Lateralus es Helica
4shi
She was out to fool people whether you feel it was altruistic or not. She convinced her peers and teachers she was pregnant then announced, "Ta-da! I fooled you!" in front of the whole school. The concept of a prank is to trick people, though we like to think of it today as something playful. Pranks are not always meant to be playful. My reason for using prank falls under the premise that it was meant to deceive for pretty much personal gain that isn't all that benevolent.
Six months though for a prank? And having to put up with the social stigmas and stereotypes that entire time? Personally I fail to see how any type of gain could possibly make up for what she had to deal with being seen as a teen mom.
Yes, people will pull a prank for months at a time. Some people have published hoaxes and kept it going for years. While it was for money and not a prank, read up about
A Million Little Pieces and the hoax it was exposed to be. Look at how long that took to discover. There's a more recent case too about a book that was even used by my alma mater. I believe it was called
Tea for Three or something like that.
Quote:
I'm with Call Me Apple here. Sometimes if you really want to bring an issue into the light you have to dive right in to the issue at hand. I can't remember her name but there was a journalist earlier in the century whom faked being psychotic in order to get admitted into a psych ward and find out what conditions were really like. Obviously no one was listening to the patients, so it took someone from the outside getting into a role and finding out what life was really like for them. I don't think we're far off here either. No one's obviously listening to the teen moms enough to make a change in the social stigmas and the way we treat them, so what will happen now that someone that wasn't actually pregnant exposed the behavior? At the very least, it'll bring more attention to the issue than the teen moms themselves did.
If this was the 19th century "journalist" you are speaking of that was a part of what yellow journalists did. They weren't doing it to be ground-breaking or even what later muck rackers would do; they were doing it to find a bit of truth to drum up a story. If they weren't exaggerating something they flat-out made it up. It's how America started the Spanish-American War; it was over a yellow journalist article.
Reply
