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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.
If you take the books in the order they were written, it happens at the beginning of the 16th book, but was hinted at in the end of the 4th book.
RE: katz
Such is the dilemma of the fantasy publisher staff artist. Poor guy.
Yeah. And I do feel for him there; it can’t have been fun for him as an artist working on a series, and having the covers slowly devolve from “barbarian with giant spider,” to, “OH GOD WHY DO YOU PUT THIS UPON ME.”
RE: Falconer
OH GOD THE WORM. Yeah, glad I had my friend there, I wouldn’t have figured that out. (Though my fumbling around DID lead to one of my favorite lines in all of gamedom, “LOOK OUT YOU PIGEONS! IT’S ROBERT FROST!”)
About the Hugo Schwyzer situation- just based on his writing, he’s clearly not in his right mind. By his own admission he’s on medication and has recently been committed to a psychiatric ward (he may still be there for all I know). We are witnessing a mental breakdown, and- whether or not you think he deserved what he got- the hatred directed at him on the Internet has clearly been a major contributing factor.
Whatever you think of him, it seems like we could maybe give him a bit of a break, instead of endlessly nitpicking over everything that a mentally ill person says.
The first chapter of Sword of Shannara is seriously the most boring thing ever.
Somehow I finished the first chapter, got caught up in the almost rollicking tale that followed, but the end of the book was such a huge anti-climax my eyes crossed and I had to crawl my way to his next book.
I was dumb enough to do the next one, too…
Oh. See, I am not fond of that character (the one who is killed) very much at all, whereas I am very fond of the character who was introduced as a replacement.
Also: Wow, that book is the 16th book. Wow, there are so. many. books.
Can you ask the clown for a balloon animal of Robert Frost? That’s the only way that makes any sense to me. I can’t remember Frost having any sort of particular animus towards pigeons.
@CassandraSays, I’d assumed H-f’in-S had the bit between his teeth and was impossible to rein in.
Oh hey, Raymond E. Feist.
Krondor represent! [Hand sign]
Given that I’m about as gangster as your local chalk wall, you’re all free to snicker. Reading my way through Magician one awkward page at a time when I was 11 taught me English.
Without Googling:
Pug. Thomas. Midkernia. Merchant Prince. Secondary Continent. Empire down south. Riftwar. Black magicians. Shipwreck. Dragon riders. Walk through caverns deep in the Earth. Thomas finds weapon in old dragon hoard.
Yeah. Yeah I can force it all back. I think it’s actually chemically bonded to parts of my skull. Less words than pictures. Some part of the way I process this weird language of far Albion or Avalon is actually just calling up the embedded idea of Magician and letting it tell me what someone is trying to say.
Surprisingly boring books, when you re-examine them. But there’s a few great bits and some wonderful… Things.
One of the things I remember the best is the demonic invasion of a secondary world, in one of the sequels, which is retold in this droll, utterly heartbreaking style over a few pages.
(Paraphrasing:At the height of his power, more than a million warriors answered his call. And yet, the monsters kept coming. Children would be born in the camps and cities and grow up. And still, the monsters kept coming. Adults would procreate, grow old and finally die. And even so, the monsters kept coming….)
I’ve always liked how that managed to capture an enormous sense of scale within a few short descriptions. Incidentally, that is one of the reason I was even more annoyed with Terry Goodkind and his “Million strong armies pour out all the time!”
Anyway, that’s my fanboy moment for now. Ahem.
I can only offer you my sympathies, and endless amounts of it. And it will never, ever be enough.
I am sorry for your loss.
Perhaps you’d be interested in reading A Madness of Angels to cleanse your palette?
I’m reading Nightwatch by Sergei Lukyanenko right now, I’m pretty far into the book. It’s urban fantasy set in modern day Moscow. Besides the regular human beings there are “others” with magical powers; vampires, shape-shifters, witches and so on – “others” is the name for all of them as a group. They’re divided into light ones, who use their powers for altruistic purposes, and dark ones who use them for selfish ones.
All that sounds pretty common, but the book is seriously different from most western fantasy stuff on a number of points.
1. The main character is nothing special. He’s a magician with sort of average magic powers. It turns out during the course of the book that his powers are greater than originally thought, but they’re still far from outstanding; there are lots of people more powerful than he is. He’s not the chosen one, doesn’t have any special destiny or anything like that.
2. It’s a crappy world because everyone has to compromise so much. The best that the others have managed to come up with is a peace deal between the dark and the light forces, according to which the dark ones are actually allowed to kill off a certain number of innocent human beings now and then. Which is obviously pretty horrible, but having an all-out war and defeating the dark forces forever and then everyone lives happily ever after just wasn’t a realistic option, so this fairly crap peace deal is the least bad alternative. And our protagonist, who’s been in the game for some years now, has become completely used to all this crappy compromising.
3. The light ones are pretty nasty in various ways. They’re altruistic in a sort of utilitarian way; they’re willing to do quite a lot of nasty things for the greater good – manipulating people’s minds, telepathically watching over everyone all the time so nobody has any privacy etc. And they’re still, honestly, the least bad ones.
4. And, well, everything is so mundane. There are lots of average joes on the dark side as well, who’re nothing special, who doesn’t have any kind of epic evil in them, who just go about their everyday business and occasionally kills someone they have a license to kill.
So yeah, it’s pretty different from anything western I’ve read. Western protagonists tend to be much… grander. Even a really gritty down-to-earth anti hero like, say, John Constantine in the Hellblazer comics is pretty grand in his own way; he’s like the coolest magician ever (if not the most powerful of all), the smartest, trickiest etc – he’s special. And if there’s a light and a dark side that are both more or less crappy in a western story, there’s almost always a third option, which is to GO YOUR OWN WAY and be this super independent bad-ass. You rarely see all this crappy compromising from the protagonist.
All in all… and this is a weird thing to say, considering all the magic that goes on, but… “Nightwatch” feels much more realistic than most western fantasy stuff I’ve read.
There’s also a set of movies about the Watches, and they were one of the first grand, adventurey-fantasy films released world wide from Russia, utilizing pretty much equivalent tech to Hollywood. They don’t really do the books justice, but they’re fun, and come with funky funky subtitles.
But the “manipulating people” and “Altruistic in various ways”? This isn’t a spoiler, but to give people an idea of the scale here, Nazism was originally a plot thought up by the Light Side….
I highly recommend the books, and just felt like commenting that it’s fairly quality fiction.
On that note, I might also recommend Metro 23, which I’ve enjoyed for its relentless bleakness and misery. Oh Eastern Europe, you do write the most ennui inducing stuff.
Oh man, Sword of Shannara, the book that was so boring that it drove me to read the entire Silmarillion — anything, ANYTHING but finishing Sword of Shannara.
As far as Magic Kingdom for Sale goes, I think it’s relevant that my copy was missing a chunk of pages, and as far as I can tell this didn’t matter a whit. It was a pretty bland book, for sure.
Yeah, I’ve seen the movies, I liked them too. Now I’m reading the first book.
Do you mean Metro 2033? I’ve read the first book, and I liked it overall, although it was crazy silly with all the radioactive monsters on the surface. I also read the published fan-fic “journey to the light” (don’t know if that’s the English title, I read it in Swedish), but that was pretty meh.
RE: Falconer
Can you ask the clown for a balloon animal of Robert Frost? That’s the only way that makes any sense to me. I can’t remember Frost having any sort of particular animus towards pigeons.
Yes, you can. (And we did. It was actually pretty good.)
RE: Dvarghundspossen
I read a chunk of Nightwatchers. And while I did appreciate the ass-up-ending of light/good, dark/bad, I actually found it so grimy I couldn’t get through it.
Definitely hear you on the Chosen One stories. God, I HATE those fucking stories. There’s a reason I much prefer to write about the D-listers, the people whose powers suck, the remedial class. Or if they are good at something, they are really, really awful at something else.
RE: Hugo Schwyzer
Oh god, I just read that Schwyzer redemption narrative piece. Gross, gross, GrOSS. It also proved surprisingly relevant to me, actually!
As many folks here know, we have issues with our parents, of a severity that I took homelessness and destitution over reinitiating contact with them. It’s just a big toxic mess of bringing out the worst in each other.
Last week, I got a text message from our mother, apologizing for hurting us and saying she wanted a relationship with us again. I have chosen not to respond, but I felt guilty over rejecting the olive branch.
Thing is, the relationship didn’t break over one furious fight in a week. It rotted for YEARS, and a lot of it was people swearing they’d change, and then not actually changing. Even if our mother DOES want to change, even if she really has BEGUN to change, I don’t believe she can undo fifty years of conditioning so quickly, and I don’t want to be the family punching bag while they learn to treat me better. I am not obligated to hang around and teach them not to abuse me.
This is kinda revelatory for me today. Thanks, whoever posted it!
Oh, and I’ve much enjoyed The Witcher, for its generally fun and different take on common fantasy / fairy tale tropes.
The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski is a good collection of interconnected short stories set within the universe. Polish writer, not Russian.
It’s kind of in the same vein as Night Watch and Metro 23, set in relatively grey-grey morality fantasy world and following a monster hunter on various outings.
But for series ostensibly about a monster hunter, very few monsters actually get hunted, in the end, which is the nice touch. More often than not there’s a slight… problem with the situation at hand.
You can get an idea about the sort of writing you’ll find in these free translations from the original polish:
http://en.thewitcher.com/forum/index.php?/topic/20967-our-community-fan-translations/
and I think there’s actually a translation of the original book series out now, as well? But I’d have to investigate that.
@Dvärghundspossen
Yeah, you have the right of it! Metro 2033. Not Metro 23.
I think that’s my cue to head to sleep, because my incoherency is rising. Toodle-pip.
*scribbles furiously*
Oh, yes, yes, I would. 🙂
Yo, Howard! Falconer! I need your help! (And any other male boobzers here.)
I’m having a fight with someone on tumblr. So I have to know, do you guys feel you have been harmed by the prevalance of pretty boys in art? What are your opinions on this? Does it bother you?
(I can’t believe I’m having to ask this, but I dunno, apparently my opinion is a tiny minority or some shit.)
*Sad trombone*
Sorry dear, but being mentally ill neither makes you an asshole nor is a free ticket out of criticism.
LBT: Doad says: “hey – no, not really? Maybe Hugh Jackman” and “well from my anecdotal experience I’d say no, generally”
RE: katz
Thanks. I mean, WTF. The hell is this?
Also, uh, yeah, I ain’t buying that mental breakdown shit. I HAD a mental breakdown last year. I know EXACTLY what it feels like. Shockingly enough, I didn’t become a giant douchebag to anyone! I was definitely out-to-lunch and zombielike and couldn’t perform more than the most basic actions without being prompted, but I wasn’t gushing rapeporn.
Anyone else getting a whiff of snowdropexplodes with that shit?
Honestly, I have not been harmed by pretty boys in art. I’ve been perplexed by some aspects of yaoi, e.g. tiny heads and humongous hands, but in general I’m not bathing in a toxic atmosphere the same way that women are with a culture demanding that they all look like Playmate of the Year. I pin this on the existence of multiple male body types in media.
I don’t have a Tumblr or I’d back you up, sorry. I’m just not enough into Attack on Titan and Johnlock to qualify for a Tumblr page.
Erm, who’s snowdropexplodes?
NM I have teh Googel.
askjpl; snowdropexplodes called his website “A Femanist View” ???
Pretty boys in art are pretty; their existence has not so far harmed me. In fact, they have given me an excellent reason to look at pretty art.
…
“Femanist View”
…what