cyberbullying

Today has been designated ‘Stop Cyberbullyinging Day.’

I am reposting violet blue’s SFGate.com column. Although I haven’t been a victim of harassment, I’ve tried to support my blog friends when they’ve been harassed and stalked.
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When A Man Hates A Woman
The ugly side of sex and the Web

Violet Blue, Special to SF Gate

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Ask any three women who publish online if they’re ever been stalked, sexually threatened or threatened with violence on other blogs or in comments. I don’t need to bet money to know you’ll get a yes from one of those women. Too busy to ask anyone? That’s OK, I’ll raise my hand for all three.

Imagine being a girl and working really hard to earn the reputation of a respected voice in the world of tech journalism and blogging — a world populated by disproportionately more men than women — and to find yourself the target object of a hate-filled Web site. The tone and content of the hate site centers around sexually threatening you, suggesting ways you could be killed and have your corpse defiled, stating that you are a “slut” and that your gender is also in question. Your straight male colleagues don’t have this problem.

Then the person running the hate site blogs about every word you say, every time you make a post or publish an article. And targets your friends. And posts the names of your family and Google satellite maps of your family’s homes. They deface your Wikipedia page at every opportunity, with sexual slurs, objectifying you at every possible chance. It’s enough to make a girl choose not to be a tech journalist.

What I described above is a true story, one I have lived through with one of my closest female friends for over a year now. She was the target; I was collateral. My friend’s fellow bloggers said, “Wow, that’s awful,” but to my recollection, the only writings about it were authored by me, on my blog — standing up to him — and the New York Times, which wrote about the hate site (free registration required) as though it were written by a rascally-but-humorous cad, and linking directly to the hate site, sending it that fat New York Times traffic. My friend chose not to address the troll, and the hate site targeting her continues to run unfettered.

Recently, a marketing professional and blogger named Kathy Sierra blogged about finding herself on the receiving end of (anonymous or identity-obfuscated) sexually hostile posts, violent threats and even a Photoshopped image on a Web site that was ostensibly set up for trash-talking but evidently took a turn into troll-topia. Her post on her discovery is here (NSFW language). The offending Web site has since been taken down. On her blog, Sierra wrote a frightened and emotional post, canceling her appearance at the ETech Conference, providing examples of what frightened her (including a screen capture of horrifying comments directed at another woman) and naming a list of people she felt colluded, or at least were complicit in the situation — I only hope no one directly implicated is wrongfully associated with the hate speech.

How the blogging community reacts to open sexual hatred of women bloggers and writers is worth examining. In the Sierra case, she describes herself as feeling so helpless as to have to run and hide, saying on her blog: “I have canceled all speaking engagements. I am afraid to leave my yard. I will never feel the same. I will never be the same. … I have no idea if I’ll ever post again.” And Sierra has received support from many.

My friend did not characterize herself as helpless at any point, and neither have I. And with my friend, there was (and still is) no “bloggers-stick-togetherness” in our corner of Blogistan. The question is, Do we women need to portray ourselves as victims to garner support when men threaten to defile our corpses if we gain notoriety?

Sierra’s haters — and the man behind the hate, in my friend’s case — are doing this not because they’re immature. They’re doing it because they want women out of their worlds. Every female tech and sex writer I have contact with knows this — every girl whose work has been Dugg, Slashdotted or commented on in a forum that allows trolls to fester. When someone goes this far, to make death imagery and maintain a 24/7 hate blog, we’re not talking about a lack of social skills, we’re talking about a desire to destroy. These are the same kind of acts of sexual hatred that Patrick Califia wrote about in his essay about the sex-murder of transgender teen Gwen Araujo in “Sex With the Imperfect Stranger”:

“This strategy relies on widespread social acceptance of the belief that this is what straight men are supposed to do when their heterosexual identities are threatened. They are supposed to murder in defense of their masculinity. Because if one of them doesn’t do this, if he does not violently repudiate the possibility that he found it pleasurable to have sexual contact with someone who was not born female, then he must be queer himself.”

In these situations, Califia tells us, “The victim in such cases is usually deliberately sought out by the attackers, hunted down and intimidated, battered or slaughtered. Violence against sexual minority people is a sport.”

When you’re female in Blogistan, you expose yourself to a whole new kind of hate, and often your male colleagues (or your community) have no idea what it feels like.

But we belong here, too.

Tagged as: bloggers, Blogging, cyberbullying, humor, r, sex, tes, The Marketplace, transgender