Twitter troll apologises to Mary Beard after threat to tell his mum about online abuse

[FairPhyllis]

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/10209643/Internet-troll-who-abused-Mary-Beard-apologises-after-threat-to-tell-his-mother.html

For the record, it was not Mary who threatened to tell on him to Mummy, but another user after Mary retweeted his abuse. He swiftly apologised. He is 20 btw.

I think Mary's strategy of 'retweet and shame' is pretty good. However I am thoroughly depressed by all aspects of this - that it happened, that a man thought he could do this for the lolz, that he clearly has a mental distinction between the women you can abuse and the women you respect (his mother). I hope his mother bloody does know by now.

How can you even begin to combat the misogyny that the internet reveals is out there? I feel as though any man I know could have all this seething misogyny hidden from me. I bet Oliver Rawlings' mother didn't know he was such a nasty little piece of work.

If police incompetence and corruption were limited to their treatment of women, Dueling, I could not agree more. But it isn't. And if our society did not care about women, there would be no laws under which perpetrators of abuse could be arrested and prosecuted. Is the system perfect? No. But UK law grants us all a large degree of free speech, and such a framework allows for all sorts of views to be expressed at an individual level. The alternative would be worse.

CiscoKid, that's exactly why the answer is not police and arrests and sentencing. If the answer were judicial, there would be a hell of a lot of people in prison.

The issue is misogyny in society - which sometimes leads to crime. But which more often just leads to more misogyny which we all then internalise and learn to live with and that's the bit we need to stop.

Can I also add a for the totally cool and groovy new pope yesterday who was all over the press for being totally cool with gay men being part of the church. Yay! Go cool new pope. Women on the other hand - ugh! Are you kidding? No way.

"The alternative would be worse."

so what you mean is - stop making a fuss it could be worse?

Apologies if I have interpreted that incorrectly?

"But UK law grants us all a large degree of free speech, and such a framework allows for all sorts of views to be expressed at an individual level"

also - threats of rape is not 'free speech' or 'opinion' they are threats to rape. That's THREATS to RAPE.

I regret calling Rawlings a troll in the thread title tbh because I agree this isn't really trolling. This is a young man casually expressing his deep-seated personal hatred of women without even thinking about it.

Calling behaviour like this trolling, or saying that it's an isolated incident, or that people who do stuff like this are 'psychopaths' is disguising how widespread the problem is and what it truly is.

I was also disappointed to see that the BBC article tacked on the second half about the guy with autism: I'm interested to learn more about the difficulties people with autism face on the net but lumping what happened to MB in with the treatment that man experienced is stopping most people from naming or recognising what Mary experienced as misogyny.

I just find the whole thing so frustrating.

Women tweet their examples of everyday sexism/harassment/misogyny to a dedicated feed = loads of sexist and misogynistic harassment

Media picks up on sexist and misogynistic harassment and give women a chance to expose/talk publicly about it = even more sexist and misogynistic harassment including rape threats.

Women discuss whole issue of sexist and misogynistic harassment and rape threats = people say it's no big deal, it's not misogyny it's just opinion, just go to the police/ignore it/ shut the fuck up/ oh men have it so much worse/ at least you're not in in Germany/Jewish/Black and so on!

As FairPhyllis said "How can you even begin to combat the misogyny that the internet reveals is out there?" particularly if people are so insistent it's not really happening to 50% of the population.

CiscoKid google 'femicide' or gendercide if you want information about hatred of women and girls in male supremacist society.

There are millions of females missing from the world because they have been killed for being female (many of them aborted or killed as newborns). This culling of females has actually affected the natural male/female ratio of the global human population. It is detectable at global population level.

(And that is just one thing on a long long list of acts of violence and domination that are perpetrated by men against women.)

Fairphyllis I'm glad you picked up on the autism element of the BBC piece too. It's difficult to express without sounding as if somehow abuse against autistic people is ok. But I did not appreciate that juxtaposition. It was somehow - "look, abuse does happen against men too - ok "only" autistic men and not the default human who is, of course, a white NT male, but for god's sake let's not let on that this is about women because we can't write a whole piece just about women".

I am going to go back to reading this thread, because this may go off track, and I don't want that because it's an important subject. I just think we come at it from different perspectives.

In response to an earlier question though, I am not saying ignore it. I am saying that I think it is part of a bigger problem/attitude. But this is a section about FWR, so the focus is on the effect on women. Fair enough. And when I said 'the alternative is worse', I meant that I prefer free speech and the expression of abhorrent ideas to the alternative of censorship. Finally, threat of rape, or violence of any kind, are not 'free speech' or 'opinion'. They are against the law (as far as I understand it).

And just to be absolutely clear, I am not trying to trivialise people's concerns, or tell people like Mary to put up with this crap. Thank you for the discussion though. Plenty to think about.

"But this is a section about FWR, so the focus is on the effect on women"

it's about Misogyny and rape threats towards women so is always going to be about the effect on women, though of course men are effected by misogyny too, in a different way, as shown by the actions of the young man who was so vile to Mary Beard - and he didn't even know he was doing it!

FWIW I don't think a 'panic Button' on twitter is going to help (I have issues with the way facebook deals with misogyny and with Breastfeeding), I think it's far too serious for that and there needs to a be a sustained and prolonged attempt at educating everyone on how ingrained Misogyny is in society.

What a nob. Good on her, she's great.

There's so much bilge out there. People feel invisible they regurgitate every thought. Often vile.

Great that he nearly had to be accountable and it made him retract.

Yeah, it was 'let's make this a story about how some people are just generally obnoxious on the net rather than actually examine the underlying motivations of people who feel free to abuse women with obviously sexualised, gendered language'.

I disliked that it felt like it was tacked on for some sort of spurious 'balance'. As if the fact that people with disabilities experience harassment somehow 'balances' misogynistic harassment?

I think we need to start repeatedly making the sexism/racism analogy because ime that is the only way people get it.

Ok it is a derailment but Quangle IMO the Pope is not being cool or trying to appease gay men at all-he is rather grudgingly and half heartedly saying that it is not for him to judge, while still making it clear that they are sinners unless they remain celibate and are certainly not allowed to lobby for equal rights or adopt children/marry or have any other rights as humans beings and citizens. It is not really any different to his attitude to women at all-2nd class citizens and no attempt at full inclusion.

Great that he nearly had to be accountable and it made him retract.

The best thing is though that his name is all over the media and his mother gets to know anyway now. Unless she lives in a cave of course.

Someone suggested earlier that what Twitter needs is not a report button but an 'email the tweeter's mum' button

True Grimble!

Tunip

What I simply don't get is how someone can have this compartmentalisation of the women you respect and want to please (in this case the poster's mum presumably), and the women you feel free to abuse. How do you actually live with that? Seriously, how do you? Or do you actually feel contemptuous of all women and you're just keeping the ones who are useful to you sweet?

I think that the specifically Internet based easy expressions of hatred and violence against women just cannot be separated from the fact that for many, many young men the primary images of women they ever see online are pornographic.

Phyllis, I wonder if it's a bit like the thing that happens with racists, where they might get to know one black/muslim person and decide 'he's OK' but still hold racist attitudes about 'them' as a group?

It's a common phenomenon: 'Those Muslims are all XXXXXX' 'But your mate Fahad is Muslim' 'Oh, Fahad, he's OK, it's all the others who are the problem'.

I wonder if misogynists reserve their hate for women who are not direct relations - their Mums are OK but it's all those other women who are pesky. E.g. the ones who report things to Everyday Sexism.

Misogynysts love their mums but still think of them as lesser beings.

I'm guilty of that...I don't like men (as a group) with the exception of my husband and dad. They just cause too many problems and hurt too many women.

That thing earlier where the journalist got some trolls to phone in and talk about why they did it.
Didn't she ask one of them something like 'Would you talk like that to your mum?' and he said 'I wouldn't need to, she's not a feminist.'?

yeah, how do you go about educating someone like that?

trocodile I agree but I was really commenting on the commentary about the pope. It coincided with his gig on Copacabana beach and the BBC were totally overplaying his coolness with regard to gay men (which I agree is actually not at all cool). But not really any coverage of his slamming the door yet again on women despite the fact that that bit seemed to be part of the same statement.