"I'm afraid of men on the Internet"

You mean I’m going to have to listen to culinary slights once a day for the next 1,000,000 days? :scream:

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Oh, OK, I didn’t realize that, since so many of the more famous examples have included real-life stalking as part of the package.

Still, would you want to show up to a completely different site about a completely different interest only to find your online stalker responding to your every post about flowers or juggling or Georgian music? That would start to feel like there had to be some real-life component to it for them to find you, you know?

I concur, as a white man I can barely walk down the street without getting harassed.

I don’t care if it is Pumpkin Spice season. This kind of stuff is inappropriate.

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We are talking about online harassment which has a fairly even split between male and female victims according to Pew, not street harassment. No one denied that women are the primary targets of street harassment or other forms of offline harassment. The author even narrowed it down to online harassment by random strangers on the Internet.

I’m not sure why this is so hard for people to believe. Surely I can’t be the only male on here who has been threatened online. That would be pretty shocking.

I’m always concerned when I make a post on a new forum, if I haven’t gotten the feel for it yet. And there’s some guys I won’t engage at all because I’d rather not draw their attention to me.

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In as much as there ever really was a debate. [whynotboth.gif]

But epigenetics still won’t create genes you don’t have. It’s entirely about expression and activation, but the genes have to be there. Even if epigenetics are responsible for 100% of effects we cannot explain using the Central Dogma, the Central Dogma is still intact. So I wouldn’t say “meaninglessness” exactly.

Don’t know why this came out as a response to @Shaddack, when it was meant for @mindysan33. Actually, I do know: Time to create a meta topic!

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Absolutely fucking PUMMELED lately by meta topics. Let’s just moosh everything into one big topic and have at it.

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So a meta-meta topic?

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Got that right here for ya.

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Yeah. No more titles or articles. Just comments. Not even about anything. Just comments. That’s it.

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Another abandoned post to keep from going OT. Damn you.

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I think my point was probably more that we don’t really understand what’s going on fully vis-a-vis nature/nurture, so making sweeping comments about such doesn’t make much sense, or rather giving either side the weight of “THE TRUTH” is probably too soon.

Just look at Elizabethan / Victorian England. Just look at it. Let us all take our time.

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No, you are not the only one. No, you are not. No, you are not.

But who receives more online and offline serious harassment? Again, I am not minimizing your experience, but based on numbers it isn’t dudes.

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Good, no comments here yet. Moved it back.

I think this is important, and it fundamentally challenges the idea that abuse is mainly perpetrated by people who think too highly of themselves. If there’s a large correlation between violent crime and childhood abuse (and aside from that, it’s hardly the most privileged sectors of society who have high criminality rates), then often we’re dealing with people who have been long term victims, enough to change their genetic makeup and make them less likely to feel empathy for others or act in non-violent ways. Added to this, you have other evidence that it is fragility, not strength that leads people to discriminate against others. Extreme homophobes often turn out to be homosexual themselves. Sexist comments in video games often come from the poorest players. Extreme racists are generally not physically or mentally the strongest in their group.

I’d say a big problem is that many people have not learned that they are good enough. This is not ego stroking, but saying in a profound way that you can accept yourself as you are and don’t need to feel threatened by those around you. Empathy is key here: if these people have been made to feel insignificant through abuse, telling them that male victimisation is not that bad is telling them what they already know - they don’t matter. Nobody has the right to dominate or abuse others, but if anyone is being attacked, we should have their back. No more than that - MRAs want to make a political issue of this, but it doesn’t have to have anything to do with who is more frequently attacked. This behaviour is not acceptable whoever the victim is, even though there are clear patterns in society. Past abuse has to be addressed in ways that don’t promote abuse now.

Sending people to prison should be the last resort - putting men in an environment where they are surrounded by indifference and cruelty and other low empathy males will not teach them empathy. There have to be more effective tools to encourage people to accept themselves and not pull others down.

This seems to be an important principle in general that is very problematic here. If something is stolen or someone is killed and you think you know who did it, it’s good to keep an open mind as the evidence available to you could be pointing in the wrong direction. With a rape (especially when the perpetrator is known to the victim) or many cases of online abuse, the victim has no doubt about the person’s identity and what they did. This isn’t because they don’t have an open mind, it’s because it happened to them and they were fully aware of it. Unfortunately there are very rare cases where people do lie, but presuming innocence is not a neutral stance at all.

Just another data point, but I haven’t personally been threatened online. Many times in person, but I’ve never feared for my life or safety other than being physically or verbally attacked. My wife found a creep literally the first time she went online back in the 90s, in the first internet conversation she ever had. Luckily that was more of an exception than the rule.

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My thought would be just as someone who is accused of a crime such as harrassment is ‘innocent until proven guilty’, victims should be also considered innocent of making false accusations or perjury, until they are found guilty, too. That is to say, when an allegation is made, it must be assumed to be made honestly and investigated thoroughly as such. To investigate an accusation thoroughly (including bringing charges) should not presuppose guilt on the part of the accused - all it indicates is that there is enough evidence that a crime may have occurred that a court must examine the case.

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You say that you have never felt threatened or fearful due to online interactions, but does that mean that you have never been threatened? I’ve been addressed in a manner that was clearly intended to threaten, but that didn’t actually scare me the way that a similar interaction in the street would. Harassment is clearly a crime of intent, though, isn’t it?

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I think it helps that I finished school before I was on social media, and I was older than the other students at uni and mostly kept to myself (I didn’t live on campus either). I really don’t think I’ve ever been intentionally threatened online. Somebody started a Facebook group to criticise me and a couple of other students who liked to unicycle to university, and somebody else started one to support us, but that’s probably about the most online attention I’ve had related to myself rather than my opinions.

I’ve just checked the two groups, and the unicycle hate group is down. “I wish I could unicycle like him” is still there, with all the fan mail:

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