[View the story "e-Patriarchy" on Storify ]e-Patriarchy Does the internet promote misogynistic behavior? Storified by The Stream · Sun, Aug 12 2012 08:19:20
WARNING: Links within this story may lead to sites with graphic or explicit content.
The aforementioned
study from the University of Maryland showed that female usernames on internet chat sites averaged 163 threatening messages per day, which tended to be sexual in nature. Users of social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have adopted their own
unofficial versions of the experiment:
I had a feminine user name years ago.
It was like having a target on my back.
I'm actually a chick. I had a female name and was harassed to no end; berated and belittled for any opinion I held.
According to the study, this measurable difference indicates that online harassment, or trolling, comes "from human users selecting targets, rather than automated scripts targeting every user in a channel".
Data collection shows that humans use social sites differently based on their gender. In an
infographic from July 2012, data from Pew Research, Google Ad planner, and Digital Trends suggested that Reddit is the most male-dominated site.
Digital Flash NYCAJstream
This
infographic from May 2012 lists a slightly lower number, attributing 74 per cent of Reddit 'usership' to men.
Information Is BeautifulAJstream
The site features community pages ('subreddits') such as AskReddit, IAmA (commonly called "AskMeAnything"), Sh*tRedditSays, TwoXChromosomes, MensRights, and WomensRights. Each community page hosts its own discussion threads around the topic at hand. Users are free to comment on whatever posts they like, at the discretion of each page's moderators.
Even with moderators and administrators, experience with sexualised harassment on Reddit is
well-documented . While blame is sometimes placed on random trolls, the harassment is often attributed to the site's self-proclaimed mens' rights activists (MRAs). Their subreddit has been named a hate site by the
Southern Poverty Law Center :
While it presents itself as a home for men seeking equality, it is notable for the anger it shows toward any program designed to help women. It also trafficks in various conspiracy theories.
Even on public, non-gendered forums, such as AskReddit, women face misogynistic backlash. A recent post in the AskReddit feed
detailed the experience of a user, who asked the Reddit community 'is this rape'?
Commenters proceeded to
blame the alleged victim,
question her identity and story, and dispute her morality.
Why the hell are people thinking someone who is 14 has the mentality of an 8 year old? On average these days, girls lose their virginities at that age.14 year olds aren't innocent little babies that don't know what they're doing.
She's partying, smoking pot and I will assume (if this isn't a troll) that she didn't lose her virginity at this party. No, I'm not saying that she deserved it, but she's coming very close to ruining a boys life because of sex she regretted.
In
an interview with the Atlantic, Reddit's general manager Erik Martin suggested that the site's own concept of user-managed subreddits could help address this problem. Martin proposed that women find or build their own communities on the site.
This approach has been used on a larger scale with the creation of women's chat forums, news curators, and websites. In 2011, US actress Zooey Deschanel co-created the site
Hello Giggles with the intent that:
Everything hosted on the site will be lady-friendly, so visitors need not worry about finding the standard Boys Club content that makes many entertainment sites unappealing to so many of us.
Many users find this response model unsustainable. Bloggers have responded saying that these sites create polarised gendered enclaves online:
FeministPhilosophers.Wordpress.comAJstream
Molly Fischer writes that the sisterhood community created by these sites actually reproduces insider-outsider hostility online. The only difference is that this hostility now takes place within the women's communities:
I had written to express skepticism about the voice cultivated by women’s websites. Now I was experiencing the real problem with the community defined by that voice: the way it manages criticism. When intimacy is your model of success, it becomes easy to assume that everyone is either a friend or a traitor. I had tried to approach the ladyblogs as an observer rather than a participant, but my writing about them in an apparently impersonal public voice, as a woman—which became a woman holding myself apart from their community of women—registered as unacceptable aggression. So, was I a spinster feminist, or just out to impress boys? This was the exact corner of the internet that seemed like it ought to know better.
Certain online groups of women opt-out or are inevitably left out of the women-friendly-site response model. Female gamers have long tried to integrate into a male-dominated field, but have
battled sexism and harassment, sometimes from their own teammates.
WARNING: Graphic content.
Day 1: Sexual Harassment on Cross Assaultcrossassaultharass
Anita Sarkeesian, gamer and vlogger for
Feminist Frequency sought to investigate how deeply rooted these attitudes are in the gaming community with a
Kickstarter project . The project asked for funding to analyse and deconstruct common cliches of female game characters.
Support My Kickstarter Project - Tropes vs Women in Video Gamesfeministfrequency
Sarkeesian faced a
backlash of harassment and threats for her project, including a game created by a fellow gamer that
invited users to 'Beat Up Anita'.
WARNING: Graphic image. New StatesmanAJstream
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Gamers flooded Sarkeesian's inbox with memes and rape drawings. Some even organised a denial-of-service attack on her Kickstarter page. Despite the attacks, the project earned 250 per cent of its original fundraising goal.
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Below, vlogger @jsmooth995 sends a message to fellow male gamers regarding the Sarkeesian scandal:
Ill Doctrine: All These Sexist Gamer Dudes Are Some Shook OnesANIMALNewYork.com
In addition to the
daily threats that vocal female users face, sexualised violence on social networking pages and threads have brought attention to the issue of harassment online.
Facebook received criticism in 2011 when it defended the existence of pro-rape community pages. Facebook likened the pages, with titles like 'It's not rape if you yell suprise [sic]', to harmless pub jokes.
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In Facebook's
Statement of Rights and Responsibilities , the site requires that users "not bully, intimidate, or harass any user", or "post content that: is hate speech, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or...contains graphic or gratuitous violence":
Facebook.comAJstream
Many of the sites have since been
removed by Facebook. But the company's initial resistance raises questions about the line between free speech and hate speech online.
This line was again tested in July of 2011 when a Reddit user
asked rapists to share 'their side of the story'. At the time of this story, the feed had received just under 15,000 comments:
RedditAJstream
Some, including Jezebel noted the worth of the public feed:
It's a mistake to think we're justifying rapists' actions by listening to their stories. Some of them are tough to read, but their brutal honesty illustrates how a lack of communication and education perpetuates rape culture. Ignoring or dismissing these men (and women) out of hand may be an effective coping strategy for a given individual, but not for society. It gets us nowhere.
Still others protested the posting,
calling it an incitement to violence or a glorification of rape:
These people have the right to tell their stories. But that right to speech doesn’t obligate one of the largest sites on the Internet to provide a platform for their speech.
Tarzwell didn't respond to our requests for comment, but we have some questions: Is it Reddit's responsibility not to trigger rapists? (We don't think so.) Is it wrong for newspapers to cover sexual assault crimes for the same reasons? (We don't think so.)
We stand by our belief that it's imperative to understand where rapists are coming from in order to combat rape culture.
Writer and editor
Erin Kissane notes that, if change is going to come online or off, these behaviours must be engaged:
Online threats derive their force from offline violence. A quarter of women in the US will experience domestic violence. One in five high school girls have been raped or sexually assaulted. By the time they finish college, that number goes up to one in four. And the people who hurt us take comfort and encouragement from a culture of violent threats. “Ignoring them” is not going to do the trick.
