A small bout of internecine warfare has broken out, it appears, amongst some US feminist blogs.
The issue is blog referrals. What originally was a humorous look by Biting Beaver at the weird search strings found in her blog referrals, turned into a report of potential child porn to the FBI cybertipline. This then turned into a vehement discussion, nay blogfight, on the question of whether women bloggers should report referrals through google search strings, which, by their wording, could be potential child porn searches.
One camp says the interests of privacy override all, the other that the interests of exploited women and children come first. (I grossly oversimply for brevity, but you get the general drift).
Tempers have become heated, insults have been thrown, aggression has flared. Bitch Lab:
Sorry, but whatever someone may be typing in to their favorite search engine doesn?t rise to the level of investigation by some idiotic organization, asshole. Really, this kind of shit is such cryptoproto-fascist bullshit it makes me want to scream.
Whatever, uh, respect I may have had for this person just evaporated ? not to mention she?s a fucking beanbraned tool for buying into whatever bullshit she read at some Web site. Patriarchy schmatriarchy. Fucking neo-con b.s. is what it is.
Here?s a clue asshole :) errrrr BeebDim, you can?t hunt down an individual on this basis, and to do so violates so many of our rights as citizens that you should be ashamed of yourself for fucking buying into it. Not to mention the number of people who can simply scam the whole system with anonymizing tools, etc.
Red State Feminist gives a less inflammatory overview, but comes down on the side of reporting:
Brief recap before I forge on: BitchLab was greatly affronted by Bitingbeaver’s notifying the authorities on certain google searches which appeared on her sitemeter, which Bitingbeaver was concerned represented possible searches for illegal child pornography.
While on one hand, I respect BitchLab’s point about the potential threat to privacy rights, I can’t take it very seriously. ISPs are required to give up all sorts of information under subpoena; no one is safe from that . Anything you identify about yourself to your ISP is fair game. Like it or not. And the authorities have to show probable cause to get a warrant or a subpoena to get that.
Bitingbeaver has some very important issues to raise. Ultimately I felt that my personal ethics and my understanding of feminism in general led me to find more fault with the arguments put forth at BitchLab, and that I tend to agree more with the concerns prioritized at Bitingbeaver.
So. My thoughts on this conflict are as follows:
Progressives are particularly sensitive right now, because of the Bush spying thing, to any reference to people being “watched” or “turned in”. With good reason.
That being said, let’s remember that no one’s email was being read, and no one’s mail was being opened, in this case. People are talking about reporting behavior that is public, transparent information. It’s accessible, as I mentioned above.
Ditto BitingBeaver, in a follow up post to the original:
What people are suggesting (i.e innocent people are being locked up) isn’t happening. Nobody is being tossed into jail for a suspicious search. A repeated pattern of suspicious searches will launch a quiet tracking program which will see if you really ARE just a bad searcher or if you’re actually doing something illegal.
It is THIS reason alone that I’m pissed off over this entire thing. And if this particular procedure is STILL too much of an invasion of your ‘privacy’ then you seem to think the Gov’t has an obligation to make it easier for you to break the law and abuse children.
I can see both points of view here: women and children are horribly beaten, tortured and exploited for sexual gratification worldwide, online and in graphic colour. It would seem idiotic, nay immoral, not to try and do something about it if you can. Reporting a ‘suspicious’ blog referral is is such a small thing and if it’s done for the right reasons… what’s the problem?
But it’s the tracking program. Do you want to be responsible for siccing a government tracking program on someone, in the light of the US government’s proven attitude to spying? Theirs is a prime example of the ‘thin end of the wedge’ argument and I use the cliche advisedly. If we report our suspicions of child porn searches, shoudln’t be also report other ‘suspicious’ searches? Where does it stop? Who decides what’s suspicious? Cliches are cliches because they’re true. And here’s another – ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’.
Suspicion is not proof and most certainly not even probable cause. It’s all very well to say an individual is innocent until proven guilty and that their innocence will be proved on investigation, when investigations of any kind, in the age of omnipresent media, routinely ruin lives and reputations. Having the likes of Nancy Grace and her clones on your ass is no small thing.
I’ve managed to come across a child porn site at least twice while idly googling via a competely innocuous search string. Doesn’t mean I was looking for it. Sometimes I google strings like ‘novelty fetus’ or ‘tentacle sex’, just to see what comes up. Humans are insatiably curious, and I’m human. I might even Google ‘novelty+fetus+tentacle+sex’ just for the googlewhack. Is that a pattern? Would that make me suspect too ? The FBI say no, but what about Biting Beaver? Who died and made her custodian of my morals?
What’s suggested is that we all have a responsibility, as women, to report suspicious referrals to our blogs, and that it would be unfeminist not to do so. Talk about drinking the koolaid – these are exactly the tactics that totalitarian governments use to control their citizens and Biting Beaver thinks they’re just dandy. These governments rely on ordinary people sitting at home speculating wildly and acting on what are quite often unfounded suspicions, whether of anti-Americanism, sedition or what-have-you.
For women bloggers to do this would have a chilling effect on world-wide open discourse, and discourse is exactly what’s needed if women are to forge an international commonality and challenge patriarchy and abuse worldwide. Note to US sisters – it’s not all about you.
One of the things that saddens me as a feminist about this whole exchange is to see so many good minds bogged down in name calling and squabbling, thus fulfilling the all-pervasive misogynist myth of the female intellectual, that every feminist hides a shrieking harpy within.
If these bloggers and commenters must be shrill ( and these are shrill times) let it be about all the places in the world in which the Fundies want to condemn all women to this:
“I was devastated after finding out that I was pregnant for the fourth time, despite using contraception.
My husband and I can barely look after our three children on the little income we have. How could we afford to feed another mouth?
Thus, I decided to have an abortion. I didn’t have any counselling – the decision was my own.
My friends told me about a special clinic in Accra. Trusting them, I decided to go there.
Four months gone.
On the day of the abortion I woke up early, did some household chores and got the children ready for school. After dropping them off, I took a taxi to the clinic. I was four months pregnant at the time.
The reception was very neat and tidy and there were other women waiting on benches.
I felt cold and couldn’t see. I was losing so much blood, I thought I would die
I had thought the procedure would be done in an operating theatre but it wasn’t. It was just an ordinary room.
Even though I realised it wasn’t a proper clinic, I was still determined to go through with the termination. I had no choice.
The ‘doctor’ asked me to undress and lie down. After an examination, he inserted some metal instruments into my vagina. He didn’t give me any aesthetic – he just began removing things from my body.
I didn’t see anything, but felt a pulling sensation. The pain was unbearable, but I muffled my screams.
I did not allow myself to fully express my pain. I felt guilty about the whole thing, but the idea of bringing up another child in abject poverty convinced me I had made the right decision.
After fifteen minutes of ‘surgery’, he inserted a white tablet into my vagina. He told me that this would cause the remaining foetal parts to eventually discharge.
In agony, I went home, to await the next stage of my abortion.
That night, I bled profusely. My stomach was bloated and I gave off a foul odour. I felt very weak and confused. My husband was on a night shift, so a neighbour rushed me to hospital.
My heart was beating very fast and I began to drift in and out of consciousness. I felt cold and couldn’t see. I was losing so much blood, I thought I would die. My mind went blank.
When I regained consciousness, I was told that my womb was rotten and had been removed.
I cannot have any more children and if I had lost any more blood, I would have died. I am very grateful to the doctor and his team at Accra’s Ridge Hospital who saved my life.
I am lucky to be alive and really regret going to an unqualified person to have a termination.
I would urge anyone considering an abortion to get counselling from a qualified doctor first, before undergoing this procedure.”
And while we’re on the subject of feminism , RIP Octavia Butler.
