I remember when I was an administrator on Wikipedia, many years ago, there was a website called Perverted-Justice (PeeJ, I think). There was some sort of dispute about it, I can't recall what it was about.
However, my online identity and a lot of other admins were accused of paedophillia. When I had pointed out that I had severely curtailed a number of people from the then "Boy Love" article (ew), they retracted it from my username.
It's very, very easy to destroy someone's reputation online. But if you get caught doing so, I hope you get everything you sow!
>A lawsuit was always an option. Websites aren't liable for what their users do, but it’s possible to subpoena for the identity of your online harasser and haul him or her into court on civil charges like defamation or intentional infliction of emotional distress. But Chen and Hamm didn’t want to spend more time, money or energy on the problem. They just wanted it to go away.
A lawsuit is precisely how you make it "go away". Yes, the police should have pursued the criminal complaint, but lacking official action private action should be taken.
The internet is relentless, and as soon as you hit foreign jurisdictions, you're bound to fail. Governments, the MAFIAA and dozens other organizations have tried and failed for over a decade to shut down TPB - do you really think a mere human stands the chance to ever stop the Internet from trolling her?!
This is not a well-funded industry with an engineering staff, it is a single lunatic. Subpoena a list of IP addresses from hosting companies, then subpoena the ISPs responsible for those addresses, then have the local police put the kibosh on the lunatics. Yes, it is possible that the lunatic uses a cloaked Internet connection and has flawless op-sec, but the odds are that he is just another raving schizo who can barely remember to pay the electric bill.
Yes, thank you. The lunatics of whom you speak utterly rely on the shadows in which they hide. The article makes it seem as though minimal effort has been put into pursuing the attacker, which is maddening if true. Libel and defamation are very much actionable in the U.S., especially as civil matters.
Who's harrasing her and her associates and defenders is probably single semi-skilled no-life. You don't need courts. You need a single decent hacker to dox the guy, order him some weed on silkroad successor and call the cops on him.
Do you want police and courts in your internet? I don't. It's enough we have government spies and government malware here.
She was explictly told by google to sort this out herself and police ignored her. Civil lawsuit? I don't think she's rich enough to provide for all the lawers.
Besides did I say anything about justice or punishing the guy? I was talking about problem solving.
So doing a Google search for the subject's former boyfriend (the one wrongly accused of rape, just by association with her), this Blogger post still lies as the third highest
It strikes me as pretty obvious link-abuse, the kind that I thought Google's algorithm would squash, but apparently not. It's good practice to own your own name and domain...but in his case, the victim's own Harvard bio page is ranked lower than this one-use blog
"It's good practice to own your own name and domain"
Good luck with that. Subdomains make that basically impossible; even large, established corporations with big branding budgets have difficulty with this.
The real problem here is that people still think that if they see something written down, it must be true. People might as well be reading The Weekly World News, though the kind of harassment described here would be well below the standards of WWN.
> Good luck with that. Subdomains make that basically impossible; even large, established corporations with big branding budgets have difficulty with this.
It's not only anonymous harrassers causing problems - for example, I've had a few magazines (2 mainstream owned by the same outlet and 1 industry magazine) in my country campaign against my name recently, after our company pointed out illegal price fixing in the industry. Now the top google (and bing) results for my name are 2-3 such articles in magazines with otherwise decent reputation, previously my personal web page, facebook page (with 0 friends 0 comments), old university web pages and various old programming projects were the rop results. How do I "clear my name" other than being more active on the web, using my own name (I haven't bothered to blog or post stuff online for various reasons, one of them is that my personal life doesn't belong there), or hiring SEO experts to push more neutral content to the top? I guess I'll just sit it out ...
You're absolutely spot on...the problem is that we often don't have time or motivation to challenge what we see...which is why headline-writing can so easily color opinions of an entire article body. Even in this case, even when I knew this blog post was part of a smear campaign, some reflex in me instinctively mused, "Hmm, maybe this guy is bad...look at all the words devoted to him".
Now imagine any given employer or background-checker seeing this, without the context of the OP...what are the chances that they'll be skeptical of the smear campaign?
But because as humans, we have limited time/energy/patience...computers and sound algorithms really are one of our best allies in rooting this kind of thing out. I'm just surprised that Google's ranker hadn't already flagged this...It's a single-post blog with a circle-jerk of links to other single-use blogs, with the kind of keyword stuffing that was common in the AltaVista days...and I'm pretty sure the text is verbatim from other such smear sites. Isn't that enough penalty to take the site down from the top of the SERPs?
I would rather see a system based on digital signatures, with keys tied to identities. If you are checking someone's reputation you should be able to check the identity of people who are making claims about them -- are they former employers, jilted lovers, or did they choose to remain anonymous? I want to know what former employers and coworkers have to say; I do not want to know what an ex-boyfriend masquerading as a former coworker says. If we could establish a mentality of checking for a signature from a verifiable key before assuming that a statement is true it would go a long way toward solving this problem.
Of course, this comes with problems as well. How do you verify public keys? Web of trust systems do not seem to work in practice; people do not have the time. A CA model would allow a central authority to silence people who say the wrong things by denying them verification. The system cannot be like SSH, because you need a way to verify keys from people you have not yet contacted.
I agree that search engines should be working toward a solution, but in this case that would not have been enough. This stalker went as far as sending messages to the victims' employers.
This article ties in with the recent Block change on Twitter. See all that vile material posted? Now imagine having that tweeted to you on a daily basis from multiple fake accounts. This is why the change to Block mattered. Because of vile driven sociopaths of the type displayed in that article.
As much as I can't stand a lot of the ultra-extremist feminists out there in the internet, this kind of behaviour (doxxing, cyberhunting) is beyond unacceptable, it's dangerous to society.
Anyone who ever has engaged in "slut shaming" or whatever the current term is for hunting down/doxxing activists, please go, take a 9mm and shoot yourself.
And to Google/FB: please, make it possible for victims of doxxing/cyberhunts to contact a real human in your organization who has the authority and ability to track and remove such abusive content.
What is an ultra-extreme feminist? Given that feminism is the advocation of social and political equality twixt genders, what is extreme feminism? What's the difference between social and political equality, and extreme social and political equality? How can two things that are equal be even more equal?
I'm referring to the kind of people like Alice Schwarzer, who thinks for example that all prostitution is inherently bad for the women and that there cannot be anyone working in prostitution out of his/her own will, or those "womyn" folks who think they have to change the word "woman" because it contains "man"... this is just ridiculous.
Also, by providing just-for-women courses in tech, for example, you're creating an inequality for men at the same time... you can't fight men-focusing with only focusing on women.
Well that's not feminism. Sounds like someone who wants to discredit feminism has hung a whole lot of other things on it, hoping to slur feminism by association.
The first one - thinking that all prostitution is inherently bad for the women and that there cannot be anyone working in prostitution out of his/her own will - is basically a mandatory part of being feminist here in the UK. Essentially every major feminist activist organisation thinks this way, and they refuse to accept groups or individuals who disagree as feminists. If you go looking for a feminist group near you, you'll find a list set up by UK Feminista, a joint effort between all the major feminist organisations which refuses to list any group which doesn't think this way. Oh, and they're the feminists who have all the contacts in the press, which they use to smear women who disagree with them.
Interestingly, I've basically never seen anyone refuse to accept feminists who think this way as feminists, except when it's inconvenient for some argument they're making about feminism being all sunshine and roses and equality. The net effect of this is that nominally reasonable feminists - like presumably yourself - are actually supporting these extremists by protecting them from criticism.
While you are correct that people looking to discredit feminism often cast aspersions and claim that xyz behavior is the work of the feminist movement, which it is clearly not, there are plenty of self proclaimed feminists who are nutters. I doubt they want to discredit feminism, but by their acts they certainly fall into what people might call "extreme feminism". I call them what they are, which is man hating. Feminism (as I know it) is about establishing both sexes on equal footing.
A prime example of the nutters below; If you are not familiar with Dworkin, she is famous for many stupid, stupid things.
"In the book, she argues that all heterosexual sex in our patriarchal society is coercive and degrading to women, and sexual penetration may by its very nature doom women to inferiority and submission, and "may be immune to reform""
What can I say. All I have is a stack of dictionaries to check. Your beloved Wikipedia itself begins its feminism article "Feminism is a collection of movements and ideologies aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights" which agrees with the dictionaries I have and also with the simple definition I used above. If you think that using that definition means I'm guilty of No True Scotsman, our methods of rationality are so far apart that we are literally incapable of communicating.
Take another look at the definition you cited. Feminism is a collection of movements and ideologies aimed at defining...equal political, economic, and social rights. All you are doing is excluding people whose definitions of "equality" you think are too extreme using a classic No True Scotsman argument.
Arguing this angle is pointless. I'm a marxist, and so face the same battle of the tons of people who use the term in a completely different way to myself. Including people who self-identify as marxists.
I've had conversations with people who also considered themselves marxists where our only point of agreement was that in "their" ideal society I'd probably be considered a criminal dissident, and would probably be involved in armed uprisings, and that they'd very much enjoy to see me locked up.
For a while I tried to fight the "wrong" usage of the term and related terms. Then I thought about picking other terms myself.
But eventually I realized that what worked best was simply to acknowledge the "wrong" usage, and distance myself in suitable way depending on what I write. E.g. by also using a more descriptive term, such as liberal socialist or left-communist, that most people either know or have to look up, that does not have the same immediate connotations.
As Friedman said, the ultimate end is the search for the acceptable means, and I think your little exchange highlights this pretty well.
Turns out, ideologies are rather good at branding themselves to appeal to all kinds of people, and at first blush, most ideologies sound eminently reasonable. That in no way implies that the actions of adherents to such ideologies are the same, or that the overall structure of the ideology couldn't lead to disagreeable outcomes.
The whole declaring equality and rights for all is the easy bit; that's just the ultimate end. The means, the dirty work of "defining, establishing, and defending", is where everything can and does go to hell. Feminists are just as susceptible to this problem as everyone else, and when they get it especially wrong, they create the blowback you are seeing.
It's the extremists who self-identify as feminists who create that association, not "someone who wants to discredit feminism".
While it is disingenuous of critics to treat those as representative of feminism in general, it is equally disingenuous for feminists to act like they don't exist.
> Given that feminism is the advocation of social and political equality twixt genders, what is extreme feminism?
People who don't define it that way. Or people who (as in pretty much any controversity) feel compelled to see everyone who doesn't agree with them as an enemy to be taken down.
The normal term is 'radical feminism'. Andrea Dworkin for example has said:
"Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women"
From her Wikipedia page:
In the book, she argues that all heterosexual sex in our patriarchal society is coercive and degrading to women, and sexual penetration may by its very nature doom women to inferiority and submission, and "may be immune to reform".[59]
Wikipedia citation for that is a b Dworkin. "Occupation/Collaboration". Intercourse. Retrieved February 14, 2013.
Well, if we're going to just redefine words we can say anything. I hate those ultra-vegetarians insisting that static typing is the only way to go.
In the face of people redefining words to mean whatever they want, all I can do is suggest that without a clear definition, communication becomes meaningless anyway because I will just redefine "feminist" to mean "a kind of blancmange popular in the former Yugoslavia", so in the absence of anything better I'll use a series of dictionaries as my first stop. In this instance, they're pretty clear on the definition.
The goal for some self-proclaimed feminists is not gender equality, but raising women above men. They still call themselves feminists for political reasons, so some deserve the hate.
> Given that feminism is the advocation of social and political equality twixt genders,
I'm afraid that isn't actually given.
That is your working definition, however, over the years there have been numerous "waves" of feminism and numerous often contradictory interpretations of what feminism and, even equality means.
Andrea Dworkin for example identified as a feminist, and is identified by some others as such, yet has written extensively about things that are far from simple equality. (Quite frankly, in some cases, anti male hate-speech)
Erin Pizzey, the founder of UK's first domestic violence shelter for women received bomb and death threats when she realised that equal protection from dv meant men should have shelters too. The self identified feminists who campaigned against her did not have the same definition of equality.
Even online dictionaries disagree with you on the meaning of feminism.
Google define feminism and you'll see that it says that it is the advocation of women's rights with respect to men.
Equality is in the definition, but what it leaves out is the acknoedgement that there are some conditions where women have significant advantage over men.
There are branches of (self proclaimed?) feminism that have different interpretations of that.
There are some branches that blame men for all the worlds woes.
Some that say a woman could never have as much privilege as a man.
The definition of feminism is so diluted as to be virtually meaningless without secondary descriptors.
What 'wave' or type of feminist? Radical? Radical trans exclusionary? Sex positive? Second wave? Third wave?
I'm sorry, I can't accept that "feminism means"
Why what about the campaign "feminism is simply the belief that women are people"?
Yet another definition.
Stienham through Paglia to Hanna Roisin (who recently declared men not equal but obsolete), feminism means a lot of things.
The sad part is a lot of contemporary feminists on the web think in very similar terms as this crackpot. They're histrionic and have discarded all forms of critical thinking in favor of their emotions. This type of thinking, which is not motivated by facts and reason, leads to statements like those of Irigaray.
Sometimes feminism, as practiced by those who call themselves feminists, is the advocation of social and political equality regarding areas where women are disadvantaged, ignoring and even opposing those areas where men are disadvantaged.
Source: here's[0] the best example I've seen, skip to minute two to see a man get physically prevented from entering a talk about some men's issues. You can also watch the actual event[1] and decide for yourself if it was or was not misogynist. You can also read about Warren Farrell, the speaker, and decide for yourself if he is for or against rape.
I am a feminist by your definition, but I am also concerned with, e.g., statistically more men seem to commit suicide and thought that talk was interesting, so those feminists in the video might say I was a rape apologist.
Not only do feminists who hate trans people exist, from what I can tell they're more widely supported and considered more feminist than trans women who criticise them for it. Even some of the more prominent trans feminists[1] think that way, presumably because the ones that don't get rather less support from other feminists.
[1] See for instance Natalie Reed's blog post: http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/12/13/complicit... Bear in mind that Cathy Brennan publicly outs trans women, encourages others to harass them, contacts their workplaces in order to try and get fired and their doctors in order to get them denied treatment. Somehow this is less objectionable - and more feminist - than the people she's targetting complaining about it.
Yes, they exist. I Follow people on Twitter who have made me aware of that issue. There's one prominent columnist in particular whose name I can't recall that seems to have it in for trans people and restrooms, for example.
Yes, the range of people with radically divergent, often incompatible, and sometimes nearly diametrically opposed views fighting for control of the word "feminism" is pretty broad.
You see the same thing with, say, "socialism". Or "Christianity". Or, really, lots of other things.
"Feminism" is sometimes somewhat more problematic than many of the rest because, for a variety of reasons, there hasn't been as much development of secondary terminology that is less contentious which helps discuss and identify the various competing factions clearly, so, when we try to discuss them, we end up having to say things like "Feminists who believe x, y, and z" and then half or more the discussion gets sidetracked into an argument of whether or not belief x, y, or z is necessary to, compatible with, or opposed to "true feminism" and whether, therefore, it is correct to use "feminist" to describe people with that view (or, OTOH, whether it is redundant to qualify "feminist" with reference to those beliefs.)
It starts out that way. But then it turns out that to achieve equality, you mostly need to improve women's position in society. And then people only remember the second part and forget about the equality thing.
Lena Chen and Kathy Sierra shouldn't be mentioned in the same article.
Kathy Sierra was attacked for being female. She did nothing that would cause people to attack her, except for being a successful woman. It was disgusting, unprovoked, and utterly wrong.
Lena Chen didn't deserve what happened to her, but she courted the attention in a way that a mature and psychologically sound woman wouldn't. She ran a blog called Sex and the Ivy. I'm sorry, but if you write a blog whose title says, "I'm in the most privileged 2% of the population, I have lots of sex", you're putting a target on yourself. Maybe the world shouldn't be that way, but it is. There are reasons why adults keep their sex lives private (and non-adults, regardless of chronological age, shouldn't be having sex).
I don't think she deserves "slut-shaming" at this point, and the men involved in the revenge porn clearly belong in jail. Anyway, she's been in a long-term relationship (with Hamm) for years, and she's clearly trying to better herself and recover from the mess she made of her college years (and the additional mess others worked to make of her life). And the last thing a person with an obvious biological mental illness needs is for a bunch of cowardly, anonymous, asswipes on the Internet to make it worse by tearing her down.
Where the anger rightfully belongs is on a culture, not on specific people or a gender. The Sex and the City fake feminism (it's actually one of the least feminist TV shows out there) is horrifying, but people like Chen should be left alone to work out their problems in as much peace as they can have.
This is a strange topic because I know exactly where that male anger comes from. The culture of casual sex (in high schools, colleges, and some professional circles) has broken down respect between the genders. It leads naturally to pre-monogamous, primitive, dysgenic, and in practice anti-feminist social patterns and has divided men between an "alpha" contingent who objectify and degrade women, and an "omega" contingent (cyberstalkers, doxxers) who hate them. It's a hideous culture based on social status and acquisitiveness ("Game") and it's left a large number of people (men and women both) unable to form mature relationships.
Most male misogynists are in what I would call the Misogyny Loop. (There's probably a Misandry Loop for heterosexual women.) Because they have negative and false beliefs about women (i.e. "all women are whores who fall for Game") they end up meeting and dating only damaged women, and the sampling confirms their incorrect (and, from our perspective, socially unacceptable) beliefs.
The real enemy, though, is a specific culture created by the worst of men and the worst of women. Sex and the City feminism is based on lowering moral standards for women (i.e. women should be able to behave like the worst 5% of men without consequence) when the real goal should be to raise moral standards for men.
I want to make it clear that I have no sympathy whatsoever for the 1% of men who engage in cyberstalking and doxxing. I do feel slightly bad for the 39% who have been led astray into casual misogyny by a fucked-up and perverted culture. (But I feel much worse for non-participating, innocent women like Kathy Sierra.)
It leads naturally to pre-monogamous, primitive, dysgenic, and in practice anti-feminist social patterns and has divided men between an "alpha" contingent who objectify and degrade women, and an "omega" contingent (cyberstalkers, doxxers) who hate them.
Lots of big words, but always the same adolescent logic: "the culture" somehow prevents male nerds from dating. So it's no surprise that they abuse women.
How is it that so many of us manage to actually grow up? Most of the male nerds I know today have families. It's because there is no such thing as an "alpha" or an "omega". Those are concepts are invented and reinvented in different contexts to let people off the hook for their own thoughts and actions. It's not about taking personal responsibility for... what, being on the same Internet as a person who wrote a sex blog? --- no, it's that they're omegas victimized by a culture that promotes Game.
Horseshit.
The problem as I see it is much simpler. Variance in human cognitive ability ensures that there will always be people damaged enough to harm others purely out of blind, undirected malice. The Internet (a) creates an affordance that makes harassing women the simplest way to do that and (b) amplifies them. You don't need a conspiracy theory about "Game" and "alphas" and "omegas" to understand what's happening; people that used to spend their lives living in their grandparents basement torturing animals for fun now spend that time doing something else online.
What I don't understand is the urge others have to rationalize their behavior.
I didn't read that the same way you did. I don't think GP was using "culture" as an excuse for anyone's behaviour; rather I read it as a suggestion that maybe in addition to personal culpability, there are cultural problems in place which perpetuate/encourage/condone bad behaviour. Doesn't sound like horseshit to me, at least not in the obvious sense which you seem to suggest. (FWIW, I might also forego the "alpha/omega" labels, but that's a small nit to pick.)
The last part of your comment almost seems orthogonal to that; "whether or not there is a problematic culture in place, there are also crazy people alive, and the internet gives them a platform".
If there's a cultural problem, it's the one that suggests that having a hard time finding a date when you're 17 (or 24) is a problem that implicates all of society and can be expected to motivate a hatred of women.
The person we're talking about on this thread did nothing worse than write a blog about a topic that makes certain people feel uncomfortable. In return, she was the victim of a concerted and unrelenting campaign of harassment. And what the commenter we're replying to has to say about this is that he thinks she might be mentally ill, and, if nothing else, surely provoked the harassment by writing. That would be a contemptible sentiment if it wasn't instead alarming evidence of a real problem within the commenter.
I think you might be letting your opinions about 'michaelochurch unfairly affect the way you parsed his comment. You have to read pretty deeply between the lines (and his mentions of "alpha"/"omega"/"Game") to get to any point about "having a hard time finding a date". What he does directly refer to is "a culture of casual sex" and although I'm far from a prude and ideologically believe that what happens in someone's bedroom is their own business, I don't think it's "horseshit" to suggest that a culture of casual sex (or even a culture which glorified that idea, without it necessarily being a reflection of the way things actually are) could negatively affect social norms with regard to male-female interactions.
I also take issue with the assumptions 'michaelochurch has made about the mental welfare of someone who is completely foreign to me (and presumably, him, and... you?) and if that was your only original issue, you should have said so. (Then again, it could be argued that you repeatedly make assumptions about his mental welfare publicly, so I guess that would have been a strange comment for you to make.)
As an aside: if we really think someone on the internet is crazy, we can nicely suggest to them one time that they may want to speak to a professional (which I know you have already done in this case, and in an admirable fashion). After that, for a foreign commenter on a message board, the remaining options are to a) engage with the content of their posts or b) ignore them. Replying to each of their comments in disagreement without actually coming up with a good reason is what I took issue with here (not that there weren't good reasons to disagree with GP, just that I didn't think you chose one) and, of course, making further commentary about them frequently also seems problematic to me.
I actually read quite a few posts on her blog. She wasn't just writing about sex. She was writing about people she was with, sometimes in intimate detail.
No one sane has any problem with sex columnists, who write about the topic in general. "[Identifiable person] has weird genitalia" is another.
If you read the comment carefully again, its author is not excusing this kind of behaviour, but simply saying that he/she understands where this kind of behaviour is coming from.
The comment takes pains to separate Lena Chen, who provoked her harassment (by writing a blog that the commenter disapproves of), from Kathy Sierra, who is at least pure of heart. Later downthread, the same commenter diagnoses Lena Chen as mentally ill. No, I don't think I've misread the comment.
> Later downthread, the same commenter diagnoses Lena Chen as mentally ill.
Right, just like you have a habit of casually, publicly diagnosing michaelochurch as mentally ill (I think this is the fourth time I've seen you do this just in the last 2 months).
Anyway, small nitpick: Lena actually did have mental illnesses. On her blog she's spoken of substance abuse, self-image issues she had, paraphilia etc.
Writing a sex blog isn't evidence of mental illness. You know what Michael O. Church meant when he wrote that she might have been mentally ill, but you pretend that his point was ambiguous, because the reality of what he said is inconvenient to your argument.
>she courted the attention in a way that a mature and psychologically sound woman wouldn't.
You just justified the attacks on her, which was the entire point of the article, saying that no attacks are justified, regardless of the situation.
She was studying sociology and gender theory. As a woman I appreciate it when other woman have the courage to write about their lives in public, it enriches our own understanding of ourselves. If we all kept to ourselves there would be less information, especially for young woman whose lives are complicated (like young men).
Anyone has a right to keep a blog about anything she wants, using her real name, and not be attacked for it. The issue here is that people are posting vitriol about others, on sites where there is no allowance for rebuttal.
I just read a book about the Victorian-era, where it was fairly common to complain in the local newspaper about someone else, and the ethics of the papers allowed the attackee to issue a rebuttal in the same issue.
> You just justified the attacks on her, which was the entire point of the article, saying that no attacks are justified, regardless of the situation.
No, he didn't. I have a daughter who I instruct to dress in a way that covers most of her body. This does not mean that I am justifying rapes that happen because some lustful men are aroused by scantily-clad women, it simply means I observed and recognized the reality of the situation, and realized that dressing in a certain way reduces the chance of an incident. The fact that there are men out there who are unable to control their urges is a separate thing (that we of course should be talking about as a society). Likewise, michaelochurch made an observation on what is a good strategy to reduce the chances of being hurt. He explicitly went on to mention that he wishes the reality of things weren't this way.
Is today 'purposely misread/ignore the point of posts and make a flippant content-less one-line reply' day or something? I'm a strong supporter of affirmative action programs, I go out of my way to get women and girls interested in programming, and I consider myself to be a feminist. I'm interested in getting results, and making practical and smart decisions for the day-by-day happenings.
As for you - please stop being this way, stop with the snippy replies, stop polarizing the crowds, what you're doing is unproductive. Step away from the keyboard and think about what you're doing here.
If you were to say, don't walk through the ghetto flashing your Rolex or you might be mugged, no one would consider that a controversial statement, not a justification for mugging.
It's only when sex is involved that people get a little weird.
No, it is when people makes statements that assumes we're living in a kind of environment that we refuse to accept we are living in.
And most of us are not living in places where "covering up" is a way to avoid rape.
Not least because the vast majority of rapes are date rapes, carried out by people known to the victim, not carried out by strangers. Covering up when going out is thus not advice that actually protects women in a noteworthy way.
If the intent is actually to protect women rather than to exert moralistic control over them and their sexual expression, we should expect said men to be more concerned about said women's boyfriends, spouses or other male friends, not worrying about the lengths of their skirts.
Do you keep your door locked? Yes? Why should you? After all, it's not you who needs to guard your property, it's the thieves who should be told to stop stealing!
This is the exact same logic a lot of contemporary postmodern feminists use in arguments concerning rape. It's not about bondage and discipline, it's about risk management.
You just justified the attacks on her, which was the entire point of the article, saying that no attacks are justified, regardless of the situation.
No. I think she was immature and probably mentally ill. Biological mental illness deserves compassion and treatment, not vitriol from anonymous cowards.
I'm not saying that the attacks on her were justified. I'm saying they were predictable.
I live in Baltimore. I'm in a nice neighborhood. Two miles north of me? Dangerous urban decay. I should be able to walk around at 3:30 am in any part of the city-- any part of the world, really-- without fearing physical harm. But that's not the world we live in, now is it?
no attacks are justified, regardless of the situation.
Where on earth do you get the mental illness from? Teenagers are not 'mentally ill' because they do things that older folks consider unwise. There is a difference between having different beliefs and having unhealthy beliefs.
Here's the issue. Kathy Sierra was attacked without provocation. Lena Chen used her sexuality in the public to gain attention (and, to a degree, social power).
My levels of sympathy are different. Kathy Sierra was the lawful driver hit by a drunk. Lena Chen was the 120-mph speeder who ended up in a crash. Everyone speeds, and no one "deserves" to be in a crash for driving 120mph, but the laws of physics are not so kind.
If we have to choose between enforcing DUI laws and redoing all our roads to make 120mph safe (which may not even be possible given the limits of most cars) then I'm going to take the former.
The "Game" culture of casual sex-- and it's important to note that it's the culture and not the sex that is so revolting; sex that isn't in other peoples' face is none of anyone else's business-- has damaged respect between the genders and proven itself to be generally toxic. The prudent thing for a young woman to do is distance herself from it entirely, date respectable men, and have a private sex life existing in the context of monogamous relationships. If you're offended by the prior sentence, then switch the genders (or extend it to gays) and note that it's equally valid. I would advise a son not to have casual sex (false rape accusations, emotional problems that can afflict both men and women, reputation risks) just as fervently as a daughter. It's just a horrible culture that is best avoided outright.
Where I see mental illness is in the use of the word "power" (here "social power") to confer adversarial standing to anything that makes you uncomfortable, Michael. You do that a lot. It is extremely worrisome.
In actual fact, writing a sex blog did not harm you or anyone else one iota. It was not in fact a provocation to harm the author. Rational adults can see this. You seem not to be able to. Your posts often seem like a cry for help. Please find some.
>She ran a blog called Sex and the Ivy. I'm sorry, but if you write a blog whose title says, "I'm in the most privileged 2% of the population, I have lots of sex", you're putting a target on yourself. Maybe the world shouldn't be that way, but it is.
If you replace "she" with "he" then there's no issues there. No target.
Please don't engage in this "she shouldn't have done that" bullshit. Its cause of assholes like you that when women get sexually assaulted they don't come forward. They don't want to be told they deserved it. That's what you just did, if you know it or not. They don't want to be the ones on trial for falling out of line of social ideals of female, because thats what happens.
On the contrary, if you saw a male blogger write that, you would think "asshole". There is simply is no way to boast about your wealth and popularity, regardless of gender or orientation, without coming across as obnoxious.
You might think "asshole", but there's a giant step from thinking "asshole", and maybe even writing a blog post or comment about it somewhere, to even a tiny fraction of the level of harassment she has been subjected to.
Agreed. What I do find terrible about this culture on its attitudes toward sexual misbehavior is that it's a guilt culture for men, but a shame culture for women. Guilt is feeling bad about something you did. Shame is when it's generalized to the person.
If a man does something stupid, he's told to feel bad about what he did. If a woman does something stupid sexually, she's told to feel bad about herself. That's wrong and it should change. The double standard is shitty.
I can't get on board with the Sex and the City crowd that glorifies horrible female behavior, but neither can I support the hideous double standard that exists now. The correct middle ground is not to glorify bad behavior and call it "feminist" (as the SatC people do) but for women to experience the same guilt culture (not the shame culture) that men do. It should be "that was dumb, don't do it again" (as it is for men) but not "you're a horrible person".
> Lena Chen didn't deserve what happened to her, but she courted the attention in a way that a mature and psychologically sound woman wouldn't. She ran a blog called Sex and the Ivy. I'm sorry, but if you write a blog whose title says, "I'm in the most privileged 2% of the population, I have lots of sex", you're putting a target on yourself.
Of course they have the right to say how they feel.
But if they keep saying, screaming really, for 5 years when it's not really relevant to the discussion any more and only keeps damaging her life, then it's (IMO) wrong.
> I don't think she deserves "slut-shaming" at this point
At exactly what point would someone deserve that? To me, the entire concept is entirely alien and I consider anyone that consider such behaviour tolerable at any point at all a big ass-hole that isn't fit for society.
I'm sorry, but she is partly at fault. What she essentially did was maintain a diary with all the raw details of her private life, only she did everything in public view. That's naive. She did not warrant what actually happened to her, but it was doubtlessly naive.
Radical feminists would make horrible information security consultants, now that I think of it. "Risk management is oppressive. Don't tell me to set up firewall rules and ACLs, tell crackers not to enumerate my services!"
Is the concept of personal responsibility and analyzing the situation really that hard to comprehend for these people? You can't just scream "YOLO, I'll do whatever I want!" and expect to be unharmed.
I find it quite telling that you grasp at the "radical feminist" label instantly on being called out about assigning her blame. I'm male, and frankly tend to get on the wrong side of even quite a few moderate feminists for my views.
But I find it outright disgusting when it is somehow ok to label it as "irresponsible" for a woman to write openly about sex.
I've known many women who have written openly about sex, and while all of them have run into unpleasant situations, none of it has been so bad that I would label them as "irresponsible". Brave, perhaps. Admirably tough for sticking it out.
Frankly, while she might very well have been slightly naive, for my part I doubt I'd have expected that something like this could happen. Some of it, sure. The milder stuff. But for it to keep spiralling so out of control with no action from authorities, no.
Excellent display of sympathy for the "39% [of men] who have been led astray into casual misogyny". Those poor weak lambs, unable to think for themselves.
Anyway, congratulations on reaching the upper tiers of the HN victim blaming elite. Achievement unlocked and all that.
> Lena Chen and Kathy Sierra shouldn't be mentioned in the same article.
I don't have a problem with them being mentioned together, although their cases are certainly different in substantial ways. While Chen courted attention, from what I can tell she did not specifically attempt to court controversy and profit from internet rage (though I could be wrong).
My problem is with bringing up Anita Sarkesiaan, who trolled lowest-common-denominator male videogamers on purpose to get publicity, sympathy and funding for her kickstarter project and has the audacity to claim in a TED(x) talk that it was all because she was a woman.
I think the main problem here is not that people are harassing her. The main problem is the fact that it is possible for people to be harassed in this way. There are a number of things that the people around someone have to believe for that to be possible. Beliefs that I would say are simply wrong.
My main belief here is: if you care about preventing the personal misery of people like Lena Chen and Kathy Sierra, you should not try to prevent this type of harassment with judicial or technical means. You should try to change the beliefs of people so this kind of harassment is simply not possible, which automatically results in this kind of harassment not being perpetrated (because it is pointless).
Here are some of the beliefs that are necessary ingredients for this kind of harassment to be possible:
* people are not adapted to living in a small world, where your actions can become known to, and commented on by, a vast amount of people. Given you are living in such a world, you should internalize the fact that it shouldn't matter one bit what a few random internet commentators say or think about you.
You happen to have drawn some attention and as a result not only the one lunatic in your direct environment has noticed you, but another hundred of the thousands of lunatics out there have noticed you and are vocal about that. But they are just random unknown people. They think you are a slut? Why do you care? More importantly and much more relevant to solving this: why do your friends care?
* so a reasonable concern is of course: what is the actual impact of the beliefs and statements of these unknown people on your direct environment? How many of the people you should reasonably care about have noticed? How many of those people seriously wonder whether these random people are right?
If they have noticed: people adjusted to this world wouldn't believe anything J. Random person says. They would ignore it as one set of implausible datapoints in the overload of information available these days. If anyone believes it: good to know, those people are not fit to be friends or colleagues. Someone thinks you're a slut because some random people on the internet are saying so? What kind of gullible numskull is that person? A person maladjusted to this small world.
* suppose some facts are undeniable. These are pictures of you naked. Why is that a problem? Having seen someone naked or having been seen naked should not change the way you behave towards each other. That's allowing yourself to be victimized by the puritanical standards that have become a strong factor in Western civilization over the past fifteen hundred years. If someone cares about it being possible to see you naked on the internet, then that person is at fault, not you.
* suppose some facts are really scandalous. Let's say it's evidence of a crime, but it was too long ago to prosecute. It still shouldn't matter. You aren't a few photographs or letters and anyone who believes otherwise is, again, not worth the air in his lungs. I don't care if you murdered someone thirty years ago: if you've been a decent person ever since and I have no reason to suppose you would commit such a transgression again, then I should assume you will be a decent person now.
So, tl;dr: the reason it is possible for people to be harassed in this way is because too many people care too much about opinions of random others, care too much about what other people do and commit the fundamental attribution error. Solve that and the problem goes away.
Mr Confusion, please write here your real name, let somebody make all top Google results to your name link to always new brutal lies about you, then explain us all how you can not care too much about the opinions of random others.
For the start, I'd like to know what would happen if people start down-voting your posts here, would you delete some? Would you close the account? You see, it's easier, you haven't provided your real name.
Nobody would bother to make the top search result point to new brutal lies if my friends and potential employers wouldn't care about the top search result. Which they wouldn't if they would care less about what some random persons on the other side of the world believe. Which they should if they would properly internalize how the world works these days.
I practice what I preach. I'm constantly advocating being wary of information found on the internet. I advocate not caring about what random people think. However, this way of achieving change takes a lot of time. It doesn't prevent a new incident tomorrow or next year. But maybe in 10 years.
No, primarily the people around the victim need to change. Which means beliefs in general, of everyone, need to change. That the victim would then also change is a bonus, which wouldn't even be needed anymore.
It's bizarre for you to claim my points are directed at the victim, when I'm arguing that isn't my intention.
My point is: if someone would have internalized that, what happened would be less of a problem. However, internalizing such things is more likely if everyone around you has internalized those things, which would already go a much longer way towards making what happened less of a problem.
The train of thought starts at the first point, suggests a solution, but doesn't say that only that single point is the solution. The entirety of the post suggests a solution, in which most people would not consider what happened a problem anymore. And only the entirety is the message. That single point out of context isn't.
Your "solution" is nothing more than the "just ignore it" tripe that victims already hear enough. Framing it in big words and bullet points adds no real weight.
You are knee-jerk reacting to what you perceive as victim-blaming. I am arguing that the beliefs of people need to change for it to be possible to 'just ignore it'. So yes, the solution ultimately is 'just ignore it', but because circumstances are such that ignoring it is possible. And because that is possible, it wouldn't happen in the first place. So I'm not saying either of the women mentioned could solve their current problem by 'ignoring it'.
Though experiment: suppose there were only three people in the world: you, a girl I vaguely knew and someone you both didn't know and didn't communicate with. In that case, the 'someone' couldn't possibly harass the girl by posting nasty online comments, because you and her just wouldn't have any reason to care. If there was a fourth, an ex-boyfriend, who posted nude picture online, but was otherwise not a threat and not being an ass, then there still needn't be any reason to care. Extrapolate to a world.
If I were an anti-Putin Russian advocating a world in which everyone could safely use real-name accounts for their anti-Putin propaganda, you wouldn't argue that my advocacy was false or insincere, just because I was using an anonymous account, now would you?
My comment only makes sense in this world, since it advocates a combination of changes that would lead to a different world.
If I wanted to retract what I wrote or backpedal on it, I would edit or delete it. I would not need to play any 'gambit' nor would there by any point. What's the point of that if I leave the post up?
I'm explaining that I intended something different from your interpretation and all you're doing is keeping hammering that your initial reading must necessarily be right. Why would I bother?
However, my online identity and a lot of other admins were accused of paedophillia. When I had pointed out that I had severely curtailed a number of people from the then "Boy Love" article (ew), they retracted it from my username.
It's very, very easy to destroy someone's reputation online. But if you get caught doing so, I hope you get everything you sow!