"This is what online harassment looks like"

[Starry Messenger]

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/internet/2012/07/what-online-harassment-looks

When I first wrote about the sexist abuse of women online, collating the experiences of nearly a dozen writers, the response was largely positive. Many hadn't been aware there was a problem; they were shocked. Others had assumed that they were the only ones whose every word on the web was greeted with a torrent of abusive, threatening comments.

But a few reactions stood out, among them that of Brendan O'Neill, the Telegraph blogs section's resident contrarian. He wrote that feminist campaigners pointing this out was a "hilarious echo of the 19th-century notion that women need protecting from vulgar and foul speech". We were, he said, "a tiny number of peculiarly sensitive female bloggers" trying to close down freedom of speech.

The best response to that argument, incidentally, comes from Ally Fogg, who wrote recently:

What you fail to understand is that the use of hate speech, threats and bullying to terrify and intimidate people into silence or away from certain topics is a far bigger threat to free speech than any legal sanction.

Imagine this is not the internet but a public square. One woman stands on a soapbox and expresses an idea. She is instantly surrounded by an army of 5,000 angry people yelling the worst kind of abuse at her in an attempt to shut her up. Yes, there's a free speech issue there. But not the one you think.

<snip>

[Lionessa]

1. But the internet isn't a soap box, and angry words can't intimidate online

in any rational comparison to being "surrounded by an army of 5,000 angry people yelling the worst kind of abuse." Granted we keep trying to make them the same, but they are not.

Let the flames begin, but it does to me also seem like women want to be equal on one hand, but protected from foul ... well foul anything. If one goes into an arena of only men, y'know they aren't exactly kind and gentle in the way they speak to each other, so I understand their confusion about how we want equality, but then can't handle being harangued like they do to each other.

Unless there is some evidence that men posting the same information and opinions are treated more kindly than the women, I can't jump on this idea that a response to a woman should be gentler or more kind than one to a man. I mean just look at all the names Joe Walsh has been called on DU the past week. Does he deserve it, hells yeah, and so would Michele Bachmann or Ann Coulter if they had said the same about Duckworth.

[yardwork]

3. Did you read the article and review the images at the link?

This article is not about posts on a message board like DU. It's about women being cyberstalked, including threats on their lives. The images at the link are disturbing - scroll down.

[Lionessa]

4. Only partially,

I don't feel the need to expose myself to it. So I won't. However, I say it is the "winger-ness" of it, not the sexism of it. I point to... was it Bachman, Palin, both? who had targets on the President and other dems? I resist the idea that it's "sexism" without regard to the primary issues of sexism being among wingers and teabaggers of both sexes. I mean the war on women has quite a few women voting hatefully towards women.

I know it's easy to see sexism, but that's a symptom, not the disease. The disease is religious winger-ism.

[yardwork]

5. The article is not about public figures or presidential candidates.

It's about people who become targets of concerted internet cyberstalking. It's not about sexism.

[Lionessa]

7. Actually, posting on the internet is a public situation, now maybe they aren't famous,

but posting on line or in print makes one a public commentator.

[DrewFlorida]

2. Well said, you have my support!

Hate is as hate does.

You have my support against the haters!

[wandy]

6. Sadly, on line harassment is just one more area where......

our society hasn't caught up with our technology.
We can now say nasty things to others anonymously without the fear of getting punched in the nose.
Or a swift kick in the......
People will post things on line they would never say to another persons face.
They can rant out their pet hatreds in ways they would never in a thousand years dream of doing in a theater.

This just might be how we settle the evolution argument.
Nowhere in the bible does it say that computers were also created on the sixth day.