5 ms·

I think this somewhat romanticizes things. Those characteristics were irrelevant as long as one passed as male, but many women experienced a lot of harassment f

I think this somewhat romanticizes things. Those characteristics were irrelevant as long as one passed as male, but many women experienced a lot of harassment for participating online.

dijit 5y ago
I have anecdotes both for and against this from women who were on the internet before anything that could be considered a “women in tech” movement existed. I can’t say from a male perspective. But I think it’s not as black and white as you paint it. The (consistent) impression I was given was that if you didn’t try to constantly talk about being a girl/woman the majority of people just didn’t really care. There is, however, a sad truth of the internet: that people are free to try to antagonise anyone they want without major repercussions; being a woman is something to bring up if you are one of those. But those people would find another reason anyway, I truly don’t believe it’s “because” a person is female. So “male passing”, on IRC, about technical topics, is “human passing” in most cases, and when it’s not, nobody seems to really care, or that’s what I’ve been told.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Most people not caring isn't the problem though, because it doesn't take that many people to constantly harass someone.
- falcolas 5y ago
  A lot of times, announcing that you're a woman on the internet was (is still?) seen as a request to be treated differently. This is how "Tits or GTFO" came about. i.e. denigrating yourself is the only way to be treated differently from everyone else. I'm not entirely sure if we've progressed or regressed from that.
  - duckfang 5y ago
    Weirdly enough, "Tits or GTFO" was primarily a 4chan-ism. Everybody was "anonymous", so if someone claimed to be a woman, she needed to show tits. Thats not to say I've never seen discrimination of any sort on irc. It's usually troll behaviors I see there, and general hate.
    - ljm 5y ago
      Is it not apparent in the description that you were also assumed male by default, then? I don't recall 'cock and balls or GTFO' being a thing. The point being that whatever noble intention was behind this anonymity, the simple fact of being a woman (or not a man) was enough to make you stand out. Therefore, a woman would have fewer problems if they either kept their own gender out of it, played along with the guys who would happily talk about women in questionable ways, or stuck only to conversations where all of that could remain ambiguous.
      - thefunnyman 5y ago
        Rule 29: On the internet men are men, women are also men, and kids are undercover FBI agents.
      - duckfang 5y ago
        When the more puerile culture of The September that Never Ended happened, we saw most of this machismo garbage take hold. Myself, having access to AoL for a time, saw what that place was like and agreed it was a seething cesspool. Sexist, racist, homophobic diatribes were *everywhere* on AoL. Most heated arguments you'd get on the internet proper were the gnu vs bsd, or vi vs emacs. Prior to that infamous date, either the custom was Mr. or Sir, or the like. Or, more commonly, was whatever nickname you chose for yourself. Some names have a more feminine sound, while others had more masculine. Yet more were androgynous. Yet when AoL decided to become the gateway to the internet, is when we saw that "average" (aka: racist, sexist, homophobic, different-phobic) people join for the first time, the old guard of the internet didn't know how to handle it - we've always dealt with a higher class of people, and these distinctly weren't it. It really didn't start turning really bad until these Web 2.0 companies started linking payment gateways to real names. Overnight, your account would be locked/banned for "fake names or transgender names"... And companies like Facebook would use your friends as that proof. And of course, we know how all that is turning out - it's just as unsafe for women (or really anyone "different") walking on a sidewalk as it is with their real name online. Fortunately, there's still fringes on the internet. I don't know if you're male, female, young, old, disabled, ,black, white, native, asian, from a different country, etc.... If we leave it out of the discussion, its unimportant. HN is most definitely not one of those areas, as the assumption is that you're a white, probably male, tech worker, and that you're happy with venture capital and startups. (I really don't want to mention those quieter areas, as it reminds us of our old ideas of the internet and all the wonders we imagined it could do... Unlike today's marketing hell, capitalistic cesspool, and emotional monetization. It doesn't have to be like that.)
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    > A lot of times, announcing that you're a woman on the internet was (is still?) seen as a request to be treated differently. This is the problem, isn’t it? The women who state (not “announce” - never in my 25+ years on the internet have I attended an anon user gender reveal) their gender online and then dare to request they’re treated the same as their peers. They want to be treated differently than women are usually treated online. Equal to male and anon users.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  > The (consistent) impression I was given was that if you didn’t try to constantly talk about being a girl/woman the majority of people just didn’t really care. Not mentioning your gender when you have a gender-neutral username means people “don’t really care” you’re a woman because they just assume you’re a man. But often the mere mention of the fact you’re a woman, however relevant to the discussion, is viewed as “constantly talking about” your gender.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - splithalf 5y ago
    When is it ever not relevant? It’s all most humans can think of, arguably for valid if not good reasons.
- wyclif 5y ago
  The (consistent) impression I was given was that if you didn’t try to constantly talk about being a girl/woman the majority of people just didn’t really care That sounds right to me, and matches up with my experiences back then. Nobody really cared as long as you weren't trying to make it the basis of your identity and constantly talking about it. A lot of women didn't want to announce their gender because they didn't want special treatment. Of course in some cases that meant sexual attention, but the difference between then and now was that there wasn't as much sexual harassment and fear online.
zozbot234 5y ago
"Passing as male" isn't really a thing on IRC, or even on many forums/BBS's. The default is a totally genderfluid nickname.
- Lammy 5y ago
  It's totally a thing. I see comments all the time on various sites where people use "he" by default to refer to previous commenters in a discussion thread even when they're known only by nickname.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Sure, but "he" is a default pronoun in English.
    - Lammy 5y ago
      For people who pass as male online, yeah. It makes me feel out of place any time it's happened to me.
    - frereubu 5y ago
      That's not really true is it? There are alternatives like "they", which has been perfectly good usage for longer than people think. It's not like Spanish, where a group of people are "chicas" if they're all women, "chicos" if they're all men and "chicos" again if they're a mixture of men and women.
      - makomk 5y ago
        The thing about singular they is that it only really became "perfectly good usage for longer than people think" within the last few years, well after the heyday of Usenet. I don't think it was even a major contender for the English language gender-neutral singular pronoun before then.
        chimeracoder 5y ago
emilfihlman 5y ago
That's your internalised view of the world. It's not "male passing", it's "human passing".
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  These are not equivalent. The Internet of old treated them as equivalent, which (it turns out) was pretty implicitly exclusionary. When someone found out a handle was tied to a man, it wasn't news; tied to a woman, it was.
gsich 5y ago
Male until proven female.
- falcolas 5y ago
  Dog until proven otherwise. And even then, everyone's still a dog.
cout 5y ago
I don't doubt that in those days women experienced harassment online. There was a running joke, "there are no women on irc", implying that anyone claiming to be female was actually a male pretending to be female to gain attention, or even channel ops. What is an IRL female to do in such a culture? It wouldn't surprise me to learn any of the people I used to chat with were females pretending to be male to avoid the drama.
kragen 5y ago
This is true, and the expectation of "real names" has made this enormously worse. If you were "snopes" or "diogenes", nobody could harass you online for being a woman, because they didn't know you were a woman. Even a feminine name was no guarantee that your real-life gender identity was female. Contrast Fecebutt, which extorts photos of your government ID from you by cutting you off from your social network, then publishes your walletnym for every wanker to see. During the period in question, IRC (EFNet) was governed for many years by Helen Rose, known as Trillian.
api 5y ago
If you doubt this, create an alt with a woman's name and try participating in programming, hacking, or gaming groups. Prepare to be covered in drool, get lectured condescendingly, and get lots of dick pics.
- belval 5y ago
  One of these is not like the other. Programming and hacking are usually much more respectful groups than gaming. Gaming is a cesspool of edgy teenagers (hence people screaming the N-word in various lobbies) it's not really limited to women. That being said playing any FPS with voice chat as a girl/woman makes for a pitiful experience. My gf won't play Rainbow Six Siege anymore because she kept getting team killed for making callouts.
- ggreer 5y ago
  I have run this experiment in several communities, including Xbox Live (which is full of annoying teenagers). My experience wasn't much different from choosing my normal male-coded nicknames. Instead of assholes calling me, "fag", they called me "bitch". Also I got more comments related to sex instead of violence. I didn't keep track of actual numbers, but the amount of harassment and trolling I received felt about the same. Apparently a Pew poll came to similar conclusions. The only area in which women reported significantly worse harassment was regarding stalking. On the other hand, men were almost twice as likely to be physically threatened. It really seems like a wash to me.[1] 1. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2014/10/22/online-harassment/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2014/10/22/online-haras...
  - emilfihlman 5y ago
    Yup. People are generally quite shitty, but not because of gender. That doesn't mean they won't use gendered language to be shitty (because that's a more natural way to be shitty), but it's about the same amount for both. There was a study, might have been Pew, but I can't find it.
KingOfCoders 5y ago
I can only speak about my experience and other people have their experiences, which do not want to invalidate. Back in my IRC days in the 90s (from somewhere around '91) I only knew people on (German) #Linuxger, #Linux.de and #Java.de channel by nick, no clue about gender or anything beside Linux and Java. Ah the times of Nickbot. Years later when some people met IRL for the first time, everyone was suprised about everyone else. (this was some years before the WWW, and before digital photography etc.)
sneak 5y ago
Indeed, but many other women experienced none of that because, while it may have been sexist, non-gendered nicks were assumed homogenous with the group (ie male). It really was a lot more about what you brought to the table than identity.
- GavinMcG 5y ago
  But the other side of that is that potential targets of harassment can't bring all of their experiences to the table. Many people who didn't experience harassment still had to self-censor to avoid attention.

I think this somewhat romanticizes things. Those characteristics were irrelevant as long as one passed as male, but many women experienced a lot of harassment for participating online.

dijit 5y ago

I have anecdotes both for and against this from women who were on the internet before anything that could be considered a “women in tech” movement existed. I can’t say from a male perspective. But I think it’s not as black and white as you paint it. The (consistent) impression I was given was that if you didn’t try to constantly talk about being a girl/woman the majority of people just didn’t really care. There is, however, a sad truth of the internet: that people are free to try to antagonise anyone they want without major repercussions; being a woman is something to bring up if you are one of those. But those people would find another reason anyway, I truly don’t believe it’s “because” a person is female. So “male passing”, on IRC, about technical topics, is “human passing” in most cases, and when it’s not, nobody seems to really care, or that’s what I’ve been told.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Most people not caring isn't the problem though, because it doesn't take that many people to constantly harass someone.
falcolas 5y ago
A lot of times, announcing that you're a woman on the internet was (is still?) seen as a request to be treated differently. This is how "Tits or GTFO" came about. i.e. denigrating yourself is the only way to be treated differently from everyone else. I'm not entirely sure if we've progressed or regressed from that.
- duckfang 5y ago
  Weirdly enough, "Tits or GTFO" was primarily a 4chan-ism. Everybody was "anonymous", so if someone claimed to be a woman, she needed to show tits. Thats not to say I've never seen discrimination of any sort on irc. It's usually troll behaviors I see there, and general hate.
  - ljm 5y ago
    Is it not apparent in the description that you were also assumed male by default, then? I don't recall 'cock and balls or GTFO' being a thing. The point being that whatever noble intention was behind this anonymity, the simple fact of being a woman (or not a man) was enough to make you stand out. Therefore, a woman would have fewer problems if they either kept their own gender out of it, played along with the guys who would happily talk about women in questionable ways, or stuck only to conversations where all of that could remain ambiguous.
    - thefunnyman 5y ago
      Rule 29: On the internet men are men, women are also men, and kids are undercover FBI agents.
    - duckfang 5y ago
      When the more puerile culture of The September that Never Ended happened, we saw most of this machismo garbage take hold. Myself, having access to AoL for a time, saw what that place was like and agreed it was a seething cesspool. Sexist, racist, homophobic diatribes were *everywhere* on AoL. Most heated arguments you'd get on the internet proper were the gnu vs bsd, or vi vs emacs. Prior to that infamous date, either the custom was Mr. or Sir, or the like. Or, more commonly, was whatever nickname you chose for yourself. Some names have a more feminine sound, while others had more masculine. Yet more were androgynous. Yet when AoL decided to become the gateway to the internet, is when we saw that "average" (aka: racist, sexist, homophobic, different-phobic) people join for the first time, the old guard of the internet didn't know how to handle it - we've always dealt with a higher class of people, and these distinctly weren't it. It really didn't start turning really bad until these Web 2.0 companies started linking payment gateways to real names. Overnight, your account would be locked/banned for "fake names or transgender names"... And companies like Facebook would use your friends as that proof. And of course, we know how all that is turning out - it's just as unsafe for women (or really anyone "different") walking on a sidewalk as it is with their real name online. Fortunately, there's still fringes on the internet. I don't know if you're male, female, young, old, disabled, ,black, white, native, asian, from a different country, etc.... If we leave it out of the discussion, its unimportant. HN is most definitely not one of those areas, as the assumption is that you're a white, probably male, tech worker, and that you're happy with venture capital and startups. (I really don't want to mention those quieter areas, as it reminds us of our old ideas of the internet and all the wonders we imagined it could do... Unlike today's marketing hell, capitalistic cesspool, and emotional monetization. It doesn't have to be like that.)
- elliekelly 5y ago
  > A lot of times, announcing that you're a woman on the internet was (is still?) seen as a request to be treated differently. This is the problem, isn’t it? The women who state (not “announce” - never in my 25+ years on the internet have I attended an anon user gender reveal) their gender online and then dare to request they’re treated the same as their peers. They want to be treated differently than women are usually treated online. Equal to male and anon users.
elliekelly 5y ago
> The (consistent) impression I was given was that if you didn’t try to constantly talk about being a girl/woman the majority of people just didn’t really care. Not mentioning your gender when you have a gender-neutral username means people “don’t really care” you’re a woman because they just assume you’re a man. But often the mere mention of the fact you’re a woman, however relevant to the discussion, is viewed as “constantly talking about” your gender.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- splithalf 5y ago
  When is it ever not relevant? It’s all most humans can think of, arguably for valid if not good reasons.
wyclif 5y ago
The (consistent) impression I was given was that if you didn’t try to constantly talk about being a girl/woman the majority of people just didn’t really care That sounds right to me, and matches up with my experiences back then. Nobody really cared as long as you weren't trying to make it the basis of your identity and constantly talking about it. A lot of women didn't want to announce their gender because they didn't want special treatment. Of course in some cases that meant sexual attention, but the difference between then and now was that there wasn't as much sexual harassment and fear online.

zozbot234 5y ago

"Passing as male" isn't really a thing on IRC, or even on many forums/BBS's. The default is a totally genderfluid nickname.

Lammy 5y ago
It's totally a thing. I see comments all the time on various sites where people use "he" by default to refer to previous commenters in a discussion thread even when they're known only by nickname.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Sure, but "he" is a default pronoun in English.
  - Lammy 5y ago
    For people who pass as male online, yeah. It makes me feel out of place any time it's happened to me.
  - frereubu 5y ago
    That's not really true is it? There are alternatives like "they", which has been perfectly good usage for longer than people think. It's not like Spanish, where a group of people are "chicas" if they're all women, "chicos" if they're all men and "chicos" again if they're a mixture of men and women.
    - makomk 5y ago
      The thing about singular they is that it only really became "perfectly good usage for longer than people think" within the last few years, well after the heyday of Usenet. I don't think it was even a major contender for the English language gender-neutral singular pronoun before then.
      - chimeracoder 5y ago

emilfihlman 5y ago

That's your internalised view of the world. It's not "male passing", it's "human passing".

shadowgovt 5y ago
These are not equivalent. The Internet of old treated them as equivalent, which (it turns out) was pretty implicitly exclusionary. When someone found out a handle was tied to a man, it wasn't news; tied to a woman, it was.

gsich 5y ago

Male until proven female.

falcolas 5y ago
Dog until proven otherwise. And even then, everyone's still a dog.

cout 5y ago

I don't doubt that in those days women experienced harassment online. There was a running joke, "there are no women on irc", implying that anyone claiming to be female was actually a male pretending to be female to gain attention, or even channel ops. What is an IRL female to do in such a culture? It wouldn't surprise me to learn any of the people I used to chat with were females pretending to be male to avoid the drama.

kragen 5y ago

This is true, and the expectation of "real names" has made this enormously worse. If you were "snopes" or "diogenes", nobody could harass you online for being a woman, because they didn't know you were a woman. Even a feminine name was no guarantee that your real-life gender identity was female. Contrast Fecebutt, which extorts photos of your government ID from you by cutting you off from your social network, then publishes your walletnym for every wanker to see. During the period in question, IRC (EFNet) was governed for many years by Helen Rose, known as Trillian.

api 5y ago

If you doubt this, create an alt with a woman's name and try participating in programming, hacking, or gaming groups. Prepare to be covered in drool, get lectured condescendingly, and get lots of dick pics.

belval 5y ago
One of these is not like the other. Programming and hacking are usually much more respectful groups than gaming. Gaming is a cesspool of edgy teenagers (hence people screaming the N-word in various lobbies) it's not really limited to women. That being said playing any FPS with voice chat as a girl/woman makes for a pitiful experience. My gf won't play Rainbow Six Siege anymore because she kept getting team killed for making callouts.
ggreer 5y ago
I have run this experiment in several communities, including Xbox Live (which is full of annoying teenagers). My experience wasn't much different from choosing my normal male-coded nicknames. Instead of assholes calling me, "fag", they called me "bitch". Also I got more comments related to sex instead of violence. I didn't keep track of actual numbers, but the amount of harassment and trolling I received felt about the same. Apparently a Pew poll came to similar conclusions. The only area in which women reported significantly worse harassment was regarding stalking. On the other hand, men were almost twice as likely to be physically threatened. It really seems like a wash to me.[1] 1. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2014/10/22/online-harassment/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2014/10/22/online-haras...
- emilfihlman 5y ago
  Yup. People are generally quite shitty, but not because of gender. That doesn't mean they won't use gendered language to be shitty (because that's a more natural way to be shitty), but it's about the same amount for both. There was a study, might have been Pew, but I can't find it.

KingOfCoders 5y ago

I can only speak about my experience and other people have their experiences, which do not want to invalidate. Back in my IRC days in the 90s (from somewhere around '91) I only knew people on (German) #Linuxger, #Linux.de and #Java.de channel by nick, no clue about gender or anything beside Linux and Java. Ah the times of Nickbot. Years later when some people met IRL for the first time, everyone was suprised about everyone else. (this was some years before the WWW, and before digital photography etc.)

sneak 5y ago

Indeed, but many other women experienced none of that because, while it may have been sexist, non-gendered nicks were assumed homogenous with the group (ie male). It really was a lot more about what you brought to the table than identity.

GavinMcG 5y ago
But the other side of that is that potential targets of harassment can't bring all of their experiences to the table. Many people who didn't experience harassment still had to self-censor to avoid attention.