Tuesday, May 8

Biting Beaver Writes About Online Harrassment

Biting Beaver came back from hiatus and wrote an extended metaphor to help readers understand what it feels like to be harrassed in a sexualized and a violent way as a blogger.

She's written about this before, though her attempts to communicate the experience have never given me such an "Aha" moment.

In fact, she was writing about it last year, before it became front-page-dead-tree-Washington-Post news and the subject of mainstream feminist and pro-feminist blogswarms.

But here she is, back again, conveniently (for us readers and "stop threatening bloggers!" activists) appearing before the "stop threatening bloggers!" movement has lost momentum. Lucky us to have such a well-written piece contributed to the cause within a convenient timeframe.

She and Kathy Sierra, as far as I can tell, have very different real-world memories and have had very different real-world lives. Reading about BB's background will make you not at all surprised to see that she, as she put it, "believed the [snapping] dog."

Read both posts to see that both she and Kathy Sierra were reasonable when they believed that:

the words from these violent, misogynist men are ... the words of rapists, molesters and abusers. They are men who have not yet been caught for their crimes, but filth and hatred of the type they spewed with their threats of slitting me up one side and down the other, do not come from the hands of people who are otherwise non-violent.

Perhaps that connection can help you convince friends, family, and other unaligned people who use the internet to come down harder than they ever imagined important on people they see harrassing other internet users violently and/or in sexualized manners. Because maybe, just maybe, since online life is still communication, scorning them everywhere they turn will convince more of them than would otherwise have been convinced that what they're doing both online and in real life is wrong.

It's worth a try--don't you think? Especially after reading these links?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here's the deal - she caught her kid looking at porn (or possibly, just FOR porn) and posted online about how she'd like to KILL him for it.

KILL HIM.

Not punish. Not ground. KILL.

The people who attacked her actually have a concern for her son. Yes, they went around about it the wrong way, but they were totally freaked out by a woman saying that due to looking at porn her son was going to be a rapist when he got older and how she would rather KILL him than inflict him on another woman.

She is more sick than you can imagine and needs to have her freaking children taken away from her. She can only see their genitals when she looks at them and she figures that since they're male they're just going to rape everything in sight. I mean, they are being brought up in a situation that is not only causing them to HATE who they are as men, but also setting them up mentally saying "if I do feel attracted to a woman that makes me a rapist" - which may even lead to them feeling like the only way to express themselves sexually is through rape.

In my opinion, her kids need to be taken away from her now before she does more damage. And yes, that also means what was done to her was just.

They just should have been a little less generalized about their attacks and more to the point. She is a danger to her children and she needs to be stopped.

I'm a woman, by the way. And I feel sorry for her kids. Not her - she's turned them into victims just as much as she was once victimized.

Anonymous said...

I know this is SUPER late, but to anonymous "lady". Get a fucking clue. How many people raise children without at some point saying they'd like to "kill" them? Most.

My money is on you being an MRA anyways.

Anonymous said...

Actually I'm a full fledged Anon. And her statements about wanting to kill her son were not the traditional "ugh, he's pissing me off right now" but more along the lines of "I should smother him quietly tonight just to save the world from one more rapist".

One is the statement of an exasperated parent. The other is the statement of an extremist.

Or to answer your question, how many parents, upon catching their teenage boy looking for porn on the internet would call him a rapist?

That doesn't sound too freaking kosher to me.

As for MRA, I have no clue what you're talking about.

Anyhoo, in b4 "no girls on the interbutts".

Anonymous said...

I'm with Femanon.

Recent headlines from the blog "Black and Missing but Not Forgotten:"