11 ms·

A Survival Guide to Being a Woman on the Internet

8 points by woldemariam 6y ago

ok123456 6y ago
What is 'online violence'? That seems like a misnomer.
- hackeraccount 6y ago
  That was what I wanted to know.
- blakesterz 6y ago
  What is online violence? Dr. Emma A. Jane, a UNSW Senior Lecturer in the School of the Arts & Media, says online violence can refer to a range of dialogs and acts that occur at the gender, technology and violence nexus. "Examples of online violence include hate speech, sexually violent dialog, plausible rape and death threats, stalking, large groups attacking individuals, the malicious circulation of targets' personal details online (known as "doxing"), and the uploading of sexually explicit material without the consent of the pictured subject ("revenge porn")," Dr. Jane says. https://phys.org/news/2019-11-online-violence-destructive-offline.html https://phys.org/news/2019-11-online-violence-destructive-of...
  - ok123456 6y ago
    Doesn't this trivialize the victims of physical violence by forcing them to qualify that their violence was indeed physical?
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  If you think of it kind of like the idea of "poverty is violence" maybe that helps make it make some sense. I am not going to read through this. I have some sympathy for why and how stuff like this gets written, but I think stuff like this tends to be more part of the problem than part of the solution. I believe what they are going for is the idea that hostility you run into online has real world consequences. We dismiss the idea that "words on a screen" can have impact, but lots of men have no problem using Hacker News to make money but it is not a female-friendly space and even being fairly prominent as a woman here is more downside than up. It has not proven to be a good networking opportunity for me and I am given all kinds of crap for trying to talk about that, even in comments like this one intended to simply elucidate a problem space for someone scratching their head. There is no good way to talk about such things, so they get entrenched and it causes real and serious problems for women and other marginalized peoples. I'm spending less time here generally and may be in the process of "leaving" HN, more or less, because this is not a solvable problem and my motives for putting up with this shit are possibly disappearing. Without compelling reason to put up with it, I seem to be spending less time here and more time elsewhere. So that's likely to leave HN with more crap like this piece and, hey, you get what you want. No one wanted to hear my take and I'm tired of trying to build bridges while getting kicked in the teeth and lumped in with man-hating self-proclaimed feminists for the crime of trying to make my life work.
  - rabite 6y ago
    I'm not trying to be offensive here but you are a self-admitted longtime homeless person with a community college certificate and an unfinished BA in "Environmental Studies" with a concentration in... Housing. Your Github consists of a readme. The reason HN isn't a good networking opportunity for you is a lack of qualifications and personal achievements. I guarantee if you put in the work, learned a programming language, got in some commits of actual code to FOSS projects people actually use on a day to day basis and made a cool tech demo to Show HN, it would suddenly be a very useful networking opportunity for you. I don't think any spaces should be hostile to women who arrive in earnest. But your lack of equal contributions to the valued posters here make me think you are not operating in earnest.
s9w 6y ago
Try being a human instead, that works well.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  If you are a woman, an awful lot of men treat you like you are nothing but a pussy to fuck and their entire interaction boils down to deciding if they would like to fuck you in specific or not and whether they want to fuck you or not, it's all downside for the woman. If they want to fuck you, they will be using you and mistreating you. If they don't want to fuck you, you will not be treated like a human being. You will be ignored, at best, or treated with open hostility. I've spent a lot of years trying to "just be a human being" on the internet and, just like off the internet, the vast majority of men I run into find out I am a woman, wonder to themselves if they would like to sleep with me and regardless of the answer, the outcome is I will never, ever, ever, ever be treated like a human being. I will be treated only like a walking, talking sex object who utterly doesn't matter and has nothing whatsoever of value to add other than maybe sex and doesn't deserve any respect, any intellectual outlets, any friends, any money, etc. unless I am sleeping with some man who has an adequate income. No, I am not exaggerating.
  - hirundo 6y ago
    > the vast majority of men I run into find out I am a woman, wonder to themselves if they would like to sleep with me and regardless of the answer, the outcome is I will never, ever, ever, ever be treated like a human being This does not follow. As a heterosexual man I too wonder what it would be like to sleep with most women I meet that are in the fertile age range. This is less of an idiosyncratic personality trait than one built in by millions of generations of ancestors that all successfully bred. It does not imply that I consider those women to be less than human. In my own mind at least, it does not demean the women I speculate about.
    - DoreenMichele 6y ago
      I'm not suggesting it demeans women to speculate. But, in a nutshell, I am dirt poor and cannot seem to escape poverty in spite of apparently being the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board of HN. Plenty of men have no problem using HN to network and make money. For me, it's mostly been a dead end in that regard. And I get a zillion personal attacks and excuses when I say that, but if it is "just me" then explain to me where all the women "doing it right" are. Because I appear to manage to fit in here better than average in spite of my gender, yet cannot turn it into an adequate income even though that's an explicit goal of mine. So when five million mostly men step over my body in the gutter and go "Meh, not my problem she can't afford to eat. It's not like I'm sleeping with her." it's pretty freaking dehumanizing. And after eleven years here, I am quite clear that boils down to "Most men don't really want to engage me with me in a substantive and meaningful fashion if I am not going to sleep with them and even if I did sleep with them, I would merely be a sex object. They still wouldn't engage me meaningfully in a lot of the ways I want to be engaged." That opinion is based on 55 years of living, lots of reading and yadda. It's not an uninformed or knee jerk opinion by any stretch of the imagination. Eleven years ago, I showed up here (on HN) all naively assuming I should be treated like a person simply because I am one and that's not been my firsthand experience of participating here.

8 points by woldemariam 6y ago

ok123456 6y ago

What is 'online violence'? That seems like a misnomer.

hackeraccount 6y ago
That was what I wanted to know.
blakesterz 6y ago
What is online violence? Dr. Emma A. Jane, a UNSW Senior Lecturer in the School of the Arts & Media, says online violence can refer to a range of dialogs and acts that occur at the gender, technology and violence nexus. "Examples of online violence include hate speech, sexually violent dialog, plausible rape and death threats, stalking, large groups attacking individuals, the malicious circulation of targets' personal details online (known as "doxing"), and the uploading of sexually explicit material without the consent of the pictured subject ("revenge porn")," Dr. Jane says. https://phys.org/news/2019-11-online-violence-destructive-offline.html https://phys.org/news/2019-11-online-violence-destructive-of...
- ok123456 6y ago
  Doesn't this trivialize the victims of physical violence by forcing them to qualify that their violence was indeed physical?
DoreenMichele 6y ago
If you think of it kind of like the idea of "poverty is violence" maybe that helps make it make some sense. I am not going to read through this. I have some sympathy for why and how stuff like this gets written, but I think stuff like this tends to be more part of the problem than part of the solution. I believe what they are going for is the idea that hostility you run into online has real world consequences. We dismiss the idea that "words on a screen" can have impact, but lots of men have no problem using Hacker News to make money but it is not a female-friendly space and even being fairly prominent as a woman here is more downside than up. It has not proven to be a good networking opportunity for me and I am given all kinds of crap for trying to talk about that, even in comments like this one intended to simply elucidate a problem space for someone scratching their head. There is no good way to talk about such things, so they get entrenched and it causes real and serious problems for women and other marginalized peoples. I'm spending less time here generally and may be in the process of "leaving" HN, more or less, because this is not a solvable problem and my motives for putting up with this shit are possibly disappearing. Without compelling reason to put up with it, I seem to be spending less time here and more time elsewhere. So that's likely to leave HN with more crap like this piece and, hey, you get what you want. No one wanted to hear my take and I'm tired of trying to build bridges while getting kicked in the teeth and lumped in with man-hating self-proclaimed feminists for the crime of trying to make my life work.
- rabite 6y ago
  I'm not trying to be offensive here but you are a self-admitted longtime homeless person with a community college certificate and an unfinished BA in "Environmental Studies" with a concentration in... Housing. Your Github consists of a readme. The reason HN isn't a good networking opportunity for you is a lack of qualifications and personal achievements. I guarantee if you put in the work, learned a programming language, got in some commits of actual code to FOSS projects people actually use on a day to day basis and made a cool tech demo to Show HN, it would suddenly be a very useful networking opportunity for you. I don't think any spaces should be hostile to women who arrive in earnest. But your lack of equal contributions to the valued posters here make me think you are not operating in earnest.

s9w 6y ago

Try being a human instead, that works well.

DoreenMichele 6y ago
If you are a woman, an awful lot of men treat you like you are nothing but a pussy to fuck and their entire interaction boils down to deciding if they would like to fuck you in specific or not and whether they want to fuck you or not, it's all downside for the woman. If they want to fuck you, they will be using you and mistreating you. If they don't want to fuck you, you will not be treated like a human being. You will be ignored, at best, or treated with open hostility. I've spent a lot of years trying to "just be a human being" on the internet and, just like off the internet, the vast majority of men I run into find out I am a woman, wonder to themselves if they would like to sleep with me and regardless of the answer, the outcome is I will never, ever, ever, ever be treated like a human being. I will be treated only like a walking, talking sex object who utterly doesn't matter and has nothing whatsoever of value to add other than maybe sex and doesn't deserve any respect, any intellectual outlets, any friends, any money, etc. unless I am sleeping with some man who has an adequate income. No, I am not exaggerating.
- hirundo 6y ago
  > the vast majority of men I run into find out I am a woman, wonder to themselves if they would like to sleep with me and regardless of the answer, the outcome is I will never, ever, ever, ever be treated like a human being This does not follow. As a heterosexual man I too wonder what it would be like to sleep with most women I meet that are in the fertile age range. This is less of an idiosyncratic personality trait than one built in by millions of generations of ancestors that all successfully bred. It does not imply that I consider those women to be less than human. In my own mind at least, it does not demean the women I speculate about.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    I'm not suggesting it demeans women to speculate. But, in a nutshell, I am dirt poor and cannot seem to escape poverty in spite of apparently being the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board of HN. Plenty of men have no problem using HN to network and make money. For me, it's mostly been a dead end in that regard. And I get a zillion personal attacks and excuses when I say that, but if it is "just me" then explain to me where all the women "doing it right" are. Because I appear to manage to fit in here better than average in spite of my gender, yet cannot turn it into an adequate income even though that's an explicit goal of mine. So when five million mostly men step over my body in the gutter and go "Meh, not my problem she can't afford to eat. It's not like I'm sleeping with her." it's pretty freaking dehumanizing. And after eleven years here, I am quite clear that boils down to "Most men don't really want to engage me with me in a substantive and meaningful fashion if I am not going to sleep with them and even if I did sleep with them, I would merely be a sex object. They still wouldn't engage me meaningfully in a lot of the ways I want to be engaged." That opinion is based on 55 years of living, lots of reading and yadda. It's not an uninformed or knee jerk opinion by any stretch of the imagination. Eleven years ago, I showed up here (on HN) all naively assuming I should be treated like a person simply because I am one and that's not been my firsthand experience of participating here.