“Surly Amy” Roth, a Los Angeles artist and writer for Skepchick, has created an art installation that attempts to capture and convey what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the relentless abuse she and too many other outspoken women face online.
With the help of members of the Los Angeles Women’s Atheist and Agnostic Group, Roth has built a small office-within-an-office inside the The Center For Inquiry-Los Angeles – and covered every surface with printouts of actual harassing messages sent to her and an assortment of other misogynist bete noires, including Rebecca Watson, Amanda Marcotte, Soraya Chemaly and Lindy West.
As she writes,
There is a false notion that online spaces are not real. That what happens online does not have an effect on the regular day-to-day life of people. As we have seen recently with the stolen photos of Jennifer Lawrence, high profile women are seen as mere objects and targets or play-things meant to be stolen, acquired and used- that if they can not handle these made up rules- that they should leave the internet and all forms of technology behind.
My art exhibit is meant to put you, the viewer, in their shoes if only for a moment. See what it is like to be obsessively judged based on “fuck-ability”, “rape-ability”, as an object, or alternatively as what seems to be a target in a socially accepted (or otherwise ignored) game of online stalking, harassment and silencing techniques.
The opening reception for “A Woman’s Room Online” is tonight, September 13th at 7pm at the Center for Inquiry in Los Angeles; the installation will remain up through Oct. 13th.
You can read more about it here.
“But it can’t possibly be THAT bad!” is the eternal cry of someone for whom it never has been.
I am grateful to have turned out gay; without that, I might have had less motivation to unlearn certain types of bad mindedness.
sporkle
One of those “harassing” messages is an article by Paul, about Rebecca Watson. It was posted on his site and not tweeted or sent to her, so even if you think it’s vulgar, it’s not “harassment”.
Yeah, I think a LOT of men don’t really listen when women try to tell them how bad online harassment is. I find it pretty interesting when I’m in feminist circles and I see women saying things like “But men should KNOW this by now! The info is available EVERYWHERE! We’ve been talking about [issue] for years and years!”
It came up a few months back in the context of a guy writing one of those Road To Damascus type “I used to think online harassment wasn’t a big deal, but now I realise and I’m totes on board with feminism” articles. A lot of feminists were rolling their eyes and saying things like “The last thing we need is another dude writing an article like this. They should KNOW by now!” (heavily paraphrased). The thing they missed was that looking for things on the net in particular is highly selective, and that feminists weren’t the audience that needed to read that article – it was men in (in this case) the tech world.
I think there can sometimes be an offputting amount of gatekeeping in (some) feminist circles about people who don’t understand but are sincerely trying to grok it. While nobody should have to perpetually explain every basic tenet of feminism to every single visitor to their page, I think that we need to be mindful that everybody needs to start somewhere, and that sometimes that needs to consist of reading things that, to our minds, are hopelessly unenlightened and/or barely count as feminist and/or have been done to death.
That’s what I like about this site. Most of the time, Mammotheers are fairly willing to give someone a gentle nudge in the right direction. But if someone proves resistant to the nudge, you’re not afraid to give them a shove. 😉
I rummaged a link for the basics:
http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/the-faqs/faq-roundup/
Oh yeah, I know that stuff is out there, blahlistic, and it’s great resource. 🙂
I guess I’m more referring to when there’s an article published somewhere in a space that’s not explicitly feminist, where guys who don’t grok the importance of feminism are more likely to see it and have their lightbulb moment, that in some of the spaces I’ve visited the commentariat has been very condescending and dismissive of the value of an article that is less than ideally progressive and (to them) rehashes ground that’s been trodden a bajillion times.
Sometimes it’s hard to remind those people that others might only just be starting on that journey, and if you set an arbitrary hurdle to inclusion that’s too high you can turn people off. I still don’t visit Twisty over at I Blame The Patriarchy, for instance, even though I’d consider myself a pretty good ally these days – simply because I feel excluded. And me feeling excluded is to do with me, not her, so I’m not suggesting she should have to change a damn thing!
…As far as the online harassment of feminists and women, is there any blog people can submit the hatemail to?
I personally have only been harassed once. I was harassed as a genderqueer and an abuse survivor…by one guy, but he was REALLY obsessive about it.
I eventually just upped my privacy on that site and he could no longer heckle me.
sporkle
Also, most of these messages are not sent by MRAs, and none are sent by prominent MRAs.
Shut up, Woody.
You’re not even reading the OP, from what I can tell.
I love these troll challenges and I’m glad they’re back.
Oh, and shut up, Woody.
How the heck would you know?
I mean, who’s going to identify their political affiliations when sending hate mail and dick pics?
What I like best about this is, that even when he’s being dishonest and defending MRA; he’s still aware that some of these messages are undoubtedly sent by MRA.
So, I suppose the argument is that MRA is not that bad because they aren’t responsible for all death and rape threats?
The OP didn’t even mention MRAs. The whole point is that women deal with this shit from all quarters just being online.
You’re failing the “relevance” part of the troll challenge, Woody, even if you’re remembering the “sporkle” part. And that’s before we even consider how many men on the MRA spectrum do consider it totally fine to harass women with everything up to rape/murder threats and doxxed personal info. All of which is a digression from the original point, which is that it sucks to be a woman on the internet a lot of the time.
I’m not going to tell you to shut up, Woody, but I am going to ask you to at least pretend that you’ve read the article, and remember one of the first rules of discussing any oppressive practice:
If it’s not about you, don’t make it about you.
http://i.imgur.com/TzamlJo.jpg
(My apologies to the Dos Equis Guy, who I understand is actually very nice)
The nastiness is sent by a bunch of dudes (presumably) with hidden identities. You don’t know who they are, neither do we.
We just know there’s an Imperial shitton of men who take joy in anonymously punishing women via electronic message for daring to disagree with said men about ANYTHING.
MRA’s publicly spew a lot of anti-woman and anti-feminist vitriol.
Proof’s hard, but I’d be foolish not to have suspicions.
Most of the specific messages in the art installation may or may not be from MRAs (prominent – huh? sounds like no true Scotsman, self-identified, or whatevers) but that’s not the point.
The purpose of the art installation is not to show the percentage of online harassment that women receive from MRAs. The purpose of the art installation (I’m interpreting here) is to show the sorts of online harassment that women receive.
A revealing research project, if Woody wants an MRA focus, would be to go over the past – say two months’ – worth of “prominent” MRA online comments and categorise them into “not harassment/bullying/hate speech against feminists type” and “harassment/bullying/hate speech against feminists type”. It has to be a retrospective study, so that the MRA behaviour does not change due to the study being conducted.
That’s called *research*. The art installation is *art*. While art may be based on research/science (e.g. perspective in drawing landscapes), there is no definition that says art must be based on research/science.
MRAs: still not grasping the whole “science” and “research” arenas, let alone “art”. Crap, now I am reminded of MRA “art”. I will go and scream in my corner now.
Welcome back Woody.
Now shut up and sparkle.
I meant sporkle, but now I’m imagining Woody as a Twilight vampire and it’s cracking me up.
Does he sneak into Elam’s bedroom to watch his one true love sleep?
Nobody is supposed to know that the vampires are vampires initially, right? You’d think they’d have gone a bit easier on the makeup then, it looks like randoms should start chanting “undead, undead” whenever one of them walks into a room.
I love that this exists. Of course it’s not a magic cure-all that will suddenly eliminate (or even necessarily cut down on) online abuse and harassment, but it’s one more meatspace venue that acknowledges that yes, this is A Thing, and it matters.
Over time, the more this is talked about and acknowledged, the weirder it will look for people to deny that there is a problem. The more universally it’s acknowledged as a problem, the more likely it is that solutions will be sought.
Whether or not this particular exhibit generates measurable results, I really like that it’s pushing towards something good.
You know, we hadn’t heard from you in a while and I thought maybe you’d decided you had better things to do with your time than talk at people who don’t want to hear from you on a site where you weren’t even able to post. But here you are, months later, still thinking we give a shit.
Though I am a little curious as to how you can tell one of Elam’s “articles” is among the pages upon pages of printouts. Did you go over the photos with a magnifying glass, hoping to see your hero’s words in there? God, you’re so sad.
Where did anyone say they were? You guys aren’t the only misogynists out there, you know.
@Strivingally,
Or in Woody’s case, “if it’s not about Paul Elam, don’t make it about Paul Elam. It won’t make him love you”.
I think Woody’s new troll challenge should be that he’s not allowed to talk about Paul. That’d leave him with nothing to say, and maybe then he’d finally move on.
“Though I am a little curious as to how you can tell one of Elam’s “articles” is among the pages upon pages of printouts.”
I followed the link back to Skepchick.org, and one of the pictures is that same picture, but the messages aren’t blurred. One of the messages is the headline of an article by Paul about Watson, which probably made the wall because he called her a “whore”. But again, even if you think it’s vulgar, that’s not the same thing as “harassment”.