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Staying Safe(r) Online, With Anita Sarkeesian

 

safety
Online, too.

The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive is on! If you haven’t already, please consider donating through the PayPal button below. Thanks!

Three women who have survived some pretty nasty (and ongoing) campaigns of online harassment are sharing what they know about how to protect yourself online.

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"A Woman's Room Online" attempts to convey the real-world consequences of online harassment

"A Woman's Room Online." Photo by Amy Davis Roth
“A Woman’s Room Online.” Photo by Amy Davis Roth

“Surly Amy” Roth, a Los Angeles artist and writer for Skepchick, has created an art installation that attempts to capture and convey what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the relentless abuse she and too many other outspoken women face online.

With the help of members of the Los Angeles Women’s Atheist and Agnostic Group, Roth has built a small office-within-an-office inside the The Center For Inquiry-Los Angeles – and covered every surface with printouts of actual harassing messages sent to her and an assortment of other misogynist bete noires, including Rebecca Watson, Amanda Marcotte, Soraya Chemaly and Lindy West.

As she writes,

There is a false notion that online spaces are not real. That what happens online does not have an effect on the regular day-to-day life of people. As we have seen recently with the stolen photos of Jennifer Lawrence, high profile women are seen as mere objects and targets or play-things meant to be stolen, acquired and used- that if they can not handle these made up rules- that they should leave the internet and all forms of technology behind.

My art exhibit is meant to put you, the viewer, in their shoes if only for a moment. See what it is like to be obsessively judged based on “fuck-ability”, “rape-ability”, as an object, or alternatively as what seems to be a target in a socially accepted (or otherwise ignored) game of online stalking, harassment and silencing techniques.

The opening reception for “A Woman’s Room Online” is tonight, September 13th at 7pm at the Center for Inquiry in Los Angeles; the installation will remain up through Oct. 13th.

You can read more about it here.

 

 

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Check out my interview on Vice about harassment of women online

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I’ve been so busy the last several days I forgot to put up a link to this interview I did with a writer from Vice. Check it out!

I’m happy with the interview overall. Though I should point out that my comments were edited somewhat, and there are a few places where the writer removed some of the context and/or simplified what I said by removing some qualifying statements. Thus, for example, where I talk about how rape threats towards men have less of an impact, I don’t want to suggest that no men outside of prison fear rape; obviously that’s untrue, and obviously there are many men outside of prison as well as inside who have been raped. What I was trying to say — and what I suspect would be much clearer in the unedited transcript of my interview  — is that the typical (straight, cis) man outside of prison doesn’t spend much time worrying about rape, and is much less likely to take rape threats seriously than women, who have every reason to take them much more seriously.

Anyway, that caveat aside,  check it out.

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a new woman to hate a voice for men antifeminism doxing evil women harassment men who should not ever be with women ever misogyny MRA not-quite-explicit threats reddit

Harassment as Activism: Men's Rights Redditors Gleefully Dox a College Student, Face No Repercussions

No long post today. Instead, I urge you to go over to the AgainstMensRights subreddit to read about how several long time Men’s Rights Redditors have doxxed and harassed a college student, with one of the regulars gleefully setting forth a plan to stalk her and ruin her life and another seeming to suggest he might want to pay her a visit to “debate” her.

Some screenshots from the original Men’s Rights subreddit discussion:

 

AceyJuan -2 points 12 hours ago (4|6)  High school or University? If it's HS, then report everything to the administration on a weekly basis.  If it's University, then she's an adult and deserves what she gets. Here's what you do:      Gather several photos of her, her full name, and a good collection of her most hateful posts.     Post all of it to some lovely webpage that will rank highly on search results. Facebook or Google+ comes to mind. Be sure not to identify yourself as the author.     Let her own bile destroy her future careers. Unless she plans to become an academic feminist, then it might actually help her.     Stop engaging her online, except very short responses like "this is hate speech."     If you've the time, do the same for her most enthusiastic followers.     (Bonus) If you're still angry in 2 years, keep track of where she works and be sure to share her writings appropriately.

TracyMorganFreeman 1 point 7 hours ago (3|2) White men are 72% of all suicides, and have the highest occupational deathrate and second highest occupational injury rate after Hispanics. Either she doesn't know this, or thinks "deserving of help" isn't based on who is most hurt in a given arena, although it could be both. In any case, she appears to be in Connecticut. I don't live too far from CT, and would gladly debate her.

The thread (which remained up for many hours) has now been scrubbed by the Men’s Rights mods — I got these screenshots from u/Aceyjuan and u/TraceyMorganFreeman’s respective timelines —  but as of right now none of the doxxers have been banned from the subreddit, or from Reddit itself.

The “crimes” of the woman in question? According to her main stalker — who has apparently been harassing her for months — she’s tweeted comments like “white men are like the gum on the bottom of my shoe” and “Jared Leto looks like the kind if guy that gives you herpes.”

Yep. Apparently the second-worst evil misandrist comment she made was … a joke about Jared Leto. For these comments, apparently she deserves to have her life ruined.

Here’s the thing: If you don’t like someone’s comments online, you are certainly well within your rights to quote them and point out why you don’t like what they said. That’s kind of the point of this blog. But it’s one thing to point out these comments, and another thing entirely to track down their identity and stalk them in real life. It’s another thing to whip up a virtual mob against them.

Doxxing by Men’s Rights Activists isn’t an accident; it’s the inevitable result of the peculiar style of Men’s Rights Activism.

MRAs, you see, seem utterly incapable of engaging in any kind of activism that might actually benefit men in the real world in any concrete manner. What they as a group specialize in is demonizing women, and in the case of too many MRAS, nothing gets their activist juices flowing faster than the opportunity to attack an individual woman.

That’s why A Voice for Men “activists” put up “wanted” style posters featuring their favorite feminist villains of the day; it’s why they started Register-Her.com. That’s why a certain red-haired Canadian activist who yelled at some MRAs once at a protest now finds her image splashed everywhere online as a visual representation of an evil feminist. That’s why MRAs show up at protests with cameras and threaten to expose the women they film — even if they’ve done nothing more than stand there with a sign.

And that’s why they doxx.

The Men’s Rights movement isn’t a civil rights movement.  As it stands right now, it’s a union of abusers, and their enablers.

EDITED TO ADD: Lest anyone claim that the OP didn’t “really” dox the woman in question because he didn’t literally post all her personal details, he provided enough to allow anyone with even rudimentary Google skills to find out her real name and a great deal of other personal identifying information in less time than it would take to order a pizza online.

 

 

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Facebook: Page advocating murder of feminist blogger “doesn’t violate our community standard on bullying and harassment.”

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Several months ago, you may recall, feminist activists got Facebook to agree to remove blatant sexist hate speech from its site — much to the chagrin of many Men’s Rights Activists, like Paul Elam of A Voice for Men, who declared, in a post filled with alarmist rhetoric, that “feminist ideologues are co-opting Facebook, and they will root out any and all opposition to their worldview.” AVFM’s John Hembling, meanwhile, denounced the feminist activists as “fascists.”

Ever since then, Men’s Rights activists have been playing a game of “gotcha” with Facebook, trying to prove that the hate-speech monitors there only care about misogynist hate speech, and don’t actually care about hate speech directed at men. Every few days, it seems, there is a new thread in the Men’s Rights subreddit purporting to document this alleged “double standard.”

Ten days ago, for example, a Men’s Rights Redditor called dizzy_j got nearly 400 upvotes for a post complaining that “I reported three anti-men Facebook pages for gender-based hate speech today. Only one was removed.”  Six days ago,  DerDietrich got 580 upvotes for submitting this supposed evidence of a double standard. Trouble is, you can’t actually prove a double standard with a handful of examples.

But I would like to suggest an alternate hypothesis, which also fits the anecdotal data provided thus far by the MRAs, and provide an additional piece of anecdotal evidence that supports my theory and undercuts theirs.

My hypothesis is that Facebook is shitty at recognizing and dealing with hate speech and harassment, no matter whom it’s aimed at.

My evidence for this? Well, yesterday bloggers at Skepchick noticed a Facebook page targeting a specific feminist/skeptic blogger and asking if she “should … be murdered.” The anonymous poster — who identified her by name and posted pictures of her on the page — coyly avoided a literal call for murder, writing instead:

We should not ever break the law. Rather, we should advocate , through lawful land constitutional processes, to have the law changed so that it is legal to kill [name redacted by DF]. Alternatively, we should, where legal, request that [name redacted by DF] kill herself. Relevant laws should be changed so that suicide, and advocating suicide, is legal.

The Skepchick bloggers reported the page to Facebook for its obvious violations of the site’s harassment policies.

And they received this reply from Facebook (I’ve covered up the blogger’s name):

facebookharassnoteREdact

I think it’s fair to say that if Facebook can’t recognize a page calling for the literal murder of someone as harassment there is something very wrong with its system for dealing with harassment and hate speech.

The page has since been taken down, though it’s not clear if it was removed by Facebook or by the original anonymous Facebooker.

Get your act together, Facebook.

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Roosh V forum members baffled that fat woman doesn’t welcome sexual harassment

Online dating: It doesn't always work like this.
Online dating: It doesn’t always work like this.

For a certain subset of horrible men, there are few things more infuriating than the fact that women they find undesirable can turn down men for sex. For this upsets their primitive sense of justice: such women should be so grateful for any male attention, these men think, that turning down even the most boorish of men shouldn’t even be an option for them.

Consider the reactions of some of the regulars on date-rapey pickup guru Roosh V’s forum to the story of Josh and Mary on the dating site Plenty of Fish. One fine December evening, you see, Josh decided to try a little “direct game” on Mary.

That’s what the fellas on Roosh’s forum call it, anyway. The rest of us would call it sexual harassment.