So someone on Reddit did a little experiment that confirmed what we already know: that Reddit is overflowing with misogynist douchebags. Here’s the experimenter explaining her somewhat casual experimental protocol:
I noticed after two months as my female username I was constantly having to defend my opinions. I mean constantly. I would post something lighthearted, and have people commenting taking my comment literally and telling me I was dumb or I didn’t understand xyz. People were so eager to talk incredibly rudely and condescendingly to me. People were downright hateful and it made me consider leaving.
Then I decided to experiment with usernames and came up with an obviously male name. While people still disagreed with me which is to be expected, I had more people come to my defense when I had a different opinion and absolutely no hateful or condescending comments. I am completely shocked at how different I am treated since having a male username. I am not saying Reddit is sexist, well kind of yes, but I think it’s really interesting and thought that some other girls on here would want to get male usernames and see the difference for themselves.
She posted this in TwoXChromosomes, a subreddit devoted to women and women’s issues that is regularly overrun with angry MRA dudes and an assortment of FemRAs. This time the MRA squad didn’t take over the discussion, and numerous 2XCers reported experiences similar to that of the OP.
earthpeesfire noted:
I had a feminine user name years ago. Fuck that. It was like having a target on my back.
cantstopthe tried to duplicate the experiment on a smaller scale:
Just wanted to say that I made an alt yesterday with a female name, and continue to post the kind of things I normally post under this account. And today I was told I should be raped.
That has NEVER happened in all my 4 years of being on this site with various neutral names.
misscastaway also tried posting with a clearly female name:
I just tried posting on an discussion from this account. Immediately an insult including the word cunt and remarks on how I’m making a fool out of myself.
Might be a coincidence but when posting from my regular account (which is very gender neutral) that I use for discussions related to science, fitness, books etc I have never received this kind of behaviour. Not even when it turned out someone knew more about the subject and I was wrong/short in my knowledge. Then I was given another point of view, with a source – that was it.
I guess I’ll keep using those accounts in parallel now just to see if this was just by chance or if it really makes such a difference.
fatchick400 reported on the results of a similar experiment:
I created this account a few days ago to comment on some fat-hate, and have actually found it really interesting to see reddit from a different point of view.
The biggest surprise for me is the difference in how fat women are treated vs fat men. There is so much more hatred towards the fat women. A lot of people even refer to these women as “it”, completely negating their gender all together.
Meanwhile in the posts about fat men there are a few hateful comments, but they’re mostly full of light hearted jokes. In a few posts where the guys were obviously morbidly obese, barely anyone commented on the guys’ weight at all. Yet in posts with woman who are maybe 200lbs , mocking her weight always seems to be the main focus of conversation.
twofish added her experience to the pile of anecdotal evidence:
Most people on reddit assume I am male until I make it a point to say otherwise. More often than not, once it’s discovered that I own a vagina I’m no longer taken seriously, my opinions are belittled, and a slough of sexist and misogynist jokes/accusations get thrown my way.
I love Reddit for many reasons but it is one of THE most hostile places on the internet to be a woman.
Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, meanwhile, the locals largely dismissed the experiment as unscientific and biased. As DavidByron put it:
Just seems like someone who set out to “prove” her own biases. She was biased to begin with, she ran the “experiment” in a biased way, interpreted the results in a biased way and then presented them to support her initial assumptions.
It’s the usual princess feminism which says men have it easy and women have it hard even while the exact opposite is happening. Why wouldn’t she say which usernames she used in her “test” so others can look at her methodology? Of course it’s not serious but then that’s the point.
Others explained that they weren’t really sexist because they’re such earnest fanboys of GirlWritesWhat, a woman who is able to bypass the usual MRA misogyny by pandering to the misogynists’ fantasy of male martyrdom.
The woman who posted about the experiment in the first place has now popped in to the r/menrights thread, and has (very politely) suggested to Mr. Byron that he try the experiment himself. I guess we’ll see what happens.
“Sorry about the typos. I hate my iPhone.”
Typing on a Smartphone is the bane of my existence.
…and it’s what I do most of the time for Twitter.
I wrote a blog about a similar issue in the gaming community. I also discovered this website:
http://fatuglyorslutty.com/
Basically, it’s a list of various sexist and horrible things that female gamers and those with female sounding usernames endure that would not be an issue if said gamer were male.
And yeah, it sucks to be considered female on the internet. Either someone wants to fuck you, they want to go on about how NO ONE would want to fuck you, or they’re talking about trying to kill/rape you for saying anything at all.
Sexist, misogynist, religio-psycho babble about women is a sure indicator of male idiocy. As a man, it makes me wonder at the lack of moral courage and rampant stupidity of far too many of my fellow men.
All of my usernames are identifiable as female, yet I have never had any of these ridiculous experiences. This entire experiment seems painfully slanted and is absolutely blood smeared with the hyper feminist bull**** that is plaguing the internet. If you’re a woman and can’t make fun of yourself as a woman or otherwise, then you have bigger problems than internet frat boys. How about we get some humor in here? My vagina. That is all.
I would give a medal to all of the trolls on this thread, because no one here seems to be recognizing the genius. All of you who are getting frothy at the mouth, raging, should step back and realize that the one you are raging at is LAUGHING at their computer screen. You are all victims to your own ignorance of the trolling community.
@Shadow: That Marcotte article is, actually, utter crap. It is a huge strawman argument that attributes to the article being “taken down” claims and ideas that the article in question clearly did not make. In fact, Marcotte claims the article says the exact opposite of what it really says, and then argues against that to come to the same conclusion the article was pushing in the first place.
—
As to the subject of the Reddit experiment, let’s not make the mistake of thinking that this is just Reddit. The experiment would produce identical results on most major internet forums. If you’re a gamer, go to the gamefaqs dot com forums and advertise that you’re female. You *will* get the same results.
Case in point, just yesterday, I saw a user asking a question about a handheld gaming system, and was given a reply that didn’t work. In answering that reply, the user identified herself as female and calmly asked to stop being called “him” before going on to calmly explain why the reply wasn’t any good for her. The user who made the reply then came back with the most disgusting display of condescending sarcasm I had seen all week up to that point, going on and on about how her identity as female was utterly unimportant. He then declared that the lady’s answer to his reply had consisted of “nothing but spazzing out” (he might as well have said “she must be on the rag”), and petulantly sneered that he at least deserved a thank you for replying at all.
So yeah, this is a huge and wide-spread problem.
Miss B., it great you had a good experience, but it should be painfully obvious to anyone who’s not brain dead that it doesn’t authorize you to negate the experience of countless who were harassed, insulted on the basis of their gender, threatened with rape or with assault.
As for your second comment, I won’t take the effort to answer it, as it has already been done enough.
You’re pathetic. And I guess* lying about being a woman.
*or hope? hard to say.
Thanks for telling us how to do it, MissBitch. I’m not sure how we ever got this far without you.
Mizbitch: Did you bother to read the comments here?
Would you be so kind as so share with us which of them are, “frothing” at the mouth?
Why, pray tell, are you encouraging the people whom you claim don’t exist, by praising those who troll here? If no one is being mean/dismissive/rude/crude/condescending to women, how can they be “laughing at their computer screens”?
You either don’t believe it exists, in which case I am glad for the good fortune you have had to never experience it, or you do, and you are on the side of the abusers.
For the sake of one and all, I hope it’s the former.
No way! Around here, they have to earn it.
But we’re laughing even harder!
Raging? Once again, drive-by trolls really need to read the blog’s tagline.
@Shade Tail
Can you elaborate? I’ve read both articles (and re-read them in order to respond to you), and I think Amanda’s pretty much spot on. A lot of Wong’s article is essentialist in an easily disprovable way.
I agree with Shadow. I read both articles, and while Wong’s was obviously well-meaning it was incredibly problematic and I felt Marcotte pointed out precisely why.
MissBitch2U…or mral….
@Shadow: The problem is that pretty much everything Marcotte attributed to the Cracked piece was nowhere in the Cracked piece. Perfect example, when talking about the bit where Cracked says that men throughout history have fought wars, erected monuments and buildings, and etc., all to impress the chicks, Marcotte snidely adds, “So much for creation by women and gay men.” As if pointing out the motives of powerful men is inherently an attack against everyone else. That was quite possibly the stupidest bit from Marcotte’s article, because it very obviously had *absolutely nothing* to do with what Wong was writing. He was saying that men do these things as a show of power, to lift themselves up and feel like they’re in charge. And what do you know, immediately after her snide strawman commentary, Marcotte agreed with that very point: men have done those things to put themselves in charge.
The entire Marcotte article is littered with blatant nonsense like this, where she falsely attributes things to the Cracked article that are actually the opposite of what the article was saying, and then using her blatant misrepresentation to argue the exact same point.
If you really read the Cracked piece, and I mean *really read it* with the intent to understand it (rather than the intent to misrepresent it to grind an axe, as Marcotte did), then you’ll see it’s real point. Contrary to Marcotte’s full figured strawman fallacy, Cracked was not praising men, or making excuses for their misogyny, or claiming that their frequent violent behavior is justified. Cracked was saying, “Hey fellas. *This* is why you act the way you do. *NOW STOP ACTING THAT WAY, YOU DUMBASSES!!!*”
And Marcotte ignored all of this, claimed the Cracked article *was* trying to excuse bad-man behavior by blaming it on women, and then used that strawman to argue the exact same point that Wong had made: that men *are* responsible for themselves and are obligated to control themselves better.
Marcotte’s article is nothing but a huge strawman fallacy from beginning to end, which is what makes it utter crap.
Yeah guys, if you really read the article, you’d agree with Shade. Obviously.
Well, to be fair, I love me some axe-grindin’. I can’t speak for Shadow, but personally? Nothing makes me happier than a really, really tiny axe.
Shade, here is an actual quote from the Cracked article:
Let me repeat that with emphasis added:
Gosh, it’s almost like Wong did, in fact, explicitly say that ALL the skyscrapers in any given city skyline were built by men who wanted to impress women.
How unfair of Marcotte to suggest that he said all the skyscrapers were built by men who wanted to impress women (thus unambiguously ignoring all the ones built by women and gay men), just because he said all the skyscrapers were built by men who wanted to impress women. The nerve of her.
Uh, Shade Tail? Where exactly in the Cracked article does it say or even imply “Now stop being misogynist dickbags”. Because I seem to have missed it.
Yeah, I did read the article, as it happens. Strange that someone who claims to have “really read it” didn’t notice that it wasn’t even addressed to men, let alone tried to tell them to stop being misogynists.
That’s just great for you, because it’s not just english-speaking dudes who have hailed me with really lewd bullshit just for being a gal. I’m not exactly fluent in portuguese, but I can follow just enough of it to know I am being cat called. And I don’t even have that feminine a user name, I just had a female character. Same thing happens to a friend of mine in a particular game he plays.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v339/Zecro/trolling.png
There is no such thing as a single trolling community (Although there are communities with high numbers of trolls, such as /m/ on 4chan)
@Shade Tail: the fact that this post is about ONE misogynistic example doesn’t mean that everybody here doesn’t KNOW that the same thing can happen all over the internet — because, you know, we DO. Sounds as if your reading comprehension is what needs some work because nowhere did David or any of us imply that X is the only place such things happen.
Hehe, that’s hilarious! My experience is very different. I regularly post with my female handle or avatar. It typically results in men falling all over themselves to help the little lady, explain in great detail how something works and ensure I’m able to accomplish whatever I need. I can’t recall ever having had someone be rude to me when I use a female screen name. When I use a male or a neutral handle, people are much less helpful, more matter-of-fact, more inclined to tell me to figure things out for myself, and generally more rude. So yeah, using a feminine handle changes things, but not negatively.
I wouldn’t worry too much about misogynists as long as women have jobs and you are willing to be patient. Statistically hateful male supremacists are a dying breed. The primal drive in life is still to procreate. That’s declining dramatically. Women are avoiding those men. Their dna will get thinned out in a hurry. Even if they do impregnate someone they woman will often leave if she can. Yes, some will always exist the same way white supremacists will always exist but they won’t be the dominant class going forward. Society needs women move up in the world because look where we got as a species without women’s input. Almost completely self extinguished.
If you don’t know men and women are very different, think differently and evolved differently you are missing a huge piece of the puzzle as to why humans are a species at constant war who have never even managed to feed the majority of their own species. Think about it. Women need to rise up and temper this with their natural caution and focus on basic needs of others in order for humanity to survive. It’s common sense and I believe it will happen. We are a crossroads in the power structure and the push back is intense. Don’t breed with them and it’s game over. That’s why they are pushing back on abortion and contraceptives. They don’t control procreation any more. That is ultimate power. If you can’t procreate, your DNA dies – forever. You’re done.
Never really gave much thought to the whole “rape culture” idea until Reddit. It’s sounds so inflammatory as to be absurd, but last week, a woman on reddit posted about how she was sexually assaulted multiple times because men treat attractive women like objects to be had and multiple guys told her to get over it. The relative merits of being attractive obviously trump any potential rape-y downsides (which I guess would be: people wanting to bang you because you’re hot, also be friends with you because you’re hot. Sounds like fun?)
So, yeah. Rape culture is a thing. TIL.