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Spoken like someone who has never been slut-shamed. Or had his/her leg blown off by a landmine. People don't actually get maimed because they stupidly walked in

by wam 14y ago

Spoken like someone who has never been slut-shamed. Or had his/her leg blown off by a landmine. People don't actually get maimed because they stupidly walked into a minefield. They get maimed because someone put a minefield where they live and grew up, and they can't live life at all without being in constant danger. Women don't get slut-shamed because they did something to deserve it, they get slut-shamed because they live in a culture where our first reaction to anything having to do with women and harassment is to look for a reason why she had it coming. Someone doesn't have to say "I blame the victim" to blame the victim. Usually what they say is something along the lines of "I'm not blaming her, but..."

awj 14y ago
...how again is someone who (according to the article) has been part of 4chan for some time fundamentally incapable of poking that particular bear? I understand and agree with your logic (at least so far as "judging people for their participation in unavoidable situations is wrong" summarizes it), but I don't think it applies here.
commandar 14y ago
In this case, I think it's kind of a stretch to suggest the victim doesn't hold some level of culpability. She wasn't randomly targeted just for going about her business; she was targeted because she repeatedly posted calling /b/ "fags," "jits," "[/b] ain't shit," etc. Suggesting that she doesn't have any responsibility for what happened doesn't make any more sense to me than condoning how /b/ responded.
mcantelon 14y ago
>Spoken like someone who has never been slut-shamed. Or had his/her leg blown off by a landmine. Lord knows it ain't easy being a slutty amputee.
- marshray 14y ago
  But wouldn't it be awesome if one showed up and made an insightful contribution to the conversation? If I were a woman who had lost a limb in combat and had had a higher than average number of boyfriends, I think I would probably feel quite insulted that people were assuming I was unable to reason logically about the OP's premise.
  - huggah 14y ago
    In this case, wasn't the poster assuming that you (the slut-shamed landmine victim) were unable to avoid reasoning correctly? Without taking sides here, it seems as if the poster was saying "you're wrong about X, therefore you couldn't be part of group Y that would know about X".
    - marshray 14y ago
      Perhaps, but it seems to me that the "X" was a premise about how 4chan relates to people who taunt it openly. Then an analogy was made to sexual assault and landmine victims and then it was "you couldn't be part of group Y" that would have first-hand knowledge of sexual assault and landmine morbidity factors. I'll say this: anyone who goes around using sexual assault victims and landmine amputees for their analogies is just asking for it.
marshray 14y ago
Spoken like someone who has never been slut-shamed. Classic ad hominem. People don't actually get maimed because they stupidly walked into a minefield. The operative term here is 'hypothetical analogy'. By insisting on the accuracy of the morbidity statistics of real-world minefields you're intentionally confusing the point and trying to derail the discussion.
- wam 14y ago
  I don't know. The only rail I see in this discussion is "wow, she should have known better." Nothing about how pathological the response was, nothing about the culture that encourages that community to retaliate with such vengeance and mirth. All of that is in the story, and in the background, but we're not talking about that... we're talking about whether or not she should have known better. That's the rail.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    Discussing the response is useless, because there's nothing much to discuss, we'd just be agreeing with each other and patting ourselves on the back. I know that some communities enjoys such circlejerks, but I expect HN to be above that.
  - theorique 14y ago
    OK, let's talk about that: "4chan /b/ is immature, toxic, stupid, and destructive" In other news, water is really quite wet. Seriously, what else can be said about this that is not just repeating some variation of the above?
macchina 14y ago
I don't buy the landmine analogy because she didn't "walk into" this situation by happenstance. Imagine a woman (or a man) who is sexually assaulted after deliberately entering a prison reserved for violent sex offenders and intentionally provoking the inmates. The offenders have committed a reprehensible crime. Still, the victim is responsible for taking on an obvious risk. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_Man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_Man I have sympathy for the Grizzly Man but more for the average bear attack victim.
mpyne 14y ago
> Spoken like someone who has never been slut-shamed. Or had his/her leg blown off by a landmine. People don't actually get maimed because they stupidly walked into a minefield. They get maimed because someone put a minefield where they live and grew up, and they can't live life at all without being in constant danger. If we don't expect people to exercise "common sense" in trying to avoid becoming the victims of circumstance, then why do we install locks on cars and homes? Missing locks on a house doesn't make it acceptable to steal things from inside of it, yet we don't in general rely on that social and legal rule alone. Lacey doesn't deserve the treatment she's been getting but it's entirely appropriate to point out that the response could have been foreseen by anyone with experience with 4chan's /b/ (which includes Lacey, if she's to be believed). Any other argument is of the same intellectual logic as trying to prevent teen pregnancy by not teaching teens about sex (which is even worse as a method than abstinence education!) This should be a "teachable moment" for other teenage or young entrepreneurs trying to drum up public interest in their enterprise by poking 4chan. It certainly shouldn't be hidden from public view just to make it look like it was a completely random attack on /b/'s part. People need to be educated about what can happen.
- wam 14y ago
  I don't think this accurately characterizes the article and the discussion. Saying that this is a "teachable moment" is sugar-coating the character of the responses here. I'm not arguing that the agency of the harassment victim, and what should be "common sense" precautions, can't be discussed at all. But it's a distraction and a cop-out, and it fits a destructive pattern. When our first response, collectively, is to dismiss the person whose life is still being actively dismantled with "well that's what happens," then all we're doing is blaming the victim. We talk about what the victim of this harassment campaign should have done differently, but not about what the perpetrators should have done differently. "Common sense" should dictate that you don't try to get someone fired and harass them relentlessly in this way because they took a jab at you on the internet. I don't think that the basic facts of what she did to "provoke this" are in dispute, at least if we take the article's account at face value. What I'm saying is that it's stupid that we don't talk about the nature of the harassment. That's what's really hidden from the discussion. The peanut-gallery reaction to things like this ALWAYS centers on what the victim did, and there's an extra edge to it when the victim is a woman. (see the later "clarification" by the original commenter in this thread -- why use that language instead of "she definitely deserved it"?) And when somebody points out that we're blaming the victim, everyone's ready to jump in and make sure it's clear that that's appropriate this time. Well, there's almost always someone arguing that it's appropriate "this time." I'd like this to be a teachable moment about how we excuse and perpetuate this behavior by focusing solely on what the victim could have done differently. That starts with somebody saying "hey, you're blaming the victim" and it'd be nice to get to "why focusing on the victim is a distraction from the actual problem" and then "how and why is this kind of thing happening and what do we do about it?" but we don't get to go there in this forum. It's trivialized to the point where even suggesting that it could be an alternative course of discussion is snarked at (see other responses). Yes, I'd argue that talking about the intersection of anonymity and technology that enables and encourages wanton and massively effective harassment campaigns is what I'd like to see from a hacker news discussion. (I'll put my thoughts on that in another comment, if anyone's still paying attention a day later.) I got dinged for talking about the real nature of how a woman's sexuality is used both as a weapon of harassment and an excuse for that harassment, and for pointing out that hypothetical landmine analogies have no bearing on reality. Well, that seems a lot more relevant to me than trying to construct a thought experiment proving that the victim of this harassment had agency in order to defend a useless thats-what-happens comment. And while comparing it to how we lock up and take precautions in general is entirely reasonable in isolation, the comments here aren't isolated and they mostly add up to "she provoked it, end of discussion." The pattern of people responding that way reinforces the culture that accepts this as normal. I'm not ignorant of the argument that risks can't be entirely mitigated, or that anonymous groups also do good things. But the perpetrators of this harassment are liability-distributed and unaccountable in ways that individuals and even organized groups aren't. That's interesting, and scary, and we're not talking about it.

by wam 14y ago

awj 14y ago

...how again is someone who (according to the article) has been part of 4chan for some time fundamentally incapable of poking that particular bear? I understand and agree with your logic (at least so far as "judging people for their participation in unavoidable situations is wrong" summarizes it), but I don't think it applies here.

commandar 14y ago

In this case, I think it's kind of a stretch to suggest the victim doesn't hold some level of culpability. She wasn't randomly targeted just for going about her business; she was targeted because she repeatedly posted calling /b/ "fags," "jits," "[/b] ain't shit," etc. Suggesting that she doesn't have any responsibility for what happened doesn't make any more sense to me than condoning how /b/ responded.

mcantelon 14y ago

>Spoken like someone who has never been slut-shamed. Or had his/her leg blown off by a landmine. Lord knows it ain't easy being a slutty amputee.

marshray 14y ago
But wouldn't it be awesome if one showed up and made an insightful contribution to the conversation? If I were a woman who had lost a limb in combat and had had a higher than average number of boyfriends, I think I would probably feel quite insulted that people were assuming I was unable to reason logically about the OP's premise.
- huggah 14y ago
  In this case, wasn't the poster assuming that you (the slut-shamed landmine victim) were unable to avoid reasoning correctly? Without taking sides here, it seems as if the poster was saying "you're wrong about X, therefore you couldn't be part of group Y that would know about X".
  - marshray 14y ago
    Perhaps, but it seems to me that the "X" was a premise about how 4chan relates to people who taunt it openly. Then an analogy was made to sexual assault and landmine victims and then it was "you couldn't be part of group Y" that would have first-hand knowledge of sexual assault and landmine morbidity factors. I'll say this: anyone who goes around using sexual assault victims and landmine amputees for their analogies is just asking for it.

marshray 14y ago

Spoken like someone who has never been slut-shamed. Classic ad hominem. People don't actually get maimed because they stupidly walked into a minefield. The operative term here is 'hypothetical analogy'. By insisting on the accuracy of the morbidity statistics of real-world minefields you're intentionally confusing the point and trying to derail the discussion.

wam 14y ago
I don't know. The only rail I see in this discussion is "wow, she should have known better." Nothing about how pathological the response was, nothing about the culture that encourages that community to retaliate with such vengeance and mirth. All of that is in the story, and in the background, but we're not talking about that... we're talking about whether or not she should have known better. That's the rail.
- icebraining 14y ago
  Discussing the response is useless, because there's nothing much to discuss, we'd just be agreeing with each other and patting ourselves on the back. I know that some communities enjoys such circlejerks, but I expect HN to be above that.
- theorique 14y ago
  OK, let's talk about that: "4chan /b/ is immature, toxic, stupid, and destructive" In other news, water is really quite wet. Seriously, what else can be said about this that is not just repeating some variation of the above?

macchina 14y ago

I don't buy the landmine analogy because she didn't "walk into" this situation by happenstance. Imagine a woman (or a man) who is sexually assaulted after deliberately entering a prison reserved for violent sex offenders and intentionally provoking the inmates. The offenders have committed a reprehensible crime. Still, the victim is responsible for taking on an obvious risk. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_Man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_Man I have sympathy for the Grizzly Man but more for the average bear attack victim.

mpyne 14y ago

> Spoken like someone who has never been slut-shamed. Or had his/her leg blown off by a landmine. People don't actually get maimed because they stupidly walked into a minefield. They get maimed because someone put a minefield where they live and grew up, and they can't live life at all without being in constant danger. If we don't expect people to exercise "common sense" in trying to avoid becoming the victims of circumstance, then why do we install locks on cars and homes? Missing locks on a house doesn't make it acceptable to steal things from inside of it, yet we don't in general rely on that social and legal rule alone. Lacey doesn't deserve the treatment she's been getting but it's entirely appropriate to point out that the response could have been foreseen by anyone with experience with 4chan's /b/ (which includes Lacey, if she's to be believed). Any other argument is of the same intellectual logic as trying to prevent teen pregnancy by not teaching teens about sex (which is even worse as a method than abstinence education!) This should be a "teachable moment" for other teenage or young entrepreneurs trying to drum up public interest in their enterprise by poking 4chan. It certainly shouldn't be hidden from public view just to make it look like it was a completely random attack on /b/'s part. People need to be educated about what can happen.

wam 14y ago
I don't think this accurately characterizes the article and the discussion. Saying that this is a "teachable moment" is sugar-coating the character of the responses here. I'm not arguing that the agency of the harassment victim, and what should be "common sense" precautions, can't be discussed at all. But it's a distraction and a cop-out, and it fits a destructive pattern. When our first response, collectively, is to dismiss the person whose life is still being actively dismantled with "well that's what happens," then all we're doing is blaming the victim. We talk about what the victim of this harassment campaign should have done differently, but not about what the perpetrators should have done differently. "Common sense" should dictate that you don't try to get someone fired and harass them relentlessly in this way because they took a jab at you on the internet. I don't think that the basic facts of what she did to "provoke this" are in dispute, at least if we take the article's account at face value. What I'm saying is that it's stupid that we don't talk about the nature of the harassment. That's what's really hidden from the discussion. The peanut-gallery reaction to things like this ALWAYS centers on what the victim did, and there's an extra edge to it when the victim is a woman. (see the later "clarification" by the original commenter in this thread -- why use that language instead of "she definitely deserved it"?) And when somebody points out that we're blaming the victim, everyone's ready to jump in and make sure it's clear that that's appropriate this time. Well, there's almost always someone arguing that it's appropriate "this time." I'd like this to be a teachable moment about how we excuse and perpetuate this behavior by focusing solely on what the victim could have done differently. That starts with somebody saying "hey, you're blaming the victim" and it'd be nice to get to "why focusing on the victim is a distraction from the actual problem" and then "how and why is this kind of thing happening and what do we do about it?" but we don't get to go there in this forum. It's trivialized to the point where even suggesting that it could be an alternative course of discussion is snarked at (see other responses). Yes, I'd argue that talking about the intersection of anonymity and technology that enables and encourages wanton and massively effective harassment campaigns is what I'd like to see from a hacker news discussion. (I'll put my thoughts on that in another comment, if anyone's still paying attention a day later.) I got dinged for talking about the real nature of how a woman's sexuality is used both as a weapon of harassment and an excuse for that harassment, and for pointing out that hypothetical landmine analogies have no bearing on reality. Well, that seems a lot more relevant to me than trying to construct a thought experiment proving that the victim of this harassment had agency in order to defend a useless thats-what-happens comment. And while comparing it to how we lock up and take precautions in general is entirely reasonable in isolation, the comments here aren't isolated and they mostly add up to "she provoked it, end of discussion." The pattern of people responding that way reinforces the culture that accepts this as normal. I'm not ignorant of the argument that risks can't be entirely mitigated, or that anonymous groups also do good things. But the perpetrators of this harassment are liability-distributed and unaccountable in ways that individuals and even organized groups aren't. That's interesting, and scary, and we're not talking about it.