Saying all lives matter instead of #BlackLivesMatter erases the urgent need behind #BlackLivesMatter. No one is saying that all lives don’t matter, but right now, we need to focus on #BlackLivesMatter because there is an immediate and urgent need. Saying all people need to defend every other person “against evil” instead of sticking up for women being harrassed online… is very much the same. You take the urgency and focus away from what is demonstrably a women’s issue. Yes of course everyone should defend everyone “against evil” - but also specifically, we need to address the very real issue of women being harassed online.
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I agree, but that’s not what I said at all. Do you feel the #1 most urgent need online is to defend women from being harassed? Or that trolls, trolling, trollage is the #1 problem and needs to be eradicated, thereby also solving the ‘harassing women’ issue along with it?
I think it is largely a women’s issue, and often women are the ones who are less likely to be defended, so that makes it important to focus on this aspect. However, it’s also a systemic issue and should be addressed at that level too. While that does mean that the solution also helps male victims and stops female abusers, it will help those who are more vulnerable more, and in a more sustainable way. In the same way, improving the economy doesn’t mean that black lives don’t matter any more, it just means that economic inequality is a big tool of oppression, and attacking that element will do more lasting good than trying to focus on benefiting one group. From the perspective of people’s attitudes, we certainly need to ask ourselves why we allow women to be victimised and what we can do to address that issue.
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Those things are not in opposition to each other, neither of them is likely to be completely achievable within our lifetimes, and I’m not sure that comparing the two leads to anything informative or useful. Also, trolls aren’t the only people who harass women, unless you define all harassment of women as trolling
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It’s difficult to quantify.
But even offline, they’re louder and more nasty and more prominent. I live in an area with a high degree of social services, public transportation, and the only hospital in the city that treats regardless of ability to pay. I get crazies screaming at my wife in front of me while she’s by my side, while I rarely get more than a mutter from women in a similar state of personal distress.
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It’s just not ideally framed. We don’t disagree about the need, “male defenders [of women]” comes off as unnecessarily paternal and distracts from the goal. Honestly, I don’t have the perfect framing, but I can see why that is offputting and even if men have a duty to keep other men from being terrible through whatever sanction we have, and it is our problem, there’s got to be a better way to give women the autonomy and assistance we can without stepping in their way at the same time.
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My favorite take on that: http://the-toast.net/2014/09/11/father-daughters-think-treat-women-like-daughters/ Because liver pyramids.
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Why are we pitting things against other things? This isn’t the oppression olympics where we only pay attention to the worst off group is it?
I don’t think that eradicating trollage will do away with the harassment women face, no.
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You are correct, it won’t.
…
It would be nice, but it won’t stop harassment.
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Yes, it does distract. But as with many things, it can be interpreted a couple of different ways. One way is “DEFENDER OF LOWLY WOMEN!” The other way is, yeah, I fuckin defend women. And children and people in general from the wrath of jerks.
That might be taking it too far. Things don’t have to be pitted one against another and we can cognitively hold different priorities simultaneously. That said, this world requires choices. Sometimes we have to decide what we are going to defend or put our efforts into. Nobody has mentioned, so far, internet bullying of children… which I personally find much more disturbing than any of what we’ve discussed so far in the thread. (Not the fact that we haven’t mentioned it… the bullying itself is disturbing.)
Wait, what are we talking about again? I forgot. Yes. The Internet needs places that are cleaned up, where women don’t have to cower and adjust. @Missy_Pants doesn’t think that eradicating trollage in these places will have an effect on harassment against women. So my question is, assuming there exists a safe and sane place for women on the Internet, what would that place be like? How would we achieve such a place?
I am in a mood… between the murder of three women just outside of Ottawa yesterday that postponed the “Take back the night” march, and the delivery of the ripped rape kit to Kanes’ accusers mother today… I’m just done. Y’all discuss these issues clinically and logically and from a distance all you like. This is real life for me and my friends, its all connected, and today, I just can’t. Later.
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Fair enough. Just know that I’m not out to prove you wrong. I want to hear what you have to say.
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I think a big issue is the lack of empathy. Even if all the right systems are put in place, actual people have to be there to support women and oppose trollies. I think there needs to be a sense of #alllivesmatter to some extent, where we destroy this oppositional, zero sum idea where men feel that we are losing ground to feminism and start identifying with women in a real sense. We are internet communities, and some of us are being systematically attacked. You attack one of us, you attack all of us. We don’t share the same problems or experience them to the same extent and we are not claiming to share them either, but we are able to leverage things that unite us to a large extent.
Sorry to insult you if this is how you see this conversation. However, you have said that this is something for men to address and that male support is lacking, so I do think that we should be discussing it (and not in a clinical and logical way, apart from where that implies seeking an effective solution).
War machines are built to defend empires and states (at times, even from their own citizens), not the outcome of supposedly natural male aggression, though. Your example is a bit apples to oranges.
And then there is epigenetics, which blur to the point of near meaninglessness the nature/nurture debate… or at the very least throw that discussion back open a little bit:
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You also should add to this cloud-pile, Steven Jay Gould’s masterpiece, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.” Brilliance. And also takes apart this whole nature/nurture thing, AS WELL AS eviscerating the linear/mechanistic interpretation of natural selection. Double plus good reading.
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Aren’t the empires and states, and their clashes and hierarchical structures, in a way a direct result of said natural male aggression?
I’d say “which introduces a degree of relatively rapid feedback from the environmental influences”. The effects, while significant, aren’t nearly as dramatic to make the difference anywhere close to meaningless.
Plus - and while this is tangential and a minor inconvenience compared to the harassment women must deal with - lots of men would like to be able to share the world with BOTH HALVES of the human race, so, in addition to it being the right thing to do, we have a vested interest in not letting despicable little man-boy failures run women out of the public sphere. Or, in terms the basement trollies can understand, thanks for making the internet a sausage fest, you unwashed slimy losers.
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Really?
I honestly thought everyone who ever did more than passively read the internet had been harassed online. I’ve been stalked, doxxed (a good decade before the word was even coined) and threatened with assault/death more times than I remember. I’ve had it cross over into the physical world a few times - though thankfully just through the postal service. These days I have a pretty good idea what subjects bring out the crazies and avoid them as best I can.
I guess the only gender difference I thought there might be is that I’ve never been threatened with rape. I’ve had it wished upon me, but never threatened.
Are there any statistics on this? It seems odd considering violent crime victims are usually men. I would expect that to continue online and doubly so for anyone with any kind of significant soapbox.
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Can’t say as I have. I would submit the possibility that, while your lived experience is valid and deserves justice as much as any other victim of threats and harassment, yours may not be especially representative of the usual experience of men (or even those who post as men) on the internet. Most men I speak to (and I can’t and won’t claim a comprehensive survey) don’t get this treatment, whereas very nearly every single woman I know who is or has actively posted on the internet is subjected to the sort of treatment to which you’ve been (and often them some) regularly.
