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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.
Let’s be fair, now.
These days I’m much more likely to pick up something with ‘the color of her panties’ on the cover than ‘Piers Anthony.’
So once you have Piers Anthony there in big huge letters, it’s not like you have much to lose….
Okay, I am aware that translating a mansplainer/whitesplainer often comes across as a repeat of the original offense. But I have an obsessive need to delve into the psyches of certain groups of people, and see if I can figure out what their fundamental error is. Thus, I’m gonna try to do a quick run-through of that awful post that Ally linked to–“You’re not oppressed because you’re black; you’re black because you’re oppressed.” Anyone who has no interest in this sort of exercise, please feel free to skip this post.
****
Okay, the baseline issue is that, much like libertarians, communists are utopians. Often they have a good core idea, but then they forget that they aren’t designing this perfect world in a vacuum, with ready raw materials; they have to work from Point A to Point QQ, making all stops between.
Unfortunately, they often look at Point B, or Point C, and say that because it’s not Point QQ, they can’t go there. The classic formulation of this is, “Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
From a historic and scientific point of view, the poster was correct–‘race’ is purely a social construct, one which has less to do with reality–even superficial reality–than it does with cultural views that often seek to sustain the status quo. So if one were building a perfect society, the notion of including different sub-cultures based on this arbitrary ethnicity, and then celebrating those cultures, is bizarre and counter-productive compared to one in which everyone’s part of the same general culture, with the only subcultures based on things like ideology and taste. “You’re black because you’re oppressed,” is simply meant to convey the idea that in a world sans oppression and racism, being ‘black’ would be a physical trait, one that would probably be LESS important than say, height or weight.
And this is wonderful, and true, and utterly fucking irrelevant, because we are not creating a perfect society for a bunch of colonists on an alien world, said colonists having been mind-wiped about any memories of the society they came from, so as to enable them to act according to our rules alone. We’re dealing with a real world, with history.
And yes, part of that history was the creation of ethnic sub-divisions as a means of control by the dominant group, as other groups were marginalized and oppressed and denied access to the full benefits of the whole society, forcing them to come up with one that would work.
But since we’re not in that perfect world, we have to figure out how to make race meaningless. And part of that process is recognizing that subcultures are, in fact, formed in great part as a reaction to the dominant culture’s actions and oppression. Ethnic subcultures, therefore, are going to exist so long as racism exists. What is needed is for the best elements of those subcultures to be lauded and expanded, and the detrimental elements be culled and corrected. And the crux of this is that this is something that can only ever really be accomplished from within–if you aren’t part of the subculture, you can’t ‘fix’ its problems. To claim otherwise is to repeat the fallacy of the White Man’s Burden from an allegedly progressive angle.
katz: I suspect that the cover of that book was designed by a desperate art director (or rather, one of his subordinates) trying desperately to not portray a scene that did not actually represent the title, and might still appeal to someone, anyone.
Right, but you might as well go all-out and put a hawt chick in underwear on the cover.
It ain’t like fantasy publishers are shy about hawt chicks in underwear on the covers.
BEHOLD!
(Forgive the bling — they’re having a dragon themed week, and apparently a gonzo one at that. I do realize this note will be outdated in a couple of days.)
Everybody do the limbo now!
There’s something very odd going on with the woman’s legs and butt in that last one.
I KNOW
CONSTRUCTION — IT IS YOUR FRIEND
As horrible and absurd as those covers are, though, Falconer, they still have the decency to portray mature women. PA, on the other hand, is like a lot of MRAs–he won’t even consider describing a woman as a romantic possibility if she’s over the age of 21.
Showing an obviously teenage girl in her underwear wasn’t quite something you wanted for wide press release at that point (I suspect/fear that with the adultification of the YA genre, that cover probably WOULD now be a teen girl flashing her panties at the viewer).
I have, and I really liked it. I much prefer it over 1984. One reason is that although the society in “we” is horrible and you’d never want to live there, you can still see the appeal it could hold for people. Like, it’s all so pure, so clean, so perfect. I like that; the fact that it’s horrible, but you can still totally see how some people would regard it as a utopia and want to create a society like that.
I also like that the story isn’t as… uh… gubbsjuk as 1984? What’s “gubbsjuk” in English? I just realized I don’t know. It’s an adjective which applies to an older man who lusts after young girls (not a pedophile though, but someone who lusts after adults who’re still way younger than him), but you could also use it for a movie or book or the like.. 1984 has this young super hot girl who inexplicably gets the hots for this ugly middle-aged dude, and it kind of comes off as a fantasy some middle-aged dude might have of young hot girls throwing themselves at him… Damn, there must be a world for this in English too!
If there isn’t one, there should be.
@ Dvarg
I love 1984 but the society depicted in it is so obviously unpleasant that you assume it could only by created and maintained by force, whereas We reads like a social experiment gone horribly wrong.
I thought the world-building in 1984 was ill-focused; all the synthetic food and rationing and such just distract from the main reasons it’s dystopic. I prefer worlds like Brave New World and The Giver where the specifics of daily life aren’t so bad, thus putting the really dystopic elements into sharp relief.
Heh. Most of what I recall of Brave New World is doing a tiny drawing of someone who was either the Savage or a very young Theoden from LotR – long tawny hair in plaits, moustache – which turned out to look really good. My gf and I sat staring at it all during English class. 😛
The Langoliers movie had maybe the funniest ending ever. Not only did the horrible looking monsters ruin every ounce of fear and tension built up, but the end where they run and jump in the air and freeze in place. So cheesy. I want to watch it again right now haha
Thinking back to the books – what’s the worst SF or fantasy you’ve ever read?
I’d have to put Canticle for Leibowitz high on the list.
I love that book. It may be that I was alive in the time that was talking about (not the 50s, but the age when living to a ripe old age wasn’t because we were going to crash a car, but someone was going to bomb the planet).
Worst… hard to say, mostly becuase I purge them from my mind, save to never read them again.
Hyena Girl: I’ve read all of Drake, save his fantasy books, as well as essays he wrote about why/how he came to write them. The question is, since I have some of my own issues to work keep working out on that subject how they will look to me now.
So was I – I think we’re about the same age – and I felt the same way. I might have connected with it then, but I read it last year. Or rather, read about half of it. It was one of the most tedious things I’d read in ages, and I couldn’t finish it.
Mind you I started a worse book the other week: Before The Fact. Didn’t even get halfway through; I hated the characters and the writing was so flat. And no, it’s not because of the era when it was written: I’ve enjoyed plenty of 19th and early 20th century books.
I’m probably going to get some pushback for this one, but while it’s great as a bit of history and as a feminist manifesto, I think The Female Man is pretty shit as a story.
I haven’t read it, but Edmund Cooper’s Five to Twelve (1968) is a novel that dares to take the bold stance* that Women Need Men by imagining a world where there are five men to every twelve women, and everything is going to shit because Men Accomplish Stuff.
“His attitude to women is said to have been controversial.”
Gag me with a spoon.
*I will pay for all your sarcasm meters, sorry.
Holy fucking framing error, Batman. I’m sitting here, minding my own business (literally, I’m trying to develop the page structure for my website) and onto my podcast feed comes this gem:
Do Baby Girls Cause Divorce?
Not, do sexist men leave their families if they don’t get sons as firstborns? No. Do baby girls cause divorce?
Oh gods, there was one in which women had figured out how to have children without men, so they went on a campaign to eradicate all men. I forget why one man was spared (and one who had been some sort of “sympathetic” figure). He was an Air Force officer and when he died they taxidermied him, but reversed the eagle on his rank insignia; to show that he was of a bastard house.
It was awful.
Of course they do. They are agents of the Furrinati.
It gets better, even. They break the research down and report on what parents say when they talk about whether they would prefer sons or daughters, pointing out that women are fairly evenly split on the topic, and that it’s the men who prefer sons, and then they keep going on to talk about “parents” preference for boys.
Because men are the only parents, women are just the portable incubators, you know.
gillyrose: Blegh. And all the comments pointing that out are getting downvoted (a good example of why I don’t like upvotes and downvotes).