Women

If you read nothing else today please read Sara Robinson’s essay at Orcinus about the harassment of Kathy Sierra and the wider issue it raises of the treatment of vocal women online. She posits that the world of online discourse has effectively been declared as another theatre of war by the US Right, and any notions of rules of engagement have, like the Geneva Coventions, been declared quaint and outdated.

This ties in directly with what I posted yesterday about the US government’s attempt to steal the root keys of the whole internet: that there has been an unofficial (ie the pundits have announced it but the government hasn’t – dodging accountability yet again) ‘declaration’ of proto-fascist, imperialist online war by the Right. now they’ve lost the political argument and the facts are against them.

Oh no, what to do? Slash and burn and blow up the ‘battlefield’. As in real life, so online – no virtual atrocity is now considered out of bounds :

[…]

Back in the bad old days, in most Western cultures, abusive men were protected by a sweetheart deal with the rest of society. The line was clear, simple, and firm: Within the privacy of your home, you could abuse the women of your household in any way that pleased you. That was your right as lord of the castle. As long as you kept it behind closed doors, the community would take your word over hers about what happened, and look the other way rather than notice her bruises. A man’s right to abuse women was absolute and protected — as long as he kept it out of the public eye.

But — and this was the catch — if a man abused a woman in public, where other people would be forced to acknowledge the brutality, all bets were off. Once there were witnesses, it became everybody’s business. Of course, the sanctions focused less on the welfare of the victim, and more on society’s perception of the perpetrator: a man who lost emotional control in front of others lost status and deniability (from then on, those bruises might be noticed after all) — and was at risk for losing his job, his money, and his freedom as well.

There was, however, one place this contract didn’t reach. In war zones, even “civilized” men were excused from any accountability for their actions towards women. In wartime, even “civilized” nations have regarded the public rape and slaughter of women as just another act of war.

And that’s what concerns me here. Metaphorically, the Web is analogous to a public street or meeting hall, and most of us adhere to the same social conventions that we’d use in real-world public places. Women may get whistles and cat-calls (which are every bit as annoying online as they are on a city street — and, fortunately, as ignorable as well); but by and large, we reasonably expect that men will let common courtesy govern their interactions with us.

But if you read her blog, it’s obvious that Sierra’s attackers weren’t adhering to anything like the town square behavior code. (To make the point: if a gang of men had surrounded her and threatened her with rape and murder on a city street, she could have called the cops and had them put away for a long, long time.) Instead, everything about these attacks suggests that those responsible assumed they had a war zone exemption, which suspends accountability for even the most extreme forms of violence against women. Which tells me that, somewhere in their minds, these guys no longer recognize the Web as a community, or the women they meet there as legitimate and equal members of that community. Instead, they see it as a battlefield, where violence is the expected norm. In this imaginary war zone, any woman who’s out in public without male escort has already forfeited any claim to dignity or life.

Where did they get this idea? Sierra’s blog was a downhome tech blog, not a political free-for-all. Her readership was largely male, and she’d served them well for over four years. The vast majority of men would never allow themselves to be seen treating a woman (or anyone, for that matter) this way in public; but these guys figured they could brutalize her, in broad daylight in front of hundreds of other people, with impunity. Why?

Most likely, it was because the men who put up the most heinous comments were right-wing authoritarian followers (RWAs), whose high-social-dominance (high-SDO) leaders given them permission to unleash their violent impulses, and encouraged them to direct it toward high-profile female targets. They did it because someone they regarded as an authority figure told them that the community rules don’t apply any more. America is a war zone. The President has told them so. Their leaders have given them the formal go-ahead to behave accordingly. And that has very specific implications for how they’re allowed to treat women they see as standing outside their own in-group.

[…]

Read whole thing

This is an excellent examination of the way in which certain objectified individuals are isolated and attacked as away of building coherence within an in-group. All are united in the five-minute hate.

If I have any argument with this essay at all it’s that it doesn’t acknowledge that this is the kind of behaviour that minority bloggers of whatever gender have to put up with day in, day out. Sara Robinson herself quotes this from Salon:

But it coarsens you to look away, and to tell others to do the same. I’ve grown a thicker skin. I didn’t want skin this thick. And what does it mean that women writers have to drag around this anchor every time they start to write — that we reflexively compose our own hate mail, and sometimes type and retype to try to avoid it? I can honestly say it’s probably made me more precise and less glib. That’s good. But it’s also, for now, made me too cautious. I write less than I would if I wasn’t thinking these thoughts. I think that’s bad. I think Web misogyny puts women writers at a disadvantage, and as someone who’s worked for women’s advancement in the workplace, and the world, that saddens me.

Without wishing to denigrate the experience of women so afflicted I do have to wonder if, had that read ‘minority’ and ‘racism’ in the place of ‘women’ and misogyny’, whether the topic of online harassment would have got half so much coverage in blogtopia (thanks Skippy).

There’s also the question of anonymity and the licence it gives to be considered, though it’s not as though Orcinus hasn’t tackled that or the position of minority bloggers in the past, so these are minor criticisms.

But, continuing the analogy of a unofficially declared online war, this move to intensify the attack on visible women can be seen as just another battle tactic – attacking your enemy where she’s percieved to be weakest.

The Right is too stupid and vaingloriously testosterone-addicted to realise that women are far from weak; the fact that they see us as being so says all we need to know about their paucity of their intelligence sources and the illusory nature of their ‘online war’ capability.

They’re chickenhawks, not only in life, but also online: and like all abusers they should be named and shamed, using every online tool available. You can tell a lot from an IP address.