Media Re: Virtual Dystopia
posted by on April 30 at 11:37 AM
The Washington Post finally stumbled into the Kathy Sierra story today, months after bloggers were all over the story. Unfortunately, the Post’s story adopts a typical “on the one hand, on the other hand” style, suggesting that while “some female bloggers” are feeling “stifled” by violent threats, others are managing to suck it up and deal. I mean, everybody knows that if you can’t handle threats of strangulation, throat-slashing, and rape—along with the publication of your address and social security number—you’re better off being silent. Rape and death threats: the price of entry for blogging while female.
As evidence that not all women bloggers are “being stifled” (again with the passive voice!) the writer quotes Michelle Malkin—an extremely prominent right-wing blogger—telling other women bloggers they ought to get thicker skin. “‘First, where have y’all been? For several years, the unhinged Internet underworld has been documented here,’ she wrote, reposting a comment on her site that called for the ‘torture, rape, murder’ of her family.” She urged women bloggers to “keep blogging” no matter how ugly the threats may get.
But come on. Kathy Sierra (who blogged about the incredibly contentious world of software development) is not Michelle Malkin. I’m not Michelle Malkin. Very few bloggers in the world come close to Michelle Malkin’s prominence. That doesn’t justify threats against her, of course, but it is a bit unfair of the Post to cite Malkin’s experience as in any way typical of all women bloggers—as if “some women” just can’t take the heat, while “other women” can.
Even worse, the passive voice used throughout the story (bloggers “are threatened” and “made targets”) moves the spotlight onto the victims, and off the violent predators who are driving them offline. The culprits, as Shakes notes, are “painstakingly not mentioned to the point of utter silliness,” resulting in paragraphs like these:
A female freelance writer who blogged about the pornography industry was threatened with rape. A single mother who blogged about “the daily ins and outs of being a mom” was threatened by a cyber-stalker who claimed that she beat her son and that he had her under surveillance. Kathy Sierra, who won a large following by blogging about designing software that makes people happy, became a target of anonymous online attacks that included photos of her with a noose around her neck and a muzzle over her mouth.As women gain visibility in the blogosphere, they are targets of sexual harassment and threats. Men are harassed too, and lack of civility is an abiding problem on the Web. But women, who make up about half the online community, are singled out in more starkly sexually threatening terms — a trend that was first evident in chat rooms in the early 1990s and is now moving to the blogosphere, experts and bloggers said.
Does it matter who’s doing the targeting, the threatening, the harassing? Of course it does. By failing to talk about the perpetrators of these online crimes, the Post implicitly says it’s OK for men to threaten women, publish their personal information, and bully them into silence. The only solution the offer: Get thicker skin. The obvious alternative—prosecuting the men who are doing the threatening, the publishing, the bullying—goes unmentioned.
I could barely even make it through this article because I was getting sick to my stomach.
I'm being serious, not snarky here: What do you propose as a solution to the problem? I feel like women bloggers' silence is a step backward, but how does a woman (forget blogging, even) balance safety with courage?
Babe, (news flash) its a mans world. Deal with it already.
"By failing to talk about the perpetrators of these online crimes, the Post implicitly says it’s OK for men to threaten women, publish their personal information, and bully them into silence. The only solution the offer: Get thicker skin. The obvious alternative—prosecuting the men who are doing the threatening, the publishing, the bullying—goes unmentioned."
No, the reason that "alternative" goes unmentioned is that it's just not feasible to make the Internet entirely harassment-free. Tracing with certainty the subject of a particular blog comment or email is, quite often, an exercise in futility - if it isn't hard enough to track down the single subscriber at a major ISP who posted that threat, what about public terminals? Anonymous proxies? Foreign posters well out of the range of US law? Furthermore, given that 99% of Internet harassment doesn't result in any actual physical assault, it's not surprising that law enforcement shrugs their shoulders at much of it. Yes, it's a real problem, and the other 1% is seriously disturbing. But simply saying "No, no, it's up to THE MENZ to stop!" is overly simplistic.
Shit, I got caught up reading this dang blog. I was supposed to meet bonehead down at the library for a Native Plants demo. At least the exhibit will be up for a few more days. Gardening has given us the opportunity to meet some wonderful couples, and has made bone and my's gender differences much more palatable.
http://www2.spl.org/calendar/default.asp?DoAction=Calendar&MoveTo=4/30/2007&View=Event&IDEvent=11385
TSM- It might be overly simplistic to ask the men to stop, but by using the passive voice in the article, the Post eliminated all culpability. Naming the offender is the first step towards eliminating abuse that exists in, and because of, an anonymous environment.
The interesting thing isn't that threats are made; it's that the threats are completely out of proportion with the writing. Michelle Malkin can expect to get some heat, because she is in the business of generating heat. You could say the same about Erica, to a lesser extent; she invites controversy.
But blogging about software also gets exactly the same kind of reaction: not just aggression and violent threats, but specifically sexual ones. That's weird and interesting.
I don't think "it's a man's world, baby" is going to cut it as analysis. Men do not often threaten to rape and sexually mutilate each other, or if they do it's clearly jesting and not serious anger. Anger exists but takes other forms.
I have never threatened sexual violence, or any other kind, to an ordinary writer on a blog or anywhere else; but I will admit to saying things to spammers, on those rare occasions when spammers leave themselves open to reply, that would make Erica's hair fall out. Sexual violence doesn't even begin to describe what I would like to happen to spammers.
The other issue that I wonder about is how many of the threats made to female bloggers are from OTHER females? In my experience, as a female, I get plenty of negativity and craziness from females. Not to say that the men aren't the majority, but I think the problem stems from women hating on other women. As long as we tolerate it, it will be tolerated from men.
Think of how many women hate on Hilary Clinton based off of false information that the media has portrayed her with. I have asked numerous times for people against high profile women to explain why, and all I get is a shrug and "I don't know, I just don't TRUST her" type comments. Most of those come from women.
I don't understand people who cry "free speech" when the intent of these monsters is to stifle speech. To me, these threats have as much to do with free speech as cross-burning. I agree - let's prosecute.
I'd like to see some deterrent action taken against the perpetrators of this behavior. Yes, it's impossible to track down every commenter, but if more website operators took a random sample of threatening comments made and contacted the perps' ISPs, and even better, where possible tracked down names and addresses and made them public, it would be a powerful deterrent against this behavior.
That being said, it's extremely distressing what sits under the surface of many peoples' personalities.
Didn't Malkin publish the contact info of some students last year? Of course, she doesn't give a fuck about threats made against her. She has given her fans the means to carry out threats against others.
@2,
You're absolutely right. It's a man's world where men are even more likely to be murdered...by other men. So, go enjoy that man's world of yours.
There's a simple solution to this--don't allow anonymous comments on your blog. Require any commenter to register their email address. USSMariner does this, to cite just one blog.
Idle death threats will drop practically to noting.
If it's your own blog, why would you want to let people comment anonymously on it? You wouldn't invite random people to come spray-paint your house, so why would you let them spout off on your blog?
Dude, if I had a dollar for every time some schmuck told me they had my IP address and they were going to use it to track me down and kill me, I'd be a rich man.
As for the threats of rape-- the kind of freaks who take online discussions to the level of threatening physical violence are exactly crazy enough to threaten sexual violence. But what are we talking about here? Lonely overweight men with a collection of replica swords from their favorite movies, blogging from basement appartments where they use their overclocked computers to play World of Warcraft 12 hours a day, or telephone sales reps with flattops and subscriptions to Soldier of Fortune magazine who constantly look for excuses to tell you about all the different ways they know to kill a man with their bare hands-- and wonder why they can't get laid, in spite of the fact they spend 15 hours a week at the gym.
These people aren't exactly safe. Every once in a while one of them does flip out and kill someone. But neither are they some special plague that only women have to deal with. I've had tons of these freaks come after me.
The part I find interesting is whether there really is a skewing of comments towards sex in the responses to women's blogs. And let's not pretend it's just guys doing all the sex & violence posting. It's not.
This is a real problem, no doubt, but in all seriousness, how would you have written the two grafs you quote from the WaPo piece? Do you have the names of the people who made these threats, or were they anonymous?
The piece is about women in blogging and the changing state of their real or perceived safety, so the grafs seem to be to appropriately focus on the featured women and what happened to them. A piece that focuses on the perps, what they did and what should/does happen to them would, of necessity, be a piece about online stalkers or um...what would you call them? cyber-violent-offenders? The point is, if it's about the perps, it's about the perps. If it isn't, it isn't. Change the way the piece is written, you change the piece itself.
Perhaps our own intrepid female blogger/journalist ECB could take this angle on herself?
@11 Not a value judgement, just a fact.
@ Fnarf
Which begs the question: what's worse than sexual violence? Like most people, I enjoy rape humor. But trans-rape humor, sir, is a step over the line I am not prepared to take.
#13 Judah -
What is an overclocked computer?
@7: Women can say really awful things. But as a veteran of both journalism and government, it's been my experience that the authors of nasty, obsessed, overlong, and/or vaguely (or overtly) threatening letters and e-mails are almost exclusively men.
Get raped.
Hello everyone, wanna be part of some kind of community, possible here? anyone here?
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