14 DAY TRIAL // Rumer Willis, Bruce Willis and Demi Moore’s daughter and the winner of the latest season of Dancing With the Stars on ABC, has a thing or two to say to online haters, trolls and bullies, and generally people who don’t understand how much damage they do with their mean comments posted online.
She does it in an essay for the latest issue of Glamour Magazine. Living your life in fear of what others might think or anticipating the mean things they could say of you is the surest method to live an unhappy life, she says.
“I struggled with body image a lot”
Rumer isn’t exaggerating when she’s saying she was bullied online for her looks while growing up. Being the daughter of someone as famous as either of her parents paints a target on you even if you have no intention of making a career in the spotlight as well.
Rumer (and her sisters too) became one such target, with many bloggers and anonymous commenters finding in her facial features and shape of her body an unbelievable richness of material for their nasty jokes.
As she admitted on DWTS as well, this took a toll on her already chipped self-esteem, to the point she would not do something she’d planned out of fear of how it might be dissected online. That last part she adds in this new Glamour essay.
Rumer admits to struggling with her body image, and the constant barrage of criticism didn’t help her one bit. At her worst, she wanted to disappear into the background completely, to look in such a way as to be able to pass unnoticed. That, at least, would have allowed her to step out in public and not read her name online the next day.
Facing your fears helps, but support from loved ones is essential
It was Demi, her mother, who finally made her understand that she needed a more positive outlook on everything if she wanted to get through this.
There will always be someone smarter, prettier, stronger and more talented than her to compare to, so always seeking that person and finding faults in herself was a way to guarantee the rest of her life would be unhappy. Instead of that, she needed to take a better look at herself and, instead of hunting flaws, find things to be proud of and happy about.
Ultimately, Rumer writes, accepting to be on DWTS and then performing in such a way as to win the Mirrorball trophy, was her way of giving the haters and the trolls the middle finger.
So now that she’s beat them, she wants to highlight where the problem really comes from: the Internet and the relative anonymity it allows. This is what is holding us back.
“The real pressure comes from the Internet and social media,” she says, “the mentality that it's OK to attack people from behind a computer screen. Strangers say the nastiest things. Until recently the thought of making one misstep that could be criticized would stop me from trying new things and from standing up for myself.”
She wishes more people, both women and men, who have been bullied online understood this. Because that’s how they can finally find the complete freedom to be themselves.