Which raises the question: Is attacking Hynde for blaming herself (and yes, by association, blaming others) ultimately productive and worth the cost of revictimizing her? Or is the impulse to shame her and others like her sometimes more about self-gratification than advocacy?

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If 2014 was the “Year of Outrage,” as Slate posited, 2015 has been the year of witnessing how outrage manifests, and the consequences it can have on people’s lives in a matter of minutes. In March, the British journalist Jon Ronson published So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, a book in which he interviews recent targets of popular opprobrium about the impact it had on them. In June, Rachel Dolezal resigned from her position as president of the Spokane NAACP after it emerged that she had lied about and disguised her race. In July, an American dentist, Walter Palmer, had to flee his home and practice after he was revealed to have shot and killed a protected lion in an African nature reserve. Last month, the BBC called the pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli “the most hated man in America” after his company raised the price of a drug for AIDS patients by 5,000 percent.

Also in September, Hynde published Reckless, and gave an interview to The Sunday Times in which she said women who dress provocatively put themselves in more danger than those who dress and act modestly.

“If I’m walking around and I’m very modestly dressed and I’m keeping to myself and someone attacks me, then I’d say that’s his fault,” she said. “But if I’m being very lairy and putting it about and being provocative, then you are enticing someone who’s already unhinged—don’t do that. Come on! That’s just common sense ... I don’t think I’m saying anything controversial, am I?”

For many, she was. “Chrissie Hynde, the Pretenders’ Female Lead Singer, Just Blamed Rape on Its Survivors,” read a headline at Mic. On the outrage spectrum, Hynde’s comments fell somewhere between Dolezal/Palmer/Shkreli and the manifold micro-outrage storms that erupt on a daily basis—a Taylor Swift video shot in Africa featuring only white people, a reality star styling her hair in cornrows, anything Azealia Banks posts on Twitter. Still, they offer insight into how social-media users tend to respond to inflammatory opinions.

“Bile has been a part of the Internet as long as Al Gore has,” Teddy Wayne wrote in The New York Times in 2014 in an insightful piece about social-media outrage. “But the last few years have seen it crawl from under the shadowy bridges patrolled by anonymous trolls and emerge into the sunshine of social media, where people proudly trumpet their ethical outrage.”

Wayne cites a study conducted at Beihang University in 2013, which found that anger spreads more easily than any other emotion on social media, and considerably more rapidly than joy, the next most viral emotion. The study also mentions homophily, or the social phenomenon wherein groups of like-minded people band together, validating each other’s ideas and supporting each other’s reactions and feelings. On social media, this encourages ferocity and discourages nuance, particularly when thoughts are limited to 140 characters. “Twitter is basically a mutual approval machine,” Ronson said in a TED Talk in June. “We surround ourselves with people who feel the same way we do, and we approve each other, and that’s a really good feeling. And if somebody gets in the way, we screen them out. And do you know what that’s the opposite of? It’s the opposite of democracy.”