“I can’t be insensitive about death threats because my daughter got one” lines up to join “I can’t be sexist because my girlfriend says I’m not”, “I can’t be racist because some of my friends are black” and “It’s not homophobic when I say ‘faggot’ because I know a faggot who’s totally cool with it”, amongst other passengers on the next train to Lame Excuse City, pop. seemingly limitless.

I stopped reading after this. You are saying that a death threat against a helpless two-year-old isn’t as bad as one against a full grown woman? Are you serious? Death threats are bad in any form but including a daughter is by far worse. If anything I would say that a random death threat to a woman who can take precautions to protect herself is better than one against a child where they would need to learn who that child even is.

The answer you should have given was “Death threats are wrong.”

The Guardian, Friday 6 April 2007:
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2051580,00.html

How the web became a sexists’ paradise

Everyone receives abuse online but the sheer hatred thrown at women bloggers has left some in fear for their lives. Jessica Valenti, editor of Feministing.com, reports

Last week, Kathy Sierra, a well-known software programmer and Java expert, announced that she had cancelled her speaking engagements and was “afraid to leave my yard” after being threatened with suffocation, rape and hanging. The threats didn’t come from a stalker or a jilted lover and they weren’t responses to a controversial book or speech. Sierra’s harassers were largely anonymous, and all the threats had been made online.

Sierra had been receiving increasingly abusive comments on her website, Creating Passionate Users, over the previous year, but had not expected them to turn so violent – her attackers not only verbally assaulting her (“fuck off you boring slut . . . I hope someone slits your throat”) but also posting photomontages of her on other sites: one with a noose next to her head and another depicting her screaming with a thong covering her face. Since she wrote about the abuse on her website, the harassment has increased. “People are posting all my private data online everywhere – social-security number, and home address – a retaliation for speaking out.”

While no one could deny that men experience abuse online, the sheer vitriol directed at women has become impossible to ignore. Extreme instances of stalking, death threats and hate speech are now prevalent, as well as all the everyday harassment that women have traditionally faced in the outside world – cat-calls, for instance, or being “rated” on our looks. It’s all very far from the utopian ideals that greeted the dawn of the web – the idea of it as a new, egalitarian public space, where men and women from all races, and of all sexualities, could mix without prejudice.

On some online forums anonymity combined with misogyny can make for an almost gang-rape like mentality. One recent blog thread, attacking two women bloggers, contained comments like, “I would fuck them both in the ass,”; “Without us you would be raped, beaten and killed for nothing,”; and “Don’t worry, you or your friends are too ugly to be put on the black market.”

Jill Filipovic, a 23-year-old law student who also writes on the popular blog, Feministe, recently had some photographs of her uploaded and subjected to abusive comments on an online forum for students in New York. “The people who were posting comments about me were speculating as to how many abortions I’ve had, and they talked about ‘hate-fucking’ me,” says Filipovic. “I don’t think a man would get that; the harassment of women is far more sexualised – men may be told that they’re idiots, but they aren’t called ‘whores’.”

Most disturbing is how accepted this is. When women are harassed on the street, it is considered inappropriate. Online, though, sexual harassment is not only tolerated – it’s often lauded. Blog threads or forums where women are attacked attract hundreds of comments, and their traffic rates rocket.

Is this what people are really like? Sexist and violent? Misogynist and racist? Alice Marwick, a postgraduate student in New York studying culture and communication, says: “There’s the disturbing possibility that people are creating online environments purely to express the type of racist, homophobic, or sexist speech that is no longer acceptable in public society, at work, or even at home.”

Last year I had my own run-in with online sexism when I was invited to a lunch meeting with Bill Clinton, along with a handful of other bloggers. After the meeting, a group photo of the attendees with Clinton was posted on several websites, and it wasn’t long before comments about my appearance (“Who’s the intern?; “I do like Gray Shirt’s three-quarter pose.”) started popping up.

One website, run by law professor and occasional New York Times columnist Ann Althouse, devoted an entire article to how I was “posing” so as to “make [my] breasts as obvious as possible”. The post, titled “Let’s take a closer look at those breasts,” ended up with over 500 comments. Most were about my body, my perceived whorishness, and how I couldn’t possibly be a good feminist because I had the gall to show up to a meeting with my breasts in tow. One commenter even created a limerick about me giving oral sex. Althouse herself said that I should have “worn a beret . . . a blue dress would have been good too”. All this on the basis of a photograph of me in a crew-neck sweater from Gap.

I won’t even get into the hundreds of other blogs and websites that linked to the “controversy.” It was, without doubt, the most humiliating experience of my life – all because I dared be photographed with a political figure.

But a picture does seem to be considered enough reason to go on a harassment rampage. Some argue that the increased visibility afforded people by the internet – who doesn’t have a blog, MySpace page, or Flickr account these days? – means that harassment should be expected, even acceptable. When feminist and liberal bloggers slammed Althouse for her attack on me, she argued that having been in a photo where I was “posing” made me fair game. When Filipovic complained about her harassment, the site responded: “For a woman who has made 4,000 pictures of herself publicly available on Flickr, and who is a self-proclaimed feminist author of a widely-disseminated blog, she has gotten pretty shy about overexposure.”

Ah, the “she was asking for it” defence.”I think there’s a tendency to put the blame on the victims of stalking, harassment or even sexual violence when the victim is a woman – and especially when she’s a woman who has made herself public,” says Filipovic. “Public space has traditionally been reserved for men, and women are supposed to be quiet.”

Sierra thinks that online threats, even if they are coming from a small group of people, have tremendous potential to scare women from fully participating online. “How many rape/fantasy threats does it take to make women want to lay low? Not many,” she says.

But even women who don’t put their pictures or real names online are subject to virtual harassment. A recent study showed that when the gender of an online username appears female, they are 25 times more likely to experience harassment. The study, conducted by the University of Maryland, found that female user-names averaged 163 threatening and/or sexually explicit messages a day.

“The promise of the early internet,” says Marwick, “was that it would liberate us from our bodies, and all the oppressions associated with prejudice. We’d communicate soul-to-soul, and get to know each other as people, rather than judging each other based on gender or race.” In reality, what ended up happening was that, online, the default identity became male and white – unless told otherwise, you would assume you were talking to a white man. “So people who brought up their ethnicity, or people who complained about sexism in online communications, were seen as ‘playing the race/gender card’ or trying to stir up trouble,” says Marwick.

And while online harassment doesn’t necessarily create the same immediate safety concerns as street harassment, the consequences are arguably more severe. If someone calls you a “slut” on the street, it stings – but you can move on. If someone calls you a “slut” online, there’s a public record as long as the site exists.

Let me tell you, it’s not easy to build a career as a feminist writer when you have people coming up to you in pubs asking if you’re the “Clinton boob girl” or if one of the first items that comes up in a Google search of your name is “boobgate”. And for young women applying for jobs, the reality is terrifying. Imagine a potential employer searching for information and coming across a thread about what a “whore” you are.

Thankfully, women are fighting back. Sparked by the violent harassment of Sierra, one blogger started a “stop cyberbullying” campaign. This was picked up by hundreds of other bloggers and an international women’s technology organisation, Take Back the Tech, a global network of women who encourage people to “take back online spaces” by writing, video blogging, or podcasting about online harassment.

It won’t mean the end of misogyny on the web, but it is a start. Such campaigns show that women are ready to demand freedom from harassment and fear in our new public spaces. In the same way that we should be able to walk down the street without fear of being raped, women shouldn’t have to stay quiet online – or pretend to be men – to be free of threats and harassment. It is time to take back the sites.

Perhaps Lowbrow should redraft?

Seriously though, someone needs to tell Jonathan Davis that childhood rape victims only get one cathartic release of emotional anguish. As near as I can tell he’s been milking the same childhood trauma for songwriting material for over 10 years now.

Yeah. Right. What a f**kwitted idea.

I KNOW that’s not true. It’s taken me 10 years to *begin* to come to terms with my sexuality after I was date raped at 18. I can’t *imagine* the horrible trauma a child would suffer (and that’s only assuming there was one incident of rape).

I’m glad that wasn’t actually posted by someone here. I’d have been SO tempted to castigate them publicly.

Glad you caught the “HE wasn’t threatened with rape, his TWO-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER was”. Patriarchal privilege in action: The thought of threatening rape to a man is so preposterous that they have to threaten a toddler. *grrrrrrr*

Idiots that say fallacies such as this need to experience the realities from the other side, that of the violation being done to them. I would bet they would then change their tone and attitudes fairly quickly.

I am appalled that rape is now interwoven into video games as part of entertainment. Male violence and sexual violence is largely conditioning, not innate. If I believed otherwise, my strategy as a feminist would not be to try and change the attitudes of males and society, but instead develop a bio-chemical weapon that would target the Y-chromosome, killing the male of the species.

Worldwide, millions of women (and children) are raped every day. Feminism does not create ‘man haters’, men do, by their actions. Rape is not sex, not sport, not entertainment, and certainly not a joking matter.

I hear them all the time.

http: //www.somethingawful.com/d/news/rape-is-funny.php

Actually, let’s search the SA archives for “Rape” and see what shows up:

Rape is such a harsh term. I won’t dispute that rape happens and it’s bad, but every Canadian knows when a woman goes out on a date with a man she is entering into a verbal contract to be sedated and sodomized before the night is over.

I promise not to rape you for your opinion if you promise not to rape my pets.

go have sex with the guy because he probably put drugs in your drink and is going to knock you out and rape you (date rape, but still rape)

Seriously though, someone needs to tell Jonathan Davis that childhood rape victims only get one cathartic release of emotional anguish. As near as I can tell he’s been milking the same childhood trauma for songwriting material for over 10 years now.

There were something like 500 results, too, and that’s just for rape. Now, Lowtax and his writers can say whatever they want about this being “satire”, but for Christ’s sake, of course their fanbase is going to get the idea that it’s OK to make light of rape if the site publishes material like this. And his defense that this is just “what people do online” doesn’t cut it, either. I have, in my time, been involved heavily in about a dozen sizeable online communities, and none of them let this stuff happen, because the moderators – which, at one point, included myself – made it clear that this kind of behaviour wasn’t acceptable. It’s what people do on sites that let them do it. He could run a site where the forum never got to the stage where people are buying offensive custom titles for a rape survivor in the first place. He doesn’t.

No, SA is not the only source of this kind of attitude on the internet. There will always be idiots sending barely-literate emails about how they’re going to kill you for not liking Final Fantasy 7 (I speak from personal experience). But validating the behaviour of online abusers by framing it as a battle for free speech against humourless old fuddy-duddies will encourage it, regardless of how flippantly you treat the issue.

Also, this…

I can’t imagine he was anything other than exceeding badly misinformed and blinded by his distrust of the media on this issue.

…probably is true, or at the least the first part, since his “distrust of the media” involved him believing they cared more about women than men, which smacks of self-pity that borders on delusional. He could have read virtually any other article on Sierra and gotten the full story instead of “Blogger receives death threats, cancels workshop”, but apparently couldn’t be bothered doing a few minutes extra research before blasting Sierra and “the media” for not being as smart as him and his readers.

But the problem isn’t whether or not he meant to marginalise Sierra and any other female bloggers who’ve suffered this kind of abuse – and Sierra isn’t the worst example by any means – it’s that he did. And he did it on an incredibly popular site that encourages flaming, abuse, total insensitivity to others and all-around bigotry because it’s “just a joke”. Best case scenario is that nobody was paying attention. Worst case scenario is that their attitude gets even worse. And there’s thousands of them.

I mean, just the other day he was expressing incredulity that he had recieved complaints from several forum members that the insulting custom titles they had bought for another member, a victim of multiple rapes, had been removed.

his readers who are probably going to take his opinions wholesale, assimilate them as their own and become secondary Lowtaxs

This is the real problem with sites like SA. “I can afford to be totally insensitive about X, therefore anybody who cares about X is just overreacting and we should make fun of them” is giving your readers a license to treat everybody like shit, regardless of whether or not you occasionally tut-tut about it. Of course Lowtax and his staff are on record saying that they “don’t condone” their readers launching attacks on other sites; their names and email addresses are plastered all over the place, and because of this we can hold them directly accountable. But when it comes to their thousands of readers, all bets are off, since they’re just a bunch of nameless, faceless cyberthugs who don’t have to answer to anybody.

Urgh.

And it’s the same attitude that informed the repulsive crap I ended up quitting my old blog over, even though the people involved seriously thought themselves superior to SA trolls. Straight white middle-class 20something men don’t have to worry about being raped, ergo anybody who takes rape seriously just needs to lighten up and stop being so damn sexist!

What I don’t understand is how certain individuals can talk themselves into believing any of this weird 1984 think in the first place. How can it not ring hollow? It boggles my mind!

This is when I stopped giving Lowtax the benefit of the doubt. I used to think he was just trying to be to funny and didn’t consider the ways in which his writing reinforced some pretty disgusting beliefs, since he also wrote his fair share of sarcastic video game reviews and absurdist comedy that didn’t seem to be pushing any kind of agenda. But, on the basis of that post, it looks like he genuinely believes in that whole “It’s so hard to be a straight white American male” crap, which makes him calling Sierra a “big baby” even harder to swallow. Truly the Fred Durst of online comedy.

Also, new reader! Hi

Also, harassment and threats of harm are absolutely illegal here too and it now stretches to all media, including email, comments and text messages, therefore he is so wrong in saying that no crime has been commited.

What was the point in him even passing comment on what happened to Kathy Sierra – what is there of consequence in relation to him? No he just wanted to cause a stink and publish his twisted outlook to the world, ie his readers who are probably going to take his opinions wholesale, assimilate them as their own and become secondary Lowtaxs. What a f**king hateful, bigot!

I’m so glad you’re posting about these things Richie!

“Because nobody would have directed this kind of behaviour toward a man in the first place, maybe? NOPE! It’s because the media is just so biased toward women.”

What I don’t understand is how certain individuals can talk themselves into believing any of this weird 1984 think in the first place. How can it not ring hollow? It boggles my mind!

Thanks for a terrific analysis of the situation, in all its insanity.