cyberbullying is just another way to communicate, and mass rejection by all your peers severely damages your psyche if you've never experienced it. Snap out of the "haha how the fuck is cyberbullying real" meme and realize she cared about how other people felt about her.

Simply put, as long as the person wasn't definitively some terrible shitbag, you should feel bad for them when they commit suicide, because that automatically says something about how bad it got for them.

Harassing someone till they kill themselves is legally considered manslaughter in Canada. Chances are someone is going to jail.

I think you may be conflating cyberbullying with run of the mill trolling. They may use the same platform, but they're two separate situations with different consequences.

A negative response to such blatant callousness is not being " bootyblasted". It's called being a human with empathy.

You're like, two steps away from invoking the infamous "Look how she dressed, she was asking for it" defense.

You might want to take a step back and reassess your argument man. Or maybe reassess your life, idk.

This topic is a depressing one because it shows exactly what the problem is with current age "Activism". These people who cyberbullied her probably didn't think of her as a person, but instead as a collective manifestation of people who don't like gay people. So they stopped treating her like a human and attacked relentlessly.

Now that she's dead, they refuse to acknowledge what they did was wrong, and instead continue to treat her as some metaphysical entity. See, she can't have died, because she's not real. She's a representation of homophobia, so when she stops living, that means homophobia simply lost a reprenstative.

The mental gymnastics employed are not the first we've seen of this. Dehumanizing others based on Ideology is nothing new. What's new is the amount of information we have avaliable to see this ugly side of humanity from all angles.

This is a group problem, but not a gay problem. This is what happens when you get a bunch of people into an echo chamber of interaction, and give them something to be hostile towards. They are able to circulate news that reinforces their views, and they are able to more easily use numbers to deflect criticism and responsibility for their actions.

These are the kinds of groups and people who all these social media platforms should be targeting for their enhanced scrutiny policies. Unfortunately, because of the side of the political spectrum they fall on, it's likely they'll get a free pass to continue this insulated and barbaric behavior.

@Black
How these people think:
"I'm still moral if I don't think of others as humans"

Maybe I should've mentioned that she was already suffering from depression even before this incident happened.

This comment shows a depressing ignorance of the mentality behind suicidal thoughts. There is no "Ha ha, why get mad, it's her choice" here, she was harassed constantly and had her mental state systematically degraded by the cyber bullying to the point she was no longer mentally capable of making a sound decision.

And there is no "turning off the machine/stop going to those sites" because even if you make a new account or a new email, these people often have your IP address so they can just find your new account and continue the harassment. They know your name and address, and often times, cyber-bullying can escalate to sending things in the mail if they try to go silent. You are also talking about giving up the ability to use email accounts, social media and the internet in general, cutting you off from a lot of your friends who use and talk on them, not to mention making work emails harder to access.

There's no excuse for this.

so why do only a few people who get cyber bullied kill themselves?

Assholes like targeting people who have depression cause it makes them feel good.

For the same reason that not everyone who gets bullied in real life kills themselves.

No one without actual issues will kill themselves over cyber bullying. Even if there's no diagnosed issue, those who kill themselves over these kind of things usually suffer from some form of mental illness like depression, and plenty of them die without being actually diagnosed.

She was suffering from bipolar depression. She had a pretty fucked up childhood, which is probably the cause for her mental illness.

You, instead of thinking for a moment, started spouting off nonsense without even knowing what the fuck you're talking about. You made a fool out of yourself by making dumb assumptions and not thinking logically, that's all. The least you could do is admit it.

I find your lack of empathy unsettling.

He's just typing out of his ass at this point.

Yall need to chill out. No one told her to do anything harmful to herself

He made no effort

Empathy for your fellow man?

Understanding that mental illness is not the fault of the person and needs to be treated, not exploited or used as an excuse to not care?

Wow. What a fucking idiot. The fact that he does not understand what he did wrong is disturbing.

Sometimes it feels like the gay community(or LGBTQXYZCDFG)think they deserve to have special privileges. Like they should be treated as special heroes just because they revealed to the world they love having sex with the same sex.

You never seize to amaze me with your ignorance.

She did go through therapy but these kind of things never just go away. It doesn't take a genius to know that.

Once you attack a person who suffers from such mental ilness on such a furious, sickening level it's bound to trigger it.

If your ego is so fucking bloated that you can't admit a simple mistake like a man, at least try and come up with a more clever excuse.

People generally kill themselves because they lose hope that whatever situation they are in will change. People whose self image is particularly low tend to believe they cannot change things and thus are more susceptible to the temptation of suicide. A woman who engages in porn to make a living is probably less likely to have a positive self image for two reasons: 1) she may feel that her body is her -- and thus that she is only her body; and 2) she is generally speaking, looked down upon by general society since her activities are imagined to a result of her not being able to make a living in the "legitimate" world and/or she is a person with a low moral standard.

Having said this I can imagine that if she then says something which makes people upset and causes them to think they have the right to bully her (which they don't), she may not have possessed the confidence in her abilities (outside of her body) to defend herself -- meaning she did not think she could get them to stop.

In the end, I think, she probably became a porn star because she had little else going for her (not meaning that she didn't have any talents but that she perceived herself as having no real options by which she could 'succeed') and in doing so undermined her own sense of strength and self-worth. Pornography is not something which empowers women but degrades them because it constantly tells them they are only worth their bodies, and usually at less per hour than the common street prostitute.

At minimum her life choices were unwise. At minimum they degraded her and undermined her sense of self-worth. But at a minimum she should be honored as a person and should have been left alone. Though I never heard of her or know anything about her, I am saddened by her passing and angered by those who can only build up their own weak egos by finding somebody weaker and destroying her.

AJ

Tbh I would like to say a big fuck you to the cyberbullies who did this
They're not getting a pass and they should be held fully responsible

Really funny that they are like "Man, cyberbullying isn't going to harm the victims physically, so the victims will not be affected by words on screen and they will just shut down the computer and walk away" , but when the suicide happened and made into news they freak out

This whole mess reminds me of Amanda Todd