Beat down vs. public humiliation
Sun Meng, a 25-year-old man in Chengdu, China, is being publicly shamed this week. He was in bed with another man’s wife when the husband unexpectedly came home. Sun hid, naked, on an air conditioner on the side of the building. A neighbor snapped some photos and posted them to the Internet. You can check out larger versions here and here.
“My family is ashamed and none of my own neighbours will talk to me any more,” said Sun. ”I know what I did was wrong but I was afraid he would kill me.
“People are even laughing at how I look naked – but I have to point out it was a very cold day,” he added.
via Caught on camera: naked love rival flees furious husband – Telegraph.
This made me wonder which would be worse: a naked beatdown or permanent infamy on the Internetz? Severe — but temporary — bruises would likely have been better than the long-term damage to the man’s reputation (and ego).
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But with the way the Internet moves, no one will remember him in a few weeks. I almost forgot about Balloon Boy already!
Gotta love Internet justice. What’s old is new again.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Kashmir Hill and benjamin barnes, Retourkutsche. Retourkutsche said: Sun Meng, a 25-year-old man in Chengdu, China, is being publicly shamed this week. http://bit.ly/3juMo5 Es darf gelacht werden. [...]
If the photog or husband are skilled in the ways of SEO, the picture could be worse if that becomes the #1 search result for his name for the rest of his life.
Good point. He’s safe for now! http://images.google.com/images?rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS337US337&sourceid=chrome&q=sun%20meng&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi
In response to another comment. See in context »Kash, do you know about the Chinese internet phenomenon called the “human flesh search engine” (人肉搜索）? Basically when someone pisses off bulletin board users by doing something morally reprehensible (e.g. a relative severely beating a child or government official abusing his power) or shows up looking beautiful in a photograph, hundreds of BB users will literally scour the internet in order to find that person’s name. It might be an effective civic means to shame government officials, but I think it’s also, in a way, a creepy holdover of Mao-era mob punishment mentality.
There’s a lot of coverage on ChinaSmack about this phenomenon: http://www.chinasmack.com/stories/xuzhou-government-outlaws-human-flesh-search/
I don’t know if this guy has been the subject of such a search (not one for browsing Chinese BBs) but even if he wasn’t tagged by the distressed husband, his name could still live in infamy on the bulletin board communities.