Are you sure most men you know haven’t experienced it or that they don’t talk about it? Honestly, other than once having to call the police about a package, I’ve never commented on any harassment I’ve received since I either didn’t feel particularly threatened by it or didn’t want my harassers to know they got to me.
Um, I think current studies either don’t back upwhat you posited, or perhaps you are arguing a different point.
Young women, those 18-24, experience certain severe types of harassment at disproportionately high levels: 26% of these young women have been stalked online, and 25% were the target of online sexual harassment. In addition, they do not escape the heightened rates of physical threats and sustained harassment common to their male peers and young people in general.
http://www.aware.org.sg/ati/wsh-site/14-statistics/
I am not minimizing or dismissing your experiences.
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From the Pew report you linked to:
Overall, men are somewhat more likely than women to experience at least
one of the elements of online harassment, 44% vs. 37%. In terms of
specific experiences, men are more likely than women to encounter
name-calling, embarrassment, and physical threats.
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Sure, but in my opinion the last couple–the most serious–are weighted higher.
I really, really don’t think this conversation has been about the hurtfulness of name calling.
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Sure, but the physically threatened statistic is where death threats go. This pretty much lines up with experience of not getting any rape threats, but getting plenty of threats of physical violence & death. If you take out the calling offensive names and purposefully embarrassed buckets, you still end up with a pretty even split between men and women victims.
Maybe being physically threatened is less awful than being sexually harassed because it is scarier to the victim. I don’t know.
But I do find it really odd that anyone would think that men aren’t the victims of online harassment. I just assumed everyone was.
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Agreed!!!
I often ponder this dilemma and agree wholeheartedly.
It is sad to say, but if only one woman had come forward against Bill Cosby, likely a large percentage of the population would side with him and think she was lying. This leads to a cycle of dis-empowering the victims to come forward and allows nasty things to perpetuate with little consequence.
I’ve tried to figure out why this happens. I think there is a smallish (hopefully) percentage that shares similar predilections and benefits from shaming victims allowing them to continue victimizing. I think there is a larger percentage that feels helpless when confronted with something they feel they can do little about and makes the wrong choice to dismiss it so that they can get back to their bubble than have to face some difficult and uncomfortable realities. I don’t think that is all of it though, and am at a loss as to why this happens more often than not. Perhaps some of it is a carry over from less progressive times?
To further complicate the issue, these types of crimes and issues are often difficult to prosecute. They are a she said/he said and unless you can find multiple victims to corroborate it is the word of one person against another…one person who has been traumatized and being asked to stand up to the person that victimized them against the person who is likely well practiced at getting away with such unsavory behavior.
We must believe the victim.
When I’ve argued for this in the past I am inevitably met with the “innocent until proven guilty” argument with no thought or hesitation to judging the woman guilty of lying or trying to get “revenge” on a man. While it might happen on rare occasion I don’t think it likely, or that many people would put themselves through what is unfortunately a humiliating process unless a transgression was quite real.
I don’t have any easy answers but I do know that we must believe the victim and give them the full benefit of the doubt and our support as we look into any claim.
Thoughts?
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The graph that would make me sad would be the reverse perp graph…threatened by men/women…harassed by men/women…
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Everyone is. But put it in the perspective of current, embedded misogyny, an overwhelming number of dude bros, and an environment where if a person speaks out they get mobbed with harassers (cough GG).
Shits gotta change, and we propose we start there.
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Oh AnCaps and their belief that all government is implicit violence.
No, “The State” exists with women at the helm as well.
@anon67050589 first off I wanted to just acknowledge how much I appreciate your contributions to the threads here, thanks for all your thoughtful comments over the years.
secondly, I largely agree with this but with a slight twist from my personal atheist perspective. I think humans are just animals, albeit advanced capable animals, who have self domesticated/socialized/civilized ourselves so that we can live in closer larger population groups for mutual benefit. As such I do believe a lot of our base behavior is rooted in biology, BUT also that just because it is doesn’t mean that there is any excuse to indulge these base tendencies that we have managed to collectively rise above. The biological basis exists but is not a cop out or excuse. Same as with a domesticated dog (or any domesticated animal), sure they have impulses, but certain impulses won’t be tolerated if they are to live among humans. We need to and do hold ourselves to even higher standards that we mutually agree upon as collective societies. So basically I am fully agreeing with you, just from a slightly different slant. 
I secretly hope that there is some spill over from the recent rights and acceptance won by the LGBT community…that bullying isn’t acceptable at all, and that accepting people that might be different in this way or that actually enriches our lives. I also hope that there will be a depolarizing effect on the gender issues, more of a we are all humans and come in all sorts of packages and varieties and that we all deserve equally respect and love…that could just be wistful thinking on my part though. i can hope!
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Huh. I am having trouble wrapping my head around how different my worldview is.
Dude bros are actually some of the last people I would assume are online harassers since they are so self-absorbed that I can’t see them getting worked up about anything online. Now the physical world is, sure, but online? Not unless you include just being mean.
Mostly when I think of online harassers, I think about obsessive, insular people with often with low self-esteem (it is largely men who fall into this category) and the mentally ill (which is again, largely men).
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Stalking takes the harassment off the internet and into real life. I’ll take a million nasty comments over one stalker, thankyouverymuch.
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Your bread isn’t always perfectly shaped!!!
(Yeah, that’s my limit on awful comments)
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You are terrible at this.
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‘fighting evil’ is a cute goal for fans of super heroes and whatnot. The problem isn’t ‘evil’, it’s misogyny. This isn’t a technical problem, nor a biological one. It’s a cultural problem. We need to change our culture. We need to challenge commercial culture that re-enforces sexism. We need to raise boys to encourage them to have more empathy. We need to address the fragility of masculinity - if we have some sort of crisis about being insufficiently manly, that should not lead us to go looking for victims.
The way people are talking about this here … we could have more empathy in this thread.
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The statistic above is for online stalking, not physical stalking and the author is talking about online harassment, not physical harassment. I mean, we can talk about that, but it seems pretty distinct from the online versions.
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I… Disagree.
Well, ok. According the Bureau of Justice Statistics (US only obviously), the vast majority of offline stalkers are people you’ve been intimate with (28%) or friends/family/workmate (42%). That just doesn’t sound like a heavy overlap with most online stalking to me.
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Two things–it doesn’t? Really? How would I start stalking or harassing someone I knew in real life… Well, the internet.
Second, I have a hard time rectifying the difference between the two. We don’t break out classifications of harassment by mail, telephone, fax, or teletype. Online harassment isn’t a special case that needs different rules for harassment.
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Not necessarily… for one, states/empires run by women haven’t always been less aggressive (the few that existed). Such things do not grow naturally out of men’s nature, rather out of the need to ensure survival of the elites who rule the state, hence the exploitation of the lower classes. States/Empires/etc that are set up to protect a particular class will be violent places because they are always going to have outgroups, or those who must hand up in order to exist… I’d say that the military can be a space for men in society who might have aggressive tendencies, but I don’t think that means that states/empires are built only by male aggression. They probably do much to develop and sustain it though.
Not necessarily… a friend of mine, whose mother is a biologist who is interested in genetics more generally was describing studies where men who were in prison had these genetic markers that were turned on and what turned them on was abuse in childhood - something like 80% of violent offenders had these. But you can find these but turned off in the non-prison population, who had childhoods where they didn’t experience abuse - the childhood environment made the difference in those cases.
Now, this is a newer field, from what I understand. But I think it does indicate that we’re really very early in our understanding of what happens between our genetic code and our environment, and how that shapes who we are as individuals. I’d suggest taking either side (pure nature/nurture) with something of a skeptical eye, and instead seeing that the two likely interact in ways that we can’t always predict and understand at this point. Just because we can now read the genetic code doesn’t mean we fully understand it, is my point.
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