Sometimes when I post links, they’re simply interesting things I’ve run across. These, though, are essential reads:
Why the Trolls Will Always Win, by Kathy Sierra, Wired
A detailed post by Java expert and game developer Sierra describing the harassment and vilification she’s faced for the crime of, well, basically for being a woman in the tech world. While long and a bit rambling in spots, this is an important piece that, among other things, describes how harassers can sometimes transform slanderous assertions about their targets into “conventional wisdom,” details the damage that “trolls” can have on a person’s reputation (and their life generally), and offers some sobering reflections on the culture of harassment and how difficult it can be to fight.
She offers these thoughts on the ways in which Twitter can serve as an enabler of this kind of harassment:
Twitter, for all its good, is a hate amplifier. Twitter boosts signal power with head-snapping speed and strength. Today, Twitter (and this isn’t a complaint about Twitter, it’s about what Twitter enables) is the troll’s best weapon for attacking you. …
It begins with simple threats. You know, rape, dismemberment, the usual. It’s a good place to start, those threats, because you might simply vanish once those threats include your family. Mission accomplished. But today, many women online — you women who are far braver than I am — you stick around. And now, since you stuck around through the first wave of threats, you are now a much BIGGER problem.
And she takes on the “troll logic” of those who insist that unless there’s legal action no “real” harassment has happened:
You’re probably more likely to win the lottery than to get any law enforcement agency in the United States to take action when you are harassed online, no matter how viciously and explicitly. Local agencies lack the resources, federal agencies won’t bother. (Unless you’re a huge important celebrity. But the rules are always different for them. But trolls are quite happy to attack people who lack the resources to do anything about it. Troll code totally supports punching DOWN.)
There IS no “the authorities” that will help us.
We are on our own.
And if we don’t take care of one another, nobody else will.
We are all we’ve got.
Much of Sierra’s piece focuses on one of her biggest enemy in all of this, “hacktivist” Andrew Auernheimer, better known as weev. He’s posted a response to Sierra’s piece. It’s pretty appalling; weev is a hateful misogynist and white supremacist. Here’s a sampling:
Kathy Sierra is the epitome of what is wrong with my community. She had something coming to her and by the standards set by her own peers in the social justice community, there was nothing wrong with what she got.
I do not hate women. My colleagues include quite a few (cis and trans) women. I support women making tech. However, it is high time for the “women in tech” to get the fuck out.
The other essential bit of reading?
Telling My Story, by Adria Richards, Storify.
Developer and tech evangelist Richards, you may recall, ignited the fury of the Great Internet Lady Harassment Machine by tweeting about sexist jokes she overheard at a tech conference. At the time, she largely kept silent about the harassment she was getting. But now she’s speaking up and sharing the details.
In a series of Tweets yesterday, Richards posted screenshots documenting some of the worst harassment she’s gotten; this Storify collection pulls these together in one place.
Make the effort to enlarge and read the screenshots; they’re horrifying. And Richards promises to post more.
If there is one thing I have learned in the last year when being harassed online it is: DON'T BE QUIET ABOUT IT!
— Adria Richards (@adriarichards) October 9, 2014
While I’m posting links, here’s one that’s hardly essential but that’s pretty funny:
Local Chicago Man Would Like Women to Smile, Accept His Advances, by Kara Brown.
No, this last one isn’t from The Onion. It’s REALLLL.
Telling a person that their negative response was incorrect is one of the ways abusers test to see how amenable a person is to being manipulated and controlled.
Reblogged this on Dreams of the Shining Horizon and commented:
Yes, everyone does need to read this stuff.
For those who dismiss cyberbullying and online harassment as “people saying mean things on the internet”…this is why you’re wrong.
I mentioned in another thread, but that Chicago bro reminds me of the guy who was whining about ear buds preventing him from asking his crush out. Therefore, ear buds are misandry.
@thebewilderness:
Really? That explains a LOT of PUA gambits. Especially their variations on “You’re not hot enough to be acting like this”. I guess since PUA predation is about trying to find women who won’t or can’t stand up for themselves and enforce their boundaries, or manipulating them with social pressures, it makes perfect sense that a lot of their first strikes are already gating whether or not a woman will modify her response based on someone else’s expectations.
I saw a related post from a guy seeking advice on how to approach all the “hot women” who had their headphones in and weren’t making eye contact with him. The answer was simple: don’t! Wearing headphones and looking straight ahead or down without making eye contact are universal signals for “don’t bother me.” Surprisingly, this sound advice came from a PUA forum (although a few of the responders had to criticize women for being unfriendly, as if trying to get to a destination without stopping to chat with strangers is a uniquely female defect).
But these guys take it to mean “she doesn’t want to talk TO ME.” Not “she wants to be left alone” in general. It’s always a personal assault to their egos.
I’m afraid I would not take this well. I would not be polite. I would say something like, “What the fuck are you doing? Get the hell out of my way, I have a job to do, and if you have nothing to do I’m sure your boss would love to hear that.”
As I get older, I am losing my ability to tolerate bullshit at precipitous speed.
@strivingally: They do specifically target women with low self-esteem. One even wrote a pros-and-cons list of dating a woman with confidence vs. a woman with none. He sincerely believed confidence was a bad thing, because it reduces a woman’s dependence on him (kind of odd, since PUAs go on and on about “beta provider chumps”). And of course, all confident women are apparently man-haters (an assertion that just won’t die). But the thing that bothered me the most was his statement that he normally only goes after intoxicated women and is wary about women who don’t drink, even going so far as to say he tries to get her to have at least 3 drinks before making his move. Now, if I were to have that much alcohol, I’d be on the floor, so that scared the crap out of me.
Oh, but of course. It’s because they’re all Too Alpha To Ignore, don’tcha know?
I might be a bit wobbly, but I’d still be in reasonable possession of my faculties. And just disinhibited enough that I might whack him upside the head with the bottle if he tried anything stupid.
@policy of madness: I know, that’s what I want to do every time! It’s very frustrating. Lately when I can’t avoid him, I’ve been just saying “hi” and then looking away and continuing to walk. If he tries to stop me (which is normally to comment on my hats, and he always talks in a sing-song voice), I walk around him – I don’t make excuses anymore like “I’m sorry, I have to get to a meeting” – I just keep going. He’s an older man known throughout the company as being very socially awkward (and probably just looking for someone to talk to), so I try not to be too rude, but I also don’t feel that I should be obliged to have a conversation with him, especially when I’m in a hurry.
The level of entitlement displayed here (in the OP) is astronomical in dimension. “Talk to me! God created you so I could have an audience! Fulfill your divine purpose, or I will whine until your fillings are loosened! I HAVE NEEDS!”
As my mother would say, they have no idea what they look like.
@Amanda
UMMMMMMMMM.
My experience is that dudes who are “socially awkward” and express it by making things uncomfortable and awkward for you are doing it knowingly. As in, they know that you feel uncomfortable, and do it anyway, because they are rewarded with the reaction they want. “Socially awkward” always seems to be “he disregards the social rules that ensure we can all work together comfortably and for some reason we make excuses for why it’s okay for him to make us uncomfortable rather than holding him accountable for that.”
Again, I have less and less tolerance for bullshit as time goes on. I’m not even old. I’ve simply reached a point where I’ve realized that it does not benefit me at all to waste minutes on my life catering to someone else’s feelings when that person clearly can’t be fucked to do the same for me.
Even if I wasn’t in a hurry, and had literally nowhere to be, I would not take kindly to some dude literally blocking my path until I am forced to acknowledge him. I mean, I would acknowledge him, but I would do it loudly and unpleasantly and I’d make it as uncomfortable for him as I could. And if people complained at me? Well, I’m socially awkward! Apparently that’s the get-out-of-acting-like-a-decent-person card, so why can’t I use it for myself?
Oh wow, gawd help him if he tried that on me.
The last time I had 3 in public I vaguely remember snarkily insulting everybody, including shouting at the top of my lungs to a guy in a sports car “SORRY ABOUT YOUR PENIS!”
…At 4 drinks I’d just throw up.
Despite being basically guy-sized, I have no alcohol capacity.
Bwahahah, I want what you were having. Last time I was publicly tipsy, I was unbelievably polite. And miserable.
Urgh. Did anyone see that fuckwited first comment on the Jezebel thread? Seems to come from a regular creep there:
Yeah, they might murder you, exactly like the case actually cited in the article. But hey, watch me trot out male privilege and say how you should be nice to them anyway, because I plainly have not One Goddamn Clue!
What — and encourage them? HELL NO!!!
If they want a woman, they must first learn not to be such fucking dorks about it. It isn’t even that hard to do, fergawdsakes. But we don’t owe them any “bones” just because they’re “socially awkward”. Hell, I’m socially awkward a lot of the time, and I’ve never made a rude, unsolicited pass at anyone yet.
I cannot tolerate any alcohol at all now but when I could my favorite top of my voice joke was directed at my supervisor who owned a corvette.
Do you know the difference between an porcupine and a corvette?
With the porcupine the prick is on the outside.
Snurk.
Well, with the ‘vette, it’s kind of on the outside, too. As in, “Look at my flashy penis extender! Whaddya mean you don’t want to blow me now?”
Toss them a bone? GTFO. The dudes on the Jez thread whining almost dislocated my eyeballs.
If anyone wants more about Gran Fury, ACTUP, and the whole scene: http://www.actuporalhistory.org
It’s an amazing read.
I’ve always been fairly socially awkward (though I have learned to do a fairly good job of faking otherwise at times), and walking up to a woman I didn’t know in a public place and trying to hit on her is about the last thing I would ever do. As far as I call recall I’ve never done it. Socially awkward does not mean aggressively rude and insensitive.
If I were to approach a strange woman in public, it would be because I needed information and thought she might have it. These jerks make women so creep-sensitive that it’s harder for someone like me who has a legitimate need to initiate a conversation to do so successfully.
I wonder how many of these guys there really are. They hit on so many women that it must seem like they are much more numerous than they really are.
@policy of madness: I think you’re right. I hadn’t really thought of it that way with him for some reason, probably because he doesn’t make lewd comments or do anything overt, so everyone just assumes he’s not good with people. Although, a woman in his department did yell at him one time when he kept trying to chat with her when she was on the phone with a customer. Lesson apparently not learned.
There’s also a guy in my department who used to behave this way toward me and most other women who started working in our office – again, never anything flirtatious, just hovering and overly interested in what we were doing. The final straw was when he kept standing around me and trying to interrupt when I was talking to my now-boyfriend at the company holiday party, and I told him in no uncertain terms to stop interrupting. I later learned he had been reported to HR for this type of behavior years ago, but his boss wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt because he was just “socially awkward.” I’ve been his supervisor for the last 2 years, and he hasn’t done this to anyone since.
I agree that the “socially awkward” card is often a cop-out to try to excuse bad behavior. I have been socialized to be polite, but when someone makes me feel uncomfortable, I need to just tell them like I did with that guy, and not second-guess myself or think I’m just overreacting – after all, they definitely won’t stop otherwise.
Because potentially being shot is no big deal? I feel like someone really needs to go read Shrodinger’s Rapist, and then read all the comments and sit with that for a while before trotting out any more sexist cliches.
FWIW, I use skin bleaching cream. This is purely due to vanity.
I started to develop very large and very weird-looking hyperpigmentation spots.
…AFAIK, skin-bleaching cream doesn’t actually lighten your natural complexion, it just reduces the incidence of weird old-people blotches.
It may not be entirely safe to use.
Here I note that life is 100% fatal, and I’d rather spend my remaining 30 or so without those big weird things going on over my eyebrows.
It never fails. Every single time there’s a Jez post about street harassment the comment sections overflow with guys whining about how mean we are to want to be left alone. How are they supposed to date? What if they just want to compliment a woman in a non-creepy way? Can he have some picking up “girls” tips? This even happened in the articles about the Elliot fucking Rodger shooting.
Of course, I have zero tolerance for this shit and give zero fucks if they have a sad so I always tell them how horrible and entitled they are for thinking getting a date/laid should be placed at a higher importance than our sense of safety. They always get so defensive when I do that. I love it.
I just found some really great brain bleach