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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.
And now some asshat is making bomb threats on Twitter against female journalists.
Pssh. We shouldn’t worry about this, because nobody ever in the history of history ever has ever followed through on a bomb threat.
No, no. What I said is that in the majority of cases, people don’t follow through on bomb threats.
Why is everyone swearing at me? All I said was that sometimes people don’t follow through on bomb threats.
/Quark
I haven’t read much, if any, of Goodkind but I hear that series boils down to “It’s Okay If You’re A Rock-Jawed Protagonist.”
I read several novels of Wheel of Time, up to about the overseas invasion, and then it seemed to me like there were so many threads in the plot each one got about a chapter in each of the later books. Also it got very Battle of the Sexes, something that series shares with plenty of David Eddings’ work.
@LBT: I’m sorry someone mentioned, um, That Author to you. I read several of his books the summer I was 18. The plot of the very first book should have been a big tip off, but I was young and dumb and hadn’t had a girlfriend. Then I discovered Terry Pratchett later and have never looked back.
Well everyone knows Austen was a man-hating feminazi who rode the cock-carousel one too many times and then spent her bitter latter years writing romance novels that mocked the patriarchy. Any woman who reads the stuff is clearly using the novels as a means of learning how to entrap and enslave alpha men within the confines of a sexless marriage……
On a lighter note Winston Churchill (yes him, voted Greatest Briton of all time) said that antibiotics and Austen got him through the war. If she’s good enough for Churchill I’m quite sure she’s good enough for a ten pound note.
Cutest apocalypse ever.
My relationship with Goodkind is… complicated, to say the least. In many ways it’s a repeat of my teenage years spent reading Heinlein; I had to keep reading partly because there was *just enough* good stuff to keep me interested, but also because of a morbid curiosity to see how bad it could possibly get.
In the end, I can’t say as to whether I’m better or worse off for having read the Sword of Truth books, but dammit the Mord-Sith were cool. And that’s all I’ve got to say about that.
Regarding PA, I actually remember liking Pale Horse and Being a Green Mother, and didn’t he write one about a sentient (and pissed off) tree near a house in the Everglades? I was visiting with family who owned a house on the edge of the Everglades when I read that one and I remember that it made me give the (already super creepy) trees an enormous side-eye. I was recovering from an accident that had me on a lot of painkillers, so I read a lot but all of it kinda mushed together after a while, so I might be thinking of someone else on that tree book…
RE: Falconer
One of the amusing ironies of our childhood was that our parents were totally fine with us reading Piers Anthony, because they thought it was lighthearted fun, but they were way more dubious about Spider Robinson… who actually talks about consent, polyamory, bisexuality, and blew our ten-year-old mind by saying that drugs weren’t instant deathevil.
@MordsithJ, What Heinlein did you read, if you don’t mind my asking. I remember being more or less meh on lots of the shorter books, and driven to distraction by how much I hated (but had to finish) Stranger in a Strange Land, but I rather liked The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.
… Always remembering, of course, that Terry Goodkind is a different person from Terry Brooks.
Innit tho? But I still have all these boxes I haven’t unpacked since the move.
@LBT: Yeah, Spider Robinson’s a whole lot better on the sexuality/gender spectrum than You Know Who, although one of his stories made me worry that he was pushing all-gay-men-are-child-molesters.
Also, Robinson has a series set in a brothel that was all sisters-doing-it-for-themselves that I felt (in my 20-something, white boy view of the world) was saying that prostitution was bad because of all the pimps.
@gillyrosebee, It went like this: The first Heinlein book I read was Have Spacesuit Will Travel, and I don’t know why I picked it up, but since my dad owned a bookstore I could read whatever I wanted to, and there wasn’t much else to do in my small town so I would read anything that caught my eye. Including Sweet Valley High, but we won’t go there.
Anyway, I read HSWT, and I loved it, and I thought I had discovered an author I could really get into, so I read another Heinlein book, and it wasn’t as good, and I read another and it was worse, and pretty soon I was on a desperate quest to find something, anything, that I would like as much as HSWT. Eventually I gave up on that and just kept reading out of aforementioned morbid curiosity.
I don’t recall the order in which I read them, but the titles I remember are: The Star Beast, The Rolling Stones, Starship Troopers, Podkayne of Mars, Farnham’s Freehold (Particularly awful, that one), The Number of the Beast, I Will Fear No Evil, Friday, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and some short stories.
By the time I got to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I was so pissed off that I was unable to read it objectively, so even though it’s probably one of his less offensive book I still managed to find offensive stuff in it. So instead of thinking polyamory was in interesting concept, I just thought, “Why is it always about sex with this guy?”
Well, fair enough. Even objectively, I will admit the guy was obsessed with sex. Thanks for sharing your perspective! I had it in the opposite direction, I think, because I’d read some of the better books before things as bad as Farnham’s Freehold (and I’m with you there) and so I was able to just roll my eyes and move on when I got to some of the worst ones.
Huh, turns out Goodkind’s first book was published in 1994, I thought it was at least 5 years older than that. That means that when I first ran across him, it was in the middle of his first flush of popularity.
Let’s play Name That Novel! I’m thinking of a book I read in the late 90s that was about a family that went on a religious pilgrimage and ended up taking a cryogenic trip back to Earth over the course of several books. I can’t remember the title, is why I’m asking. All I can remember is one of the brothers was very weak and rode around in an antigravity chair, and religious services were divided into his’n’hers, and the male services involved kneeling in a pool of water and scratching oneself on the arms and bleeding into the pool.
I thought it was written by Orson Scott “Can’t You Ignore My Big Mouth Long Enough To Go See My Movie” Card, but I can’t recognize it by title among his works on Wikipedia.
RE: Falconer
@LBT: Yeah, Spider Robinson’s a whole lot better on the sexuality/gender spectrum than You Know Who, although one of his stories made me worry that he was pushing all-gay-men-are-child-molesters.
Really? Which one was it? Because although I remember far more of his characters being bi, rather than gay, I don’t remember much pedoness. I admit to feeling squick on some of his ‘teenagers having sex with older folk’ things, but he at least TRIED to deal with the ramifications, and both cases I recall, the teenagers involved were specifically written as being unusually intelligent and adult in their behavior.
Also, Robinson has a series set in a brothel that was all sisters-doing-it-for-themselves that I felt (in my 20-something, white boy view of the world) was saying that prostitution was bad because of all the pimps.
Oh yeah, Callahan’s Lady and Lady Slings the Booze. Not my favorite of his books, to be sure, but I actually kind of appreciated it for introducing the idea to me as a wee teen that sex work was not inherently bad or degrading, and that sex workers shouldn’t be looked down on. If I recall right (and I’ve got the books on my shelf, if you want me to check), the books wrote that sex work was often awful because of a lot of the toxic crap wrapped into it. There’s a really nasty pimp in Callahan’s Lady… but I never read him as bad BECAUSE he was a pimp, but bad because he was a violent, abusive fuckwad.
Has anyone else read Robinson’s “The Free Lunch?”
I can’t remember the name of it, but it was a short story in which Fast Eddie the piano man tells how a man used to give him hand jobs when he was a preteen, and then he turned around and touched a little girl who wasn’t much younger than he was, and everybody got upset and the handjobs came out and I can’t remember how it ended, except Eddie was placed into the foster care system, I think, and anyway the moral turned out to be uptight prudes care more about sexual purity than what’s best for children.
Yeah, it’s been a while, but the Callahan’s Lady series certainly doesn’t blame the women in the brothel. I suppose if you wanted to get really wacky, you could view it as a Marxist, workers-seize-the-means-of-production kind of story.
Did you get the joke about “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” in one of the books?
Oh, that’s where your handle comes from. Cool.
No, I don’t think I have read “The Free Lunch,” but I’ve got several of his short story collections, I might have.
RE: MordsithJ
Read it? I own it! I love it; it helped me deal with my family relationships going to shit.
Oh, it’s a book? Sorry.
Yeah, Spider Robinson’s an odd bird for me. When he’s on, he’s ON, and our anthology of the first three Callahan’s books are among the oldest, most battered, and most beloved books on our shelf. Even when he’s off, I’m willing to give him some benefit of the doubt, and I usually don’t REGRET reading one of his books. He at least tries to give some thought to his work, and though there’s DEFINITELY a generational influence that I disagree with, I find him work of ’empath science fiction’ to be one of the foundational influences of my own work.
…And then you’ve got Piers Anthony, where I curse and tear my hair and wish I’d never read that guy. He gave us FAR too many bad ideas, in writing and in gender.
My only experience with Heinlein was The Puppet Masters, and that was on audiobook, which I enjoyed, but once I was done, I pretty much said, “Okay, I’ve read some Heinlein, I’m good.” I think it sounds like I got lucky–while there’s a typical romance subplot, the book as a whole doesn’t delve too deeply into sex. There’s one scene where the protagonists get married and fill out a more complicated form with options for term marriages and polygamous marriages, but that’s glossed over in such a matter-of-fact way that it’s almost unremarkable.
Only Heinlein I ever read was Starship Troopers. I pounded through it in a weird craze of determination, and I don’t feel bad about it, but I have no desire to read it, or anything else of Heinlein’s ever again.
Then again, a LOT of classic sci fi and fantasy don’t do it for me. A lot of fantasy is Tolkien knockoffs and epics, neither of which I care for, and for me, sci-fi is interesting on a social, psychological level. I’ve seen FAR too many sci-fi books where the writer was WAY more invested in showing off their sandbox than actually telling a story.
I’m not sure why ‘soft’ sci-fi is spoken of with such derision. It’s far and away my favorite type.