> I lead a development studio that makes games. Sometimes, I write about issues in the games industry that relate to the equality of women. My reward is that I regularly have men threatening to rape and commit acts of violence against me.
My suspicion is that she is not threatened because she leads a development studio, but because she is a writer. She's not asking for it, but she is making herself a public figure and they are usually targets of such behaviour.
I'd hope that the women I work with aren't regularly getting rape threats from my co-workers...
> I’ve personally never heard of a man in the games industry getting rape threats for having an opinion.
Because men are not women, and women are not men, it goes a little something like this: rape is an act of power (not sexual satisfaction). The threat of rape is the threat of asserting power over someone else. When these lowlifes are offended by a woman, they respond with the animal instinct of threatening to overpower them and rape is the closely available tool. None of them would actually ever have the guts to rape, I'm sure.
When men have contrarian opinions, rape is not threatened, but a whole chain of events occurs, the purpose of which is to remove as much power as possible from that man.
Consider famous causes that you know of where men who are not independently wealthy and have voiced opinions that are controversial to some. What happened to them? They were fired, demoted, jailed, investigated etc. The PyCon case some time back comes to mind.
Consider famous cases of women who did the same. What happened to them? Threats of rape. The same woman involved in the PyCon case, I'll bet, received rape threats. Additionally, she did get fired because she was a public spokesperson for her company.
These threats are about asserting power over dissenting viewpoints in a bid to make yours dominant. You perhaps won't outright hear of a man getting threatened with rape, except maybe in prison or during a competitive game, but you will definitely hear of men being hurt in different ways for having opinions that make people uncomfortable.
I get what you're saying... but I think you're getting downvoted because it's dangerously close to victim-blaming. No matter what they wrote, nobody ever deserves graphic threats of rape and murder.
And, c'mon, by your definition pretty much anyone with an internet presence and an opinion is a public figure, and therefore a "target." I don't think that's a helpful way to approach the problem.
>>In the area of competitive sports, it is pretty common to receive death threats for athletes who do not perform well.
You are making this comparison because you haven't fully thought things through. In your mind, death is worse than rape, therefore receiving death threats is worse than receiving rape threats. But it's not so simple.
Rape threats are significantly worse than death threats, for a similar reason that killing children is worse than killing adults. Women are a vulnerable group in society -- they are smaller and physically weaker than men on average, and are socially oppressed on top of that. If both rape threats and death threats are an attempt at exerting power (with no intention of actually carrying through with the threat), then rape threat is a lot worse because it exploits a vulnerable group in the most mentally damaging way possible.
Funny, for most things that you wrote, one could say the exact opposite, with equivalent validity.
> You are making this comparison because you haven't fully thought things through. In your mind, death is worse than rape, but it doesn't automatically follow that receiving death threats is worse than receiving rape threats. But it's not so simple.
> Death threats are significantly worse than rape threats, for a similar reason that killing children is worse than killing adults (a child has a longer life and more choices to make than an adult, so killing a child is more choice-reducing than killing an adult - just as killing is more choice-reducing than raping). Men are a vulnerable group in society -- they are physically stronger than women on average and therefore work more dangerous jobs, and commit more suicides and die sooner on top of that. If both rape threats and death threats are an attempt at exerting power (with no intention of actually carrying through with the threat), then a death threat is a lot worse because it exploits a vulnerable group in the most mentally damaging way possible.
You seem to be missing the important part, where we are comparing death threats made against adult male sports players and rape threats made against women.
Death threats against players are made as a way of voicing displeasure with the player's performance or the result of the game. The intent is to air frustration. Since competitive sports themselves are a way of bringing out the human primal side, being the target of threats or other displays of hostility is perceived and treated as part of the culture (even though it still sucks).
Rape threats against females are made as a way of mentally and emotionally damaging them. The intent is to harm, oppress and silence. This alone makes them way worse than death threats made against players, because women are targeted specifically due to their perceived weakness and inferiority.
P.S. I'm very disappointed by the down-votes. If people are disagreeing with what I'm saying then the situation is much more hopeless than the anecdotes in the article suggest.
> Death threats against players are made as a way of voicing displeasure with the player's performance or the result of the game. The intent is to air frustration. Since competitive sports themselves are a way of bringing out the human primal side, being the target of threats or other displays of hostility is perceived and treated as part of the culture (even though it still sucks).
You could easily say the same thing about violence/death/rape threats against people writing opinion pieces online (which is what this conversation is about):
"Making threats when you disagree strongly with someone is perceived and treated as part of the culture (though it still sucks)".
> Rape threats against females are made as a way of mentally and emotionally damaging them.
I don't see how you can credibly conclude that when it happens to a sports player, "it happens all the time so it's nbd even though it sucks", but when it happens to an online writer who happens to be female, it's a much higher level of significance and is intended to mentally/emotionally damage them. I'm pretty sure that's the purpose of all violent threats? Seriously, how would one make a violent threat to anyone without expecting that it may mentally or emotionally damage them?
> women are targeted specifically due to their perceived weakness and inferiority.
This has to be a joke. Google "death threats twitter" and you'll see a billion examples of every person under the sun who's inspired ire on a large scale (for whatever reason). For fuck's sake the creator of FLAPPY BIRD got death threats. I think this whole culture of "take every Twitter loon's vioent threat as if it may be serious" is a good one in the name of prudence, but it's disgustingly hypocritical when people turn around and go "oh except for threatened sports figures, and except for threatened X and threatened Y, those are crappy but not that big a deal".
> I'm very disappointed by the down-votes. If people are disagreeing with what I'm saying then the situation is much more hopeless than the anecdotes in the article suggest.
You think the situation is hopeless because people don't agree with your very specific, intricately constructed apologia of death threats against public figures in sports?
How many people would be offended at the statement "white people can't see the colour purple"? Very few, I'd imagine, because it's patently ridiculous.
If you imply that women are inferior though, the statement has to be vigorously opposed. Imply that feminism isn't necessary, and the tumblr and twitter brigades will come out to shame and silence you, until you agree that women have it harder.
It's absurd behaviour for a group of people who supposedly believe women are equally capable as men. Once you figure this out, feminism makes a lot more sense. When they can blame men, they blame men. When fairness requires them to blame women, they blame 'society'.
Perhaps people are disagreeing with you because you are the worst kind of sexist - the kind who thinks their sexism is justified because women have special needs.
I don't think I agree with your premise, but even if I did... what's the point you're trying to make? That women would be safer if they never voice an opinion?
I'm guessing they're saying that "women working in the industry don't get rape threats for working in the industry. Women who do get rape threats are women with twitter accounts"
Maybe that's true (I don't think so), but like you said so what? It doesn't make it any better.
One thing that's often missed is that it's not only men making the death and rape threats - one of the people jailed for threats against Caroline Criadoperez was a woman. It'd be interesting to see what portion of the "troll"[1] population is women.
as an anonymous woman in tech, I guess what he is trying to say that women need to stop thinking that all the unfairness in the tech world is directed to them. Men suffer too. Yes, women mostly suffer because they are women and because stereotypes suck. But that doesn't mean that women should be segregated as a group that is the only victim of harassment.
Hopefully you don't mind me responding here. I appreciate your attempt to understand what I was saying but I was only saying that the experience of an anonymous woman in tech is going to be different from the experience of a public writer on the Internets, when it comes to abusive language.
It's just like any other IT guy's day. Go to work, do your job, fuck up a bit, say sorry, give others a hard time when they fuck up :P But seriously, no difference apart from the fact that I can see men at work are very cautious around me as far as cracking jokes is concerned. But I can't really blame them with all these sexual harassment out of nothing stories floating around everywhere now, can I?
It's all in the delivery. But yours is pretty much the experience I have seen from the outside: anonymous tech female worker is NOT receiving rape/death threats on a daily basis from co-workers or customers.
I'm glad your life is as uninteresting as the regular IT guy ;)
Nope. I'm saying no one is free from this sort of behaviour when they put themselves in the public eye. Look at sports-related tweets after a big loss.
Simply having a Tumblr account you post thoughts to is being "in the public eye"? If so, then that category must include nearly everyone who works in tech.
Sorry, that slipped my mind. I thought it was a Reddit post. In any case, it wasn't a random Tumblr blog, it was reblogged by someone who has been the target of online hate because of whatever reason. Hate transfers onto associates.
She's not threatened because she's a writer, she's threatened because some people in the community are abusive and law enforcement hasn't stepped up and done its job.
She's a target of the threats because she's a public writer. It's not good and obviously it's not her fault, but sometimes it feels like a woman-in-tech's workday must go something like this according to the articles I see:
That's not quite true. Women are much more likely to receive threats because they are more vulnerable. Just like bullies pick on those they perceive to be weak, abusers target those they perceive to be easy targets.
"Women are much more likely to receive threats because they are more vulnerable"
So you are saying that women are different and need to be treated in a different way than men? I thought we were trying to avoid this and treat women the same as men?
I think we should treat someone that's receiving death and rape threats on a daily basis differently than someone who does not. That we should treat someone that's more likely to be raped or killed differently than someone who is not that likely. And because the people receiving death and rape threats are also the people more likely getting raped and killed, that makes something considered as "taunting" much more real.
You are right, we should avoid treating women differently than men, that's something we're all able to agree on. That does not mean that men and women in our societies are treated the same as of now.
Women should not be considered as more vulnerable, yet that's how they are perceive, and that's also what they are being taught:
- don't fight, don't fight back
- always smile and be pretty
- don't get angry, that just shows you're hysterical/on your period/pregnant and hormone-crazy
- agree with the males, especially when they make sexist jokes, that makes you really cool
- don't be a feminist and try to improve your condition
We should not treat women differently than men, but letting society/communities/bullies target one group more than the other and then refusing to acknowledge it or to empathize with it, seems like a convenient way of not taking responsability, as a society/community, and not try to improve ourselves.
Not everything in life can be apprehended through stats, and sometimes we should be able to simply acknowledge the fact that others are having a hard time because of the way we're shaping our society.
But anyways, here's something that's been posted earlier : "In 2006, researchers from the University of Maryland set up a bunch of fake online accounts and then dispatched them into chat rooms. Accounts with feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7."
I don't want you to listen to my arguments, I was simply answering to your question about stats. I have often found out that convincing people that didn't want to be convinced took way too much energy.
"sometimes it feels like a woman-in-tech's workday must go something like this according to the articles I see"
How was this article titled? It didn't say "online harassment of female authors in the gaming industry" which is what it is actually about. The title tried to lump in every woman in the gaming industry, a common tactic. So I get to make my own generalizations just as well as they do.
She didn't identify the other women whose stories she told. It's an assumption that they're all writers.
I think you're reading too much into her tone. The key point is that no skin is thick enough to shrug off this treatment, and it's common for various unidentified women and one identified one in the industry to receive it from the general public. Do you think that's true, or not?
> Anita Sarkeesian once reblogged a Tumblr post of mine and it ended up on Reddit. I got so much hate mail from dudes that I left the internet for three days,
Unfortunately, hate for Anita Sarkeesian will transfer to her associates.
> Nicole Tanner is a former editor of IGN, and was one of the founders of "Girlfight.
Editor/writer. Don't know what Girlfight is.
> Every time I'm interacting with an enthusiastic fan
Another public figure
> Carolyn Petit is an editor for GameSpot.
Editor
There are no anonymous developers here (save for the reblogged post). This is clearly public figures in tech. I'd assume there are less public female figures in tech than there are non-public women in tech.
As for telling them to develop a thick skin, I have no opinion on that. If you are a public figure, you will be subject to this kind of behaviour.
The title of the post pisses me off. If they had just said "Online harassment of female authors", I'd have no complaint to make. But it is clickbait.
I think a big weakness of this article is that it goes from talking about horrible treats from random people to unconscious bias of coworkers without a clear transition. People skimming the article might think that she was getting threats from coworkers. The unconscious bias of developers and the toxicity of the gaming community are very different problems.
Exactly. The HN crowd needs to be smarter when we see articles like this. Demand, as readers, that there are no such mind tricks. Article title must reflect content, not hyperbole or agenda.
> You perhaps won't outright hear of a man getting threatened with rape, except maybe in prison or during a competitive game, but you will definitely hear of men being hurt in different ways for having opinions that make people uncomfortable.
it's rather bizarre that you managed to transform this story into something about men when the article is pretty clearly about the uniquely violent verbal abuse women are subject to in the tech sector.
Obviously you get more threads if you're a writer or even a journalist. Journalists get pretty extreme hate mail all the time.
But that's not what this article is about. It's about how it is different from what men get and about how it is more than what men get. You won't get the same reaction from writing a blog post as a man as what's described in this article.
My suspicion is that she is not threatened because she leads a development studio, but because she is a writer. She's not asking for it, but she is making herself a public figure and they are usually targets of such behaviour.
I'd hope that the women I work with aren't regularly getting rape threats from my co-workers...
> I’ve personally never heard of a man in the games industry getting rape threats for having an opinion.
Because men are not women, and women are not men, it goes a little something like this: rape is an act of power (not sexual satisfaction). The threat of rape is the threat of asserting power over someone else. When these lowlifes are offended by a woman, they respond with the animal instinct of threatening to overpower them and rape is the closely available tool. None of them would actually ever have the guts to rape, I'm sure.
When men have contrarian opinions, rape is not threatened, but a whole chain of events occurs, the purpose of which is to remove as much power as possible from that man.
Consider famous causes that you know of where men who are not independently wealthy and have voiced opinions that are controversial to some. What happened to them? They were fired, demoted, jailed, investigated etc. The PyCon case some time back comes to mind.
Consider famous cases of women who did the same. What happened to them? Threats of rape. The same woman involved in the PyCon case, I'll bet, received rape threats. Additionally, she did get fired because she was a public spokesperson for her company.
These threats are about asserting power over dissenting viewpoints in a bid to make yours dominant. You perhaps won't outright hear of a man getting threatened with rape, except maybe in prison or during a competitive game, but you will definitely hear of men being hurt in different ways for having opinions that make people uncomfortable.