There are 5700 words in this article. Exactly 72 of those words refer - directly or indirectly - to Sarkeesian.
Before even mentioning Sarkeesian the article reports on the threats and abuse suffered by 4 other women. Directly after mentioning Sarkeesian it details stories of 5 more women who have been harassed, violently attacked, or threatened.
So... Sarkeesian is the part that you latch onto here?
I know its a monster of an article I was commenting that when I got to that spot it registered as another data point in a the number of times I have read that name over a huge assortment of publications. I kinda of understand the downvoting I am getting for pointing it out as it seems to be a charged topic.
The thing is: even If you accept all criticism of Sarkeesian as valid and correct, her storry is still aalso a valid example of the vitrolic misogyny the article describes.
In other words: even an attention-seeking hack who misuses feminist talking points for personal gain should not have to suffer rape threats.
At the same time, it's very hard to feel sorry for her if she built her career on it.
And it's very hard to take the very real problem serious if you got people like Sarkeesian (and Zoe Quinn, and Leigh Alexander, and so forth) poisoning the discussion. They are not harassed because of who they are. They are harassed because of what they say, and what they do.
Now I'm not saying that that's okay to threaten someone over their opinion, but there's a world of a difference between hating the political agenda a woman (or predominantly female group) is pushing and misogyny.
At some point, word like "misogynist" lose all meaning and become just insults that you either ignore or worse, take as a signal to discard the opinion of anyone who uses them wholesale.
When the action is harassment of the form described in the article, then that is misogyny, no matter what the victim did.
I'd say that the people who issue these threats are poisoning the discussion a whole lot more than someone who argues in bad faith. And in the same vein, while it's annoying and hurts the cause of equality that some feminists will call anyone a misogynist who disagrees with their particular radical form of feminism, if you consider that a worse problem and spend more attention on it than on people who tweet "I’ll go to your flat and cut your fucking head off you inbred whore.", then you really are part of the problem and giving those feminists too much cause.
Because yes, I would argue that we shouldn't be paying attention to the trolls. They aren't poisoning the discussion because they aren't part of the discussion. They are trying to disrupt it from the outside, but any sort of moderated community they will be kicked out whenever they show up.
I would also argue that it might be worth differentiating between using misogynist behavior/rhetoric to attack a woman who you disagree with ideologically vs the sort of misogynist ideology that is the focus of the article. Misogyny as a means vs misogyny as an end, if you will.
The problem is that the "trolls" are quite often not, in fact, kicked off. Their death and rape threats are called "humor" and people often protest the kicking-off as censorship. And that's not even mentioning the effect on the victims. Have you ever had to deal with a constant stream of people describing how they're going to torture and kill you in graphic detail? They are VERY MUCH poisoning the discussion, and we often let them.
And I really, really don't see any difference whatsoever between the two things you mention in your last paragraph. Definitely none.
> As Hess herself put it, “Policing misogyny is fabulous in theory. In practice, it’s a bitch.”
It's interesting, but this seems to be very true. Creating rules to behaviour seem to have the primary effect of spurring people to find ways to circumvent the rules. Any attempt at enforcing the spirit of the rules and not the letter leads to long diatribes on the nature of free speech coupled with some incredible persecution complex.
The interesting part is that the culture of a community is so incredibly fragile. They do not require a majority of bad actors, because beyond a very small number, these bad actors will quickly cause the original members of the community to leave and soon the ratio becomes more and more unbalanced spiraling until the community is no longer what it started out as.
Despite my aversion to overlords in real life, I find that online communities are most effective when strongly policed with unproductive dissent silenced outright. Not all dissent, just that which is unproductive.
My personal hypothesis is that while we see public places as public, and private places as private in real life, these distinctions are less clear online. Couple that with the problem where you don't know if a person is undesirable until after you've let him in and things quickly become hard to control.
It's the same in real life. We just like to pretend it isn't and keep policing out of sight. Many American (who can) up and move to gated communities, even join HOAs because neighbour's freedom to manage his own lawn is too much.
> Not all dissent, just that which is unproductive.
And who gets to pick what's productive or not?
That's always the hitch in these schemes: is criticizing decisions about what to police productive? is criticizing the beliefs of the owners productive? is not agreeing with the norm of the community productive?
The person making these calls has a vested interested in not seeing certain kinds of criticism and in accruing more power for themselves, so there's an inherent conflict of interest that tends to go wrong.
The community! That's what we're talking about here: how can the majority of some community avoid losing their own gathering place to a minority that makes the same place unhabitable for the rest. See Hacker News. Voting. Moderating.
Edit: Sometimes even resuliting in graying this very comment out. Which is OK if we beleive in the basic principle.
In the case of Hacker News, not everyone agrees on what's productive or not. Saying "the community" without some way to decide between split opinions isn't a real answer to how we're going to pick.
One could argue that we're already doing some form of community driven decision about what's productive on Hacker News (what, with the voting and what not), but you're clearly not happy with what people settled on through that method.
> but you're clearly not happy with what people settled on through that method.
I am. And I'm also willing to risk having the post downvoted if it goes against what some "voters" would find offensive to their beliefs. For example, a lot of US people, including those on HN, believe it's not allowed to directly "talk negative" about any religion (when I just point to obvious aggresive teachings in them). And I beleive that that approach makes the world much worse.
You do, as overlord (or if you share, your cabal). Hopefully, since it is your site, you will be sensible. If you aren't, then you're left with a cesspool. Even today, dang and gang actively shut down comments that are very bad. This is, imho, A Good Thing™.
That's certainly a problem in politics, which is why in democratic countries free speech protections are usually broad enough to encompass everything short of incitement to criminal activity.
But on private online platforms the owner/operator is in effect a dictatorship, and users can participate or not as they see fit. While free speech laws prevent official censorship, nobody is owed a platform for the expression of their views; so if some trolls are discomfited by being unwelcome at many social sites, so what? Why should their putative right to say obnoxious things take precedence over others' perfectly reasonable desires not to be harassed, and the site operators' (typical) choice to cater to the larger demographic?
My point is that site policing rarely stops at trolls: it usually creeps out to extend first to people who criticize the policing of trolls, because who thinks trolls deserve defending? and then it creeps out a little more to silence fringe views, because what are they really adding to the conversation? and then it creeps out a little more to silence people who don't share the majority view, because who wants to be in a community where we constantly have to deal with people who don't agree with the obvious rightness of our opinions?
It's not like it hasn't been tried before, it's just that policing ideas so rarely stops with just the trolls I'm skeptical of the whole premise.
That's all true, but if an online community becomes unwelcoming the cost of leaving is virtually zero - I've abandoned several because I had begun to find them toxic for one reason or another. I do think moderation works better when it's unilateral and there's a clear demarcation between administration and membership so you don't end up with social capture, ie a clear understanding that Forum X is not a democracy or even a polity.
It's an imperfect situation, but if you want to run a structured forum (eg the typical case of one that's dedicated to particular topics of mutual interest), then it's better than just establishing it and walking away, because without any sort of moderation at all the evidence is that it will quickly turn into a toxic shithole and be useless for its original purpose. Usenet's alt tree was the best example of a benign self-regulating anarchy but even that buckled in the wake of Eternal September and never really recovered IMHO.
I'd say there is: constant vigilance: HN still mostly manages to keep the quality by acive sppresion of the unwanted behaviour. There isn't "fire an forget" solution to such a problem.
>I find that online communities are most effective when strongly policed with unproductive dissent silenced outright.
I basically agree but I don't see Twitter or Facebook for example as communities. Those services are more like everybody at once all lumped together whether they like it or not. In the real world things like proximity and social interdependency force people to be more measured in behavior, interactions are mediated by cliques and groups with reputations and social pressure. In focused online communities you can make assumptions about content because it's opt-in and there is infinite space for alternative communities. I guess what I am getting at is that Twitter and Facebook are bad systems in that they don't give us bearings to make good social decisions on how to act (usually the opposite.) Facebook might actually be worse than Twitter in that it simulates communities but really a planet ruled by a weird dictatorship that doesn't care too much if you kill your neighbors as long as you don't embarrass the government. Twitter is like as if you have an instant 1-1 connection with every other living being which is why you get situations where a million people are each slamming the same person with one insult. It's horrifying but it's also very clearly not recognizable as a natural sort of social interaction so you shouldn't even expect it to be sane. It is a thing that literally should not exist. Something resembling Facebook could exist and be good, just not the Facebook we have now.
Although I think women are far more likely to think of other women as bitches than males (at least among the gentlemen of European descent). I.e. males will slap this label around, but women actually mean it.
Also, since most users tend to post little, active trolls can dominate a conversation in a group where they're the vast minority: 3% of people being trolls posting with 30x the average frequency of other people will cause as much traffic as everyone else together.
I've noticed time and again that a small group of pushy users in an online community can establish or preserve a 'center of social gravity' that pretty much guarantees a pile-on attack on anybody who expresses opinions that are at odds with the group consensus. Doubtless this is a special case of a pre-existing social phenomenon, but I wonder if anyone knowns of systematic research into this behavior, which ought to be easy to study given the proliferation of online fora with persistent messaging and so on. The closest thing I can think of is a RAND corporation study suggesting that recruiting ~10% of a social population to a particular viewpoint was enough to get it entrenched, but that's several years old.
Her article seems to be about what could be done to stop anonymous trolls from terrorizing and threatening women. How about prosecuting them, since terroristic threats is already a crime? Unfortunately, as Hess discovers, the police don't care much about online stalking, which is consistent since they don't care about IRL stalking either. But never mind, it's not the problem: misogyny is the problem, amplified 1000x by online anonymity. Anonymity makes the internet mean and gives trolls= men too much power. This is the subtle shift: what starts out as "misogyny is bad" becomes "anonymity facilitates misogyny."
Keeping in mind that actual stalking has never been dealt with in any significant way ever, the desire of a few female writers to curb online anonymity wouldn't be enough to get an @ mention, except that this happens to coincide with what the media wants, and now we have the two vectors summing to form a public health crisis. "Cyberbullying is a huge problem!" Yes, but not because it is hurtful, HA! no one cares about your feelings-- but because criticism makes women want to be more private-- and the privacy of the women is bad. The women have to be online, they do most of the clicking and receive most of the clicks. Anonymous cyberbullying is a barrier to increasing consumption, it's gotta go.
...
If you're a guy, you probably don't realize the awesome pressure on women to let themselves get looked at: to reveal themselves online, to post a pic, to give everyone your attention, to stop what you're doing and give the other your self, even if they want to yell at you. "Hey lady, I hate you!" And yet that same pressure tells women they are valueless unless they are public. Madness.
The system is illogical, the things you want cannot actually coexist, but you dare not attack the system that promises everything, therefore something else must be blamed. As a basic example, Hess probably wants all the benefits of socialism and all the brand products of capitalism. When she can't have it, obviously the problem is misogyny.
I read about #jadapose -- people tweeting pictures of themselves in the same pose as a 16 year old drugged and raped at a party -- and decided I need to use the internet less. For fucks sake.
Let's stop pretending that this is just caused by a small minority. I've more or less abandoned Reddit because misogynist crap is no longer limited to obscure subs but gets upvoted to the front page via mainstream subs.
I used to think the anonymity of the internet was an outlet for a small minority of psychopaths, but aggressive online behavior towards women seems to become increasingly normal.
I think you're underestimating the power that small, active minorities can have in large communities where a small percentage is still a large number and can reinforce and concentrate.
People have said in the past that HN is just as bad as Reddit in this regard, but I've found discussion here to be quite reasonable over the past year. (Caveat: I could be totally wrong about this as I don't follow all the discussion.) I wonder what changed? After all, HN uses a voting system just like Reddit. I don't think it's the audience: Slashdot covers a similar demographic and discussion there is horrible. The only other public site I know of that does it well is Metafilter, and that's on account of heavy moderation and community policing.
Downvote away, but "meh" from me. This read to me like just another SJW alarmist, wringing their fists and crying "because social media". Women, like every other group, need to engage with the internet on it's own terms. The lights are out - so of course people are going to act based on their id. Hence the IDiots making all the rape jokes.
If people are making legitimate threats, then it should be a serious matter. Otherwise,accept there are sad morons out there who don't get to say this stuff IRL, and don't let it get to you. Sorry ladies, but creeps will always exist. So some sad Redpill fucks are making comments about some chick tied up? Yes, it sickens me, but "do as thou will" until you actually harm another human.
> A report, “Misogyny on Twitter,” released by the research and policy organization Demos this June, found more than 6 million instances of the word “slut” or “whore” used in English on Twitter between December 26, 2013, and February 9, 2014.
It's worth clicking through to the actual report [1]. For the several words they look at, they don't just count them. They break them down by gender of the tweeter, by comments (tweets about the word itself) and conversations (tweets where the word was used as part of the conversation), and how the word was used (non-offensive, colloquial, misogynistic, and so on).
For "slut" and "whore" in conversation, there is a really strong periodic component. The graph looks like a triangle waveform, with a big spike at the peak of the peak. It's probably a 24 hour period, but I can't really read it well because (for no reason that I can discern) they have used a spacing for the time grid lines of 1 day, 3 hours, 47 minutes?! See figure 5.
Figure 6 shows "slut" and "whore" in conversation tweets by gender. The graphs for males and females are nearly identical. They mention this in their "Key findings" section:
Women are as almost as likely as men to use the
terms ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ on Twitter. Not only are
women using these words, they are directing them at
each other, both casually and offensively; women are
increasingly more inclined to engage in discourses
using the same language that has been, and continues
to be, used as derogatory against them.
Is it misogynistic for a woman to call another women, with offensive intent, a slut or whore? Or is she simply being a jerk?
The article uses some fairly disingenuous constructions to make online words resonate emotionally, such as intercutting with stories of rape. I understand what they're going for but I find the technique slimy.
41 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 86.9 ms ] threadBefore even mentioning Sarkeesian the article reports on the threats and abuse suffered by 4 other women. Directly after mentioning Sarkeesian it details stories of 5 more women who have been harassed, violently attacked, or threatened.
So... Sarkeesian is the part that you latch onto here?
In other words: even an attention-seeking hack who misuses feminist talking points for personal gain should not have to suffer rape threats.
And it's very hard to take the very real problem serious if you got people like Sarkeesian (and Zoe Quinn, and Leigh Alexander, and so forth) poisoning the discussion. They are not harassed because of who they are. They are harassed because of what they say, and what they do.
Now I'm not saying that that's okay to threaten someone over their opinion, but there's a world of a difference between hating the political agenda a woman (or predominantly female group) is pushing and misogyny.
At some point, word like "misogynist" lose all meaning and become just insults that you either ignore or worse, take as a signal to discard the opinion of anyone who uses them wholesale.
I'd say that the people who issue these threats are poisoning the discussion a whole lot more than someone who argues in bad faith. And in the same vein, while it's annoying and hurts the cause of equality that some feminists will call anyone a misogynist who disagrees with their particular radical form of feminism, if you consider that a worse problem and spend more attention on it than on people who tweet "I’ll go to your flat and cut your fucking head off you inbred whore.", then you really are part of the problem and giving those feminists too much cause.
Because yes, I would argue that we shouldn't be paying attention to the trolls. They aren't poisoning the discussion because they aren't part of the discussion. They are trying to disrupt it from the outside, but any sort of moderated community they will be kicked out whenever they show up.
I would also argue that it might be worth differentiating between using misogynist behavior/rhetoric to attack a woman who you disagree with ideologically vs the sort of misogynist ideology that is the focus of the article. Misogyny as a means vs misogyny as an end, if you will.
And I really, really don't see any difference whatsoever between the two things you mention in your last paragraph. Definitely none.
It's interesting, but this seems to be very true. Creating rules to behaviour seem to have the primary effect of spurring people to find ways to circumvent the rules. Any attempt at enforcing the spirit of the rules and not the letter leads to long diatribes on the nature of free speech coupled with some incredible persecution complex.
The interesting part is that the culture of a community is so incredibly fragile. They do not require a majority of bad actors, because beyond a very small number, these bad actors will quickly cause the original members of the community to leave and soon the ratio becomes more and more unbalanced spiraling until the community is no longer what it started out as.
Despite my aversion to overlords in real life, I find that online communities are most effective when strongly policed with unproductive dissent silenced outright. Not all dissent, just that which is unproductive.
My personal hypothesis is that while we see public places as public, and private places as private in real life, these distinctions are less clear online. Couple that with the problem where you don't know if a person is undesirable until after you've let him in and things quickly become hard to control.
I don't know if there is a solution.
It's the same in real life. We just like to pretend it isn't and keep policing out of sight. Many American (who can) up and move to gated communities, even join HOAs because neighbour's freedom to manage his own lawn is too much.
And who gets to pick what's productive or not?
That's always the hitch in these schemes: is criticizing decisions about what to police productive? is criticizing the beliefs of the owners productive? is not agreeing with the norm of the community productive?
The person making these calls has a vested interested in not seeing certain kinds of criticism and in accruing more power for themselves, so there's an inherent conflict of interest that tends to go wrong.
The community! That's what we're talking about here: how can the majority of some community avoid losing their own gathering place to a minority that makes the same place unhabitable for the rest. See Hacker News. Voting. Moderating.
Edit: Sometimes even resuliting in graying this very comment out. Which is OK if we beleive in the basic principle.
One could argue that we're already doing some form of community driven decision about what's productive on Hacker News (what, with the voting and what not), but you're clearly not happy with what people settled on through that method.
I am. And I'm also willing to risk having the post downvoted if it goes against what some "voters" would find offensive to their beliefs. For example, a lot of US people, including those on HN, believe it's not allowed to directly "talk negative" about any religion (when I just point to obvious aggresive teachings in them). And I beleive that that approach makes the world much worse.
But on private online platforms the owner/operator is in effect a dictatorship, and users can participate or not as they see fit. While free speech laws prevent official censorship, nobody is owed a platform for the expression of their views; so if some trolls are discomfited by being unwelcome at many social sites, so what? Why should their putative right to say obnoxious things take precedence over others' perfectly reasonable desires not to be harassed, and the site operators' (typical) choice to cater to the larger demographic?
It's not like it hasn't been tried before, it's just that policing ideas so rarely stops with just the trolls I'm skeptical of the whole premise.
It's an imperfect situation, but if you want to run a structured forum (eg the typical case of one that's dedicated to particular topics of mutual interest), then it's better than just establishing it and walking away, because without any sort of moderation at all the evidence is that it will quickly turn into a toxic shithole and be useless for its original purpose. Usenet's alt tree was the best example of a benign self-regulating anarchy but even that buckled in the wake of Eternal September and never really recovered IMHO.
You also need a lead figure who commands the community (possibly a rotating role) to settle disputes among your moderators.
Finally, a subtle hellban so some users think they're interacting with the entire community when they're just talking to and moderating each other.
I'd say there is: constant vigilance: HN still mostly manages to keep the quality by acive sppresion of the unwanted behaviour. There isn't "fire an forget" solution to such a problem.
I basically agree but I don't see Twitter or Facebook for example as communities. Those services are more like everybody at once all lumped together whether they like it or not. In the real world things like proximity and social interdependency force people to be more measured in behavior, interactions are mediated by cliques and groups with reputations and social pressure. In focused online communities you can make assumptions about content because it's opt-in and there is infinite space for alternative communities. I guess what I am getting at is that Twitter and Facebook are bad systems in that they don't give us bearings to make good social decisions on how to act (usually the opposite.) Facebook might actually be worse than Twitter in that it simulates communities but really a planet ruled by a weird dictatorship that doesn't care too much if you kill your neighbors as long as you don't embarrass the government. Twitter is like as if you have an instant 1-1 connection with every other living being which is why you get situations where a million people are each slamming the same person with one insult. It's horrifying but it's also very clearly not recognizable as a natural sort of social interaction so you shouldn't even expect it to be sane. It is a thing that literally should not exist. Something resembling Facebook could exist and be good, just not the Facebook we have now.
This woman's word choice is particularly revealing of the pervasiveness of misogyny in (our) human culture.
Keeping in mind that actual stalking has never been dealt with in any significant way ever, the desire of a few female writers to curb online anonymity wouldn't be enough to get an @ mention, except that this happens to coincide with what the media wants, and now we have the two vectors summing to form a public health crisis. "Cyberbullying is a huge problem!" Yes, but not because it is hurtful, HA! no one cares about your feelings-- but because criticism makes women want to be more private-- and the privacy of the women is bad. The women have to be online, they do most of the clicking and receive most of the clicks. Anonymous cyberbullying is a barrier to increasing consumption, it's gotta go.
...
If you're a guy, you probably don't realize the awesome pressure on women to let themselves get looked at: to reveal themselves online, to post a pic, to give everyone your attention, to stop what you're doing and give the other your self, even if they want to yell at you. "Hey lady, I hate you!" And yet that same pressure tells women they are valueless unless they are public. Madness.
The system is illogical, the things you want cannot actually coexist, but you dare not attack the system that promises everything, therefore something else must be blamed. As a basic example, Hess probably wants all the benefits of socialism and all the brand products of capitalism. When she can't have it, obviously the problem is misogyny.
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/05/cyberbll.html
edit: s/them/themselves/
I used to think the anonymity of the internet was an outlet for a small minority of psychopaths, but aggressive online behavior towards women seems to become increasingly normal.
If people are making legitimate threats, then it should be a serious matter. Otherwise,accept there are sad morons out there who don't get to say this stuff IRL, and don't let it get to you. Sorry ladies, but creeps will always exist. So some sad Redpill fucks are making comments about some chick tied up? Yes, it sickens me, but "do as thou will" until you actually harm another human.
Full disclosure: white middle class male.
It's worth clicking through to the actual report [1]. For the several words they look at, they don't just count them. They break them down by gender of the tweeter, by comments (tweets about the word itself) and conversations (tweets where the word was used as part of the conversation), and how the word was used (non-offensive, colloquial, misogynistic, and so on).
For "slut" and "whore" in conversation, there is a really strong periodic component. The graph looks like a triangle waveform, with a big spike at the peak of the peak. It's probably a 24 hour period, but I can't really read it well because (for no reason that I can discern) they have used a spacing for the time grid lines of 1 day, 3 hours, 47 minutes?! See figure 5.
Figure 6 shows "slut" and "whore" in conversation tweets by gender. The graphs for males and females are nearly identical. They mention this in their "Key findings" section:
Is it misogynistic for a woman to call another women, with offensive intent, a slut or whore? Or is she simply being a jerk?[1] http://www.demos.co.uk/files/MISOGYNY_ON_TWITTER.pdf?1399567...