I want to run a quick question by you.
Which of these do you think is an appropriate reaction to art criticism of a piece of art you enjoy?
- A: A discussion about the differences in styles and desired effect by the artist with an eye towards the commercial viability of the property, exaggerations of form consistent with a dynamic image and the difference between presenting photorealism and depicting a heroic ideal.
- B: Ignoring the criticism because you disagree and going about your day.
- C: Spamming the critic’s email and Facebook page with “You can’t get rid of us. We’re infinite. You’re nothing but a loudmouth c*nt and we’re going to show you the only thing you’re good for.”
If you answered anything other than C… well, you’re actually a well-adjusted human being.
As opposed to being a syphilitic feces-throwing man-child, anyway
Because, let’s face it: how much of a freak of genetics do you have to be to think that the proper response to somebody - anybody - disagreeing with you about Wonder Girl is to threaten to rape them? In the realm of potential absurd over-reactions, is there anything, anything more insane, than somebody deciding that the only possible response to believing that somebody’s opinion about Mass Effect, or Altair or Black Widow or The Dark Knight Rises or what-have-you is to promise to track them down and violate them with a stick? I mean that is insane. Pants-on-head, smearing-shit-on-the-walls insane.
And yet so many of my friends – just about every single woman I know who’s active in geek culture, in fact – this isn’t an abstract thought exercise. This is their daily lives. They are deluged with anonymous threats promising rape and worse… because some rando has decided that they must suffer for the crime of being a woman with an opinion online… and they know what you look like and where you live.
And nobody seems to care. Because this is the new normal. This is what, apparently, is accepted in geek culture now.
Yes, this is another column about Nerds Behaving Badly. If you think you’re tired of reading them, imagine how tired I am of writing them.
So let’s talk about this shall we?
Janelle Asselin And The Comic Critique Controversy
The story, as so many of them do, starts with something innocuous. In this case, it all starts with a critique. Janelle Asselin, a comics veteran, wrote an in-depth and incredibly detailed breakdown of just why the cover of the Teen Titans relaunch was a lousy cover.
“Oh can you throw a paper airplane in there? We need a bit of whimsey so you can tell it’s not just Stripperella and the Glowering.”
And let’s be fair: it’s pretty much a garbled mess on many levels. There’s no dynamism to the image or any indication that these characters are interacting on any level. The most recognizable character – Robin – is relegated to fourth-tier status by size as he… I dunno, eats a candy bar or something? Meanwhile, there’s barely room for the title and all of the little random, context-free details like the gunship and a freaking paper airplane that just serve to clutter things up without providing any real insight to the story, the characters’ personality or really anything that might make you want to actually, y’know. Buy the comic.
But let’s be honest: the meat of the criticism is Wonder Girl. And by that I mean: her boobs. There’re other anatomical issues but the boobs are the biggest1 – because they’re notably fake. As in silicone. Unenhanced breasts don’t behave like that – especially without any sort of support from a serious push-up bra. And of course, the entire cover (and most of the critique) is centered around them. The tits of a girl who is, canonically, around 16 or 17.
I should mention that Asselin is a veteran of the comics industry. She was an editor and associate editor on a diverse array of DC titles including Batman, Batwoman, Detective Comics, The Savage Hawkman, Birds of Prey, Robin and Gotham City Sirens, a frequent contributor to Comic Book Resources, and Comics Alliance, the weekend editor at The Mary Sue and an academic researcher with a focus on comics. Which is to say: it was literally her job to know what does and doesn’t make a good cover.
It’s a strong, but not terribly stinging critique. I mean, shit, I was on the receiving end of far harsher criticism from my professors during my brief tenure as an art major. To be fair, I haven’t been a comics professional in quite some time, but it’s not like Asselin told the dude that he should cut his fingers off with tin-snips rather than call himself an artist2
Naturally, this was taken with grate aplomb. While many people may have disagreed with her assessment, it was generally agreed to be a valid and professional break-down of some notable flaws in the image over the course of a civil discussion.
Nah, I’m totally shitting you. People went bugfuck. Because if there’s anything that needs defending, it’s a crappy cover.
Comics professionals like Brett Booth and his fans complained that this was a hatchet job because Asselin wasn’t properly reverential and implied that she wasn’t a real comics professional:
@Demonpuppy @gimpnelly It’s just dismissive & disrespectful to the creators that feed ur hobby. Aka #clickbait
— RyanJoseph (@RyanAJoseph) April 11, 2014
…while others prefer to diminish her accomplishments directly because vaginas.
@gimpnelly So how many decades ago did you work at DC? Were you a coffee girl?
— Sean (@SeanRtchfld) April 13, 2014
But in what’s become de rigueur for talking to women who dare to have opinions about geeky things, several enterprising defenders of bad taste decided that some opposition research must be done. In doing so, they found that Asselin was also doing an survey on sexual harassment in comics. Naturally this meant that – as a feminist – Asselin must have an agenda to destroy comics because that’s what feminists do: strip you of your god-given right to shitty T&A because fuck you penis, that’s why. And of course, she was called a feminazi, a feminist bitch, a sad bitch and other lovely names and accused of having an agenda because of course an academic survey of people’s experiences in the comic industry must be ideologically driven.
And then the rape threats started coming in. After the chucklefucks discovered3 her survey, they decided the best thing they could do would be to skew the results… specifically so they could use the question box at the end to tell her they were coming to fuck her until she bled.
Because she didn’t like a comic cover.
What the fuck.
Here’s the thing though: this isn’t about whether or not Asselin is legitimately afraid for her personal safety – while not ignoring that these are threats from people who know what she looks like, where she works and where she lives – or if these threats are at all credible. It’s about the fact that this is so common place, that women get so many threats that it stops bothering them.
I don’t like mythologizing strength as a function of dysfunction. It’s not good that rape threats bother me less now. It’s super messed up.
— Laura Hudson (@laura_hudson) April 15, 2014
You want to think it’s all idiot teenagers and everyone will tell you to ignore it. The scary part is when it stops bothering you.
— Kate Leth (@kateleth) April 17, 2014
I want to reiterate that so that it sinks in: women getting so many anonymous, sexually violent threats that it just becomes normal to them.
This is what we’re letting our culture turn into, people.
The Silence of the Ladies
Cold hard fact: geek culture has a problem with women. We have shown it time and time again. Tess Fowler. Anita Sarkeesian. Mattie Bryce. Zoe Quinn. Lea Hernandez. Colleen Doran. Gail Simone. Kate Leth. Laura Hudson. Jennifer Hepler. Alice Mercier. Courtney Stanton. Elizabeth Sampat.
Whenever the subject of how women are treated in geek culture comes up, people will immediately rush to dismiss and diminish and derail the conversation. They will argue that everyone takes shit online. Or that women just need to learn to grow a thicker skin because this is how the big boys do it. There will be people who want to say “it’s important to note that guys get this too!” or rush to complain that it’s not all men who do this. They will want to play “devil’s advocate” or complain that they don’t harass women so it’s unfair for people to bring it up because it’s “tarring men with a broad brush” or maligning otherwise well-meaning dudes so just shut up about it already because it’s not really a problem anyway because their friend is totally a woman and is cool with this shit and never gets threatened.
“Meanwhile, at stately /r/mensrights manor…”
Or she’s strong enough that she just ignores all of those threats because who really gets scared about random people saying shit online.
And you know what?
It’s all bullshit.
Because when people rush to qualify how it’s “not all men” or “it’s not a problem”, it’s a way of distracting from the two real issues at hand.
First: that it’s directed at women specifically because they are women. I write a lot about feminist issues. I even have my own dedicated haters who crop up in the comments to complain every time I talk about anything smacking of feminism. And not only do I not get even a hundredth of the shit that Asselin has – or Lea Hernandez or Kate Leth or any of the other women I’ve mentioned earlier – but I’ve never had rape threats directed at me. Nor have 99% of the high-profile male writers and bloggers who cover the same issues. Nor do any of us get the same volume of violent threats. Or the stalkers. Or the harassment. Because for women, this doesn’t just stay on the Internet. It follows them everywhere.
My last bit about all this is some of these “trolls” posted about meeting me/visiting my work. These guys who write about me being raped
— Kate Leth (@kateleth) April 17, 2014
So now when I’m at a con, or behind the counter, I never know which person I talk to is behind it. — Kate Leth (@kateleth) April 17, 2014
The second is that when people argue or derail the conversation about it, they’re trying to distract from the fact women are being threatened in order to shut them up. To make them go away. To chase them away from the community entirely. The “Beat Anita Sarkeesian” game wasn’t about refuting her arguments, it was about making the scary woman who (they think) is going to rob them of their gaming T&A go away. The harassment that Zoe Quinn faced for her game Depression Quest was because people wanted to make her stop talking. Jennifer Hepler had her children threatened because people didn’t like what she had to say about Dragon’s Age 2, a game she helped write. Janelle Asselin gets rape threats for criticizing a comic book cover. Kate Leth – an outspoken critic of the casual harassment and misogyny in geek culture – gets targeted by men who are determined to “punish” her for… making comics they don’t like.
There are blogs on tumblr entirely dedicated to photoshopping my head onto rape anime and porn, because they don’t like me or my comics
— Kate Leth (@kateleth) April 17, 2014
It’s not just comics. It’s not just games. It’s geek culture as a whole. And we’re letting this cancer rot us from the inside out.
The False Myth of Geek Enlightenment
Of course, part of the problem is getting geeks to even acknowledge that it’s happening. And one of the most pernicious ways we brush this under the rug is by pretending that we as a culture are so much wiser, so much more enlightened, so much better than the jocks, the bros, the frat boys… all of those guys who are practically synonymous with date rape and sexual harassment. Nerds and geeks aren’t the bulliers, we’re the bullied. We’re the outsiders.
It were ever thus…
And therein lies the problem. We’re not the outsiders any more. Geek culture is mainstream culture. We’ve basically won. But we continue to define ourselves as outcasts and losers – insisting that being a geek means being a socially awkward freak who is still – somehow – morally and intellectually superior to the people around him.
We’re used to defining ourselves in opposition to others and assuming that by not being X (in this case, jocks, bros, etc.) we’re also not Y (bullies, rapists, harassers). We get caught up in the identity of “geek” being “outsiders”, meaning that we’re the excluded. If we start to question those definitions then… who are we? How are we supposed to identify ourselves? How are we supposed to know that, deep down inside, we’re the superior ones?
Far easier to pretend it’s not a problem. To minimize the issue. To brush it under the rug. This is why whenever we hear about someone in our culture being harassed – online, at cons, in comic stores – there are so many who are quick to pretend it it’s not a real issue. We get the “It’s not all men” protests because it’s more important to reinforce the inherent superiority of geek culture than it is to address that it’s a large and incredibly visible portion of the community. Better to enforce the No True Scotsman fallacy and pretend they’re not a real part of the culture than addressing that they exist and they’re causing measurable harm. We get the devil’s advocates who believe it’s more important to consider the harasser’s side of things than the effect he’s having on his victim. We get the no-drama-types who prefer to blame the person who points out that there’s a big fucking problem than the person actually causing the problem because drama.
And of course, we have the ones who just hate women and want them to be consumable products for their pleasure.They prefer that geek culture has a locker-room atmosphere and believe that removing casual sexual harassment from it is an offense to both God and man.
That identification-by-opposition, by the way, is part of the reason why geek culture has that love/hate relationship with geeky women. Because to be a geek is to be an “outsider” by definition4 We don’t get to have the “cool things” that the other groups have – like, y’know, women. This is why for so many, geeky women become fetish objects - they represent everything we want but have been denied to us and we end up desiring and resenting them at the same time. It ties into the idea that women somehow hold all the power. And now they’re presuming to be part of our world where we supposedly have the power? What the hell?
So geeks freak out at women and try to bully them into silent compliance. And – as Marjorie Liu says eloquently at her blog:
Sometimes it feels as though talking about misogyny in this industry is like dealing with Groundhog Day: there seems to be a continuous reset, a collective male amnesia around the issue. As if, when a woman speaks out, it’s for the first time and everyone is shocked. Just shocked, I tell you. Sexism exists? OH MY GOD.
And the rest of us let them. The men of the geek culture are all officially part of the problem.
Silence Is Approval
Now I can already hear many of you bristling at this: you’ve never sent any rape threats, you’ve never attacked a woman for having an opinion you disagreed with. You’ve never sexually harassed anyone. You’re not “that guy”.
Congratulations. You’ve achieved the baseline of human decency. But just “not being that guy” isn’t enough. If you don’t want to be tarred with the same brush as the cancerous assholes who target the women in our community, you need to speak up. Because this isn’t women’s problem. This is a man’s problem. It’s men who are the cause and it’s men who can and need to be the solution.
Because our silence is enabling them. Our silence is seen as approval. It’s validating their shitty behavior because nobody is speaking up against them.
Its encouraging to see the majority of comics creators & organizations remaining silent, not baited by @gimpnelly‘s melodrama.
— RyanJoseph (@RyanAJoseph) April 17, 2014
This why we can’t be silent any more. We can’t pretend this is a woman’s problem. We can’t pretend that we’re not part of the problem because we’re not the harassers. As I said when I wrote about Tess Fowler, we - men - need to be the ones who stand up and make this behavior unacceptable. We need to be the ones who call the harassers out on their behavior. To not hide behind the fig leafs of “not all men” or “not my problem”.
See, we have the platform. We have the voice. We have the male privilege that says male voices have more impact, that we aren’t dismissed as easily. And we need to use it. We have to be the ones who make geek culture a place where this sort of toxic hate and abuse of women is unacceptable. Do not let this behavior go unremarked. Push back against idea that belittling, harassing or abusing women is somehow a masculine virtue, that it’s acceptable because “Internet, lulz” or “guys just being guys”. Marginalize these people. Isolate them. Excise them from the community – we don’t need them, we sure as shit don’t want them.
There will be push-back. There will be people who insist that just calling out bullshit doesn’t actually do anything because trolls are trolls and assholes are going to ass. Fuck them, they don’t want to see things change. There will be people who will call your motivations into question; they’ll call you a “white knight” and insist you’re only trying to impress women and get laid by standing up for them. Fuck them too; they know damn good and well how much power a male voice telling them that their behavior is unacceptable has on the community at large. They will say anything to try to distract you, shift the goal posts, derail the conversation, try to turn it around and make it about you. Don’t let them.
If we’re going to pretend that we’re better,then we need to be better.
No more silence. No more tacit approval.
It’s up to us men to stand up and be men.
I think that maybe we should come up with a default response that we can use whenever we see this kind of behavior. It would have the benefit of being carefully thought out, and could give us a unified voice. If people write a bunch of rape threats, and each one of them gets the same response from different people, it might show them that a lot of people are on the exact same page, and that page is against them.
I'm not really sure how to start, but I'll give it a shot:
"Threatening someone is not an appropriate form of debate. It's unacceptable, childish, and only shows how little you really understand. Correct your behavior, or you will end up alone and angry for the rest of your life."
This is just the first thing that I thought of, and I was trying to make not too angry. If anyone thinks this is a good idea, build off of this, or start a new one from scratch. Then spread it to everyone you know so they can copy and paste it whenever they see some truly atrocious behavior.
I was literally just thinking this. It can be sort of overwhelming to come with a response to this stuff, just because there's so much of it. I like yours, and I came up with a simpler version: "This is not okay."
You guys are a lot more mature than me. My first thoughts are always profanity, or to reenact the ending of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
I'd go with "Threatening someone is not an appropriate form of debate. It's unacceptable, childish, and only shows how little you really understand," and stop there. The last bit is a threat that you can't follow through on and has some collateral damage attached to it—especially the "alone" bit.
Agreed on this.
Most of the vicious personal attacks are designed in large part to get a rise out of you. Your options are either a bland stock response, or no response at all. Any sign that you're letting them get to you is just feeding the trolls.
Actually., that's what happens a lot now, and it's not working. Doc is calling on people to act. Ignoring them is, in this case, giving them the idea that it's okay. If you really want to discourage a behavior, you have to step on it hard enough to hurt. Every. Damn. Time.
"If you really want to discourage a behavior, you have to step on it hard enough to hurt. Every. Damn. Time."
Unfortunately, that's really hard to do in an online community if you don't have moderator authority. If you can't make it actually hurt, it'll come off as just stomping your foot. And for trolls, that's the hilarious part.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Whenever I stand up against rape/harassment culture online, there's always at least one dudebro who tells me it's my problem because women lie, or don't report, or don't defend ourselves, or tolerate men treating us badly, or didn't avoid stepping on the right crack in the sidewalk, and so on. Like women don't already do those things and get punished for them?
You're absolutely right. Men need to start calling out other men for this shit, relentlessly, loudly, and publicly. Shun other men who do this. Make it well known in their peer group. Make them radioactive. We women have been fighting our guts out for a long time, and the punishment gets worse. Gentlemen, it's time to choose sides.
Gentlemen also have to learn to realise when, no, the problem *really is them*. Even if they think they're 'not that sort of person'. I ended up cutting someone off after a fb discussion that spiralled after he made some misogynistic comments while he was going through a break up (that he initatied). The women on his f-list commented along the lines of 'dude, I get you're hurting, but not cool', and it grew into him claiming he was a 'nice guy' (he didn't get the irony) and all the women were attacking him for no reason…
…at which point, one of his other friends (male) waded in, and started in on the violence and rape threats. (He didn't seem to realise several of us are already rape survivors). His response? Was to claim that his friend was simply 'upset' and that it was excusable… while still sticking to the 'they were nice guys, and were being attacked for no reason by the horrible wominz!'
Honestly. Truly. He couldn't grasp that this was a bad thing to do at all – he figured it was excusable along the same lines as one might swear too much in polite company if upset. They could honestly level this stuff at us while still keeping their own narrative which featured them as the good guys. To me, this was the personification of how this attitude is treated. That's the level of 'ok' this shit has become. And it needs to stop.
What I'd love to see is for this to become an automatic dealbreaker. Instantaneous. You say it, and no one will touch you. On any side. Doesn't matter what they're arguing for otherwise. This is just not, and never will be, ok. Under any circumstances.
…But I have a nasty feeling I'm dreaming and living in lala land, because that'll never happen. Call it the cynic in me.
What I'd love to see is for this to become an automatic dealbreaker. Instantaneous. You say it, and no one will touch you. On any side. Doesn't matter what they're arguing for otherwise. This is just not, and never will be, ok. Under any circumstances.
Oodles and oodles of this. Instant dealbreaker. The more of us who do this, the more it will catch on. It's not going to be easy, and like Doc said, we need guys to take this on as their battle, too. I'm fortunate in that many of the men I know already do call it out. It's time for more to do so. All. The. Time.
If every time a guy made a rape threat, the immediate response was for the other guys to threadkill it, that would be all it would take.
"I have a Mother / Sisters / a Wife / Daughters. I don't talk to Rapists. GTFO." And then publicly block them if possible in the medium.
Said jerk would immediately have to defend himself TO MEN that he was not, in fact, a rapist. That it was just a joke. Ha, ha, funny, right guys? Guys? /crickets….
The problem would solve itself rapidly. Most guys would learn that it didn't get the pat on the back they were expecting, and change their behavior. The hard core trolls won't change, but at least they would only make their rape threats on private lists to other trolls, where they could fap to each other's power fantasies.
Wish I could upvote this more than once.
They do this because they are convinced beyond dissuasion or rationality that they are the greatest victims the world has ever witnessed. They see any criticism as attack, anything but mindless obedience as threat. Because of this they feel entitled to 24/7/365 attention, to be paid solely to them and their victimization. They pick on women, minorities, the disabled, etc. because they **hate** anyone who might experience real, actual victimization – because it takes that attention away from them. When it isn't all about them all the time, when their whims have to take second place to someone else's needs, that furthers their sense of victimization because they think it *should* always be all about them! that the world exists solely for them.
Of course, to everyone else they're the super-mega-ultra-bullies from hell, whining incessantly about the bruises and blood on their knuckles.
…I really like this point. I think it’s extremely well-articulated, and isn’t something I had put together before. Thanks for that.
Oh yes, the old "I'm just playing devil's advocate."
I'm an attorney. The devil has plenty of lawyers on his payroll and doesn't need you.
http://www.burn-recovery.org/images/burn-classifi…
Just seizing any available opportunity to link this: http://the-toast.net/2013/10/02/no-more-devils-ad…
"Our records indicate that you have requested to play devil’s advocate for either “just a second here” or “just a minute here” over fourteen times in the last financial quarter. While we appreciate your enthusiasm, priority must be given to those who have not yet played the position. We would like to commend you for the excellent work you have done in the past year arguing for positions you have no real interest or stake in promoting, including:
* Affirmative Action: Who’s the Real Minority Here?
* Maybe Men Score Better In Math For A Reason
* Well, They Don’t Have To Live Here
* I Think You’re Taking This Too Personally
* Would It Be So Bad If They Did Die?
* If You Could Just Try To See It Objectively, Like Me"
My response is always "Let the professionals handle this, son."
I should make business cards!
I work for a printer… send me your designs & we'll whip something up for ya!
Never heard of the Socratic method?
You are heretofore stripped of your right to call yourself "Socrates" if you think the Devil's Advocate is part of the Socratic Method. Not even in the hybrid sense, let alone in the historical sense. Do not lecture a lawyer on the Socratic Method.
And nobody gets to play devil's advocate for fun or intellectual stimulation with my life.
There are helpful ways to phrase the questions about things you've always heard are true, or always assumed, without treating other people's trauma as a day's entertainment. "Devil's advocate" is not that way.
It always seems like the "I'm just playing devil's advocate" card crops up -after- they've been soundly trumped, too. (At least in my experiences.) Almost like it's a last ditch effort to backpedal and pretend they didn't -really- mean to be completely awful.
Yeah. I (amazingly) have a friend who looooved to play devil's advocate (and is a young, upper-middle class white straight male). He slowed that down a lot when it was pointed out to him that devil's advocate is just a cop-out for stating your real opinions on a subject. And funnily enough he's a lot more pleasant to discuss things with while drinking now.
Even if your opinions are misguided or factually inaccurate, you're a lot more pleasant to talk to when you a) actually ready to have a discussion and listen as well as talk, and b) not hiding behind 'devil's advocate' where you get to discuss in the hypothetical the realities of someone's life that you are don't have any knowledge of .
Thanks for that. As a geeky girl I'm fortunate that I fell for a 'white knight' geeky guy who appreciated having a girlfriend/wife who shared all the same interests as him and a circle of friends that all shared the same interests. Whenever I wanted to play a video game with others, I could do it with real human beings I knew and knew would treat me correctly. When I went to cons, I took him along as a body guard.
And that's part of what makes this so insideously a problem. Is that when this crap starts happening to you, you feel alone. If no one stands up, you feel alone and unwanted, and that's part of what drives the fear. There are more of them than there are of you and everyone else is just standing back and watching. I made the mistake once of playing with a random pickup group in an online game and ended up dealing with harassment 10 minutes in – something I'll never do again.
I think this youtube video sums up that feeling nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQnIJ-ljctk
One person hurling insults makes a bad day but I'll eventually move on. But when I start to feel outnumbered, that's when I start to feel worried or scared or threatened. And every time this happens there are multiples of people jumping to defend the person committing the offense but no one to jump to the defense of the victim.
Not much to add, except what you deserve Doc:
http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/5s.gif
Bravo. I'll say it again. Bravo and Thank You Dr. Nerdlove. You hit on the main direct thing I'm hating about Nerd Culture that they love to be a huge Boys Club. Exactly like the Jocks or Elks Clubs or other institutions that we gauge as normal without thinking about the impact they have on others. Every time I go into a comic or game store and see that's only occupied by men makes me feel disappointed. (Not that this is anyone's fault, I just wish it were more accepting) They take the level of scorn and hatred to a whole new level. I'd even say "Have you met a geek girl?! They are fucking awesome!"
It's super easy to insult anyone these days, but women get it much worse than men do. I think if I've noticed anything it's that when someone makes fun of a man, it's to attack their intelligence or opinion. For a woman, it's way more towards their physicality with the rape/attack threats or calling them ugly. That's a much worse kind of attack than just insulting one's intellect. In general, I'm mad that the Internet culture feels no pity or shame in the amount of bullying or insults they fling out.
I wouldn't blame so much of this on "Not all men," but my brother is personally one of those guys who believes that women are naturally inferior because of their different brain chemistry and the "feminazis." I'm not going to deny that female supremacists exist, but there's a much bigger majority of male traditionalists who believe in putting women in their place. All that this woman was doing was criticizing over a teenage girl had giant, balloon sized breasts. This is seriously one of your best articles, Doc.
"I'm not going to deny that female supremacists exist, but there's a much bigger majority of male traditionalists who believe in putting women in their place."
That, and the female supremacists are rarely more than impotent wackos shaking their fists at clouds. The guys you're talking about do real harm.
http://25.media.tumblr.com/1d86810f03ce5814d29634…
http://cmeconfessions.files.wordpress.com/2013/09…
It also seems like the vast majority of "female supremacists" and extreme feminists are just teenagers on tumblr. Like, everytime I see someone with proof of how feminists want all men to die, it's just a link to a rant on tumblr.
Meanwhile, the guys he's talking about are adults with real power.
Wasn't there much backslapping to the recent /r/MRA poll that found it was mostly white dudes in their late teens/early 20s? (Never mind the fact that it being Reddit would skew the sample by its very nature.)
You have a few people with regressive ideas who are still in positions of power. A few more who have some semblance of power because they tell people with regressive ideas things that they want to hear. And then you have what's only a small percent of the overall population, but they're still a large number of vociferous people who are happy to live in regressive fantasyland, but have about as much real power as the various tumblrites.
Over half congress has regressive ideas and is still in power. They're making laws that affect my access to health care, my safety in the workplace, etc. So yeah, the fact that dudes on Reddit are in their 20s is sort of irrelevant.
Congress and the Supreme Court, if the pre-decision gender breakdown on the Hobby Lobby case is any indication.
It doesn't matter how small a percentage of the population they are when they hold the power to affect my body.
And that's not even taking into account the crazy-ass laws at the state level that negatively affect women's health, safety, and autonomy.
Well, plus a lot of lesbians who just aren't interested in dealing with men are labeled "female supremacists," when they're actually just "female separatists." They're not trying to keep men out of jobs, etc. They just want nothing to do with them.
From the flip side, I'd have zero issue with men who want nothing to do with me, as long as they're not deciding whether I get to work in my chosen field, etc. If a bunch of gay dudes want to go off and start a no-women-allowed commune, I'm fine with that.
So if its not me, or anyone I know, how can I help?
Did you not read the article? Because there were some suggestions there, my friend.
(just FYI the "how can I help" question is a way of putting the onus on women yet again. It's making women do all the work, and if they don't tell you what to do then you get to sit back and say, "Well I tried.". You really can't figure out how to help? That maybe when you see someone say something vile to a woman you couldn't figure out that maybe what you could do is say, "Not cool". Really, how difficult is it to figure out what you can do?)
"That maybe when you see someone say something vile to a woman"
Thats the point : I haven't seen geek guys behave like this to women. Its hard to imagine anyone over the age of 14 behaving like the Doctor describes. My group of friends is pretty much mixed 50/50 , and we're nice to each other else we wouldn't be a group of friends, if you see what I mean. Ive seen some scary stuff on places like Reddit but I do not think these people go outside so I dont meet them in real life.
So I'll ask you, seeing as you clearly want to do something regardless, what do you think you can do? Talk it through. Brainstorm some ideas.
I guess that's the question then. How much moral obligation does Guest have toward people outside of his life and social circle?
Well, maybe the question isn't moral obligation but how much control and influence does Guest (and anyone else) have over the bad actors?
The answer is that it varies, but what most women describe when they talk about sexual harassment on line or off is an overwhelming rush, a constant barrage of mundanities that build and build until you just don't notice it any more. I can't tell you how many times, when the topic turns to harassment, women say things like "OH and anoooother time!" and remember an event of soul-crushing dehumanization that they *forgot* because there are just so many.
In the face of this, the only real response is a counter-offensive. To fight fire with fire, to fight noise with noise. The drown out the negative. So, even if you think "I can do nothing because I am one person and I don't have much sway over the voices (I don't know them, they are legion, whatever)" you still have power in being the detractor. Collectively, we have even more.
None. But since he asked, it's clear he wants to do something. So let's see what he can brainstorm on his own, without needing a woman to road map it for him.
Or maybe he asked so that he could later point out that he doesn't know anyone like that so there's nothing he can do. Maybe it wasn't sincere, maybe it was a way of saying in a different way "Not all men are like that." And if that's the case, there's not much point in asking him to put in any effort.
But if he really does care, maybe he should care enough to do some brainstorming. Some googling. Some reading up on sexual harassment in the geek universe. There are MANY articles out there where people say what you can do.
"Well, maybe the question isn't moral obligation but how much control and influence does Guest (and anyone else) have over the bad actors?"
Moral obligation, of course, is to do good and stop people from doing bad. No one here is going to argue with that. Practicality though, we all have limits. Me and my friends can not form a masked vigilante squad, spending our weekends hanging around comic stores attacking anyone who speaks ill of women. What is left to do?
Just playing devil's advocate here (zing!) but if the issue were cops using excessive force in your town but it hadn't happened to anyone you know, would you still need someone else to help you figure out what you can do to help?
*narrows eyes*
Cops have a chain of command that you can go up. The upper elchons being answerable to people who do care about my vote.
As we all know, the Patriarchy is a system where the elders decide who gets to ascend to their ranks. I'll get right on petitioning the elders of the patriarchy about this, though.
OK, so we've established that you're capable of analyzing a situation and critical thinking. Original point stands.
And isn't that the rub. These people, with their hate and violence and threats, primarily operate in cyberspace. Where plausible deniability and vague unenforceable ethics agreements provide the smokescreen for anyone to say anything to anyone else. You don't have to look far to see people behaving cruelly to someone else. Take a spin around 4chan, Reddit, or even Facebook and Twitter and you'll see the worst of human behavior preserved for all eternity.
Part of what's being asked is that you speak up ANYWHERE you encounter misogyny. If you see someone sexually harassing a woman at a convention, you speak up. If you see someone leaving hate-filled rape threat screeds on a females blog/twitter/facebook/tumblr/instagram YOU SPEAK UP! And you keep speaking up. Keep calling people on their shit, no matter if it's in meat space or the cloud. You don't need to tilt at windmills Guest, just open your eyes and be willing to speak up.
This is what I already do but the article left me feeling like its not enough. So I asked, what more is there I can do to help.
Then why didn't you say: "I do this, this and this, but it doesn't feel like it's enough. Are there things I haven't thought of?" All you did was say you didn't know what to do, you then said that your friends don't behave badly and you never see bad behaviour in real life. All this suggested you therefore never did anything because there was nothing that needed to be done.
If you feel guilty that you aren't doing as much as you could, that's great, and there are ways of doing more. But right now you are coming a bit across as the victim, as "It's not fair, I do as much as I can, but I still am being told I'm not doing enough. Why is it never enough?!"
If you are truly not encountering the negativity – try being a force of positivity. Post encouraging comments to help combat the negative ones that you may not be seeing. Post articles about the negative stuff when you see it, to help spread awareness. Spread articles like this one around. It may not stop bullies, but it may help inform people who know bullies and have been keeping silent, or lend encouragement to those who are being bullied and harrassed.
I'm the same as Guest- I don't know anyone who does this stuff personally.
But I know how much publicity and social inertia affects this sort of issue, and that the only way to change the tide is to FORCE the tide. So since I became aware about issues like this, as of the last 2-3 years, I've made my Twitter and Facebook feeds very positive hives of reposting good stuff that people say and do on the issue. It has an impact, I think.
That's what I do. Find the people who ARE activists, who are doing the work, and publicise it and promote it to everyone you know.
I said "I don't know anyone", too, right up until I was discussing this article with. . .I really need a stable term for her. . .let's call her Lt. Mitzy. In the course of it, we went over a couple of things that have happened in/to the crew that didn't go bad precisely because they had a guy authority figure/figurehead to step in and defuse them two or three steps before it got ugly. Its only happened a couple of times and we're talking guys making a scene or making someone uncomfortable rather than rape threats but its all on the same continuum.
Has one of the women in your circle of friends ever suddenly called you into a conversation she was having with an unknown guy? Did you find out later it as because she felt cornered by a guy who just wouldn't stop talking and you were backup?
Have you ever had to be a backup opinion for a woman you knew before someone would take that opinion seriously?
Ever pretended to be somebody's boyfriend at a club to get awkward guy off of them?
Show one of the women in your group this article, have a real conversation and I'll bet you find out there's more going on than you realize.
Yes! I basically sum up what I do as 'showing up and shutting up' – I make a point to go to things which prioritise women's voices, and I stand there. I listen. I make it so my presence can be used to counter 'only hairy-legged feminists care about this'. I link to things women say, so that they get a wider audience. I talk to men about why they also need to show up and shut up, and I try to make sure I don't talk over women and tell other men to be quiet and listen so that women don't have to spend as much time making themselves heard.
So yeah, anyone wondering what they can do – show up and shut up. Show up women's voices, and don't drown them out.
Are you familiar with that psychological experiment where they ask subjects to watch a video of a bunch of guys tossing around a basketball and count the number of times a guy with a white shirt passes it? And then when the video is done, they ask, "So, did you see the gorilla?"
Most subjects respond with some variation of "WTF?" And then the experimenter shows them the halfway mark of the video, where somebody in a gorilla costume ambles across the court waving at the camera. Which hardly anybody notices; they were all focused on what they were looking for.
Mind the potential for gorilla.
I think it's great that your own circle of friends does not participate in this kind of vicious asshattery; it speaks well of you and them. But based on the accounts I've heard of women getting harassed to hell and back at cons, I'm afraid those guys on Reddit do indeed sometimes venture outside.
Just be aware that this stuff is going on. Know what it is when you see it. And when you do see it, call it out. (Unless the context is so obviously a misogynist troll-run shithole that it's not worth bothering.) I don't think the silence referred to by the Doc is typically malicious; I suspect those guys just didn't notice the gorilla.
Yeah, whenever a topic like this comes up and a guy says he's never seen Behavior X (which, not in this instance but frequently, is accompanied with the implication "therefore, it doesn't happen"), it raises my hackles. Because it's happening. And I'd be floored if it wasn't happening where Guest has seen it, he just hasn't noticed.
(Also, am I weird that when I took that test, I did see the gorilla?)
Whereas I'm actually pretty sympathetic to the poster, because my experience has been similar. I DON'T see much of this, either. I'm not heavily social, and a lot of the social groups I do participate in tend to be fairly progressive ones like this place, where anybody who shows up with that kind of "Shut up bitch!!!" attitude is already going to get eviscerated and I'm free to either pile-on or munch popcorn as it amuses me. It took steady exposure to articles like this (and first-hand accounts from women who have to deal with this shit) for me to realize that yeah, some really shameful shit is going on, and that I'm largely insulated from it is mostly a matter of luck. And that some stuff I've encountered in the past and dismissed as an anomaly wasn't, and I shouldn't have.
I'm in the same place, although a couple of recent conversations have pointed out to me that there have been some close calls specifically because there was a guy (ie me) present who headed things off before it went to crazytown.
Signal noise. Support female creators, critics, and voices. Support them vocally. Link to them, post on their pages in rational, thoughtful, supportive ways. Shut the hell up when women in your life are describing their realities and believe them. Shoot misogyny down when you see it. If you're a man, you have a voice that misogynists will listen to. The catch-22 of women fighting misogyny is that if a person doesn't value women as equal humans to men, then women saying "Hey, we're equal humans!" are going to be ignored.
1) Start paying attention. If you frequent geek events or geek communities, chances are this stuff *has* happened in front of you but you didn't notice because it didn't affect you. Pay attention to the sort of language that's used toward/about women, how often their opinions are dismissed, etc.
2) Check your own language and behavior. Sometimes misogyny is subtle, and it isn't always intentionally malicious, but these things still add up into a culture that devalues women.
3) If you see it, call it out. If someone makes a rape joke in front of you, or uses the term "rape" to mean "beat" or "won" (e.g. "I totally raped him playing Call of Duty"), tell them you're not comfortable with that use of the term.
4) If there's work you like by a female creator (comics, art, games, etc.), comment and tell her so. Part of the reason online culture can be so toxic is because people are far more likely to comment if they dislike something than if they like it. Getting threats and gender-based harassment sucks, period. But it feels different when it's a few comments among a thread that's otherwise discussing your work positively or at least neutrally versus when it's the only sort of comment you're getting. Help shift the balance of "criticism" back to what it's supposed to be: analysis and discussion and insight, rather than just vitriol.
"Start paying attention. If you frequent geek events or geek communities, chances are this stuff *has* happened in front of you but you didn't notice because it didn't affect you. Pay attention to the sort of language that's used toward/about women, how often their opinions are dismissed, etc."
This. Also, if you've got the big stuff down — I think this is where people stumble because most of us don't live in a situation where things are so Mad Men-era obvious anymore — read up on microaggressions. Modern examples of sexism are going to be less like when my mom's college adviser flat-out told her that women didn't go to medical school, and more like when people at work ask one of my male colleagues for information on a project I'm working on instead of coming to me.
Or even go for a read of the Everyday Sexism Project and how it was created. http://everydaysexism.com/
The entries there run the gambit from microaggression to sexual assault and rape. It's a crash course in sexism, told from the mouths of victims.
If you have a presence online, you've probably seen this. Call it out there.
I read a related article just this morning: http://comicsalliance.com/sexual-harassment-onlin…
This bit is a hell of a gut punch: "But it’s not news to a lot of women I know, and to women whose work you’ve read here and around the Web. I know it’s not news to them because of the way they write about it. They describe the latest rape threat as plainly as a man like you or I might complain about a late train. It’s just a another lousy thing that happens. You know, life in the big city.
“I will find you. I will hurt you. I will physically violate you… for being wrong about Spider-Man.”
Can you imagine, gentlemen, receiving that threat from a potentially dangerous man whose identity you have no hope of discovering but who knows your name, what city you live in, what you look like and where you work?
Now imagine receiving messages like that from men so frequently that you’re no longer bothered by it.
Now understand how f*cked up it is that you’re no longer bothered by it; that you’re no longer bothered by men’s anonymous threats of brutal sexual violence, because they’ve become just as common as a train not arriving on time."
Fortunately, I've never been on the receiving end of anything like this partly because, when I used to lurk on the DC Comics message boards, some of the postings were so horrifying either in their casual misogyny about the female characters or in the vitriol with which identifiably female posters were torn down or in the gendered slurs thrown around to indicate that something was really double plus ungood, that I just never bothered registering and now just kind of enjoy my comics in a vacuum. It's a shame though because there was a point where I would have really gone in for some in depth discussion of the few books I was really into.
Yeah, the thought struck me while reading that section is that there are actually few things more frightening than realising that you’ve come to accept the intolerable as being a “normal” part of your life.
I think it can sometimes be a self-confidence issue too, why some men who are not "that guy" tend to be silent. I know it was for me for a long time. I just felt like if I stood up and said whatever was on my mind about what I was seeing that was pissing me off so much, I'd be hindering more than helping, that I wasn't eloquent enough to really convince anybody of why they're wrong and why they should stop what they're doing.
It took some time, but I realized that even if I didn't "convince" anybody, me standing up to sexism is still at least an encouraging sign to those who see such harassment as the norm. I also realize that when I stand up, someone else can see that and think that maybe they wouldn't be alone if they stood up, and so on.
That’s an important thing to remember. Even if you can’t get the morlock to stand down, having an ally makes it that much less bad for the victim. Half of the problem for any victim of bullying (and let’s call a spade a spade here) is that ‘alone in a crowd’ feeling.
I also realize that when I stand up, someone else can see that and think that maybe they wouldn't be alone if they stood up, and so on.
This is massively important! You can't always change the trolliest troll throwing the nastiest shit. But there are other people watching. They might be trolls-in-training, but not yet completely trolled-up and able to be swayed. Bystanders could feel weirded out but not know exactly why, or maybe they know why but don't know what to say. Maybe they do, but they're afraid they'll be the next victim.
Oh, and the victims and survivors. A lot of people forget about them. I don't (being one and all). We're watching, too, the ones who are currently in the crosshairs and the ones who have been, and probably will again. Seeing a bystander say "Dude, cut it out, that's hateful BS" charges my courage battery when it's low.
So one thing I notice sometimes when discussing geeky stuff is how they have a tendency to treat their fandoms as though they were practically sacred, and if anyone (but particularly a woman/minority/LGBT person) criticizes something about them, even in the context of “I like this, but…” or “[author] is cool, but zie screwed up this one storyline/character,” they react like you just shat in their Holy Grail cup on Easter.
And that’s something I kind of don’t…get. Because I read a LOT, including some comics; and I follow several TV shows with some passion, including some geeky ones. And I love music. And some of the fun for me is reading others’ opinions, including those radically different from mine, analyzing what worked and what didn’t, and sometimes holding series that SHOULD be above tropes and clichés to the level they deserve, which means mentioning when the writers fuck up. I’m not sure there is anything sacred and totally above criticism to me, and I don’t really understand the mentality that makes people FREAK OUT and issue rape threats, etc, when someone doesn’t agree about Spiderman, or criticizes the cover of a book. Where’s the challenge? Where’s the fun? Where’s the opportunity for growth, if all around you is an echo chamber? I read articles on The AV Club a lot, and I’ll often upvote comments I pretty much disagree with just because they’re so well-argued.
The AV Club (both the reviews and the comments, in particular the TV Club) is often a shining beacon of what fandom could be: passionate, engaged, articulate, intelligent audiences doing actual *criticism* — analyzing, showing each other things that individuals might not have seen on their own, teasing out meaning (or creating it). I love how they take even shows that are flawed but do something cool and are able to appreciate that and discuss it intelligently, while still acknowledging the flaws of the show. (They made me appreciate, for example, the amazing plot maneuvers of the Vampire Diaries, a show I would never have watched if it weren't for some of my favorite TV critics discussing it.)
Similarly, this is a thing of beauty:
http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/topic/79775-…
And this: http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/McGonigal…
THIS is what respectful disagreement gets you: online communities building amazing things that require hundreds or thousands of brains with different perspectives and experiences to create.
And the misogyny (and racism, and homophobia; they're all the same thing, at the end of the day) of the geek community is directly opposed to the potential embodied in those examples.
Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog at The Atlantic has a fabulous comment section as well, which he maintains via scrupulous moderation: http://www.onthemedia.org/story/178194-how-create…
And that's the thing with comment sections that aren't going to be cesspits of despair: they often start with strong moderation and guidelines.
The thing is, this stuff *isn't* just trolls on the internet. It isn't sound and fury, signifying nothing. And it isn't a case of "ignore them, they're actually harmless." (Leaving aside, for the moment, the point that they are doing harm with their words alone.)
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/splc-r…
"Racist online forums serve as a birthing den for self-described “lone wolves” by feeding their rage. Investigators find that most offenders openly advocate their ideology online, often obsessively posting on racist forums and blogs for hours every day, while absorbing the hatred around them. "
The link above is about online echo chambers for racial hatred, rather than gender-based hatred, but I suspect there's analogous behavior around gender-based hatred.
You can argue causality, I suppose, but I find it hard to believe that men trying to work up the confidence to do horrible things in real life, whether it's murdering people of a different race or beating up their girlfriend for "disrespecting" them, aren't affected by having an echo chamber of support for their plans.
True, but what is to be done? Censorship? Calling them out publicly will probably just drive them further into fringe sites, no?
To be fair, driving assholes out of these spaces strikes me as an acceptable outcome. However, I agree that there should be more of a "dude, not cool. Here's how you play nice and still make your point" role modelling type thing. I don't have anything solid this week but I'm working on it.
Calling people out publicly makes a powerful statement about what a group or society does or doesn't find acceptable. Just think of the way things like race and gender relations have changed from, say, the 1960s until now. There are so many things people used to be able to do/say openly and with impunity that they just can't anymore. And sure there are always going to be extremists but what you capture with a lower tolerance for this sort of behavior are the people in the middle. Because we're social creatures and we take a lot of our cues about acceptable behavior from the way people around us behave.
As a blogger who gets harassed on a consistent basis, I just want to say the comments section here really gives me hope. It's so great to see so many men who are willing to step up to the challenge and speak out.
Being a girl online can be…exhausting. And I really understand what these women are saying. Eventually you just go numb and stop wanting to participate. Because what's the point? If this is never going to stop…
So thanks, Dr.
Got a link to your blog?
This is a great article, but you make one mistake that everybody else talking about this subject makes. It isn't about geek culture, or even sexism. That's the internet.
You think geeks get death threats, but not comedians, or writers, or journalists, or critics, or ANYBODY who expresses any opinion at all?
Go to any forum, and you'll find the same kind of hateful speech and vitriol. Its not nerds. Its not sexism. We have problems with sexism, but this kind of death threat response isn't unique to that. Its just something that the internet has now enabled us to do, which we didn't have the ease of access to in the past.
This is the reality of true freedom of speech and anonymous communication. There's a dark side to it. Its horrible, even, but its nothing unique to geek culture remotely, other than that geeks tend to use the internet even more than most people.
But if you think people aren't making such hateful comments in, say, sports forums, you're blind.
I think it's less about denying it happens elsewhere and more about forcing geeks to acknowledge it does happen in our culture as well. As it was already said, geeks were the outcasts for so long that we have this sense of superiority compared with the jocks, the class clowns, etc etc. We are above them, we don't behave in such low ways. We are the intelligentsia. We are the wise ones. We don't engage in such small things as sexism, racism, ableism and so forth.
No one is saying it doesn't happen elsewhere. What we are saying is it happens in our community too, and it's time to take the fingers out of the ears and pay attention.
Precisely. I also get harassed on the street. People get harassed at work, at bars, in the grocery store. None of these are particularly "geeky."
But it happens here too.
You'll definitely find vitriol spread at anybody who brings a strong and widely-read opinion, but the same type?
I've been a regular participant in this site's comments for somewhere in the ballpark of two years. The Doc has posted a lot of things that a lot of people (sometimes including me) have disagreed with very strongly. Guess how many rape threats I've seen him receive in that time. G'wan. Guess.
And it's not just limited to online interactions either, as a great many women who've been harassed at cons will tell you (and would very much like you to listen when they do).
I'm pretty confident that the Doc isn't saying this dynamic is unique to geek culture. But since this blog is targeted at male geeks, it makes a hell of a lot of sense to talk about that aspect of it, since that's the subculture readers of this blog are most likely to be able to influence.
Yes, everybody gets flamed. But it's a hell of a lot more likely if you're (perceived as) a woman speaking about something a lot of guys care about, and the nature of the vitriol will be very, very different.
Plus, just because it’s not unique to us doesn’t mean we can’t aspire to be genuinely better than that.
The fact that assholes may direct non-gender-based threats and vitriol toward people they disagree with doesn't negate the problem of gender-based threats and vitriol.
Just playing socratic devil's advocate here but if this is a systemic problem, doesn't it make sense to start in your own community?
I agree it's not just a geek problem. It's a problem in many communities. This is ours, though, so why not clean it up? I'd rather my neighborhood be nice, not merely just as bad as all the other ones.
EDIT: Or what GJ said.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Um, I don't know why that copied itself when I was trying to respond to Anonymous who talked about how it's not just sexism, it's the internet.
Anonymous, NO IT'S NOT. People who post to the internet with female names get very different treatment than those with male names. Like an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day versus 3.7 for men. http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavi…
Wait, what do I have to do to get 3.7 sexually explicit messages per day? Obviously I'm not trying hard enough.
More seriously, average of 100? DAFUQ!
So, let me state right up front that I am *not* trying to justify the behavior, I'm just trying to think about why it exists:
DNL touched on some this in his explanation for geek culture's hostility to women, but I don't think he was explicit enough about it. I think it boils down to geek men being afraid of and feeling inferior to women. This comes from a mixture of sources: High school, where you are strongly attracted to women yet there are disproportionately few women who are willing to date or even be friends with geeky men. Even later in life, it seems geeky men have more trouble finding dates and female friends. They feel powerless to get what everyone else seems to get effortlessly and in their bitterness and feelings of inferiority arises anger. Of course, the tragedy is that the anger drives more women away, making them more bitter, feeding a vicious cycle.
As far as solving the issue, while stigmatizing current trolls is good, in the long run I don't think just telling young geeky men that "oh, you actually are in the powerful position" will work to change the culture. Invalidating such deep and vulnerable feelings will just promote a backlash, even if you feel you are correct to invalidate them. But I'm not sure what to do instead to raise a generation of geeky men with more healthy views of women and how they relate to them. You can't redistribute pussy or female friendship, nor would it be moral if you could.
I almost wonder if some sort of an equivalent of the "it gets better" project for young gay men that was targeted at lonely geeky men could preempt some of this. The social isolation and lack of dating experience does change as you leave high school, and especially when you are in your mid to late twenties (I'm only twenty, but I've heard enough anecdata to believe this). Raising the self-esteem of young geeky men *before* they become bitter misogynists could be very helpful I think.
I think your second paragraph is dead-on.
"I almost wonder if some sort of an equivalent of the 'it gets better' project for young gay men that was targeted at lonely geeky men could preempt some of this."
Trouble is, for gay teens, a lot of what that project promises is environmental. When they can extricate themselves from environments where they're constantly being told to hate themselves and can come into contact with more people who are like them, yeah, it really DOES get better.
For us geeks, it only gets better when we put in the work to MAKE it better, and as anybody who's tried to do that work (even successfully) will tell you, it's neither easy nor a guaranteed success. As snappy taglines go, "You Will Have The Opportunity To Make Things Better Yourself Through Personal Growth" lacks a certain panache.
You're right that telling guys they're doing something wrong and indulging in deplorable behavior can and will produce backlash, which is why I'm generally only in favor of really giving somebody both barrels when they're doing actual immediate harm. But a lot of times, they're doing actual, immediate harm. If shutting down somebody's harassment of a cosplayer in a revealing outfit results in that guy's feefs getting hurt, I'd rather that than the person he's harassing continuing to feel uncomfortable and threatened. If guys knock this shit off not because they've grown as people but because they know white knights/humorless feminazis/etc etc will jump on them with both feet if they don't, that's a step in the right direction.
I agree with you about going after people doing real harm, I guess I'm talking about "early intervention" with the next generation of geeks who are in their early to mid teens now. But, as I said, I'm not sure what to do about it.
I'm with you in that it sounds worth doing and I have no blessed clue how to do it. By choice, I have nothing to do with teens.
I don't have a pre-pack answer here but you are making me ponder if there's some sort of positive role model thing that those of us on the side of light can be doing. My crew may be doing a few cons this year, so I'm already talking with my #2 about what we can do to be proactive. We've been lucky to avoid a lot of gendered issues for several reasons but if we've got the luxury and the platform, we should be using it.
This also presumes that there aren't huge problems with "it gets better" as a whole concept.
"It gets better" was founded on trying to convince young gay boys that they shouldn't kill themselves before they can experience the world because the world is not high school. And I agree with this message, because it will get better for any teenager once their brains finish mylenation and everything stops feeling like the end of the world. (There's a biological reason for the incredible intensity of our teenage emotions.)
But it doesn't say that it gets way more better if you're white, male, straight-acting, cis, and living in a big city – which is also true.
And the problem isn't that nerds aren't surviving high school. The problem is that nerds don't seem to realise they're not in high school anymore.
"And the problem isn't that nerds aren't surviving high school. The problem is that nerds don't seem to realise they're not in high school anymore."
I want to embroider this on a t-shirt. So very frustrating, yet so true.
"I almost wonder if some sort of an equivalent of the "it gets better" project for young gay men that was targeted at lonely geeky men could preempt some of this. The social isolation and lack of dating experience does change as you leave high school, and especially when you are in your mid to late twenties (I'm only twenty, but I've heard enough anecdata to believe this). Raising the self-esteem of young geeky men *before* they become bitter misogynists could be very helpful I think."
What about lonely geeky women? That's the thing that really really irks me about this whole issue of Toxic Nerdery. It's largely predicated on the erroneous assumption that all nerds are male or white or cis het. And the focus on the woes of the stereotypical white male nerd to the exclusion of all others is part of what makes the visible "valid" nerd community so insular and so incredibly toxic for people who don't fit that mold who ALSO want to participate in nerdy things.
This goes along with what Blurgle said elsewhere in the comments: nerds are not a protected class and treating them as such is doing no one any favors. There may be other factors at play when it comes to social isolation: so what are they? Some people are bullied and bullying is a problem. Some people are non-neurotypical and understanding of those issues can be lacking in schools. Some people are dealing with mental illness and that's still stigmatized.
Some people are isolated because they have trouble seeing past the ends of their own noses in order to expand their interests. When I was an isolated high school girl, even though I thought it was mega annoying (because I was a teenager and everything was mega annoying), the community service hours required to graduate at least got me out of my own stupid head for a while and exposed me to new people and experiences.
Hm, I didn't mean to invalidate the experiences of others, I guess I'm just focusing on how to combat this problem in the long term. The quote of mine you selected was just thinking out loud more than anything. I guess I just believe that a lot of geek misogyny comes from a root of low self-esteem and loneliness, and that if we could raise the self-esteem of young geek men somehow (and by young, I mean middle schoolers and high schoolers) then I think the misogyny would be lessened (and more men would call out misogyny).
Also, I agree that geeks aren't some special class of people that need to be protected, but I do think that certain kinds of special classes of people that are not given as much attention as other classes by the broader culture (as opposed the visible ones like sexual orientation, race, gender) such as people with asperger's, other mental illnesses, victims of bullying, as you noted, also are over represented in geekdom. Of course, actions that help those groups wouldn't be targeted at just geeks, but there would be a lot of overlap.
There's some truth in the notion that bullying either teaches you to love or hate. It largely taught me to love but I guess it could teach some people to hate others. But something bugs me about that idea and it's the notion that someone acts out simply because they have low self esteem. That having a low view of yourself somehow means you don't have to take responsibility for your own behaviour and that if and when women get harassed in the geek community, it was somehow caused by some other women in some other place and time who wouldn't sleep with or hang out with some other random men.
There's a fair few women who won't sleep with me. They are not responsible for my behaviour towards anyone. The more we recognise that we don't own fun and that fun is meant to be shared, the less threatened we feel by people coming into our fandom communities.
Hm, I would say that low self-esteem is a necessary but not sufficient cause for acting out like that. Most people with low self-esteem are actually quite reserved. However, remove the low self-esteem and I think many of these people would stop.
There's a big difference between recognizing the causes and seeking to remedy them, and letting people off the hook. By all means, hold people accountable, but also try to prevent future harassers by striking at the root.
"That's the thing that really really irks me about this whole issue of Toxic Nerdery. It's largely predicated on the erroneous assumption that all nerds are male or white or cis het."
Given that LTP is talking about nerds who engage in the kind of behavior described in the article and speculating on ways to head-off that behavior pre-adulthood, 75% of that assumption seems perfectly reasonable in-context. Though, hey, if outreach that can help squelch misogynist attitudes before they last into adulthood can also improve the lives awkward young geeks who were highly unlikely to be a part of that particular problem, that'd be awesome, too.
Is the first paragraph really true anymore or was it ever true? In the past there was a gender imbalance in many nerd cultures and sub-cultures but these days it seems to be relatively balanced. Conventions seemed to be split relatively equally between men and women in attendance from what I remember. The growing number of feminist critiques of fan culture also suggest a growing gender balance.
I can only speak from personal experience, but, depending on how you define geek, there were conspicuously fewer geek girls at the places I went to school and most of the geeky guys did not date. I have no experience with conventions. Even at community college there seem to be significantly fewer (though more than at high school).
Been to a comic/game shop this century, Lee? There's a higher percentage of women, yes, but its maybe 10% up from 1%.
High school is a nasty time, when people get most of their formative experiences by being forced into a crowd full of arbitrary people around their same age, all of whom are figuring out their identities and how their actions impact other people. Dating takes everything I said above and ramps it up a notch.
It's very much worth giving people in that situation pointers so that they can have successful interactions with the opposite sex, just so they can have normal interactions instead of seeing them as some mysterious, alien Other. Then again, that's kind of what most of this site is about.
Depends on the particular corner of fandom, but yes, there's still a gender imbalance. Only about 10% of the competitive Magic circuit is female. Only about 25% of Call of Duty players are female.
And it gets worse when you look at the people creating geek culture, and not just fans. Only 11% of game designers are female. 12% of comics creators. And Geena Davis has all sorts of stats about the paucity of female representation in television and movies.
So yes, it was true and it remains true. It's nowhere even *approaching* balanced yet.
"Only about 10% of the competitive Magic circuit is female. Only about 25% of Call of Duty players are female. "
Both of those segments are widely spoken of as particularly toxic to women.
However I did see an artticle in Publishers Weekly this morning that shows that the fastest growing segment of comic book sales are to women age 17-33.
I was in manga and anime fandom for a bit, which tends towards relatively even gender balances. Games weren't my thing.
As for the creator imbalance, I recognize that it exists but the problem is partly created by past gender imbalances and the shape of the industry. The American comic book industry is much smaller than the Japanese comic book industry. The first shoujo comics were written by men but by the late 1960s and early 1970s, more and more women were getting into comic creation in Japan. The girl's comic industry in the United States practically collapsed by this point with a few holdouts like Archie Comics. Most comics were very boy-oritented and there were few avenues for anybody to get into the comic industry. You had DC, Marvel, Archie, a few independent presses and that was it. If you wanted something relatively mainstream and non-experimental but aimed at girls and women, you were badly out of luck. It took until the late 1990s for there to be enough opportunities for anybody to create somewhat to very mainstream comics outside of DC and Marvel.
You make the erroneous assumption that all misogynist nerds are straight. They're not. There are a lot of gay boys and men who are nerds who are absolutely vile about women. Because they've grown up in a culture where being vile about women is okay, it's how to make them shut up, and if they disagree with something a woman says then making her shut up is much easier than actually considering she might be right.
And in some cases these guys are worse than straight men, because they have this thought "Why should I be nice to women, I don't even want to fuck them."*
We need to start making nerd culture in general hostile to the attitude that being vile to women is okay. It's not about sexuality, it's about treating women as people.
*Note: it's hard for straight people to tell queer people their attitude sucks – it sounds like oppression. Other queer nerds (like me, I'm holding my hand up here) need to start dealing with this stuff amongst our own. Living with queer oppression doesn't excuse us oppressing others.
It's true that some gay men are hostile toward women, but the reverse is also true. The strongest male feminist allies I've had have been gay men, because they recognized the problem of geek culture being hostile to anyone who wasn't a straight white male, rather than it just being a women's issue or LGBTQ issue.
Oh definitely, there are some awesome gay male allies to women or POC. I just wanted to point out this attitude doesn't come from being denied the chance to have sex with girls in high school.
I'm too ill with stomach flu at the moment to say anything more than THANK YOU. When even my reasonably intelligent male friends consistently say things like, "Just don't give it any attention" and "If she keeps hearing these things, maybe she should look at her own behaviour," it lifts my spirits to know that men like you actually exist. Thank you.
Notes in no order:
• The "White Knight" insult always entertains me. I'm not calling you an asshole in order to get laid, but instead, I get laid because I am the kind of guy who will call you an asshole.
• I really liked the observations about how geek culture has WON and that's frakking with some people's heads.
• Please, you guys who send these threats, PLEASE act like this in public. Be proud of who you are, and share it with the world.
Going slightly off topic, re: "I really liked the observations about how geek culture has WON and that's frakking with some people's heads."
I find that that also seems to be the case with regards to the Cold War. Basically, there is a subset of Americans, sadly with disproportionate political power compared to how many of them there actually are in the U.S., who just lost their damn minds when the Soviet Union collapsed, because they defined themselves so much by who their enemy was that once that enemy no longer existed… And you can tell who these people are, because they are the elected officials and journalists who will try to get us into any war they can, regardless of who the President is. Your Bill Kristols and John McCains. They don't care where it is or why, they just NEED a war, the same way these angry geek boy misogynists need to feel oppressed.
I just attended this related panel at PAX East this past weekend! http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/pax-east-2014-why…
It is a talk by Zoe Quinn and Patrick Klepek, and focuses on overall internet bullying rather than specifically gender-related bullying, but it offers up some great insights as to why it happens and how we can help prevent it.
Not sure if I'm geeky. A Facebook quiz says I'm mildly geeky. I have no idea about comics but have dressed up as The Doctor from Doctor Who before now. If I meet a woman and she likes Doctor Who too, that's fantastic. I remember the period where the show was cancelled. Most of us fans couldn't get a date for love nor money if we revealed we had toy Daleks in our bedrooms. One of the blessings of the new series is it's really updated the whole thing and it's become much more engaging for a modern audience of men and women. Though of course we love women who stuck with the show through the classic era.
I can't fathom being angry or aggressive about someone else liking something I like. Fun is to be shared. You don't own fun. I wasn't lucky with girls when I was in high school but I've never felt the urge to harass women. But I have seen it. I've seen some very dark harassment crap. I've got a build that kind of looks a bit like a night club bouncer so when I say: "erm…nope, you're not pulling that kind of crap", harassers give it a rest. I've got female friends who are more geeky than I am and that's great. Having a passion is great.
Everyday sexism follow me (under my real name) on Twitter and reading through their twitter feed shows just how much women (and men too) put up with on a daily basis. Geeky or not, harassment is a real problem out there.Rape threats are disgusting and technically a threat to commit a crime.
It isn't all men doing this harassment crap. But I think those of us males who aren't doing it need to make it clear that we don't put with that kind of behaviour towards women (or men).
Nothing to add except to say that I'm a longtime geek and I stand with Doc here.
” Marginalize these people. Isolate them. Excise them from the community – we don’t need them, we sure as shit don’t want them.”
That’s a great idea. Take the broken people who get so angry they do awful things like threaten rape and death and then isolate and marginalize them MORE. Perfect. Don’t treat them like people that need help. Don’t treat them with kindness and love and empathy. Fuck them right? That’ll totally make it better.
Holy fuck article after article about how you need to kick “bad people” out of the door and treat them like shit because they did something bad. I admit those things are awful and terrible but you don’t know anything about their lives. Maybe they have mental problems. Maybe they’re victims of physical or mental abuse. Maybe they’re sociopaths. Forget all that let’s just insult them back and kick them out. Complete the cycle, continue a world devoid of empathy and compassion, that’ll totally make things better. Again these people are doing horrible things. There is obviously something wrong with them. Maybe our community should go to them, honestly and sincerely, and ask them what’s wrong and if we can help. Maybe through caring and empathy we can help. If it doesn’t work? Well at least we tried. We treated them like people while they treated others terribly. Like the idea of just telling them to go fuck themselves?
Congratulations. Now you’re all monsters
If I throw a party and one of the guests starts punching people in the face, I don't give a shit what combination of abuse, dysfunction, and mental illness in his history causes him to act that way. He's no longer welcome in my home until I trust he's not going to punch any more people in the face.
These guys can heal on their own time, and I hope they do. But insisting strangers put up with their abuse in the meanwhile is nonsense.
You know, if men who sympathize with men who behave badly to the point of making rape threats and want to work to help them, then by all means they should feel free to do so. But they should do this outside of the broader community so as to not impose people who behave badly on their past victims and on people who they may victimize in the future, and there should be no obligation in the part of victims (or anyone else) to participate in this effort. Receiving rape threats is bad enough. It shouldn't come with an obligation to be a part time, unpaid social worker.
All of those things explain their actions. They do not excuse their actions. I agree that there are more productive solutions for those men in the long term. In the short term, though, those concerns do not outweigh preventing them from victimizing people.
You can treat them however you want, but if they’re being threatening and hostile towards others, I don’t know why a community should have to put up with that. They’re not paying anyone in the community to be their therapist and hold their hand as they work out whatever problems they may or may not have. We don’t know what’s going on in their life or what happened in their past; what we DO know is how they’re behaving now. And to preserve the greater good of a community space, sometimes people who are being actively hostile need to be told to vacate the premises or be respectful. Besides, if the specific space is for enjoyment of comics or TV shows, the people visiting may not be qualified or prepared to counsel some hostile troll on their possible emotional issues.
Also, I don’t really care what someone went through, it doesn’t give them the right to issue rape and death threats to total strangers over a comic book cover. If they can’t hold their shit together enough to manage that, then they probably should be alone to simmer down for a while.
Also, the vast majority of auto-responses suggested here contain no profanity (or only an abbreviation for one) or outright insults and consist mainly in pointing out that a behavior is contextually unacceptable and why.
"Maybe our community should go to them, honestly and sincerely, and ask them what's wrong and if we can help. Maybe through caring and empathy we can help".
I've been bullied so much growing up it stopped being funny. I don't harass people. Having bad stuff happen to you does not excuse you visiting similar bad stuff onto other people. I am responsible for my own behaviour. I'm responsible for the times I've been a dick and responsible for the times I've been a great person.
Empathy and support from others helps. But none of that has any power unless the person takes responsibility for themselves and their behaviour.
I spent a lot of emotional energy trying to heal the men who sexually assaulted me (yes, plural). I thought it was my job. Women, in particular, are socialized up the wazoo to put everyone else's needs before our own.
Fuck that shit.
My safety is more important to me than the emotional issues of the person making me unsafe. You DO have a very good point about a culture trying to heal people who do damage, and as a culture we should value that. But not at the expense of my safety. EVER. That includes meatspace and online, since so much of modern life and modern geeky life takes place online. No one has a right to call me a monster because I am finally prioritizing my own safety over the care and feeding of someone making me unsafe.
This.
I mean, I agree that when it's safe it's better to try and help detox these people instead of feeling morally self-righteous as we ostracize them. When it's safe.
When it's not safe, the priority is to avoid letting them victimize others. The women involved aren't just set dressing.
Um, no, not wanting bad people in my community doesn't make me a monster. You behave horribly, you lose the right to be part of the community.
Other people aren't responsible for your behavior, and they're not responsible for "fixing" you. If a dude is awful to me, I am not obligated to CONTINUE SPENDING TIME AROUND SOMEONE WHO IS HURTING OR THREATENING ME for THEIR benefit.
Own your own behavior.
The flipside is, if you can't control your own behavior, you shouldn't be afforded the same freedoms as people who can. Generally, we institutionalize people who aren't in control of their behavior and are harmful to others.
You don't get to have it both ways. Either you take responsibility for your own behavior, like an adult, or you lose adult privileges.
Isn't there an article back a ways about missing stairs and how geeks feel so bad about having been excluded that they often don't want to exclude anyone else, even if they have a legitimate reason to?
Doc, can we get a link?
I've referred to both in articles ( here, in fact) but what you're generally talking about is the Geek Social Fallacy.
And the Missing Stair Problem
I'm fascinated by this response. If not wanting to be around people who threaten to kill or rape me makes me a monster, then so be it. RAWR.
Like, really, this is laughable. Next time you are threatened with acts of violence by multiple people at multiple times who know where you live, where you work and where your children go to school, please tell me about the time you sat down with them and asked them what's wrong and how you can help. Let me know how that works out for you.
"I admit those things are awful and terrible but you don't know anything about their lives."
If someone is threatening me or anyone else with absolutely vile things, I don't flipping *care* about his life and whether something bad might have happened to him at some point (and guess what? Almost everyone has had or will have at least one traumatic or truly awful thing happen to them, probably many more). Maybe his parents were abusive or neglectful or he got his feelings hurt when some girl was mean to him or he is mentally ill or he is just a really enormous jerk. You know what? It doesn't *matter* why he's being an awful human being. He needs to stop being an awful human being. And other people (most of whom, by the way, are dealing with their own hurts) are not obligated to coddle him or put up with his awfulness because there might possibly be some mitigating factor.
"There will be people who want to say “it’s important to note that guys get this too!” or rush to complain that it’s not all men who do this. They will want to play “devil’s advocate” or complain that they don’t harass women so it’s unfair for people to bring it up because it’s “tarring men with a broad brush” or maligning otherwise well-meaning dudes…"
Well, yes. When the discussion turns into pointing out how evil is inherent to the Y chromosome, you'll have people get upset. Although as they learn that discussion is a complete waste of their time, they resort to plans B (returning snark for snark) or C (completely tuning the discussions out).
I'm a dude, so no skin off my nose. It's still worth looking at the reality on the ground.
"There will be push-back. There will be people who insist that just calling out bullshit doesn’t actually do anything because trolls are trolls and assholes are going to ass. Fuck them, they don’t want to see things change. There will be people who will call your motivations into question; they’ll call you a “white knight” and insist you’re only trying to impress women and get laid by standing up for them. Fuck them too; they know damn good and well how much power a male voice telling them that their behavior is unacceptable has on the community at large. They will say anything to try to distract you, shift the goal posts, derail the conversation, try to turn it around and make it about you. Don’t let them."
So I take it that feminists have perfected their "control the culture" strategy? That I couldn't find plenty of examples of gross transphobia, slagging on sex workers, or heterosexuality-is-internalized-misogyny types if I went out there and looked?
I'm not trying to invalidate women's experiences, say that these problems are not problems, or that we should all throw up our hands and give up. What I'm saying is that most of the proffered solutions remind me of the old quote; "For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong". If our goal is to improve the quality of life for any group of people, discussing effectiveness does become kinda sorta important.
I'm not trying to invalidate women's experiences
Its generally a safe bet that if you start a sentence with this, the rest of your point will involve minimizing the issue. If gross transphobia, slagging on sex workers, or heterosexuality-is-internalized-misogyny bother you, then by all means work on solutions to those issues, too. This is an article about a single issue, women being harassed in geek circles. Changing the topic doesn't make you a broad minded activist. It makes you look like you're diverting the topic to avoid dealing with the issue.
To repeat/paraphrase the rest of my last paragraph:
If the people offering solutions still have these problems in their own community, it's worth asking if their proffered solutions actually work. If you want to effect real change, "does it actually work?" is an important question.
Agreed but lets define "work" as "fewer women are being victimized" with a useful secondary objective of "are these guys learning to behave better in order to avoid being ostracized?"
Again, very eye opening experience today tells me that yes, what I've been doing works. I haven't changed the whole world, or even all of geekdom but I have achieved the primary objective on multiple occasions. It also made it quite clear that there's more I can do.
Yeah, it's sort of like starting out a sentence with, "I'm not racist, but…"
Chances are >99% that you're about to be racist.
One of the things that I found infuriating about fandom when I was more active in it was how so many fans really wanted fantasy and science fiction to be taken seriously by critics but would get very dismissive and invoke the MST3K defense when their favorite piece of science fiction or fantasy was subject to negative criticism. The reaction to the critics that pointed out some of the not so entirely positive implication of Cameron's Avatar was a classic example of this. When you add the sexism and sense of entitlement that lacks in certain fans than your getting this reaction pumped up beyond belief.
I think I know what you mean by MST3K defense, but to make sure I’m understanding properly: you mean the line in the theme song that goes “it’s just a show, you should really just relax,” right?
That kind of thing always irritated me too. Sorry, no, it’s actually MORE relaxing for me to talk these issues out and analyze everything than it is to bury everything in the ostrich-hole and pretend the media we consume and the world we live in don’t reflect on each other.
Thats exactly what I meant by the MST3K defense. These people desperately wanted to have Robert Heinlein taken just as seriously as Thomas Hardy but when somebody would point out something they didn't like, they would argue that science fiction was meant to be entertaining not challenging or something similar.
Exactly. Sometimes assholes are just assholes and we insult people who have been abused, or who live with mental illness, by saying that all assholes must have these things and that these things mean they are broken.
I have mental illness. I am queer. I have had the shit kicked out of me by people on the street for wearing clothes that they thought someone of my gender should not wear.
This does not make me broken. It does not make it okay for me to hurt other people.
That was in response to Jared. Damnitt.
I’m one of the geek women that never post in most geek spaces on the internet because of the crap you’re calling out. Many of us lurk, though; we watch, we listen, and we wish we felt safe enough to actually join in. Thank you for creating a geek space online where I can actually feel safe enough to leave a comment, Doc. It means a lot to see so many people stand up and say “No more!”
I've actually been a bit timid for a long time to actually get involved with certain online communities do to my overall timidness. One of the first times I made a comment on a Youtube video about how I wasn't happy about the X-Box One, I immediately received two comments that called me immature and how my opinion was stupid because I'm female. Needless to say, I've been very cautious of what I type and where I type it one the Internet. The worst part was that I wasn't the only one having a negative reaction to the new X-Box.
Counterillusion, Lynnberrie, welcome to the community. Your input is welcome and I for one am glad that you picked this spot to speak up.
I just have to say, I couldn't give a flying toss if you're a man, woman or child. You could have white skin, black skin or green skin. You could be a published authority on a subject, or some randy with access to a blog and a moderate fan base, if you have an opinion that I think is wrong, I'll tell you, and I feel that more people could benefit from this attitude, so that we're not all walking on egg-shells forever.
It's not a matter of women "not being allowed to have interests", the fact of the matter is, when something becomes mainstream, in this case "geek" culture, it inevitably becomes saturated with people deemed less than worthy by those who have been part of said community for what they believe to be a longer stretch of time, regardless of evidence supporting or to the contrary.
Here's the thing though, length of time followed does not equate to amount of right you have to like something. High school might have been a terrible place for you and your D and D group, but just because the popular girls spilled water on your crotch as a joke, does not mean that you have an automatic right to like something above someone else.
Although I do not agree with many modern feminist ideals, There is certainly a problem with "geeks" feeling that they are entitled to so much more, just because they didn't get laid until the were 25 or what have you.
So whereas I admit that there is a problem with this fan base, I do not think that just because men are men, that it is their duty to fix this innate problem. Maybe everyone could pitch in, so that there isn't a deep-rooted debt-fulfillment ideology set between the men and women of future generations.