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So what sorts of things make some men so furious that they feel the need to send women they’ve never met literal death and rape threats on the internet? It doesn’t take much, apparently. A woman suggesting that it’s not such a good idea to hit on women in elevators at 4 AM. A woman making videos suggesting that there’s sexism in video games. A woman captured on video telling some men to shut the fuck up. A woman complaining about sexist jokes at a tech conference.
Add to this: a woman campaigning successfully to have Jane Austen’s face put on the Bank of England’s ten pound notes.
Over the past week, writer and activist Caroline Criado-Perez, who organized the campaign to get Austen memorialized on the bank note, has been harassed relentlessly on Twitter by assholes and misogynists and trolls for her efforts. Some of this harassment has taken the form of literal rape and death threats. One 21-year-old Manchester man was arrested and questioned in connection with the threats.
Similar threats and harassment were directed at noted British classics professor Mary Beard and female Members of Parliament.
Here’s a sadly typical example of one of the threatening comments sent to Criado-Perez from an account that Twitter temporarily banned — then reinstated.
https://twitter.com/CCriadoPerez/status/362499703285358592
And a more graphic example:
https://twitter.com/ianmcqui/status/361587787511779328
And some even more graphic threats directed at female MPs.
https://twitter.com/JonathanHaynes/status/361967658087890945
https://twitter.com/JonathanHaynes/status/361964227516309504
For many more examples of messages sent to Criado-Perez and others, see Catalina Hernández’ blog I Will Not Put Up With This: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
And if you had any doubt about how little in the way of repercussion most of these harassers expected to get for their threatening tweets, some tweeted using what are presumably their real names. Here are some comments from one Ivan Garcia of San Diego, as collected by Hernández.
And here is his blog, where this fan of jazz, video games and threatening rape shares his poetry with the world.
The harassment obviously raises a lot of issues,most notably: Why the fuck does this keep happening? And: What’s the best way to deal with this sort of harassment — and these sorts of harassers?
Twitter has promised to add a “report abuse” button; some activists see this as a step in the right direction, while others worry that the “report abuse” button will be itself abused to shut down critics of harassment. Twitter’s record in dealing with harassers has not exactly been a great one; just ask Anita Sarkeesian.
British journalists and assorted bloggers have been trying to sort through some of these issues over the past few days. Here are some links to some of the more interesting pieces, from a variety of perspectives. (Well, I’m not including the pro-rape threat perspective.) Links aren’t necessarily endorsements.
First, for a little more background, see:
Twitter under fire after bank note campaigner is target of rape threats
Caroline Criado-Perez Twitter abuse case leads to arrest
And here are some posts and pieces looking at the issues:
A ‘report abuse’ button on Twitter will create more problems than it solves, by Sharon O’Dea
A button will not, alone, rid Twitter (or the wider world) of mysogyny and abuse. These are complex issues that will take more than a button to resolve. But ‘report abuse’ buttons have been known to be widely abused on other networks. ….
Introduction of a similar mechanism on Twitter ironically creates a whole new means by which trolls can abuse those they disagree with. The report abuse button could be used to silence campaigners, like Criado-Perez, by taking advantage of the automatic blocking and account closure such a feature typically offers. In that way, it could end up putting greater power in the trolls’ hands.
Why does it always come back to rape? by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett and Holly Baxter of the Vagenda Magazine, in the New Statesman
Rape is the popular choice when women become more visible than they apparently should be, and that’s because it’s easy. …. Whatever their opinion, however they conducted their arguments, however well-researched and nuanced their replies to criticism are, they’re women and male trolls could rape them and that’s what really matters. …
[Academic] Mary Beard got called a “dirty old slut” with a “disgusting vagina” just as [Member of Parliament] Stella Creasy was being tweeted “YOU BETTER WATCH YOUR BACK… I’M GONNA RAPE YOU AT 8PM AND PUT THE VIDEO ALL OVER THE INTERNET”. …
The message is that women’s vaginas are, literally, always up for grabs. If they’re young, the rape threats will come thick and fast; if they’re older, maybe the trolls will settle for insulting their vaginas and telling them that they were “sluts” in the past.
If Every Male Troll Took a Walk in Women’s Shoes, Would He Finally Feel Our Outrage? by Elizabeth Plank
Withstanding rape threats has become a right of passage for female writers or personalities, just as making them as become a right of passage for cowardly and anonymous misogynist trolls. If you’re a woman who happens to possess opinions, and write about feminist issues (god forbid!), chances are you will be violently trolled. … the issue is not that women receive more criticism than men, but rather that it comes in more violent and vitriolic forms. Men will be attacked for their opinion, whereas women will be threatened because they have opinions.
[O]ne study showed that female usernames in chat forums received 25 times more abuse than male ones. In an experiment conducted by the University of Maryland, researchers found that “Female usernames, on average, received 163 malicious private messages a day.” So all else equal, if you’re a woman online, you’re going to be on the receiving end of more hate.
I believe it. I get a lot of shit from misogynists for running this blog — and the occasional threat — but what I get is nothing compared to the harassment similarly controversial feminist bloggers who happen to be women have gotten.
What women-hating trolls really believe, by Emma Barnett
First troll up was Peter from Whitechapel. …
“She was asking for it,” he told me. According to this nitwit, if you campaign about issues such as keeping a woman on English banknotes, you should “expect to receive rape threats”. I delved further.
“If you put your head above the parapet, like she has, then you deserve this type of abuse. It’s what you get when you are a woman shouting about something,” Peter told me, starting to get a little irate. …
Then Gary from Birmingham decided to call in [and] told me in no uncertain terms that “feminists like Caroline were undermining what it is to be a man” and needed “sorting out”.
“Men are predators,” he explained calmly. “And this [rape threats] is what we do.”
And here, after all this awfulness, is a piece that manages to be funny about it all: How to use the internet without being a total loser.
So, on books, I recently got to read my first Iain M Banks novel. There was a bit of distracting male gaze, but other than that it was a massive, sprawling epic sort of book, while actually being non-epic and featuring characters who are not epic at all.
Then I read a book by Ben Bova. There was… yuckiness. A throwaway line about a woman who was drugged and raped, only he doesn’t call it rape and she doesn’t call it rape and she laughs about it because she had been thinking she would have had sex with the guy anyway. And the tenor of the book is that this wasn’t rape at all. And there’s one character who is as messed up as the other characters except he’s always right and his steroid abuse is just a lovable quirk on the way to making him a male power fantasy.
The Wild Ways, by Tanya Huff. And that was just perfect in every detail, a fun romp with dragons and selkies and folk music.
So I checked out the website of Ivan Garcia, walking nice-guy cliche, and I thought his pathetic Twitter screeds deserved to be rendered as poetry in his own easily imitable style:
You don’t play StarCraft
You fucking poser
I’ve been playing StarCraft
before
I had hair
on my
nuts.
You’re a fake, gtfo
You’re not
a gamer
You’re a poor fucking excuse
For a human being
You’re disgusting
You know nothing
Of StarCraft
Hmn, I’m currently reading Night and Day, by Virginia Woolf. It’s slow going, which is mainly due to the print being rather small and me being too tired from the heat and work to concentrate.
Also, Whose Body, by Dorothy Sayers.
I don’t like Emma, as a character. I don’t know why. I find her to be too smug. I love P&P and Northanger Abbey.
Infant booster shot.
Agreed, this has nothing to do with Jane Austen and everything to do with women having the temerity to exist in public with their opinions, expecting to be seen as people.
For some background, the ten pound note is revised every decade. Charles Darwin is on it right now, and his time is up. He replaced Florence NIghtingale ten years ago. In ten years, Jane Austen will be replaced with someone else.
Hey all, I have a question to put to the floor – I’ve been wondering about this for a while and I can’t figure it out. Just why ARE facebook, twitter etc so shit when it comes to protecting women (as a group) from abuse that, if it was directed at, say, a particular ethnic group, they powers that be would (quite rightly) pounce on and disarm before you could say ‘post-racial America’? Either the powers that be believe that no-one should be threatened and abused becuase of their in-born, unchosen characteristics (gender, race, sexuality) or they don’t. It’s that simple. Why are women, as a group, some kind of exception?
Also, threatening to rape someone just for expressing their opinion is ACTIVELY AGAINST the principle of ‘free speech. If you do this, then you’re actually trying to suppress free speech by making certain groups feel too intimidated and threatened to be able to exercise their right. Stupid turds.
♫ He tried to kill me with a forklift! ♫
…Oh wait, wrong movie. 😛
Qu’est-çe que ç’est? Sounds like someone is speaking to us from inside of a pig. What’s he saying? Something about pêches surgelées?
Some of the worst fantasy I’ve read has got to be the paperback novels put out by TSR, closely followed by a few Star Trek and Star Wars novels. How in the hell did Salvatore get so popular? Stupid gothy teen elf.
I’m supposed to be working today, but it looks like I might take the day off, since I’m in one of those “screw things up and scream at people on the phone” kinds of moods. I was going to say, “But I’M Blast Hardcheese!” like “I’m Spartacus!” you know, but it doesn’t look as funny as it sounded in my head…
Urgh…
Does anyone have a suggestion for a task list/to do list app that runs both on the iPad and a windows desktop?
I actually liked A Canticle for Liebowitz. Sure it was dark, but there were moments of great beauty in the writing, and in another life I spent a lot of time studying the 1950s and the great atomic war panic so I’d read a lot of dark without much redeeming brightness. A kind of resigned (but ultimately hopeful) sorrow over the nature of humanity is a familiar feeling for me.
Oh, I’m not really reading them, but Fred Clark at Slacktivist is dissecting the Left Behind novels, and RubyTea at Heathen Critique is tearing apart other books that Tim LaHaye has had written for him.
They are uniformly awful, but do they count as me reading them if I read small snippets presented as part of analysis?
OMG, I need that on a tshirt. I wish my French were less ‘philosophy and Cahiers d’art’ and more colloquial, because I would love to have the “Oh no, they be stealin’ my freeze peach!” on a shirt in French, just, you know, because.
Listen, I think you’d better count this as having read them.
Because if you don’t you may be tempted to read the rest, just on the principle of completeness.
Even that temptation alone, no matter how tiny, no matter how insignificant… COULD RUIN YOUR LIFE.
Be safe.
Falconer, I actually tried to start reading them for the same reason, but the project made me so queasy that I barely made it through the first couple of books.
I think that the entire LaHaye (and whoever he has doing the actual writing on a given project) must be read in full to get the complete sense of the utter awfulness of it, but as I think that such a project is hazardous to the mental health of even those most moderately invested in promoting social justice and understanding, well, I say read the commentary.
@Sredni, you have to believe women are human to be prepared to accord them in human rights.
@pecunium
Drake is very much worth it in a very odd way. His writing is more or less his journey back to stability from a horrifying military resume.
Me mum was gifted a hefty tome entitled Street French. I have gleaned a few happy phrases from it, such as « J’ai les crocs! » for “I am starving!” (by association with crocodiles) and « Le douloureux » for a cafe bill (something like “the pain,” although Beloved likes to gloss it as “the hurtin'”).
@SredniVashtar
I think the problem mostly arises from a lack of empathy. The platforms you are referencing are (by and large) created by, maintained by, and operated for upper middle class and above, able bodied, WASP male people.
Falconer, I think that every so often you just need to open to a random page and share what you find there!
Sure! I’ll have to see if it’s still in a box somewhere, or if I actually got it onto a shelf before the Infantocalypse happened.
@SredniVashtar
(trigger warning for Freudian concept use!)
I think that because such social media allow us to curate communities of people who think more or less alike, it is possible to let the id to vent its deepest, nastiest impulses without even the faint traces of social super ego there to restrain it.
Out in meatspace, at school or work, for example, impulses from the id (what I think of as our inner three year old) may inspire us to want to eat with our hands, masturbate in public and grope all the pretty members of one’s desired type who come within reach, the expectation that people we may respect, or who we may at the very least need to rely on for grades or continued employment, might disapprove of such behavior keeps people behaving relatively well.
Online, the super ego (the inner schoolmarm, say) that keeps the inner three year old in check takes time off to go toss back a few wine spritzers.
The added difficulty of such mostly anonymous spaces (and even when your real name and photo are attached, quite often the twitter feed or Facebook page isn’t followed by all the people related to you in your physical circles of engagement) is that not only does the inner three year old get free reign, it also gets the pleasure of increased nastiness toward the cultural super ego, those external arbiters of society that, as Quark correctly noted yesterday, even the most trollish are most often unlikely to cross in public. Add to that the magnifying effect of an echo chamber, and it’s a race to the bottom as every three year old in a particular space competes to be the most nasty, vile, disgusting little cretin possible in order to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack.
Bathing puppies bookmarked for brain bleach!
That poor first puppeh! All the sads!
In response, and along the washing theme, I offer you these two bathing beauties, and this pair who would like to demonstrate the only acceptable feline use of a sink.
Gillyrosebee: The green water in that one shot is weirding me out a bit.
kittehserf:
Hands-down winner (loser?): … And Eternity by Piers “All Men Want Young Flesh” Anthony (Yes, that’s pretty much a straight-up quote from the book, and the plot is used as a vehicle to justify/prove it, and makes it very clear that precisely what is meant by ‘young flesh’ is ‘underage girl’. I suspect Owly is a P.A. fanboy.)
I understand he’s actually written even more despicable shit by way of hebephilia apologia, but I guess I was lucky(?) enough to hit that one first and therefore never get exposed to the even-more-horrible crap.
And as a kicker, beyond its moral reprehensibility, it’s easily the worst and most poorly plotted book in that series (which actually started out with some interesting conceits, even if the characters were basically running from one monologue to another).
RE: kittehserf
Thinking back to the books – what’s the worst SF or fantasy you’ve ever read?
Cockrub Warriors of Mars. (C’mon, you knew it was coming.)
RE: BlackBloc
God, I am fucking envious. The co-ops in my city are cheaper than some roomshares… but they still tend to be in the $500/$600 a month range, which is way more than I can afford right now.
I wish I could move to a cheaper area, where I COULD maybe afford more stable housing… but then I’d lose my health insurance, and in my condition, I don’t dare risk staggering around without it. I suppose at worst, I could buy a bivvy sack and set up shop at the abandoned railroad track Graffiti Quest I found.
RE: Falconer
♫ He tried to kill me with a forklift! ♫
OLE! (I was hoping SOMEONE would get the reference. I figured you were my best bet.)
For those of you who don’t know why I’d call myself Blast Hardcheese: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFHlJ2voJHY
I tried to give Anthony a chance after discovering that Dead Like me was based on On a Pale Horse. I got through about 70 pages before I had to put it down.
That one Xanth book I read was pretty awful, too.
The Sword of Truth series was terrible for me.
RE: Freemage
Hands-down winner (loser?): … And Eternity by Piers “All Men Want Young Flesh” Anthony
AAAAAAH WHY DID YOU SPEAK HIS NAME. He owned our wee child SOUL from the ages of eight to fourteen, because when you’re that age, you think that of COURSE you’re mature enough to get banged by an adult man. (Then it actually happened to us. I still feel that a lot of the most awful ideas about rape, we learned from Piers Anthony’s books.)
Of course, he’s written much, much worse than that. (Warnings for child rape apologia. And honey.)