The problem, as I found out when I got embroiled in a controversy around this in 2014, is that the worst perpetrators of bad male behavior around women can be extremely sneaky about it. Like, they go out of their way to do shitty things when no other men are around or can witness the behavior.
Sort of the prototypical “I confronted my worst troll and it was my neighbor’s son” story:
There is a lot of being assholes in private that goes on. Like the proverbial iceberg, what you see on the surface is a tiny fragment of the terrible behavior they engage in when they think nobody (other than the victim / target) can see them.
While it doesn’t come close to explaining all of the incidents, the lack of empathy of some teens and early 20-somethings can be pretty disturbing. It’s a good reminder for people who could think that bullying in school isn’t that big of a deal, when fully grown adults can suffer serious psychological effects from the kind of calculated abuse that people can give without necessarily seeing it as a bad thing. There seem to be a few of these stories where some of the most sexist or racially charged abusers turn out to have never really thought about things from their victim’s perspective, and who can be reached on a personal level. Anger can be cathartic and it’s what they deserve (along with criminal charges in many cases), but it’s also what they expect and feed on.
There have been some positive results from getting abusers to talk about what they did from the victim’s perspective (for example, rapists telling the account of the rape to themselves in the second person, while taking on the role of the victim). I wonder how effective this would be online, and how it could be implemented? A link to a website with first hand accounts of the damage people do? Allies engaging with abusers and refusing to allow them to see this as a game?
I also wonder what the longer term success of this approach was in this and similar cases. I don’t want to be overly optimistic and it’s possible that the somewhat happy ending was short lived, and the abuser just moved on to other people.
Well, you may not be able to reach the hardcore asshat, but you might be able to reach the impressionable young person watching those interactions on the victim’s twitter feed (or whatever form it takes).
I mean it would still count as spam if it happened, but wouldn’t it be nice if every bit of assholish behaviour got 50+ replies decrying that behaviour? Or 50+ downvotes, or 50+ flags?
I agree that incivility and rudeness, much less cruelty, should be decried. But a lot of this is on the platform – until very recently Twitter did zip to stop new accounts from just spewing hate at anyone.
(New tweets from new users with crazy-ass language are now blocked semi-programmatically and by default on Twitter as any freakin’ sane programmer would have done years ago…)
I’d also argue that flagging and suppression is better than arguing with someone about, well, hate. There are no winners in an argument about hate.
Anyway I just wanted to point out that dudes in general are really, really, good at being super, super sneaky about abuse. It’s not like there is some Giant Brotherhood of Being An Asshole where we run around clapping each other on the back every time we see a dude put down a woman. The problem is, a lot of it is really hidden – and very intentionally so. These kinds of dudes go to great pains to keep their little hate-a-thon a private affair between them and the target/victim, because they know other men would not approve of what they’re doing.
Just ask any dude about his porn stash.
And when we hide porno, we go all out. lt ain’t behind the refrigerator or under the bed. No, we become Batman when it’s time to hide some porno. That’s right, you hit the light switch, the whole bookshelf shifts to the side. You go down two flights of stairs into your porno cellar.
Sex… gender… and secrecy. There’s some deep stuff there to dig through.
Or it could be down to the <cough> patriarchy <cough> normalising a lot of that behaviour too. A lot of microaggressions don’t look or sound like a problem when you are a dude.
Dudes in general are more aggressive in every mammalian species. Thanks, testosterone! So you’re right, there might be more broad male gender tolerance for aggression as a “normal” thing. But not hate.
Never, ever underestimate the ability of a dude to do some nasty, secret stuff that he’s not showing to anyone else. There’s a reason all the mass shooters are men. That’s really the main point I’m trying to make here. I am all for putting a hand on another man’s shoulder and saying, “hey, whoa, too far, not cool” – but it’s difficult to achieve because the really nasty behaviors that would prompt the strongest peer male backlash, they actively hide.
What they could do, however, is listen to women who relate these nasty hidden behaviors, and believe them. Hi Anita!
Ok wait wait wait. Reading the Anita Hill wikipedia entry – and for the record even in 1991 I thought Clarence Thomas was full of – what the hell is this?
In October 2010, Thomas’s wife Virginia, a conservative activist, left a voicemail at Hill’s office asking that Hill apologize for her 1991 testimony. Hill initially believed the call was a hoax and referred the matter to the Brandeis University campus police who alerted the FBI. After being informed that the call was indeed from Virginia Thomas, Hill told the media that she did not believe the message was meant to be conciliatory and said, “I testified truthfully about my experience and I stand by that testimony.” Virginia Thomas responded that the call had been intended as an “olive branch”.
Brenda Ann Spencer? Priscilla Joyce Ford (okay, not a shooter, used a car, but anyway)? Jennifer San Marco? Sylvia Seecrest? More could be likely dug out.
Female hyenas are weird. Foetuses of both sexes get a lot more testosterone in the womb than other female mammals, and much more than the males could produce alone. Female hyenas have masculinised genitals and other features. It doesn’t fully explain why females are even more aggressive than the males, but it’s interesting all the same. Perhaps there are also hormones that promote female aggression, and female hyenas have both?
ETA: I think biology explains a lot, but doesn’t excuse abusive behaviour.
Also, I think the stories that some men have posted here about defending their wives/daughters, etc are problematic in that the feed into the ‘don’t go out alone’ advice given to many young women. Defending women that would have been historically seen as your property does not actually challenge a patriarchal system of abuse (although it’s obviously the right thing to do). If women require male defenders with whom they have a pre-existing relationship, then the abuse is still working as intended as it is preventing women’s full participation in the public sphere, on their own terms.
Obviously, we, as men, have a responsibility to challenge abuse. But it needs to be all the abuse that we witness, not just directed against people we know. Furthermore, we should challenge the culture of abuse, by letting it be known generally that we consider such behaviour to be unacceptable. As for threatening violence, I dunno, it seems problematic, but I just don’t know.
I don’t think we need to hunt for biological root cause. I think profiling aggressors is useful, but only marginally.
I think we need stronger technology and Disqus is approaching it… But not quite there yet.
On any forum or medium: New accounts don’t get to post jack diddly immediately. That eliminates fake accounts. Then when they are opened after a week or two, they don’t get to pm and get to post only a few things that are subject to the strictest scrutiny. Then, more trust as time goes on and they’ve contributed to the community in positive, subject-advancing ways.
Disqus has a few trust levels. I think there should be about ten. And that they should be structured in a way that concentrates the mods’ energy and organizes it for them.
I think one of the things that just about anyone – religious or not – is willing to agree on is that humans are MORE than just biological animals. We use our brains to do more. We “civilize” ourselves. Blaming bad behavior on biology is a cop-out: we somehow manage to rise above our biology in millions of ways every day, from learning physics to creating symphonies to driving cars, but somehow we can’t stop ourselves from picking on people with less power in our society…really?
I think “male defenders” should rightly be seen as problematic - we should help each other and make it clear that this is not acceptable, not guard ‘our’ women. This is often a systemic problem, and websites have a fairly unique opportunity to play with the system parameters of their own microculture. When sites are completely open, unregulated and unmoderated, trollies have an unprecedented opportunity to attack people and are much more difficult to confront. They can also find like-minded people and are not subject to the soft social pressures that might normally apply. Flagging people is not like putting them in jail, as they can always create a new handle. Short of highly restricted spaces where only known participants are allowed, it’s difficult to make a space completely safe. Where this does happen, it can limit people’s ability to find each other for support.
However, there do seem to be effective controlling forces, many of which are used negatively at the moment. I gave the Twitter example above not to support the responses, but to highlight the fact that men are not against defending people or attacking what they see as negative tweets in principle. Whether it’s because they think they will be accused of white knighting, or because they don’t think it’s their business, or because they don’t know what to do, or because they secretly agree, there is often not that much support for women who face serious attacks that actually have the potential of causing fear, silencing the person or putting their lives at risk. Women had to fight to be able to post photos of their own breasts on Facebook, and some photos are still being challenged. Somehow, this is seen as so offensive that they can’t keep the pictures up. Community opposition to negative content is possible, but it does take fundamental changes in mentality, including our idea of free speech.
This is true, and yet depressingly often our own actions and those of others can be all too easily explained by our animal nature. We empathise with those in groups we identify with, rather than humanity in general. We keep having wars for stupid reasons, and people still sign up. We’re still having serious problems with bullying and aggression, even while we are so technologically advanced. Our thought processes are often not logical, and in ways that can be studied. Our whole characters can change significantly based on the medications we’re taking, and people are influenced by many other physical factors. Even where we don’t personally pick on people with less power (or try not to), we can’t seem to stop it from happening. While our biology doesn’t affect what is morally right and wrong, trying to understand people’s motivations and working out effective ways to deal with negative behaviour can be helpful. There’s a lot of evidence that our bodies are important in forming who we are, but also plenty of evidence to show that this isn’t written in stone, and external factors are at least as important.
Yes. Unlike with the black lives matter thing where veiled bigots say “all lives matter,” the opposite is true for this: ALL people should be defenders. Not just men defending women. Everyone who is personally for good & goodness needs to defend every other person against evil.
– what the hell is this?
Oh my god, I had no idea that happened.