Tag: Misogyny

  • Apologies and threats collide in midair

    Tony Wang of Twitter UK issued an apology for the harassment yesterday.

    Twitter’s UK boss Tony Wang and senior director Del Harvey have apologized profusely to Caroline Criado-Perez, Stella Creasey and the leagues of other women who have received tweets that threaten death or rape in a response to their activism — including a handful of female journalists who have received bomb threats.

    Ok.

    And now, the changes: Wang says that an in-tweet “report abuse” button was in the latest version of Twitter for Apple smartphones, and from next month on it will be available on Twitter.com and Android phones — in other words, users don’t have to use the “Help” page to report abuse. The Twitter Rules page has also been updated to reflect their no-abuse policy.

    And, one hopes, the rules themselves have also been updated to reflect their no-abuse policy, so that people who report genuine abuse will no longer get messages saying this here abuse doesn’t violate Twitter rules so you’re just going to have to suck it up.

    Anyway, hours after the apologies, Mary Beard received a bomb threat.

    The classicist and TV presenter Mary Beard has been sent a bomb threat on Twitter hours after the UK boss of the social networking site apologised to women who have experienced abuse.

    Prof Beard, who has faced abuse on Twitter previously, told the BBC she had reported the new message to police.

    It used similar wording to a tweet sent earlier to a number of women, some of whom have also received rape threats.

    That’s not good.

    Prof Beard told BBC Radio 5 live: “I think it is scary and it has got to stop.

    “To be honest I didn’t actually intellectually feel I was in danger but I thought I was being harassed and I thought I was being harassed in a particularly unpleasant way.”

    Which is what the people who send such tweets want the recipients to feel. They want us to feel like the objects of hostile, potentially violent attention and rage.

     

  • The purpose of trolls

    Amanda Marcotte comments on the BBC Newsnight – Paul Mason – Twitter harassment campaign story to point out that misogynist harassers have an agenda.

    But as awful as trolls are, they do serve a major purpose, if people are willing to accept that these are actual people expressing actual opinions, instead of imagining them, as too many people do, as almost a force of nature that the internet willed into existence and not people at all. That purpose is revealing that misogyny exists and it is widespread. Understanding that, I think, makes clear why so many other things exist: Rape culture, fundamentalist religions, the Republican Party’s guns-and-abortion obsession. There is a sea of boiling anger out there because men are taught from a young age that women are here to serve, and then they grow up and discover that women often elect not to do that.

    Or because they’re taught from a young age that to be a boy is to be not a girl and that for a boy to be at all a girl is a profound disgrace and shame, deserving of beatings and wedgies and being dunked in toilets. Or because they’re taught from a young age that girls are kind of laughable and contemptible even if they are also highly desirable. Or because they’re taught from a young age that only men do things that matter, and then they grow up and find all these pesky women cluttering up the place and thinking they get to do things that matter too. Or because they’re taught from a young age that to be male is to be a bit brutal and obtuse, that fee-fees are for girrrrrrrrls (who are contemptible and Other Than boys, see above), that a boy or man who is at all good at paying attention to other people’s thoughts and feelings is a wimp and a pussy and doing the male thing all wrong. Or because they’re taught from a young age that women are dependent on men and they don’t want to have a woman depending on them.

    Some misogynists—the Rick Perrys of the world—calmly react to this realization by deciding that women’s rebellion is a temporary, feminism-induced insanity, and that the proper legislative pressure plus a good dose of condescension can return them to their natural state of servitude. Some men get a sick pleasure out of stripping away the “illusion” that women are equal and violently showing them exactly how inferior they are. The online troll population has these kinds of characters in it, but the dominant class is men who don’t get the level of sexual attention they feel entitled to from women, and therefore have concocted elaborate, dogged theories about how women are broken, because they cannot ever allow that women have a right not to like them personally. (Or that if they started acting like decent people, maybe they would actually be more likeable.) All misogynists get upset when women are given attention for their talent or skills; it violates their core belief that women are here to serve. This is why writing on the internet while female means getting everything from laughably delusional men pretending to “critique” your writing while barely concealing their rage to rape and death threats. Particularly if your writing is not upholding the opinion that women are inferior servant class.

    Ya. That one violates the “only men do things that matter” doctrine, and there clearly really is something special about it. Being a woman who writes on the internet has become like being a magnet with little bits of iron all over your environment. Wham, wham, wham, all day long as the bits of iron slam into you.

    The seething rage on display from so many men (and their female supporters) all the time on the internet is educational; it makes it much harder to hand wave and pretend that rape and sexual harassment are a matter of miscommunication, that anti-choice sentiment is a result of some kind of affection for “life”, and that women’s failure to reach economic and social equality is a matter of women’s failures instead of widespread sentiment that women don’t deserve said equality. Seeing the livid rage of devoted Republican voters at the very existence of independent women sharing their thoughts and opinions online makes it very difficult indeed to see Republican policies that hurt women as being merely coincidental. So this shit matters.

    That’s why it’s uncomfortable to have so many people insist that there’s an easy fix for troll targets, the “ignore the bullies and they’ll go away” fix, usually spouted by people who haven’t considered for a moment that the trolls may very well be actual people who are trying to protect and perpetuate sexism.

    It is educational, but I get tired of being a textbook.

    Trolls want to silence women. When they are allowed to shout at you without a response, they have created a microcosm of the world they want, where men are yelling at women who are sitting there and taking it. This is an interesting point, though as West points out, trolls also “win” when they get attention—particularly with the “women won’t fuck me like I deserve!” anger mobs, getting negative attention from women becomes a sort of revenge for them. So it’s tough, but like sexual harassers, trolls know how to create a situation where you can’t win: Either you endure their harassment or you are a “bitch” for pushing back. Cultural misogyny works in their favor.

    …

    I retweet trolls a lot (and then usually block them immediately, because I know that there is no potential for actual discourse here). I get a lot of shit for it, mostly from men. Every time a man condescendingly tells me, “You are giving them attention! Just ignore and block them!”, I hear, “Being exposed to the brutal misogyny you get aimed at you every day is uncomfortable. It would be so much better for me if I didn’t have to know this is what’s going on.” This phenomenon is not unique to the internet. Kids who get bullied get “don’t be a tattletale” from adults. Women who get street harassed end up having to apologize for making men in their lives uncomfortable by bringing it up. The intention is almost never to tell someone they are to suffer this in silence, but the effect is that you are telling them just that.

    Yes. That. Kids do get it. Gay kids get it in triplicate.

    [Lindy] West is right; it’s time to stop thinking of trolls as idiots who are just seeking attention, and see them for what they are: Misogynists with a political agenda. These are men that absolutely do not want to live in a society where women are treated equally, and they are obsessed with silencing the women online whose writings they rightfully fear are going to help push society in a more feminist direction. They want to harass feminists into silence. If we keep this understanding front and center and discard useless theories about “attention-seeking” or “lulz”, we can begin to have a more productive conversation about what the hell to do about the problem.

    I’m doing my best.

     

  • How to read satire

    Stacy alerted me to a good (feminist) analysis of the Onion tweet.

    First of all, she says, Quvenzhané Wallis is terrific, no question.

    But you know what? All of the women at the Oscars last night are awesome. Just to have survived to that level in an industry that, at best, ignores women, and, at worst, actively despises them means they have to be awesome. Maybe they’re not awesome in ways that everyone sees or acknowledges. But in their own way, they’re fierce and strong and bursting with personality in an industry that is designed not to see women that way…

    The best examples of how Hollywood hates women were supplied by Oscar host Seth MacFarlane himself. He sang an entire gleeful song about how he saw famous actresses’ breasts in movies, as if he were 12 years old and had no hope of seeing breasts in real life (maybe, with his attitudes, he doesn’t), including movies in which their characters are abused, even gang-raped. (Yup, so sexy, getting a glimpse of nipple as a woman is being brutally attacked.) He degraded women left and right by reducing all their immense talents to how “beautiful” they are or how human carbuncle Rex Reed might insult their body size.

    Hollywood and pop culture — including most pop culture watchers, such as the mostly male ranks of film critics and the mostly rank roster of “serious” film fans who populate movie sites from the IMDb to Rotten Tomatoes – is absolutely vile to women, with extra bile if they’re famous and don’t give that particular boy a boner.

    And the Onion tweet was parodying that. Not echoing it but parodying it. I saw that as one possible reading at the time, but I saw the shock-horror about the tweet before I saw the content of the tweet, so I was primed not to see the parody reading as clearly as the echo reading. Or I was just stupid. One of those.

    Or maybe a third possibility, which is that so much humor these days turns out to include misogyny, to have a misogynist edge, to be compatible with misogyny, to be the product of people (mostly men) who are misogynist. I occasionally watched Family Guy for awhile because I found Stewie and Brian hilarious. I find parts of The Big Bang Theory hilarious. I find Jon Stewart sexist quite often. I’m used to discovering that something hilarious turns out also to be misogynist and/or sexist as well.

    It was probably all three of those. Anyway, the parody reading seems like a better fit now – but Twitter can be a bad medium for jokes like that. I know this. People mis-read my jokes aimed at myself as jokes aimed at someone else, and then ignore my corrections. Twitter can be a dangerous toy.

    But the point was a good one.

    What highlights how outrageous is the loathsome treatment of women on the Web?

    Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but that Quvenzhané Wallis is kind of a cunt, right?

    That gets attention in a way that calling a famous adult woman the same thing never does. Because it’s clearly outrageous in a way that, apparently, isn’t quite so clear-cut when it comes to an adult woman. But she asked for it by wearing that dress. She’s an attention whore. She likes being in the spotlight. She can stop being famous any time if she can’t take it. We should see such rationales as ridiculous. We can see it when they’re applied to a nine-year-old. But we don’t see it in general.

    Well. Okay. Feminist pop-culture watchers see how all women are treated in pop culture as outrageous. But we feminists are still a minority. That Onion tweet was not directed at feminists. It was directed at a general readership that probably has not yet internalized that it’s just plain wrong to talk about women like this, but might possibly understand that it’s just plain wrong to talk about a little girl like this. And might possibly start to get an inkling of a clue.

    God damn that sounds familiar. She’s an attention whore. She likes being in the spotlight. She can stop being famous any time if she can’t take it.

    She’s a professional victim. She engages in drama for the blog hits. She can stop blogging any time if she can’t take it.

    So the point was a good one.

    The Onion likely demonstrated some tone-deafness when it comes to issues that some online feminists I respect immensely pointed out, like how women of color come in for extra bonus disrespect and misogyny, and how little girls are inexcusably oversexualized.

    But that’s not what this tweet was about. As I think many of my readers would attest, I am attuned to misogyny in pop culture, even the point at which I see it when others don’t. And still, I didn’t see it here. I didn’t see Wallis as the butt of this joke. It seemed completely obvious to me — to the point that I didn’t even have to think about it — that the butt of the joke here is people who say such things about women.

    But she reads the Onion much more regularly than I do, so she had a better sense of their overall attitudes than I do. I’ve learned to expect to be suddenly disappointed.

  • We are told we are respected, and yet

    Feminism is resurging, says Ellie Mae O’Hagan at Comment is Free. It’s resurging because there is still so god damn much sexist shit going on. In that sense it would be nice if feminism could drop dead because it’s no longer needed.

    O’Hagan recently read The Feminine Mystique for the first time.

    To my mind, the most amazing and miserable aspect of The Feminine Mystique is how relevant it still is. Women of my generation are still being sold lies to keep us obedient. We are told that we are valued, until we accuse a revered man of rape. We are told we are equal, and yet we still do most of the low-paid and unpaid work. We are told we are respected, and yet we are harassed in the street, objectified and ridiculed in the media, and haunted by words like nag, harridan and hysteric in our personal relationships.

    And not just those. Also bitch, cunt, twat, pussy, slut, whore, ho…

    And then there’s the new, more friendly, more accommodating kind of feminism.

    For every campaign against objectification, we have the Sex and the City brand of feminism, as personified by a burgeoning movement in America calling itself “sexy feminists“, which reassures us that one can believe in gender equality and still pay hefty sums of money to have pubic hair ripped out at the root.

    In my mind, if being sexy and funny are the two cornerstones of a new feminist movement, we may as well all pack up and go home now. At its core, feminism should be angry. It should be angry because women are still being taken for a ride. Like the women in The Feminine Mystique, we are being sold a lie of equality in a society where the odds are politically, socially and economically stacked against us.

    Feminism’s most basic function should be to emphasise that sexism is not an accident, but an inevitable consequence of a society structured to favour men. Jokes about vaginas and reassurances that we won’t have to give up lipstick are not enough. To put it bluntly, a new feminism should not be afraid to piss people off.

    Yes but you see the thing is…feminism is about equal rights for women, and women are women. The first duty of women, because they are women, is to be sexy and funny. That’s because they’re women, you see. Women have to be pleasing in some way. They just do. I’m sorry, I know it seems unfair, but they just do. Because they’re women. Men don’t have to be pleasing in some way, because they’re men, and they can do other things. They have other things to offer – success, or strength, or talent. Men can give us things like Microsoft, or coal, so we don’t care so much if they’re sexy and funny. Women can’t give us anything like that, so they have to make up for it by being pleasing. That’s why we hate older women so much: they can’t be pleasing, so they’re violating this important rule that they have to be pleasing. We wish they would just fuck off and die already.

    So if feminism is angry, we’re all going to hate it and attack it, because if there’s anything we don’t want, it’s unpleasing angry women all over the place, telling us not to call them cunts.

    Sexy, funny feminism is inspired by the fear that feminism will never get anywhere unless it is likeable. For a long time now, feminists have been told that their message will never spread to the masses if the messenger appears to be an angry man-hating lesbian shouting the odds from a gender studies seminar room. But we need to realise that popular, non-threatening feminism is destined for failure as well. In a patriarchy – and if you are a feminist, you accept that we are living in one – what is popular and non-threatening is what men deem to be acceptable.

    Can’t be helped. It’s be pleasing or get out.

  • Global pushback

    Laurie Penny went to Dublin to report on women fighting to legalize abortion in Ireland, then she went to Cairo to report on women fighting sexual harassment in Tahrir Square. In both places, women told her they were sick of feeling ashamed.

    From India to Ireland to Egypt, women are on the streets, on the airwaves, on the internet, getting organised and getting angry. They’re co-ordinating in their communities to combat sexual violence and taking a stand against archaic sexist legislation; they’re challenging harassment and rape culture. Across the world, women who are sick and tired of shame and fear are fighting back in unprecedented ways.

    And because of the internet, we know about each other, we’re in contact with each other.

    Sexism often functions as a pressure-release valve in times of social unrest – and when it does, it takes different forms, depending on local values. Right now, in Egypt, it’s groping, heckling and mob attacks; in Ireland, it’s rape apologism and a backlash against abortion and sexual equality; on the internet, it’s vicious slut-shaming and “revenge porn“. But this time, women are refusing to take it any more.

    Like the Arab spring and Occupy in 2011, local movements with no apparent connection to one another are exchanging information and taking courage from one another’s struggles. The fight against misogyny is spreading online and via networks of solidarity and trust that develop rapidly, outside the traditional channels. I met Swedish and Iranian feminist activists in Dublin, and British feminist activists in Cairo, and have seen live information about the women’s marches in Egypt spread quickly through chains of activists from South Africa to the American Deep South.

    What I’m saying. We’re linked up.

    It’s too early to say whether the mood of mutiny will last. When people fight misogyny, they aren’t just fighting governments and police forces, religious organisations and strangers in the streets – they also have to deal with intolerance from their loved ones, from their colleagues, from friends and family members who can’t or won’t understand. Over the last few weeks I have been humbled by the bravery of the activists I’ve met, particularly the women. It takes a special sort of courage to cast off shame, to risk not just violence but also intimate rejection for the sake of a better future. And the thing about courage is that it’s contagious.

    Dealing with friends who can’t or won’t understand is a tough one. Courage isn’t really even relevant to that. I’m not sure what is, other than resilience. At any rate, it’s a long game, to say the least.

     

  • No one to control them

    When in doubt, harass women.

    Shahira Amin has an article at Index on Censorship about the harassment of women in Tahrir Square.

    Egyptian Salafi preacher Ahmed Mahmoud Abdulla — known as Abou Islam — recently made remarks justifying sexual violence against female protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, claiming that women who join protests are asking “to get raped”…

    In a video posted online last Wednesday, Abdulla said that women who join the protests are “either crusaders who have no shame or widows who have no one to control them”. He also described them as “devils”, and added that “they talk like monsters”.

    Yes that’s right, just throw everything. It all sticks, so it’s all good to throw.

    It’s interesting how familiar and domestic the preacher sounds though. A mere two years ago I wouldn’t have had that thought, but now it jumps off the page at me. The Salafi preacher sounds exactly like our more local harassers.

    BBC World had a distressing – not surprising, but distressing – report on harassment of women in Tahrir Square yesterday, by Aleem Maqbool. He talks to some boys/young men in the square, who are frankly there to leer at and assault women, and who think rape is a joke.

    Back to Shahira Amin.

    While the increased violence against women has been cause for growing concern, the long-awaited new legislation, the increased willingness of women to speak out and the growing number of NGOs fighting harassment (either by spreading awareness about it, encouraging women to speak out or protecting women during protests) are all encouraging signs of positive change to come. Rights activists welcome the change but insist that more needs to be done to end gender-based discrimination.

    “Changing the attitudes of men and women can only take place through education and awareness campaigns, ” said activist Azza Kamel of Fouada Watch, an NGO that has established a round-the-clock hot line for victims to report incidents of sexual harassment, verbal abuse or assaults against women. Kamel also advocates training of the police, traditionally known to take harassment reports lightly . “But above all”she said, there must be zero tolerance for those who incite violence against women (referring to the recent comments by Salafi preacher Abou Islam.)

    “Such extremists must be silenced. Incitement is as big a crime as the assault itself”, Kamel added.

    Don’t get your hopes up.

  • Enormous splash damage

    On the rest of Christian Munthe’s post on internet harassment in Sweden and in general.

    The behaviour of the “net haters”, as the established term has come to be, is often equivalent or very close to criminal harassment, libel or threat. However, existing laws are obviously not constructed for a situation where these sort of patterns are the rule and occur in a systematic and coordinated (albeit perhaps not always in a specifically planned) way.

    That’s an interesting point. So a one-off is criminal but a systematic campaign is free speech?

    At the same time, as had it been pre-ordered, we have another sort of reaction – the idea of the haters themselves as either victims or, at least, guiltless due to structural forces that direct their actions. The former type of reasoning is, of course, a well known spineless tactic from the new racist movement – it’s your own fault that you’re being attacked, you should count on it when saying such things as you do. Not so little resembling the rapist’s or molester’s so-called defense that “her dress/smile/dance/intoxication made me do it” (surprisingly similar to the orthodox islamist motivation for obligatory veils for women, by the way).

    Well that certainly is their official view. I won’t let them post mildew here, therefore I deserve whatever they choose to dish out. They think I should stfu, so they try to make that happen.

    In conclusion:

    It is of extra importance to note that the institutions of free speech, opinion and expression in liberal democratic societies in fact rest on the presumption that people keep within the sort of moral limits just set out. It may of course, be debated exactly how harmful a behaviour needs to be for the limits to the just mentioned freedoms to be approached. But what in any other circumstance would be considered as unlawful threat, libel or harassment is clearly residing in this territory.

    It’s very important to note that, because in fact threats and libel and harassment do inhibit free speech, opinion and expression.

    In comments on a post of PZ’s about “the peace process” for instance, Cyranothe2d talked about that.

    I am really fucking tired of people who have harrassed, stalked and threatened women I look up to and love being treated (by people like you) like they have some rational points, and we are just having a jolly chummy academic argument. Ask Jen if she thinks being harassed off the internet was just a “difference of opinion about the roles of women”. Ask Ophelia. Ask Rebecca. Fucking ask any woman in this thread.

    Because this “fight” has been about and remains about my fucking dignity as a human being. My right to inhabit atheist spaces without fear of reprisal or attack because of my gender. My right to be represented by other women.

    I saw that comment late in the day yesterday, and it was helpful to me. I was feeling very over-harassed yesterday, and Cyrano’s second paragraph there reminded me that shit that’s done to me is also done to all the women who are aware of it. (Mind you, a few of the women who are aware of it are fine with it, I suppose because they think it will never happen to them, and perhaps it won’t.) Today Cyrano said, replying to me, how it does inhibit her free speech, opinion and expression.

    I really think that the reason you’re targeted is because you’re public. That’s it. Its nothing that you’ve done to bring it on. It could be any one of us. That’s why I say, “When they do it to you, they do it to us.” Because I’ve no doubt that they would harass, stalk and attempt to run ANY OF WE WOMEN off the internet if we dared to talk about sexual harassment or feminism on a popular blog. And the harassment, while targeted at you, has enormous splash damage. *I* am offended and angry and feel hated, trapped and afraid because of these people. *I* have decided not to go to conferences because of them. *I* have curtailed my net presence because of them.

    I can’t even imagine what it must be like to have it directed at myself, day after day.

    That shouldn’t be happening. It shouldn’t.

  • What they don’t get

    What it’s like to be Rebecca.

    She got a message this morning with a link.

    The link was to a pornographic MS Paint drawing someone made of me and posted to a Rule 34 porn site under the username “rand0mathe1st.” The image depicts me bound and gagged, covered in semen, with a dildo up my ass. It reads, “Rebecca Watson is an object.” Here’s a link to a censored but still NSFW version that may be disturbing to you if you don’t get this shit sent to you all the time. It’s interesting to think of how much time and energy that person must spend thinking about me, fantasizing about sex with me, and wondering how much one should charge to rape me.

    She thinks a lot about sloths, Rebecca adds, but enough to do that kind of thing? She gives it a shot, but it’s too boring. Go see the cute sloth face though.

    Usually the troll messages just go into my trash bin and I get on with my day, but I thought the timing of it was too good to not mention. For a start, it handily supports Dr. Heldman’s lecture about objectification, posted below. But also, it should help make it clearer what women like me, like the other Skepchicks, like Stephanie Zvan, like Greta Christina, like Ophelia Benson, deal with on a daily basis.

    I want you to think about this the next time you hear Michael Shermer complain that Ophelia Benson’s mild criticism of his words is a “McCarthy-like witch hunt,” or when Paula Kirby complains that she’s being persecuted by feminazis because women are asking for better treatment, or when anyone complains that PZ and others are “Freethought Bullies,” or when anyone complains that I complain too much because once every few months I provide examples of the harassment I receive. Shermer, Kirby, and the others have no idea what it’s like to be hunted and harassed, because “our side,” the people who are speaking out against harassment, don’t do this to them. Michael Shermer isn’t told every day by atheists and skeptics that he’s worth nothing aside from the sexual gratification his body could offer someone. He isn’t told by atheists and skeptics that he deserves to be raped and abused. Atheists and skeptics don’t spend hours drawing images of him in dehumanizing positions. They don’t tell him that they’re going to sexually assault him if they see him at a conference. They don’t tell him he’s too old or fat or ugly to fuck. They aren’t so terrified of what he has to say that they’ll do anything they can to silence him. And they don’t tell him that his disinterest in putting up with any of the former makes him too sensitive to be involved in the atheist or skeptic community.

    Instead, they focus on his words and on his arguments and they offer an opposing viewpoint. If that’s what Shermer thinks of as a witch hunt, then a single day of the treatment I get would have him boarding up the windows at Skeptic Magazine faster than you can come up with a bigoted nickname based on his name.

    That is the truth.

  • The timing of everything was carefully executed

    What it’s like to be a woman in The Industry. What industry? It almost doesn’t matter, does it. This one is the tech industry.

    This week – someone decided to upload fake porn pictures of me to the internet – when I say fake I don’t mean my head stuck on someone’s body, but lookalikes or in some cases, just blonde girls with blue eyes and terrible taste in underwear. I digress. This is someone with far too much time on their hands and someone with a definite grudge. I’ve taught myself over the years to take the rough with the smooth and develop a thick skin, I’ve been free of online trouble for a while and rightly or wrongly, I was kind of expecting my run of luck to end. To say it caught me off guard, would be a lie, but to see how low someone would stoop, did. However, it’s amazing how resilient and detached you can be when you know you’ve been that boring your entire life that you’ve never taken nude pictures of yourself.

    The interesting thing about what this individual did was show themselves as wanting to try and damage my professional integrity with blatant trolling. It all started a week ago from the date of writing this. I started to receive emails from creepy guys and eventually traced back to a site that various pictures had been posted to. The pictures were uploaded alongside my personal email address, (old) hometown and a screenshot of my Twitter account. There was also an open forum for comments at the bottom, which I’m sure you can imagine the type of things posted there.

    Sarah Parmenter wrote that far in August, then shelved the post. Now she continues:

    The timing of everything was carefully executed, they knew I was speaking at one of our industry’s best known conferences, ‘An Event Apart’ – they started to try and spam the feed ‘A Feed Apart’ on the day of my talk – they then tried, unsuccessfully, to post to the ‘An Event Apart’ Facebook feed during my talk, they set up a fake Twitter account and tried to at-reply my employers for that conference as well as high-profile twitter users I was associated with, to ensure they knew about the pictures and their existence.

    It all sounds so familiar, doesn’t it. She still doesn’t know who did it.

    There’s many questions around why there aren’t more females speaking in this industry. I can tell you why, they are scared. Everytime I jump on stage, I get comments, either about the way I look, or the fact that I’m the female, the token, the one they have to sit through in order for the males to come back on again. One conference, I even had a guy tweet something derogatory about me not 30 seconds into my talk, only for me to bring up the point he had berated me for not bringing up, not a minute later – which caused him to have to apologise to my face after public backlash. I’ve had one guy come up to me in a bar and say (after explaining he didn’t like my talk)… “no offence, I just don’t relate to girls speaking about the industry at all, I learn better from guys”. I could write a book on inappropriate things that have been said to me at conferences about girls in the industry so much so, it’s become a running joke with fellow speakers. I know other girls who could also chip in a fair few chapters but, underneath the humour sometimes found in these situations, lies a very real problem.

    It’s no great secret that girls are a minority in this industry, you only have to look at the queues for the toilets at any conference, however, it’s forgotten that it’s not about female speakers, it’s about finding female speakers who have enough of a thick skin to want to stand up infront of an audience of twitter-trigger-happy males and public speak. That’s an entirely different kettle of fish. Then ontop – when you finally feel comfortable with speaking, you get put into a big black pot and tarnished with the label “same old face”. This happened to me on my third ever speaking engagement, third? I was tarnished as a “same old face”. Since then it’s become water off a ducks back – I’m not going to let a label stop me from developing and growing my speaking skills, I’m by no means perfect and still have a lot to learn. We should be encouraging anyone who shows an aptitude or love for sharing their knowledge with the community.

    Among other things – many, many other things – this is one huge reason it’s such a mistake ever to claim that the reason there are so few women in ___________ is because “it’s more of a guy thing.” It’s a colossal, gigantic, monumental mistake ever to take the absence of women as the outcome of pure uninfluenced inclination. Women are being systematically deliberately forcibly kept out, in a way far more conspiratorial and intentional than I would ever have imagined possible until it started happening to me and to friends of mine and to women like Sarah Parmenter and Helen Lewis and Mary Beard and Anita Sarkeesian and is that enough name to be going on with for now?

    Don’t you ever, ever assume that my non-presence in a place means that I’d rather go out for ice cream that day. Never lose sight of the very real possibility that “I” (by “I” I mean all of us) was bullied out, on purpose. Never look at a sea of male faces and assume that all the female ones are contentedly at home making soup.

    Via PZ.

  • And with one bound she was free

    More harassment. More complications. More failure to disclose. More clumsy attempts at setups. More provocation followed by noisy media blitz to express outrage at the response to the provocation.

    The A-news people, who do that podcast I was invited to do, posted a podcast on Monday, the day I was invited.

    Lee Moore, the guy who invited me, never mentioned the podcast, not when he invited me and not yesterday when I told him about  the tweet from the impersonation account (one of them) and Paden’s blog post. He never said a word about it. He should have, since half of it is about me (and my incomparable awfulness).

    The second half is devoted to talking to some guy called Anton Hill. A few weeks ago this Anton Hill tweeted at me out of nowhere – I don’t know him, I’d never had any kind of contact with him, he was a total stranger to me – to demand that I give him evidence (or maybe he said proof) that the mildew pit is misogynist. I said no, do your own homework.

    Oh my god call the cops!

    I don’t have time or inclination to explain everything to every stranger who tweets at me. I explain things in blog posts, not in tweets to strangers.

    But he thinks this is an outrage. Last week somebody sent me a link to a 19 minute video he did on the subject. Yes really! 19 minutes!

    I only watched a couple of minutes. Those minutes are quite self-important. Apparently it’s a huge deal that he hassled me on Twitter and I refused to get into a long thing with him and eventually called him a creep – a huge deal in the sense that I did a terrible thing by not consenting to be harassed and by calling him a creep.

    It looks remarkably like entrapment, this kind of thing.

    1. Provoke her
    2. Refuse to stop; keep provoking her until she calls you a creep
    3. Make a federal case out of her calling you a creep

    People do it to me a lot. They monitor me and track me and follow me, they get in my face, then they make a federal case about whatever happens when they get in my face. Don’t think there’s any remedy in just ignoring them; then it’s a crime against free speech, it’s blocking, it’s banning, it’s refusing to engage with “disagreement.”

    Here’s some of the serious thoughtful “disagreement” of Anton Hill a couple of hours ago:

    anton

     

    See how that works? Pretend to be all serious and committed to discussion and disagreement when that works, and admit it’s just pissing people off for fun when there are other funloving Watchers around.

    Of course there are people commenting on his video to say that I “compared TAM to Nazi Germany” which is a shameless lie; of course thoughtful Anton Hill is swallowing the lie. On and on it goes.

  • Asking for brickbats

    Laurie Penny says that internet misogyny should end.

    “There’s nothing wrong with [her] a couple of hours of cunt kicking, garrotting and burying in a shallow grave wouldn’t sort out.”

    Like many women who have public profiles online, I’m used to messages of this sort – the violent rape and murder fantasies, the threats to my family and personal safety, the graphic emails with my face crudely pasted onto pictures of pornographic models performing sphincter-stretchingly implausible feats of physical endurance.

    There’s more attention to the issue (and yes, it’s an issue) now because Mary Beard spoke up about it.

    According to its creator, Richard White, a lettings agent from Sidcup who started Don’t Start Me Off! “as a humour site to discuss issues of the day”, the site “is meant to be like a pub where people banter and try to be funny. It is not a hate site.” He went on to claim that “We didn’t allow certain words or people threatening to kill people.” That certainly wasn’t my experience. Clearly, one man’s ‘banter’ can be another woman’s ceaseless, dispiriting catalogue of sadistic fantasies and homophobic abuse.

    Don’t Start Me Off! Was just one site. The attacks on Mary Beard, however, have focused public attention on just how viciously misogynist the internet is getting right now – particularly British-based sites, and particularly to women who are in any way active in public life. It doesn’t matter if we’re right-wing or left-wing, explicitly political or cheerily academic, like Beard. It doesn’t matter if we’re young or old, classically attractive or proudly ungroomed, writers or politicians or comedians or bloggers or simply women daring to voice our opinions on Twitter. Any woman active online runs the risk of attracting these kinds of frantic hate-jerkers, or worse.

    Why? Because they can, apparently.

    It’s important to stress that people like Mary Beard and me are not outliers in having this experience, although some women do seem to be singled out to be made examples of. We are not even the only women to have been targeted in this way by the blogs I’ve mentioned. There are lots more hate-sites like this, more comment-threads full of vitriol and threats, and threats to hurt and kill are hardly less distressing when they don’t come with an explicit expectation of follow-through in physical reality. These messages are intended specifically to shame and frighten women out of engaging online, in this new and increasingly important public sphere.

    If we respond at all, we’re crazy, hysterical over-reacting bitches, censors, no better than Nazis, probably just desperate for a ‘real man’ to fuck us, a ‘real man’ like the men who lurk in comment-threads threatening to rip our heads off and masturbate into the stumps.

    Perhaps a ‘real man’ like Richard White, who has now apologised to Professor Beard (and, late last night, to me – see below), although he has yet to apologise to Cath Elliott, to Josie Long or any of the other women who spoke out about his vicious misogyny. Nor has he apologised to the unnamed worker in the supermarket near his workplace, another object of this sad little troll’s Walter Mitty fantasies of femicide: “Some Chavs do indeed work,” wrote White on his site. “There is this great fat lump of make-up that sits in the Co-op opposite my office . . . if I thought I could get away with it, I’d drag her outside and kick her cunt so hard, my shoes would need a whole legion of cobblers to put them back together again.”

    Remember that Basil Fawlty line, when an American guest calls him a pain in the ass? “It’s always bottoms with you Americans, isn’t it.” It’s always cunt-kicking with you whatever-you-ares, isn’t it.

    The most common reaction, the one those of us who experience this type of abuse get most frequently, is: suck it up. Grow a thick skin. “Don’t feed the trolls” – as if feeding them were the problem. The Telegraph’s Cristina Odone was amongst many commentators to imply that Mary Beard should have done just that rather than speaking out this week. “Come on, Mary,” wrote Odone. “Women in public arenas get a lot of flak – they always have. A woman who sticks her head above the parapet. . . . is asking for brickbats.”

    Asking for it. By daring to be a woman to be in public life, Mary Beard was asking to be abused and harassed and frightened, and so is any person who dares to express herself whilst in possession of a pair of tits.

    Asking for brickbats! No she isn’t! Any more than a woman who goes outside is, or a woman who takes a bus to work is, or a woman who goes to a pub is. No one who exercises a human right to do an ordinary human activity is asking for violence or insults. It’s revolting that Odone would say that.

    I always hesitate over whether or not to speak about this. In fact, I’ve written and deleted this post that you’re reading several times. For one thing, I don’t want to let on just how much this gets to me. Nobody does. It’s what the bullies want, after all. They want evidence that you’re hurting so they can feel big and hard, like Richard White in his ridiculous Twitter profile picture, which shows him with beefy arms aggressively folded and his face obscured by a cross. Nobody wants to appear weak, or frightened, or make out that they can’t ‘take it’ – after all, so few people complain. Maybe we really are just crazy women overreacting?

    And so we stay silent as misogyny becomes normalised. We’re told to shut up and accept that abuse of this vicious and targeted kind just happens and we’d better get used to it. Whilst hatred and fear of women in traditionally male spaces, whether that be the internet or the Houses of Parliament, is nothing new, the specific, sadistic nature of online sexist and sexual harrassment is unique, and uniquely accepted – and it can change. The internet is a young country. Its laws and customs are not yet decided. We don’t have to accept sexist hatred in silence any more. This week, with many victims sharing their stories of online harassment on the hashtag #silentnomore, the fightback began in earnest.

    I’ve been too busy talking about online misogyny directed at me and my friends to look at the hashtag #silentnomore. That’s ironic, isn’t it.

  • What we need is a filter

    Cath Elliott writes about What it’s like to be a victim of Don’t Start Me Off’s internet hate mob.

    Note from Helen Lewis, who republished the post on her New Statesman blog:

    Note from Helen: Cath Elliott’s Blog, An Occupational Hazard, was one of the pieces which inspired me to collect together the experiences of female bloggers about online abuse. I thought Cath was incredibly brave to write about the hatred she was subjected to – particularly since it was deliberately as humiliating and obscene as possible.

    Funnily enough, her internet tormentors were from a site called Don’t Start Me Off! – which was taken offline last week by its owner after the unwelcome glare of publicity fell on it when Mary Beard spoke out about the thread about her posted there. As Richard White, the site’s owner, is now claiming that he has been badly misrepresented, I thought it was important to hear what it was really like to be harassed by DSMO. Here’s Cath, in a post originally published on her blog yesterday.

    Yes Richard White who said “we never try to hurt people’s feelings.” He actually said that.

    In his sniveling non-apology to Professor Mary Beard, who has recently been the victim of the DSMO hate mongers, White also stated: “We do not go out to be offensive”. He then implied that the only reason Beard had seen the vile comments about her was because she’d obviously gone on to the Internet specifically to look for them.

    According to White, the trolls at DSMO were never actually trolls in the true Internety sense of the word because they never went after anyone off the site. They didn’t for instance harass anyone on Twitter or Facebook; they all stayed safely within the confines of the DSMO comment threads.

    Well, as I’m sure you’ll understand when you see the nearly two years worth of abuse and harassment I’m about to detail here, I read that Guardian interview with White with a mounting sense of disbelief.

    So did I, though at the same time I read it also with a sense of weary, disgusted familiarity. Yes of course he bullshits, yes of course he denies it, yes of course he’s dishonest and self-serving.

    In the piece I posted back in April 2011 – An Occupational Hazard? – in which I detailed the abuse I’d received on that site, I said: “Of course I realise that by posting this piece I’m no doubt giving them enough ammunition to start the whole sick cycle off again, but so be it.” And I was right: that’s exactly what they did.

    In the comment thread under the original piece someone claiming to head the moderating team at DSMO posted what looked very much like an apology: “Firstly I wish to apologise to Cath if some of the comments did offend her” he said, “I, for one, will try to watch out for the comments that upset Cath so much, but such is the nature of some people on the internet I feel we can only do our small part to stop the maliciously intent.”

    And yet two months later, in June 2011, just when I thought things were starting to die down over DSMOgate, here’s the comment that Richard ‘Ricardo’ White, the site owner remember, tried to post to this blog:

    “Hi Cath I just thought that I’d clarify that the semi-apology on this page didn’t come from me. I think maybe you thought it did. For the avoidance of doubt, I wouldn’t apologise to you if I were tied to a chair and about to be beaten to death by a gaggle of your acolytes, armed to the teeth with heavy duty dildos.

    You see, you’re in the criticism business and we all know you just love to dish it out. I’m in that business too and as any primary school child knows, if you dish it out, you have to be prepared to take it too. You seem to be unfamiliar with this concept. I’ve been on the receiving end more times than you could imagine. Rightly so, too.

    Unlike you, I don’t expect never to be challenged. Does this bother me? I can honestly say, not one iota. Your brand of hilarious left-wing nincompoopery is absolutely ripe for ridicule. You love to portray yourself as the victim, but you’re nothing of the sort. You and your fellow arch ‘Liberals’ are in truth the least liberal people on earth. You ruthlessly defend your own opinions and will not accept any criticism or suggestion that you may be wrong. Is this the free society you long for? Is freedom in Cathland purely selective? It would seem so. I imagine that, to you, Joseph Stalin was just a cuddly, misunderstood champion of the poor. So here it is, Cath. I don’t give a shit if you’re offended. As long as you’re dishing it out, you’re going to be taking it too, whether you like it, or not. Now, polish those shoes, straighten that blazer and tie and get ready for assembly.”

    Uh huh. It’s all there. The “you write in public so you deserve anything we feel like dishing out” bit. The confusion of “challenging” with trashing, insulting, degrading, and similar bullying tactics. The unabashed announcement that “you’re going to be taking it.”

    And then there are the comments. There’s a guy there persistently interpreting Elliott’s claim that rapists aren’t somehow radically and obviously different from the normal guy in the street as a claim that all guys in the street are rapists. Oy.

    I wish somebody would invent a filter. A really good, effective filter.

     

  • He bruised his knuckles when he punched her

    It was all Mary Beard’s fault, as it turns out. No really; it was. The guy who ran that website says so. If he doesn’t know, who does?!

    The co-owner and moderator of the website that published abusive comments about Mary Beard has accused the Cambridge academic of using the row to deflect from her own comments about immigration on Question Time.

    He said that friends and colleagues of Beard, professor of classics at Cambridge University, had been “trolling” his site, Don’t Start Me Off!, which he closed down this week, by bombarding it with Latin poetry.

    Oh my god that is so mean! Latin poetry, when all they wanted to do was hang around peacefully posting comments about Mary Beard’s genitalia and similar reasonable stuff.

    The co-owner and moderator, Richard White, a Kent-based local businessman,…told MediaGuardian: “If she is genuinely hurt I am sorry because we never try to hurt people’s feelings. My suspicion is that she used our site to deflect the debate because she was so roundly thrashed after her appearance on Question Time last week.”

    If. Genuinely. We never. My suspicion is. Used. To deflect. So roundly thrashed.

    What a lying piece of shit. What a lie, to say “we never try to hurt people’s feelings.” I use the word “lie” sparingly, partly because other people throw it around so very carelessly, but that just is a ludicrous lie. It’s like hitting someone with a baseball bat and then claiming you never try to hurt anyone.

    “We do not go out to be offensive and it is true that a lot of the postings that were made you would see said by other people like the comic Frankie Boyle.”

    So.the fuck.what.

    It doesn’t matter that you can see nasty shit said by other people – that is, it does matter, because it’s a very bad thing, but it doesn’t matter in the sense you meant: it doesn’t make it ok for you to say nasty shit too. If little Jimmy’s mommy let him jump off the roof would you jump off the roof too? The fact that other people are shits doesn’t give you dispensation to be a shit.

    He did more explaining of why he’s not the troll, she’s the troll.

    “Trolls are people who go and abuse people directly in places like Facebook and Twitter and if anything she is the troll because she encouraged her friends and colleagues to flood the site with Latin poetry, which they did. I allowed a lot of the poetry to go up because I didn’t have time to translate it.

    “She came to us by Googling us and in a sense looking for negative comments. We never went to her.”

    Yeah, dude – you hosted a lot of ugly crap about her and your horrific punishment was Latin poetry.

    And the thing about Google? If she can find it on Google, that means other people can find it on Google. She has a reputation. She would probably like it not to include stuff scribbled by strangers about what a cunt she is because she said something.

    White said that “as a classics scholar” Beard ought not to seek to curb freedom of speech. “She is a historian and she should know how much blood has been spilt over the years seeking to preserve freedom of speech, which you do not give away lightly,” he said.

    Right. The glorious cause. Freedom to photoshop women’s faces onto female genitalia. That’s what the martyrs died for.

     

  • Women’s hour

    Maureen Brian alerted me to Mary Beard’s appearance (there should be a hearing-word version of “appearance” for radio and podcasts – can’t be audience, that’s taken, and I can’t think of what else it could be) on Women’s Hour to talk about verbal abuse online.

    She reports that the guys who run the repellent website that zoomed in on her actually took it down. Gee. I wish that happened more often. “Oh – this is vicious and horrible?” Pause for thought. “Why I guess you’re right, it is. That’s the end of that then. Thank you for letting us know.”

    She and the presenter Jenni Murray talk about whether misogynist verbal abuse discourages women from speaking up (and writing) in public. “D’you think it does?” “Ooooooooh I don’t know, what d’you think?” “Oooooooh hard to say really.” No that’s not how it went. Mary Beard said of course it does.

  • A good little girl doesn’t

    Laura Bates objects to casual sexism among politicians in the UK.

    Murdo Fraser, Member of the Scottish Parliament for Mid-Scotland and Fife, discovered last week that the wife of former Liberal leader Lord Steel had declared herself pro-independence. He tweeted: “Why is Lady Steel (apparently) pro-independence? Is he not master in his own house?” Presumably Fraser was joking, but Twitter users were less than impressed, with one remarking: “That line is like something straight out of the 1950s.”

    Fraser’s words closely echo those of Austin Mitchell, Labour MP for Great Grimsby, who a few months ago launched a misogynistic online tirade against former Conservative MP Louise Mensch, tweeting: “Shut up Menschkin. A good wife doesn’t disagree with her master in public and a good little girl doesn’t lie about why she quit politics.” When accused of sexism, the politician acted as if the whole affair were a huge joke, later tweeting: “Has the all clear siren gone? Has the Menschivick bombardment stopped?”

    Haha. Hahahaha. Hahahahahahaha. So so funny. Remember Tom Harris MP, Labour-Glasgow South? He’s so so funny too.

    What a hero! Fearless protester chucks an egg at EdM and runs away. Like a girl. Throws like a girl too. #loser

    Remember that tweet? Remember how we all laughed? Mmmyeah.

    Bates goes on:

    …what does it say about the status quo of British politics, if our elected representatives, who make daily decisions impacting our lives and welfare, are openly prepared to make sexist jokes and direct misogynistic vitriol towards colleagues? There is a public acceptability of sexism; a suggestion that we – “just the women” – should stop getting our knickers in a twist and take a joke. MP Stella Creasy says: “Parliament is no different from the rest of Britain, where unconscious stereotyping about women happens, too – the point is we should challenge cultural prejudices and expectations wherever they are expressed.”

    We should, as long as we’re prepared for bellows of outrage and accusations of being a McCarthyite Nazi witch-hunting inquisition that purges and pillories tragic hapless men who were only giving their honest opinion of why there were no women around the table where they were mouthing off. We are all prepared for those, right? Of course we are.

    Jacqui Hunt, London director of the international human rights organisation Equality Now, says: “As elected public representatives, it is essential that MPs communicate with respect and dignity at all times. It is their responsibility to help eliminate rather than reflect harmful gender stereotypes. They need to set the example to ensure that women and girls do not experience prejudice or abuse, but rather reach their full potential as human beings.” It is perhaps no surprise that the UK manages to come only joint 60th in the world for political gender equality, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union.

    Is it too much to ask that our elected representatives support women rather than tear them down? Particularly when their female colleagues are still dealing with sexist abuse, tweets about their breasts during Prime Minister’s Questions, and tabloid articles on “Cameron’s Cuties” and the “Best of Breastminster“. It would be nice if women coping with rape and sexual assault didn’t have to see their elected political representative going to such lengths to publicly declare, “Not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion,” as Galloway did. It would be nice to think that in a society where more than two women per week, on average, are killed by current or former partners, two politicians in the space of six months didn’t find it funny to make public jokes about husbands being the “master” of their wives. Of course, neither would have intended such a correlation, but the point is that general attitudes and ideas about women are important. Shouldn’t politicians be leading the fight against prejudice, rather than indulging in it?

    Oh but I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think general attitudes and ideas about women are important. They can’t be. Saying they are is “radical” “gender” feminism, not nice normal non-radical equity feminism. I know this because people keep saying it.

     

  • “She whined”

    I hope you enjoyed your break from the misogyny wars yesterday – I held off on commenting on the Ms piece in order to make it a real break – because the wars aren’t over yet.

    I’m staggered by something I just read by Rod Liddle at the Spectator. I’ve been staggered by things Rod Liddle said before – way back in January 2010, for instance, and reposted here in October 2011.

    And here I was fuming (or should I say bitching?) about sexist epithets and men who type thousands of words insisting that ‘stupid bitch’ is not sexist. Kind of puts it all in perspective. Except actually I think it’s (broadly speaking) all part of the same thing. I think both items are part of a broader culture in a lot of places that demeans women in a sexist way. I think the bizarro phenomenon of men who ought to know better verbally spewing on women whenever they feel like it is pretty much by definition part of a broader culture that demeans women in a sexist way. That’s why it shocks me that men give themselves permission to do that – it reveals that contempt for women is commonplace in areas where I would have thought it had gone out of fashion decades ago.

    But no – apparently it’s still seen as hip and edgy and funny to treat women like dirt. Apparently sexism is being defined downwards so that it isn’t really sexism unless, I don’t know, it comes with a signed affidavit stating This Is Sexism. Rod Liddle apparently is of that school, unless he really didn’t post this on a Millwall fans’ website:

    Stupid bitch. A year eight sociology lecture from someone who knows fck all. You could equally say that we were similar to any group which disliked a certain aspect of society, felt estranged from it but were sure we were right. The logical extension of her argument is that the status quo is always right, which is absurd, because if that were true nothing would change. Someone kick her in the cnt.

    That’s Rod Liddle. This too is Rod Liddle, three years on, telling Mary Beard “It’s not misogyny, Professor Beard, it’s you.”

    She went on Question Time, he explains. She said things there that he considers stupid and wrong.

    Beyond the confines of the programme, Beard’s remarks were greeted with frank hilarity and in some cases anger. She was very quickly made ‘Twat of the Week’ on a non-aligned website and the insults started flowing. Most of them were accurate refutations of her vacuous argument, or expressions of annoyance at her middle-class, metropolitan insouciance. But it is true that some ridiculed her appearance as well.

    Outrageous, tweeted Beard! (Yes, the Prof tweets, and that tells you something.) ‘The misogyny here is truly gob-smacking,’ she whined: all those comments were ‘truly vile’. She triumphantly listed the most graphic comments on her blog and concluded that the abuse would ‘be quite enough to put many women off appearing in public’. If only that were true in Mary’s case, but I strongly suspect it isn’t.

    We’re supposed to think he’s “joking” there – he doesn’t really wish the abuse would put her off appearing in public. Oh really?

    But there’s one other thing in the case of Mary Beard. How many professors of classics have you seen on BBC Question Time, other than Beardie? None. How many other professors of classics have been invited to take part in Jamie’s Dream School, or been invited to present a series on BBC2? None other. Just Beard. Why is this? Is it because she is so absolutely brilliant at the classics that they think she ought to be on a cooking show? Nope: it’s because of the way she looks. They think she looks like a loony. And the TV companies, the producers, love that. If they can’t get a hunk or a fox, they like an eccentric. It generates a reaction, not always entirely pleasant. And if Mary doesn’t grasp that her appearance is precisely why she — along with Grayson Perry — gets to be on TV, then she had best not look at what the genuine loonies have to say on Twitter.

    Nice guy.

     

  • Thought for the morning

    The Mellow Monkey (whose avatar is a butterfly, surely the sign of an outstanding sort of person) at Pharyngula:

    There aren’t that many people who enjoy fighting for social justice. We’d prefer it to just be a given and be able to focus on other stuff, too. Want to know the best way to ensure we all can do that? Shut the assholes up and work towards justice with us. The less time we have to spend arguing about trifling shit and fighting to be recognized as equal and welcome, the more time we have to devote to everything else under the sun.

    Some of us don’t have the privilege to just shrug and say we don’t care.

    Really. Contrary to the people who like to shout that I’m an attention whore, I don’t want to talk about woman-hating woman-baiting bullshit all the time. I’d much rather talk about other things. But, oddly enough, there’s a little bunch of people who simply will not leave me alone, and will not leave several other women alone either. If people keep thrusting themselves between you and the keyboard (figuratively speaking) then you don’t really have the luxury of ignoring them.

  • Adam’s petition

    Adam Lee has a petition to the Leaders of Atheist, Skeptical and Secular Groups: Support Feminism and Diversity in the Secular Community. Please, if you agree with it, take a minute to sign it and share it.

    We, the undersigned, are atheists, skeptics and nonbelievers who value free speech and rational thought and who seek to build a strong, thriving movement that can advocate effectively for these values. We’ve chosen to put our names to this petition because we want to respond to a video created by a blogger calling himself Thunderfoot. In this video, Thunderfoot attacks named individuals who’ve been active in promoting diversity and fighting sexism and harassment in our movement. He describes these people as “whiners” and “ultra-PC professional victims” who are “dripp[ing] poison” into the secular community, and urges conference organizers to shun and ignore them.

    We hold this and similar complaints from other individuals to be seriously misguided, false in their particulars and harmful to the atheist community as a whole, and we want to set the record straight. We wish to clarify that Thunderfoot and those like him don’t speak for us or represent us, and to state our unequivocal support for the following goals:

    We support making the atheist movement more diverse and inclusive.

    And (to speak for myself for a moment) we’ve noticed that cyberstalking and harassing and impersonating and smearing a tiny selection of feminist women and a tinier selection of feminist men (aka “manginas”) is not a good way to do that. Why not? Because it puts people off.

    We support the people in our community who’ve been the target of bullying, harassment and threats. Outside the conference environment, there are prominent members of the atheist community (including most of the people named in Thunderfoot’s video) who’ve been subjected to a vicious and persistent campaign of online harassment, including obsessive streams of slurs and invective, threatening messages, sexually-tinged taunting, and malicious impersonation on social media, all carried out with the goal of bullying them into silence. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder in support of the people who’ve been harassed in this way, and forcefully and unequivocally condemn those who’ve carried out the harassment. Unless they change their ways and make amends, they have no place within the movement.

    To put a stop to this bad behavior once and for all, we need to change the culture of the atheist movement so that sexism isn’t condoned or defended, just as racism and homophobia aren’t condoned or defended. We’re grateful to the leaders of the movement who’ve spoken out against harassment, and we encourage all atheists and skeptics, regardless of their influence or prominence, to do likewise.

    Over here! I’ve been subjected to that campaign. A lot. On the one hand, of course, it’s great, because it shows how hugely important I must be, or they wouldn’t pore over my every word. On the other hand, it gets creepy after a year or so.

    Adam has a post about this, too.

    You may have heard that the video blogger “Thunderf00t”* recently published a video titled “Why ‘Feminism’ is poisoning Atheism“, which he’s been sending to the heads of atheist and skeptical organizations. In this video, he attacks named individuals who’ve been active in promoting diversity and fighting sexism and harassment in our movement, describing them as “whiners” and “ultra-PC professional victims” who are “dripp[ing] poison” into the secular community, and urges conference organizers to shun and ignore them. He’s also claiming that prominent members of the atheist movement who’ve previously spoken out against harassment and misogyny didn’t do so of their own free will, but were coerced into making these statements using nefarious means he declines to specify.

    Although I don’t expect that anything will come of this effort, I think it’s important that ignorant and destructive statements like this not go unanswered. Therefore, I thought it would be worthwhile to demonstrate the depth of support within the secular community for measures to increase diversity among our representatives, institute anti-harassment policies at our gatherings, and other moderate and reasonable policies for making everyone feel welcome and broadening our appeal.

    That’s why I say if you agree, please sign.

     

  • Thunderfoot’s inflammatory video

    Never enough time…

    And then spending an hour walking on the beach with the dog first thing in the morning eats into the day something fierce. And yet – it’s walking on the beach first thing in the morning! And I’ve only just realized that it’s actually the best beach for the purpose on the peninsula. I tried to shake up our routine yesterday and go somewhere else for the sunset, but it wasn’t fun – too rocky, not enough beach, and too near the road. Gorgeous, don’t get me wrong, but not right for dawn and sunset walks with a dog, or really even for long comfortable walks with or without a dog. This beach here is a strolly beach. Big, and strolly, and nowhere near a road.

    So I’m reading Mick Nugent’s long reply to Thunderfoot. It’s a joy to read.

    The part about Melody, for instance.

    Thunderf00t then attacks Melody Hensley:

    “Look, let me make this simple. I just got back from an experiment where I was surrounded by sane, rational, capable, able, intelligent people. And then you come back to the secular community, where you have people like Melody Hensley, the Executive Director of the Center For Inquiry in DC going creationist style ban happy on people who haven’t even mentioned her name yet, because they might say something bad about her someday.

    And starting flagging campaigns against videos critical of her. Oh, and would you believe it, she labels herself a feminist. It’s just sickening to see someone from the Center For Inquiry embrace with such relish these silencing tactics which we have seen creationist use here on YouTube for years to protect their budget arguments from criticism. I mean, really an Executive Director from the Center For Inquiry running a flagging campaign. Shit, these people would give Scientology a run for their money.”

    So let’s examine TF’s personal attack on Melody.

    Who did she ban from where? She banned nobody from anywhere. She blocked people from following her on twitter, who were also following the Elevatorgate twitter account, which was posting tweets harassing her. That seems like a prudent and sane thing to do. She did not infringe on anybody’s right to freedom of expression.

    Melody then asked her friends on Facebook to flag as ‘bullying’ a video about her, because she was tired of dealing with constant online harassment and bullying. What did this video say about her? It was titled ‘Melodramatic Melody’ and the description began:

    ‘Melody Hensley is executive director of CFI in DC, and has been acting like a total douchebag feminist this past week.’

    Some of the content included:

    “Yours truly, who had never even given a shit about this little twat until today… had she not made it known that she was doing this mass blocking on twitter, people would have gone about their business of not giving a fuck about her at all… The simple fact is she has now stirred the pot and has painted a large bull’s-eye on her ass… She doesn’t know how twitter works, but that’s understandable seeing as how twitter is a bit more complicated than a cappuccino machine… as for Melodramatic Melody, well, she’s off to stick her flag on the top of Mount Moaning Victim. Don’t worry though, it’s more of a small hill than a mountain, because we all know that feminists don’t fare well when faced with real challenges when trying to get to the top…”

    This hate-filled video was published by a woman calling herself the Wooly Bumblebee. The video ends by seeking financial support for a website called a Voice for Boys, which in turn has a link to a website called A Voice for Men, which is so misogynistic a website that it reads like dark parody, and which is currently featuring Thunderf00t’s video which we are discussing here.

    Flagging this ‘Melodramatic Melody’ video seems a prudent and sane thing to do. Flagging is an entirely appropriate facility put in place by YouTube to govern how YouTube oversees the privilege that it gives to people to post videos for free on its website. If you want to start your own video website without flagging facilities, you can do so. If you want to use YouTube’s video service to publish your videos, you have to abide by the rules that YouTube determine. Freedom of expression does not mean that you control the use of other people’s communication platforms.

    A joy to read, I tell you.

  • Bullied or cajoled

    More anti-feminist rage, more pro-feminist pushback. No doubt you’re aware of Thunderfoot’s video, which (for my sins) I watched. That’s the rage. The pushback is…

    Michael Nugent for instance.

    Thunderf00t has published a video in which he includes me on a list of people who he claims have been “bullied or cajoled” into what he calls “a bullshit PC appeasement position” regarding feminism.

    In my case he is referring to an article I wrote last August for Skepchick, without being either bullied or cajoled, as part of a series on speaking out against hate directed at women.

    I’m republishing that article here, because it is still important to speak out against hate directed at women, regardless of your opinions about the internal politics of the atheist movement.

    The article follows. Notice the sweetly indirect way Nugent points out that Thunderfoot lied about him and all the other men who wrote articles for Amy’s series at Skepchick. Thunderfoot said they were all bullied or cajoled, and that’s a falsehood.

    Notice what the lie implies – that all men hate feminism, that all men naturally agree with Thunderfoot about feminism, that no men would have written articles for that series without being bullied or cajoled – and that feminists are manipulative bullies.

    As Adam Lee put it in a comment on Nugent’s post –

    The really bizarre part is how Thunderfoot and others are settling on the position that we can’t be saying this because we actually believe it, that someone must have somehow coerced or blackmailed so many prominent atheist men into speaking out against misogyny. This is black-helicopter territory, folks. I’d love to hear what leverage they think the evil feminists have over so many of us, that they can force us to make statements we don’t truly believe.

    PZ for another instance.

    It’s a new year, and Thunderf00t hasn’t changed a bit — he has a new video where he’s apparently ranting about how feminism is poisoning atheism, which I haven’t watched, so I can’t judge. But there are hints that it’s more of the same. It’s been picked up and praised by A Voice For Men.

    Here are a few of the amusing reactions that the video elicited from that gang. Well, they would be amusing if they didn’t testify to a deep hatred of women.

    Well, now I look upon these women as nothing but Clowns who have deliberately allowed themselves to brainwashed into believing stupid things like the Earth is flat or some other stupid crap. The vomit that spews from their mouths is not just stupid, it is absolutely laughable. I now sit here laughing my head off at what I read. In my own social movements in life, I laugh at the idiotic dialog of the females I come into contact with. It is unbelievable the level of childish trash that issues forth from the mouths of women whose ages range from 20 all the up to nearly 70.

    Women, WILL NEVER BE EQUAL TO MEN!

    I don’t care how they put it, because the simple overwhelming fact throughout the history of Mankind, is that women have NEVER been equal to men and they never will be.

    Will at Skepchick for another instance.

    Thunderfoot has published a video (it’s getting rave reviews from the MRA blog A Voice For Men) in which he accuses Skepchick Surly Amy of “bullying or cajoling” men into contributing to her awesome series of posts “Speaking out against hate directed at women.” Michael Nugent has a blog post up about it, noting that he was never bullied (or cajoled, which is kind of the opposite of bullying) into writing the article and then reposts the article in question. I’m not going to link to Thunderfoot’s video here, but the link is on Nugent’s post for those with the intestinal fortitude.

    I have two major issues with this sort of discourse. First, using “bullying” to poison the well against people because you disagree with them is the exact opposite of rational. And for people in a community that prides itself on rationality and skeptical/critical thinking, there sure is a whole hell of a lot of this kind of nonsense going on.

    The second (and more important) concern that I have about this sort of thing is that it has the effect of diminishing the experiences of people who are actually bullied. It lessens the impact of accusing actual bullies. It’s the same sort of shit that these same people complain about with the use of the word “misogynist.” They’re right about one thing—labeling every instance of sexism directed at women as misogyny does lessen the impact that that word has. So stop fucking doing it with “bully.”

    Of course poisoning the well is the whole point, so they’re not going to stop.