...the answers will never be discovered on JPP.
In January 2006, I was a student at NYU School of Law, home for holiday break. I had just gotten my wisdom teeth out. I remember that, because I was on a lot of painkillers, and I kept thinking that maybe my cloudy brain just wasn’t comprehending what I was reading on an anonymous message board created for law students, called AutoAdmit. There were hundreds of threads about me, with comments including:
"Official Jill Filipovic RAPE thread"
"I want to brutally rape that Jill slut"
"I'm 98% sure that she should be raped"
“that nose ring is fucking money, rape her immediately”
“what a useless guttertrash whore, I hope that someone uses my pink, fleshy-textured cylindrical body to violate her”
“she deserves a brutal raping”
“Legal liability from posting pic of Jill fucking?”
“she’s a normal-sized girl that I’d bang violently, maybe you’d have to kill her afterwards”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/let-s-be-real-online-harassment-isn-t-virtual-for-women
Excellent article and much too long for the boneheads here with attention spans of about 2-3 seconds, But two things jumped out at me and I thought they were compelling given the general opinion among the ownership of this board that is certainly reflected here and worth noting:
The first is this excerpt:
This week, Amanda Hess published an extraordinary piece in Pacific Standard on gender harassment online. She weaves her own experience with a Twitter stalker into a broader narrative of incompetent law enforcement, inadequate laws and dismissive online communities. She quotes feminist bloggers who left their homes to hide from stalkers, and police officers who don’t know what Twitter is. She breathes life into the statistic that some three-quarters of online abuse targets women, and that the very act of going online with a female name often means sexually violent comments are lobbed in your direction. She outlines legal challenges to the status quo. And she points to the psychic cost of living in a world where you are constantly told you’re a target for violence.
“When people say you should be raped and killed for years on end, it takes a toll on your soul,” Hess quotes feminist writer Jessica Valenti as saying.
We want to believe that the Internet is different from “real life,” that “virtual reality” is a separate sphere from reality-reality. But increasingly, virtual space is just as “real” as life off of the computer. We talk to our closest friends all day long on G-Chat. We engage with political allies and enemies on Twitter and in blog comment sections. We email our moms and our boyfriends. We like photos of our cousin’s cute baby on Facebook. And if we’re writers, we research, publish and promote our work online. My office is a corner of my apartment, and my laptop is my portal into my professional world. There’s nothing “virtual” about it.
This in a nutshell is what the people who run this forum do not get and do not want to get! They think that they can undo the harm by letting people say whatever they want and then if things get out of hand or complaints are lodged, the cover their asses with rants and complaints about "freedom of speech" as if everything except "sex with minors" is OK, and falls under the protection of "freedom of speech." And in their eyes everything does and if you don't like it they block what you can see.
Even more compelling is this from near the end of the piece after she has told about all the incidents that Amanda dealt with and the toll it took on her:
I know these harassment stories are ubiquitous to the point of being boring. “Women get rape threats” is not news. Amanda Hess helpfully details the actual costs of these threats: The hours of work lost to tracking someone down online, to reporting someone to the police, to developing self-protection mechanisms when the police fail, to, in extreme cases, hiring professional enforcement for speaking gigs. For me, the costs included a law school education, professional contacts, and a robust work life.
But what about the things you can’t put a price on? How many stories weren’t written because the women who could best tell them were too afraid? How many people like me, damaged and lashing out, paid their online cruelties forward? How many women look back at the person they were before their skin thickened, before they learned how to deal, when they were a little more sure-footed, and how many of them grieve a little bit for all the good things that got lost in the process of surviving?
What does an online landscape look like when the women most able to tolerate it are the same ones who are best capable of bucking up and shutting parts of themselves down?
These are the kinds of questions that never get asked by men because they just don't give a shit, not about women and not about rape threats and certainly not about the costs to women or to those who endure them on a daily basis because freedom of speech is more important than such things as mental health, physical well being and a woman's right to be safe in her own body and they certainly don't give a damn about a women's right to dignity and humanity!
