On BBC today - "Is there a tech solution for hatred of women?"

[NiceTabard]

here

In the wake of the convictions today of threats etc to 2 women on twitter. The article comes from a standpoint that women are targeted on the net in a certain way & possible reasons for it.

It is a much stronger article than I am used to reading on the BBC and quite enjoyed it! The later comments are also broadly interesting.

What strikes me is that the article included the bald statement from a US tech journalist:

"If it's a social problem and not a technological one, what is the root of it? Ms Norton, believes it is stark:

"The social problem is that men are raised to hate women and technology is not going to fix that. What's going to fix that is a societal conversation about why that is and why it shouldn't be, and why women aren't a threat to men. And the technology gives us the opportunity to have that conversation. It's not always a pleasant conversation, but we need to have it. Just shutting down the voices we don't like doesn't make the sentiments go away."

This of course has resulted in a lot of reaction (understandably TBH) from men saying well I don't hate women so that is wrong, men have mothers who they love so that is wrong...

It's an interesting point for discussion though, as TBH the language and attitudes about women in day to day life belie an attitude of, if not universal hatred, certainly plenty of other negative feelings. Even ones which are so common they go un-noticed.

I think that men in general are certainly raised to see women in a range of ways that are not good. Not all of that translates to "hatred". Just maybe being dismissive / patronising / only interested in women of they are sexually appealing. Maybe even tiny things like my dad will always draw attention to a "bloody woman" doing something wrong, whereas when a man does the same thing he doesn't mention the sex of the miscreant! In my own life there are just tiny things every day that all add up to, well yes, generally men are raised to view women negatively, in some ways. Even the ones they like

From the POV of Ms Norton, having spent a decade looking into this I can well imagine that it must feel like all men are raised to hate women!

Anyway.

Bit of a stream of consciousness there! What do you think?

Thank you.

I hope this isn't too needy or over-sensitive - and I've picked up that lots of you know eachother on this board - but it can feel very excluding and quite the oddest feeling to have on a feminist chatboard.

I posted first about that article I read about some men behaving differently online to real life and why that might be so and noticed this comment which I took to be a reply to it:

"I am not convinced that the fact that much of society is pretty misogynistic / or at least (best) dismissive of females is terribly well hidden TBH."

Then another (presumably more familiar) poster came on to say the same thing as me and got the response "I agree"

That hasn't happened to me for years and when it did, it was always a man who'd repackaged something I'd said in open forum at work, but when he said it he was praised for his ingenious take on the issue.

I'd guess that's happened to lots of women at work, so it feels the strangest thing for it to happen in a feminist space, to a feminist.

Developing this further, I'm not being critical of the poster (Te?) who I think expanded on what I'd been saying and was undoubtedly more persuasive in explaining thoughts.

Which was why I brushed my nagging feeling off and came back to the thread later on when the diversion about attractiveness which didn't seem to be on topic, had ended.

So as it had come back on topic about online hatred of women, I posted again.

Still not much engagement.

I'm prepared to accept this might be a skewed perception and it's just a part of online life that writers who know eachother well will always respond more to eachother than unknowns.

But it's a perception nevertheless.

For me, on a topic like FWR, it is often possible to tell. On a more neutral topic like primary education I will often go for ages not realising a poster is male (not that it matters at all as neutral advice is usually being posted there).

If my spidey sense tingles, i take a closer look at a poster and often I find out supporting evidence; sometimes I am wrong, though.

However, there are some women who post who are pretty much against lots of feminist ideas too!

I rarely know which posters are male, or keep track of who's who. I do know that posters can be written off as troublesome in some way and overlooked/insulted (though I haven't seen the perpetrators I had cause to remember around for a while, and think that has improved things). I never seek you examine the sex/gender of those, or other unpleasant posters.

I've found I interesting that on other threads, there is a great deal of respect for published academic studies (though posters usually link the original, so that readers can evaluate methods/results). An expectation that posters here are going to react in similar ways to posters across MNis reasonable (this is but one topic in a huge, open, public site). The value of commentary on research is a whole different question though, and commentary by the British media is particularly poor.

Though I suppose the feature of this thread that I have found most interesting is the huge and attentive response to a poster whose question was so unrelated to the rest of the thread I wondered if she'd put it on the wrong thread. Appearance is, after all, a characteristic that is absent or widely known to be easily falsifiable in cyberspace.

I dunno, medi, threads on FWR often meander a bit and whilst I read the whole thread the first time I post, if I post again I just read and respond to subsequent posts and don't always re-read the OP.

I know, all threads in all topics can and frequently do meander. This one just seems to do so in such a marked way.

I guess this ilustrates how differently we can all read the same thread.

ton, someone had just responded to you before you posted about invisible ink, and I saw that post last night but not your subsequent one, and to be honest I didn't understand - because someone had just responded to you. Sorry about that.

I do know some people off-board but I think I've actually met most of the people on here.

It didn't occur to me the poster earlier might have posted on the wrong thread, TBH. I thought it was completely relevant, but then I came back to this thread having read a lot of nasty stuff about trolls picking on women's appearance, so it seemed related. It's not, IMO, really that important that appearance is falsifiable. Sure, I could be Bill the Trucker or whatever, but if Mr MRA Troll responds to me as a woman and his trolling includes telling me I'm a bitter old hag of a feminist whose tits are droopy, it's still about what he thinks about women and appearance. The internet doesn't make that go away.

A lot of men who post on here do state that they are men as they understand that in FWR that can be important for other posters to know.

If you were an MRA trying to pretend, of course you wouldn't say so on FWR. Not disclosing sex is not a sufficient condition for that state, but it is a necessary one.

I had to go off and deal with DC last night Ton.

Personally, I don't feel I am very good at spotting genders online, unless it is very obvious.

I can be a bit oblivious in general though!

But so many are still missing Ton's point.

It wasn't

"can you tell if the poster is a man or a woman?"

but

"when someone is posting in a misogynist way, which can be done by men or women, can you tell which it is in those cases?"

which is a far more interesting point. It is about the different stylistic inflections of misogyny-by-men and misogyny-by-women.

It has set me thinking about the least attractive qualities of a certain style of posting on mn (the "suck it up" brigade) and perhaps re-thinking it - dur! - as a very simple kind of internalised female misogyny.

As opposed to male misogyny.

Can I just make a really pedantic point about "kicker" as in "this is the kicker" which someone used upthread.

Like so many turns of phrase, this one comes from poker. It doesn't mean "salient point" (as in "this is the point that kicks" or "this is the point that has teeth"). It means an extra.

In poker, you have a part of your hand that is most relevant - maybe something good-ish like a high pair - and, up to 5 cards, your next best card counts as a "kicker". So you have, for instance, "A pair of aces with king kicker" and if someone else has a pair of aces with a lower kicker, they lose, and if they have a pair of kings with an ace kicker, they win.

So metaphorically, and because of the aggressive sound of "kick" I suppose, it has come to mean something like " and to add insult to injury..." so, "I have lost my keys, and the kicker is my flatmate is away till Monday". It's just an extra.

Do you mean what a mysoginistic bloke would say about pubic hair, and what a misogynistic woman would say are different?

I do agree, that often that is the case. The problem is sometimes I find they take on each other's answers to back up their points. And so I am never quite sure.

But I was reading on another thread yesterday about how much more likely women are to phrase things in terms of how they feel and not how they think which I hasn't really noticed before, so maybe I will be better at that line f clue in future.

Sorry Buffy, am I being a pompous arse?
Sorry.

Thank you.

It is as Dusk says, a more subtle distinction than simply telling the difference between men and women online.

What got me thinking again about this issue and why I was interested to join the discussion was because I was puzzled that I haven't for years encountered the type of views I've seen expressed by some men online recently. I was recently called a "manhater" by one of them on a relationships thread here a short while ago and my first instinct was to laugh because that's so wide of the mark. Easily brushed off because it doesn't hit any nerves and as I mentioned before, the accuser wasn't the brightest spark...

More insidious (and harder to spot) I feel are those who don't self-declare as men or who pretend to be women - yet most of their writings undermine and criticise women in ways small and large.

Characteristics of openly misogynist male online writers and those who fail to self-declare/pretend to be women are startlingly common.

They barge into discussions and try to change the subject to one they want to discuss. Often they are successful, which is a shame. On forums mostly represented by men, other men will often tell them to FO and start their own discussion. Unfortunately I've noticed women are sometimes far too polite to do that online.

They invent straw men or constantly complain that "if the sexes were reversed..."

They show miniscule compassion for the problem being discussed, or empathy for the poster with a difficulty.

They dominate threads with posts. More typing than listening.

Throughout there is an undercurrent that if women don't do what they should/accept shocking behaviour they will only have themselves to blame if they get cheated on/left/not proposed to (!)/rendered penniless.

Women's misogyny in my experience tends to be competition-orientated and often but not always in relation to men's approval. The male approval ones are usually in relation to sex, the sex industry and appearance, but the misogyny and beating up of other women comes out in relation to who is the best mother/the best housekeeper/the best careerist.

I was astounded for example to read a long thread yesterday that now seems to have died where a poster was wondering if she was being unreasonable to expect her husband to spend the night with her in the hotel room they'd booked for his best man's wedding - since he was being expected to sleep in the best man's room instead despite going on a 4 day stag weekend just beforehand. The poor woman mentioned that the date of this coincided with her new baby's 6 week anniversary and that her parents were going to be looking after her baby and other children.

Cue hundreds and hundreds of posts berating her for wanting to leave her baby behind, NONE commenting on the baby's father taking out 6 child-free days, working full time and supporting his child being bottle fed. I saw ONE poster remark that no-one who thought the mom was unreasonable seemed to think any of it was unreasonable behaviour for the father concerned. Amazing - but very obviously women beating up other women for their choices and an assumption that fathers don't make any choices at all.

It makes sense, IMO. We're socialised differently so why wouldn't we express misogyny differently as well as everything else?

I definitely notice the 'more typing than listening'. Actually something I love about MN is that it is bad form to comment on someone's grammar or typos, unless you actually can't read the post/it's some poor fool who posted about how they hate incorrect spelling. On other forums I know of, where the gender balance is more like 50/50, it is totally acceptable to take a shot at how someone posts, not what they say. And it goes hand in hand with writing these very long, convoluted 'look at me with the big words' kinds of posts. I guess it's the internet version of that phenomenon where men speak more than women during meetings.

That thread was very, very weird. Unusually weird.

However, it did have (although to an insanely pronounced degree) a quality that I am becoming more attuned to, and more bored / saddened / irritated by - a very common feature on mn - a briskly unsympathetic approach by women to another woman's problems that:

• refuses to see any systemically gendered features to the situation

• refuses to acknowledge work or effort on the part of the woman as something that depletes her resources, and that she should have agency in how she uses these ("it's just a few towels" "politeness costs nothing" - where it is actually costing time and effort and perhaps food and drink too; etc)

• looks to what other women, particularly fit healthy cheerful sociable women who happily embrace traditional roles do as the standard, and never what men typically do

• uses endless self righteous examples from their own lives about how they have done harder things, for longer, without complaining

I think what this amounts to is a panic response resisting the horrific realisation that they, themselves, have been, and are being, royally shafted, resulting in a very aggressive need to minimise any of this stuff as any sort of issue

Yes we are socialised differently.

Another difference I've noticed is how depression is handled.

Men's depression is often treated as an all-encompassing illness that induces bad behaviour but only that which is in the open domain. It is regarded as unthinkable that a man who is depressed could undertake covertly bad behaviour, such as physical, emotional or financial infidelity. It is seen as a stand-alone condition which prevents other terrible secret behaviour.

Alternatively, if is offered as a suggestion for behaviour that is more commonly associated with another source motivation; infidelity or abandonment.

Women's depression receives sympathy only if she is getting treated and her children are not suffering. It is never assumed she is the sum of her illness and that she lacks the capacity to be cruel, unkind, secretive or badly behaved. Women with depression are seen more in the round.

Yes Dusk I notice all of that too.

As an older poster, the competitive attractiveness/motherhood/housekeeper ethos depresses me so much. I'm shocked that younger women don't question why they have a panic response and the instincts to put other women down for not meeting a motherhood/cleanliness/beauty standard.

When I was reading that thread I mentioned, I mused at what the poster's husband's friends and colleagues were saying about him leaving a 6 week old baby that was safe and well cared for. Not for long of course because the answer was...nothing more than "great! what are the plans for the stag?"

There is a whole hypocritical knot around breastfeeding where you get it from all sides (and I believe that the patriarchy has a strong hand in both sides, obvs the ff side but - i'm on my 3rd bf baby and I cannot believe that exclusive breastfeeding for at least a year is really in women's best interests, though it may well be in the dcs)

Anyway, I think you are right in that it's very much an area women feel entitled to be critical of each other in, small scale stuff.

Sorry that might be a bit of. But I feel very passionately about how breastfeeding has been co-opted.

Yes!!

I breastfed mine, but with the first if I'm honest not primarily because of its health benefits, but because of social pressure and self-imposed guilt at even considering alternatives. This meant discomfort at work, exhaustion from expressing, not inconsiderable physical pain from engorged breasts and a son with a vice-like latch!

yup.
I feel bad about this but I feel like there are some branches of ... crunchiness that want us always to pretend that, if you are a woman, bringing benefits to others (men, society, children, whomever) is automatically to benefit oneself. WRONG. Sometimes it is a zero-sum game and if you give to Peter you rob Paul. Or Paula.

There are non-material cases - like telling a joke (willingly! When you are in the mood!) where to give pleasure is to receive pleasure.

There are many many, many cases where to give is to be depleted.

Examples:
breastfeeding is knackering (though I am sure it is good for the child)

Vegetarianism makes me ill (though I agree it is nicer for the chicken not to be killed and eaten)

Cooking nice home made food is harder work than slinging a pizza in the oven (though I am sure it is better for my family in countless ways)

these are examples where we are supposed to pretend it is all win win and the effort is nugatory or irrelevant