8 ms·

Sex, lies and the Internet: The tale of Lena Chen

78 points by ValentineC 13y ago

mschuster91 13y ago
As much as I can't stand a lot of the ultra-extremist feminists out there in the internet, this kind of behaviour (doxxing, cyberhunting) is beyond unacceptable, it's dangerous to society. Anyone who ever has engaged in "slut shaming" or whatever the current term is for hunting down/doxxing activists, please go, take a 9mm and shoot yourself. And to Google/FB: please, make it possible for victims of doxxing/cyberhunts to contact a real human in your organization who has the authority and ability to track and remove such abusive content.
- EliRivers 13y ago
  What is an ultra-extreme feminist? Given that feminism is the advocation of social and political equality twixt genders, what is extreme feminism? What's the difference between social and political equality, and extreme social and political equality? How can two things that are equal be even more equal?
  - mschuster91 13y ago
    I'm referring to the kind of people like Alice Schwarzer, who thinks for example that all prostitution is inherently bad for the women and that there cannot be anyone working in prostitution out of his/her own will, or those "womyn" folks who think they have to change the word "woman" because it contains "man"... this is just ridiculous. Also, by providing just-for-women courses in tech, for example, you're creating an inequality for men at the same time... you can't fight men-focusing with only focusing on women.
    - EliRivers 13y ago
      Well that's not feminism. Sounds like someone who wants to discredit feminism has hung a whole lot of other things on it, hoping to slur feminism by association.
      - brazzy 13y ago
        It's the extremists who self-identify as feminists who create that association, not "someone who wants to discredit feminism". While it is disingenuous of critics to treat those as representative of feminism in general, it is equally disingenuous for feminists to act like they don't exist.
      - hobs 13y ago
        While you are correct that people looking to discredit feminism often cast aspersions and claim that xyz behavior is the work of the feminist movement, which it is clearly not, there are plenty of self proclaimed feminists who are nutters. I doubt they want to discredit feminism, but by their acts they certainly fall into what people might call "extreme feminism". I call them what they are, which is man hating. Feminism (as I know it) is about establishing both sexes on equal footing. A prime example of the nutters below; If you are not familiar with Dworkin, she is famous for many stupid, stupid things. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin#Intercourse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin#Intercourse "In the book, she argues that all heterosexual sex in our patriarchal society is coercive and degrading to women, and sexual penetration may by its very nature doom women to inferiority and submission, and "may be immune to reform""
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - girvo 13y ago
        I get what you're trying to say, but the people were discussing self identify as feminists. And IMO poison the well for actual feminists.
      - betterunix 13y ago
        "Well that's not feminism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman
        EliRivers 13y ago
        What can I say. All I have is a stack of dictionaries to check. Your beloved Wikipedia itself begins its feminism article "Feminism is a collection of movements and ideologies aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights" which agrees with the dictionaries I have and also with the simple definition I used above. If you think that using that definition means I'm guilty of No True Scotsman, our methods of rationality are so far apart that we are literally incapable of communicating.
  - seivan 13y ago
    Those feminists who hate Trans-people. They are the ultra-extreme feminists.
    - mschuster91 13y ago
      Such feminists exist?! Please tell me you're joking. That's even more horrifying than Alice Schwarzer...
      - mikecane 13y ago
        Yes, they exist. I Follow people on Twitter who have made me aware of that issue. There's one prominent columnist in particular whose name I can't recall that seems to have it in for trans people and restrooms, for example.
      - makomk 13y ago
        Not only do feminists who hate trans people exist, from what I can tell they're more widely supported and considered more feminist than trans women who criticise them for it. Even some of the more prominent trans feminists[1] think that way, presumably because the ones that don't get rather less support from other feminists. [1] See for instance Natalie Reed's blog post: http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/12/13/complicity-vs-cause-in-trans-misogyny-and-violence/ http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/12/13/complicit... Bear in mind that Cathy Brennan publicly outs trans women, encourages others to harass them, contacts their workplaces in order to try and get fired and their doctors in order to get them denied treatment. Somehow this is less objectionable - and more feminist - than the people she's targetting complaining about it.
      - marquis 13y ago
        Yes and it's loathsome (speaking as a woman and 'feminist/humanist' who isn't interested in elevating any gender upon another). http://www.believermag.com/issues/200311/?read=article_tea http://www.believermag.com/issues/200311/?read=article_tea http://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2013/05/28/it-wrong-perform-michfest http://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2013/05/28/it-w...
      - 13y ago
  - brazzy 13y ago
    > Given that feminism is the advocation of social and political equality twixt genders, what is extreme feminism? People who don't define it that way. Or people who (as in pretty much any controversity) feel compelled to see everyone who doesn't agree with them as an enemy to be taken down.
    - EliRivers 13y ago
      People who don't define it that way. Well, if we're going to just redefine words we can say anything. I hate those ultra-vegetarians insisting that static typing is the only way to go. In the face of people redefining words to mean whatever they want, all I can do is suggest that without a clear definition, communication becomes meaningless anyway because I will just redefine "feminist" to mean "a kind of blancmange popular in the former Yugoslavia", so in the absence of anything better I'll use a series of dictionaries as my first stop. In this instance, they're pretty clear on the definition.
      - brazzy 13y ago
        So who gets to make the official definition of what "feminism" means? And how do you enforce that nobody uses it any other way? Good luck with that... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription
      - kaoD 13y ago
        The goal for some self-proclaimed feminists is not gender equality, but raising women above men. They still call themselves feminists for political reasons, so some deserve the hate. The problem is real feminism got stained.
    - nailer 13y ago
      The normal term is 'radical feminism'. Andrea Dworkin for example has said: "Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women" From her Wikipedia page: In the book, she argues that all heterosexual sex in our patriarchal society is coercive and degrading to women, and sexual penetration may by its very nature doom women to inferiority and submission, and "may be immune to reform".[59] Wikipedia citation for that is a b Dworkin. "Occupation/Collaboration". Intercourse. Retrieved February 14, 2013.
  - gaius 13y ago
    Here you go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luce_Irigaray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luce_Irigaray See her views on general relativity and fluid dynamics (both of which are apparently inherently sexist).
    - vezzy-fnord 13y ago
      The sad part is a lot of contemporary feminists on the web think in very similar terms as this crackpot. They're histrionic and have discarded all forms of critical thinking in favor of their emotions. This type of thinking, which is not motivated by facts and reason, leads to statements like those of Irigaray.
  - knowitall 13y ago
    "Given that feminism is the advocation of social and political equality twixt genders" sigh - that's not really what feminism is... But no point to argue on HN. Just, maybe, keep your mind open next time you read feminist texts, and look for the real message.
  - arthurjohn 13y ago
    Sometimes feminism, as practiced by those who call themselves feminists, is the advocation of social and political equality regarding areas where women are disadvantaged, ignoring and even opposing those areas where men are disadvantaged. Source: here's[0] the best example I've seen, skip to minute two to see a man get physically prevented from entering a talk about some men's issues. You can also watch the actual event[1] and decide for yourself if it was or was not misogynist. You can also read about Warren Farrell, the speaker, and decide for yourself if he is for or against rape. I am a feminist by your definition, but I am also concerned with, e.g., statistically more men seem to commit suicide and thought that talk was interesting, so those feminists in the video might say I was a rape apologist. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iARHCxAMAO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iARHCxAMAO0 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6w1S8yrFz4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6w1S8yrFz4
  - alexc05 13y ago
    > Given that feminism is the advocation of social and political equality twixt genders, I'm afraid that isn't actually given. That is your working definition, however, over the years there have been numerous "waves" of feminism and numerous often contradictory interpretations of what feminism and, even equality means. Andrea Dworkin for example identified as a feminist, and is identified by some others as such, yet has written extensively about things that are far from simple equality. (Quite frankly, in some cases, anti male hate-speech) Erin Pizzey, the founder of UK's first domestic violence shelter for women received bomb and death threats when she realised that equal protection from dv meant men should have shelters too. The self identified feminists who campaigned against her did not have the same definition of equality. Even online dictionaries disagree with you on the meaning of feminism. Google define feminism and you'll see that it says that it is the advocation of women's rights with respect to men. Equality is in the definition, but what it leaves out is the acknoedgement that there are some conditions where women have significant advantage over men. There are branches of (self proclaimed?) feminism that have different interpretations of that. There are some branches that blame men for all the worlds woes. Some that say a woman could never have as much privilege as a man. The definition of feminism is so diluted as to be virtually meaningless without secondary descriptors. What 'wave' or type of feminist? Radical? Radical trans exclusionary? Sex positive? Second wave? Third wave? I'm sorry, I can't accept that "feminism means" Why what about the campaign "feminism is simply the belief that women are people"? Yet another definition. Stienham through Paglia to Hanna Roisin (who recently declared men not equal but obsolete), feminism means a lot of things.
  - nhaehnle 13y ago
    It starts out that way. But then it turns out that to achieve equality, you mostly need to improve women's position in society. And then people only remember the second part and forget about the equality thing. And finally, this happens: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2939 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2939
- stefantalpalaru 13y ago
  > please go, take a 9mm and shoot yourself Don't joke about that. Peer pressure induced suicide is much more dangerous than "slut shaming".
chris_wot 13y ago
I remember when I was an administrator on Wikipedia, many years ago, there was a website called Perverted-Justice (PeeJ, I think). There was some sort of dispute about it, I can't recall what it was about. However, my online identity and a lot of other admins were accused of paedophillia. When I had pointed out that I had severely curtailed a number of people from the then "Boy Love" article (ew), they retracted it from my username. It's very, very easy to destroy someone's reputation online. But if you get caught doing so, I hope you get everything you sow!
- VMG 13y ago
  I think that's why it is important to own the search results for your real name, and the domain names.
- FireBeyond 13y ago
  Even to this day, if you go to that site from Wikipedia, they insert a page header warning you that WP is a “pedophile safe haven”...
mikecane 13y ago
This article ties in with the recent Block change on Twitter. See all that vile material posted? Now imagine having that tweeted to you on a daily basis from multiple fake accounts. This is why the change to Block mattered. Because of vile driven sociopaths of the type displayed in that article.
- mschuster91 13y ago
  You as the victim can't see the stuff any more. May help your psyche, but it doesn't stop other twitterers or Google indexing the stuff.
  - kaoD 13y ago
    IIRC Google does not index Twitter.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
JumpCrisscross 13y ago
>A lawsuit was always an option. Websites aren't liable for what their users do, but it’s possible to subpoena for the identity of your online harasser and haul him or her into court on civil charges like defamation or intentional infliction of emotional distress. But Chen and Hamm didn’t want to spend more time, money or energy on the problem. They just wanted it to go away. A lawsuit is precisely how you make it "go away". Yes, the police should have pursued the criminal complaint, but lacking official action private action should be taken.
- mschuster91 13y ago
  The internet is relentless, and as soon as you hit foreign jurisdictions, you're bound to fail. Governments, the MAFIAA and dozens other organizations have tried and failed for over a decade to shut down TPB - do you really think a mere human stands the chance to ever stop the Internet from trolling her?!
  - scotty79 13y ago
    Who's harrasing her and her associates and defenders is probably single semi-skilled no-life. You don't need courts. You need a single decent hacker to dox the guy, order him some weed on silkroad successor and call the cops on him.
    - colanderman 13y ago
      Yes, vigilante justice is a great way to solve problems.
      - scotty79 13y ago
        Do you want police and courts in your internet? I don't. It's enough we have government spies and government malware here. She was explictly told by google to sort this out herself and police ignored her. Civil lawsuit? I don't think she's rich enough to provide for all the lawers. Besides did I say anything about justice or punishing the guy? I was talking about problem solving.
danso 13y ago
So doing a Google search for the subject's former boyfriend (the one wrongly accused of rape, just by association with her), this Blogger post still lies as the third highest http://patrickhammscandal2.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-patrick-hamm-sexploited-his-student.html http://patrickhammscandal2.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-patrick-... It strikes me as pretty obvious link-abuse, the kind that I thought Google's algorithm would squash, but apparently not. It's good practice to own your own name and domain...but in his case, the victim's own Harvard bio page is ranked lower than this one-use blog
- betterunix 13y ago
  "It's good practice to own your own name and domain" Good luck with that. Subdomains make that basically impossible; even large, established corporations with big branding budgets have difficulty with this. The real problem here is that people still think that if they see something written down, it must be true. People might as well be reading The Weekly World News, though the kind of harassment described here would be well below the standards of WWN.
  - danso 13y ago
    You're absolutely spot on...the problem is that we often don't have time or motivation to challenge what we see...which is why headline-writing can so easily color opinions of an entire article body. Even in this case, even when I knew this blog post was part of a smear campaign, some reflex in me instinctively mused, "Hmm, maybe this guy is bad...look at all the words devoted to him". Now imagine any given employer or background-checker seeing this, without the context of the OP...what are the chances that they'll be skeptical of the smear campaign? But because as humans, we have limited time/energy/patience...computers and sound algorithms really are one of our best allies in rooting this kind of thing out. I'm just surprised that Google's ranker hadn't already flagged this...It's a single-post blog with a circle-jerk of links to other single-use blogs, with the kind of keyword stuffing that was common in the AltaVista days...and I'm pretty sure the text is verbatim from other such smear sites. Isn't that enough penalty to take the site down from the top of the SERPs?
michaelochurch 13y ago
Lena Chen and Kathy Sierra shouldn't be mentioned in the same article. Kathy Sierra was attacked for being female. She did nothing that would cause people to attack her, except for being a successful woman. It was disgusting, unprovoked, and utterly wrong. Lena Chen didn't deserve what happened to her, but she courted the attention in a way that a mature and psychologically sound woman wouldn't. She ran a blog called Sex and the Ivy. I'm sorry, but if you write a blog whose title says, "I'm in the most privileged 2% of the population, I have lots of sex", you're putting a target on yourself. Maybe the world shouldn't be that way, but it is. There are reasons why adults keep their sex lives private (and non-adults, regardless of chronological age, shouldn't be having sex). I don't think she deserves "slut-shaming" at this point, and the men involved in the revenge porn clearly belong in jail. Anyway, she's been in a long-term relationship (with Hamm) for years, and she's clearly trying to better herself and recover from the mess she made of her college years (and the additional mess others worked to make of her life). And the last thing a person with an obvious biological mental illness needs is for a bunch of cowardly, anonymous, asswipes on the Internet to make it worse by tearing her down. Where the anger rightfully belongs is on a culture, not on specific people or a gender. The Sex and the City fake feminism (it's actually one of the least feminist TV shows out there) is horrifying, but people like Chen should be left alone to work out their problems in as much peace as they can have. This is a strange topic because I know exactly where that male anger comes from. The culture of casual sex (in high schools, colleges, and some professional circles) has broken down respect between the genders. It leads naturally to pre-monogamous, primitive, dysgenic, and in practice anti-feminist social patterns and has divided men between an "alpha" contingent who objectify and degrade women, and an "omega" contingent (cyberstalkers, doxxers) who hate them. It's a hideous culture based on social status and acquisitiveness ("Game") and it's left a large number of people (men and women both) unable to form mature relationships. Most male misogynists are in what I would call the Misogyny Loop. (There's probably a Misandry Loop for heterosexual women.) Because they have negative and false beliefs about women (i.e. "all women are whores who fall for Game") they end up meeting and dating only damaged women, and the sampling confirms their incorrect (and, from our perspective, socially unacceptable) beliefs. The real enemy, though, is a specific culture created by the worst of men and the worst of women. Sex and the City feminism is based on lowering moral standards for women (i.e. women should be able to behave like the worst 5% of men without consequence) when the real goal should be to raise moral standards for men. I want to make it clear that I have no sympathy whatsoever for the 1% of men who engage in cyberstalking and doxxing. I do feel slightly bad for the 39% who have been led astray into casual misogyny by a fucked-up and perverted culture. (But I feel much worse for non-participating, innocent women like Kathy Sierra.)
riggins 13y ago
all I have to say is this is horrible. Maybe this is a case were law enforcement hasn't caught up with technology.
stefantalpalaru 13y ago
> [...] self-medication with alcohol, recovery from an eating disorder and crushing desire to be liked. All standard stuff for a college student. Really? That's what passes for "standard" in a prestigious (and probably very expensive) Ivy League school?
- sneak 13y ago
  This is standard in almost every American environment where people 15-25 hang out.
knowitall 13y ago
So does that kind of thing ever happen to men (for example a stalker could spread that they are pedophiles or whatever)?
Confusion 13y ago
I think the main problem here is not that people are harassing her. The main problem is the fact that it is possible for people to be harassed in this way. There are a number of things that the people around someone have to believe for that to be possible. Beliefs that I would say are simply wrong. My main belief here is: if you care about preventing the personal misery of people like Lena Chen and Kathy Sierra, you should not try to prevent this type of harassment with judicial or technical means. You should try to change the beliefs of people so this kind of harassment is simply not possible, which automatically results in this kind of harassment not being perpetrated (because it is pointless). Here are some of the beliefs that are necessary ingredients for this kind of harassment to be possible: * people are not adapted to living in a small world, where your actions can become known to, and commented on by, a vast amount of people. Given you are living in such a world, you should internalize the fact that it shouldn't matter one bit what a few random internet commentators say or think about you. You happen to have drawn some attention and as a result not only the one lunatic in your direct environment has noticed you, but another hundred of the thousands of lunatics out there have noticed you and are vocal about that. But they are just random unknown people. They think you are a slut? Why do you care? More importantly and much more relevant to solving this: why do your friends care? * so a reasonable concern is of course: what is the actual impact of the beliefs and statements of these unknown people on your direct environment? How many of the people you should reasonably care about have noticed? How many of those people seriously wonder whether these random people are right? If they have noticed: people adjusted to this world wouldn't believe anything J. Random person says. They would ignore it as one set of implausible datapoints in the overload of information available these days. If anyone believes it: good to know, those people are not fit to be friends or colleagues. Someone thinks you're a slut because some random people on the internet are saying so? What kind of gullible numskull is that person? A person maladjusted to this small world. * suppose some facts are undeniable. These are pictures of you naked. Why is that a problem? Having seen someone naked or having been seen naked should not change the way you behave towards each other. That's allowing yourself to be victimized by the puritanical standards that have become a strong factor in Western civilization over the past fifteen hundred years. If someone cares about it being possible to see you naked on the internet, then that person is at fault, not you. * suppose some facts are really scandalous. Let's say it's evidence of a crime, but it was too long ago to prosecute. It still shouldn't matter. You aren't a few photographs or letters and anyone who believes otherwise is, again, not worth the air in his lungs. I don't care if you murdered someone thirty years ago: if you've been a decent person ever since and I have no reason to suppose you would commit such a transgression again, then I should assume you will be a decent person now. So, tl;dr: the reason it is possible for people to be harassed in this way is because too many people care too much about opinions of random others, care too much about what other people do and commit the fundamental attribution error. Solve that and the problem goes away.

78 points by ValentineC 13y ago

As much as I can't stand a lot of the ultra-extremist feminists out there in the internet, this kind of behaviour (doxxing, cyberhunting) is beyond unacceptable, it's dangerous to society. Anyone who ever has engaged in "slut shaming" or whatever the current term is for hunting down/doxxing activists, please go, take a 9mm and shoot yourself. And to Google/FB: please, make it possible for victims of doxxing/cyberhunts to contact a real human in your organization who has the authority and ability to track and remove such abusive content.

EliRivers 13y ago
What is an ultra-extreme feminist? Given that feminism is the advocation of social and political equality twixt genders, what is extreme feminism? What's the difference between social and political equality, and extreme social and political equality? How can two things that are equal be even more equal?
- mschuster91 13y ago
  I'm referring to the kind of people like Alice Schwarzer, who thinks for example that all prostitution is inherently bad for the women and that there cannot be anyone working in prostitution out of his/her own will, or those "womyn" folks who think they have to change the word "woman" because it contains "man"... this is just ridiculous. Also, by providing just-for-women courses in tech, for example, you're creating an inequality for men at the same time... you can't fight men-focusing with only focusing on women.
  - EliRivers 13y ago
    Well that's not feminism. Sounds like someone who wants to discredit feminism has hung a whole lot of other things on it, hoping to slur feminism by association.
    - brazzy 13y ago
      It's the extremists who self-identify as feminists who create that association, not "someone who wants to discredit feminism". While it is disingenuous of critics to treat those as representative of feminism in general, it is equally disingenuous for feminists to act like they don't exist.
    - hobs 13y ago
      While you are correct that people looking to discredit feminism often cast aspersions and claim that xyz behavior is the work of the feminist movement, which it is clearly not, there are plenty of self proclaimed feminists who are nutters. I doubt they want to discredit feminism, but by their acts they certainly fall into what people might call "extreme feminism". I call them what they are, which is man hating. Feminism (as I know it) is about establishing both sexes on equal footing. A prime example of the nutters below; If you are not familiar with Dworkin, she is famous for many stupid, stupid things. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin#Intercourse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin#Intercourse "In the book, she argues that all heterosexual sex in our patriarchal society is coercive and degrading to women, and sexual penetration may by its very nature doom women to inferiority and submission, and "may be immune to reform""
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
    - girvo 13y ago
      I get what you're trying to say, but the people were discussing self identify as feminists. And IMO poison the well for actual feminists.
    - betterunix 13y ago
      "Well that's not feminism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman
      - EliRivers 13y ago
        What can I say. All I have is a stack of dictionaries to check. Your beloved Wikipedia itself begins its feminism article "Feminism is a collection of movements and ideologies aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights" which agrees with the dictionaries I have and also with the simple definition I used above. If you think that using that definition means I'm guilty of No True Scotsman, our methods of rationality are so far apart that we are literally incapable of communicating.
- seivan 13y ago
  Those feminists who hate Trans-people. They are the ultra-extreme feminists.
  - mschuster91 13y ago
    Such feminists exist?! Please tell me you're joking. That's even more horrifying than Alice Schwarzer...
    - mikecane 13y ago
      Yes, they exist. I Follow people on Twitter who have made me aware of that issue. There's one prominent columnist in particular whose name I can't recall that seems to have it in for trans people and restrooms, for example.
    - makomk 13y ago
      Not only do feminists who hate trans people exist, from what I can tell they're more widely supported and considered more feminist than trans women who criticise them for it. Even some of the more prominent trans feminists[1] think that way, presumably because the ones that don't get rather less support from other feminists. [1] See for instance Natalie Reed's blog post: http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/12/13/complicity-vs-cause-in-trans-misogyny-and-violence/ http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/12/13/complicit... Bear in mind that Cathy Brennan publicly outs trans women, encourages others to harass them, contacts their workplaces in order to try and get fired and their doctors in order to get them denied treatment. Somehow this is less objectionable - and more feminist - than the people she's targetting complaining about it.
    - marquis 13y ago
      Yes and it's loathsome (speaking as a woman and 'feminist/humanist' who isn't interested in elevating any gender upon another). http://www.believermag.com/issues/200311/?read=article_tea http://www.believermag.com/issues/200311/?read=article_tea http://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2013/05/28/it-wrong-perform-michfest http://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2013/05/28/it-w...
    - 13y ago
- brazzy 13y ago
  > Given that feminism is the advocation of social and political equality twixt genders, what is extreme feminism? People who don't define it that way. Or people who (as in pretty much any controversity) feel compelled to see everyone who doesn't agree with them as an enemy to be taken down.
  - EliRivers 13y ago
    People who don't define it that way. Well, if we're going to just redefine words we can say anything. I hate those ultra-vegetarians insisting that static typing is the only way to go. In the face of people redefining words to mean whatever they want, all I can do is suggest that without a clear definition, communication becomes meaningless anyway because I will just redefine "feminist" to mean "a kind of blancmange popular in the former Yugoslavia", so in the absence of anything better I'll use a series of dictionaries as my first stop. In this instance, they're pretty clear on the definition.
    - brazzy 13y ago
      So who gets to make the official definition of what "feminism" means? And how do you enforce that nobody uses it any other way? Good luck with that... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription
    - kaoD 13y ago
      The goal for some self-proclaimed feminists is not gender equality, but raising women above men. They still call themselves feminists for political reasons, so some deserve the hate. The problem is real feminism got stained.
  - nailer 13y ago
    The normal term is 'radical feminism'. Andrea Dworkin for example has said: "Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women" From her Wikipedia page: In the book, she argues that all heterosexual sex in our patriarchal society is coercive and degrading to women, and sexual penetration may by its very nature doom women to inferiority and submission, and "may be immune to reform".[59] Wikipedia citation for that is a b Dworkin. "Occupation/Collaboration". Intercourse. Retrieved February 14, 2013.
- gaius 13y ago
  Here you go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luce_Irigaray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luce_Irigaray See her views on general relativity and fluid dynamics (both of which are apparently inherently sexist).
  - vezzy-fnord 13y ago
    The sad part is a lot of contemporary feminists on the web think in very similar terms as this crackpot. They're histrionic and have discarded all forms of critical thinking in favor of their emotions. This type of thinking, which is not motivated by facts and reason, leads to statements like those of Irigaray.
- knowitall 13y ago
  "Given that feminism is the advocation of social and political equality twixt genders" sigh - that's not really what feminism is... But no point to argue on HN. Just, maybe, keep your mind open next time you read feminist texts, and look for the real message.
- arthurjohn 13y ago
  Sometimes feminism, as practiced by those who call themselves feminists, is the advocation of social and political equality regarding areas where women are disadvantaged, ignoring and even opposing those areas where men are disadvantaged. Source: here's[0] the best example I've seen, skip to minute two to see a man get physically prevented from entering a talk about some men's issues. You can also watch the actual event[1] and decide for yourself if it was or was not misogynist. You can also read about Warren Farrell, the speaker, and decide for yourself if he is for or against rape. I am a feminist by your definition, but I am also concerned with, e.g., statistically more men seem to commit suicide and thought that talk was interesting, so those feminists in the video might say I was a rape apologist. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iARHCxAMAO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iARHCxAMAO0 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6w1S8yrFz4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6w1S8yrFz4
- alexc05 13y ago
  > Given that feminism is the advocation of social and political equality twixt genders, I'm afraid that isn't actually given. That is your working definition, however, over the years there have been numerous "waves" of feminism and numerous often contradictory interpretations of what feminism and, even equality means. Andrea Dworkin for example identified as a feminist, and is identified by some others as such, yet has written extensively about things that are far from simple equality. (Quite frankly, in some cases, anti male hate-speech) Erin Pizzey, the founder of UK's first domestic violence shelter for women received bomb and death threats when she realised that equal protection from dv meant men should have shelters too. The self identified feminists who campaigned against her did not have the same definition of equality. Even online dictionaries disagree with you on the meaning of feminism. Google define feminism and you'll see that it says that it is the advocation of women's rights with respect to men. Equality is in the definition, but what it leaves out is the acknoedgement that there are some conditions where women have significant advantage over men. There are branches of (self proclaimed?) feminism that have different interpretations of that. There are some branches that blame men for all the worlds woes. Some that say a woman could never have as much privilege as a man. The definition of feminism is so diluted as to be virtually meaningless without secondary descriptors. What 'wave' or type of feminist? Radical? Radical trans exclusionary? Sex positive? Second wave? Third wave? I'm sorry, I can't accept that "feminism means" Why what about the campaign "feminism is simply the belief that women are people"? Yet another definition. Stienham through Paglia to Hanna Roisin (who recently declared men not equal but obsolete), feminism means a lot of things.
- nhaehnle 13y ago
  It starts out that way. But then it turns out that to achieve equality, you mostly need to improve women's position in society. And then people only remember the second part and forget about the equality thing. And finally, this happens: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2939 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2939
stefantalpalaru 13y ago
> please go, take a 9mm and shoot yourself Don't joke about that. Peer pressure induced suicide is much more dangerous than "slut shaming".

chris_wot 13y ago

I remember when I was an administrator on Wikipedia, many years ago, there was a website called Perverted-Justice (PeeJ, I think). There was some sort of dispute about it, I can't recall what it was about. However, my online identity and a lot of other admins were accused of paedophillia. When I had pointed out that I had severely curtailed a number of people from the then "Boy Love" article (ew), they retracted it from my username. It's very, very easy to destroy someone's reputation online. But if you get caught doing so, I hope you get everything you sow!

VMG 13y ago
I think that's why it is important to own the search results for your real name, and the domain names.
FireBeyond 13y ago
Even to this day, if you go to that site from Wikipedia, they insert a page header warning you that WP is a “pedophile safe haven”...

mikecane 13y ago

This article ties in with the recent Block change on Twitter. See all that vile material posted? Now imagine having that tweeted to you on a daily basis from multiple fake accounts. This is why the change to Block mattered. Because of vile driven sociopaths of the type displayed in that article.

mschuster91 13y ago
You as the victim can't see the stuff any more. May help your psyche, but it doesn't stop other twitterers or Google indexing the stuff.
- kaoD 13y ago
  IIRC Google does not index Twitter.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

JumpCrisscross 13y ago

>A lawsuit was always an option. Websites aren't liable for what their users do, but it’s possible to subpoena for the identity of your online harasser and haul him or her into court on civil charges like defamation or intentional infliction of emotional distress. But Chen and Hamm didn’t want to spend more time, money or energy on the problem. They just wanted it to go away. A lawsuit is precisely how you make it "go away". Yes, the police should have pursued the criminal complaint, but lacking official action private action should be taken.

mschuster91 13y ago
The internet is relentless, and as soon as you hit foreign jurisdictions, you're bound to fail. Governments, the MAFIAA and dozens other organizations have tried and failed for over a decade to shut down TPB - do you really think a mere human stands the chance to ever stop the Internet from trolling her?!
- scotty79 13y ago
  Who's harrasing her and her associates and defenders is probably single semi-skilled no-life. You don't need courts. You need a single decent hacker to dox the guy, order him some weed on silkroad successor and call the cops on him.
  - colanderman 13y ago
    Yes, vigilante justice is a great way to solve problems.
    - scotty79 13y ago
      Do you want police and courts in your internet? I don't. It's enough we have government spies and government malware here. She was explictly told by google to sort this out herself and police ignored her. Civil lawsuit? I don't think she's rich enough to provide for all the lawers. Besides did I say anything about justice or punishing the guy? I was talking about problem solving.

danso 13y ago

So doing a Google search for the subject's former boyfriend (the one wrongly accused of rape, just by association with her), this Blogger post still lies as the third highest http://patrickhammscandal2.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-patrick-hamm-sexploited-his-student.html http://patrickhammscandal2.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-patrick-... It strikes me as pretty obvious link-abuse, the kind that I thought Google's algorithm would squash, but apparently not. It's good practice to own your own name and domain...but in his case, the victim's own Harvard bio page is ranked lower than this one-use blog

betterunix 13y ago
"It's good practice to own your own name and domain" Good luck with that. Subdomains make that basically impossible; even large, established corporations with big branding budgets have difficulty with this. The real problem here is that people still think that if they see something written down, it must be true. People might as well be reading The Weekly World News, though the kind of harassment described here would be well below the standards of WWN.
- danso 13y ago
  You're absolutely spot on...the problem is that we often don't have time or motivation to challenge what we see...which is why headline-writing can so easily color opinions of an entire article body. Even in this case, even when I knew this blog post was part of a smear campaign, some reflex in me instinctively mused, "Hmm, maybe this guy is bad...look at all the words devoted to him". Now imagine any given employer or background-checker seeing this, without the context of the OP...what are the chances that they'll be skeptical of the smear campaign? But because as humans, we have limited time/energy/patience...computers and sound algorithms really are one of our best allies in rooting this kind of thing out. I'm just surprised that Google's ranker hadn't already flagged this...It's a single-post blog with a circle-jerk of links to other single-use blogs, with the kind of keyword stuffing that was common in the AltaVista days...and I'm pretty sure the text is verbatim from other such smear sites. Isn't that enough penalty to take the site down from the top of the SERPs?

michaelochurch 13y ago

Lena Chen and Kathy Sierra shouldn't be mentioned in the same article. Kathy Sierra was attacked for being female. She did nothing that would cause people to attack her, except for being a successful woman. It was disgusting, unprovoked, and utterly wrong. Lena Chen didn't deserve what happened to her, but she courted the attention in a way that a mature and psychologically sound woman wouldn't. She ran a blog called Sex and the Ivy. I'm sorry, but if you write a blog whose title says, "I'm in the most privileged 2% of the population, I have lots of sex", you're putting a target on yourself. Maybe the world shouldn't be that way, but it is. There are reasons why adults keep their sex lives private (and non-adults, regardless of chronological age, shouldn't be having sex). I don't think she deserves "slut-shaming" at this point, and the men involved in the revenge porn clearly belong in jail. Anyway, she's been in a long-term relationship (with Hamm) for years, and she's clearly trying to better herself and recover from the mess she made of her college years (and the additional mess others worked to make of her life). And the last thing a person with an obvious biological mental illness needs is for a bunch of cowardly, anonymous, asswipes on the Internet to make it worse by tearing her down. Where the anger rightfully belongs is on a culture, not on specific people or a gender. The Sex and the City fake feminism (it's actually one of the least feminist TV shows out there) is horrifying, but people like Chen should be left alone to work out their problems in as much peace as they can have. This is a strange topic because I know exactly where that male anger comes from. The culture of casual sex (in high schools, colleges, and some professional circles) has broken down respect between the genders. It leads naturally to pre-monogamous, primitive, dysgenic, and in practice anti-feminist social patterns and has divided men between an "alpha" contingent who objectify and degrade women, and an "omega" contingent (cyberstalkers, doxxers) who hate them. It's a hideous culture based on social status and acquisitiveness ("Game") and it's left a large number of people (men and women both) unable to form mature relationships. Most male misogynists are in what I would call the Misogyny Loop. (There's probably a Misandry Loop for heterosexual women.) Because they have negative and false beliefs about women (i.e. "all women are whores who fall for Game") they end up meeting and dating only damaged women, and the sampling confirms their incorrect (and, from our perspective, socially unacceptable) beliefs. The real enemy, though, is a specific culture created by the worst of men and the worst of women. Sex and the City feminism is based on lowering moral standards for women (i.e. women should be able to behave like the worst 5% of men without consequence) when the real goal should be to raise moral standards for men. I want to make it clear that I have no sympathy whatsoever for the 1% of men who engage in cyberstalking and doxxing. I do feel slightly bad for the 39% who have been led astray into casual misogyny by a fucked-up and perverted culture. (But I feel much worse for non-participating, innocent women like Kathy Sierra.)

riggins 13y ago

all I have to say is this is horrible. Maybe this is a case were law enforcement hasn't caught up with technology.

stefantalpalaru 13y ago

> [...] self-medication with alcohol, recovery from an eating disorder and crushing desire to be liked. All standard stuff for a college student. Really? That's what passes for "standard" in a prestigious (and probably very expensive) Ivy League school?

sneak 13y ago
This is standard in almost every American environment where people 15-25 hang out.

knowitall 13y ago

So does that kind of thing ever happen to men (for example a stalker could spread that they are pedophiles or whatever)?

Confusion 13y ago

I think the main problem here is not that people are harassing her. The main problem is the fact that it is possible for people to be harassed in this way. There are a number of things that the people around someone have to believe for that to be possible. Beliefs that I would say are simply wrong. My main belief here is: if you care about preventing the personal misery of people like Lena Chen and Kathy Sierra, you should not try to prevent this type of harassment with judicial or technical means. You should try to change the beliefs of people so this kind of harassment is simply not possible, which automatically results in this kind of harassment not being perpetrated (because it is pointless). Here are some of the beliefs that are necessary ingredients for this kind of harassment to be possible: * people are not adapted to living in a small world, where your actions can become known to, and commented on by, a vast amount of people. Given you are living in such a world, you should internalize the fact that it shouldn't matter one bit what a few random internet commentators say or think about you. You happen to have drawn some attention and as a result not only the one lunatic in your direct environment has noticed you, but another hundred of the thousands of lunatics out there have noticed you and are vocal about that. But they are just random unknown people. They think you are a slut? Why do you care? More importantly and much more relevant to solving this: why do your friends care? * so a reasonable concern is of course: what is the actual impact of the beliefs and statements of these unknown people on your direct environment? How many of the people you should reasonably care about have noticed? How many of those people seriously wonder whether these random people are right? If they have noticed: people adjusted to this world wouldn't believe anything J. Random person says. They would ignore it as one set of implausible datapoints in the overload of information available these days. If anyone believes it: good to know, those people are not fit to be friends or colleagues. Someone thinks you're a slut because some random people on the internet are saying so? What kind of gullible numskull is that person? A person maladjusted to this small world. * suppose some facts are undeniable. These are pictures of you naked. Why is that a problem? Having seen someone naked or having been seen naked should not change the way you behave towards each other. That's allowing yourself to be victimized by the puritanical standards that have become a strong factor in Western civilization over the past fifteen hundred years. If someone cares about it being possible to see you naked on the internet, then that person is at fault, not you. * suppose some facts are really scandalous. Let's say it's evidence of a crime, but it was too long ago to prosecute. It still shouldn't matter. You aren't a few photographs or letters and anyone who believes otherwise is, again, not worth the air in his lungs. I don't care if you murdered someone thirty years ago: if you've been a decent person ever since and I have no reason to suppose you would commit such a transgression again, then I should assume you will be a decent person now. So, tl;dr: the reason it is possible for people to be harassed in this way is because too many people care too much about opinions of random others, care too much about what other people do and commit the fundamental attribution error. Solve that and the problem goes away.