Blog: Feminism

Those of us who aren't women don't always realize the verbal abuse many receive from asshole men. Here's an example.

At Drinking Liberally on Thursday, Jill made an interesting point: while women can at least walk away and try to forget the harassment (not fun, for sure), when this behavior goes online, the nasty words never go away. A group of juvenile law students ran a contest in February to identify the "hottest" women at "top 14" law schools. (As Jill pointed out: why top 14? Wonder which school they were from?)

The contest organizers posted pictures from the women's online profiles, and posters on the forum quickly started denigrating the students, especially those who asked to have their pictures removed. According to the UVA Law Weekly:

AutoAdmit members continually referred to some of these UVA Law students as "whores" and "sluts," among other terms too obscene to print. In other representative threads, an anonymous AutoAdmit poster wrote about performing sex acts on them, while another told them to "[g]et raped." What's more, nearly all of these threads are accessible through any Google search that includes the students' names.

Jessica Valenti, one person who has been subjected to completely undeserved humiliation online, wrote a terrific article about sexist conduct online.

Is this what people are really like? Sexist and violent? Misogynist and racist? Alice Marwick, a postgraduate student in New York studying culture and communication, says: "There's the disturbing possibility that people are creating online environments purely to express the type of racist, homophobic, or sexist speech that is no longer acceptable in public society, at work, or even at home."

While the obscenity thrown at bloggers like Jessica and Jill is completely inexcusable, at least they have chosen to be public spokespeople and are, sadly, used to this sort of abuse. Not so the other women on the AutoAdmit contest, whose names have been withheld from press accounts but for whom an online search brings up pages of postings with titles calling them "bitches" by name and making claims about the size or genuineness of their breasts.

The women most suffering from this search-results besmirching are those who have little online presence and who have unusual names, because there are fewer conflicting pages that might beat out the defamatory ones on a search. Civil libertarians (with whom I almost always agree) like to say that the solution to bad speech is more speech, and so in this case one effective remedy is to go public (leading to news stories that will outrank the abusive posts) or write a blog.

However, all of these remedies make the subject an even more public person, and this means that privacy is often a one-way trap door. Once lost, privacy can never be regained, and some people have it taken from them in what clearly a violation of these women. Friends who have avoided making Facebook or Friendster profiles, particularly women, often cite the fear of losing this privacy. Will we read a trend story in the New York Times one day of couples giving their children common names in a deliberate attempt to create some privacy in a world where that is increasingly difficult to preserve?

Nothing arouses conservative ire like former President Bill Clinton, and a lot of people in politics crave the glamour of proximity to famous people. Combine these in an event where some people participate in a lunch with Clinton, and where the only information available at first is a photograph of the bloggers involved, and we have a recipe for bad behavior.

When women first started advocating for the right to vote, or equal treatment in the workplace, or protection against violence, many people not only resisted these changes but ridiculed the individuals involved. That continues to this day - the terrific blog Feministing gets enormous numbers of nasty comments, far more than more general-interest political blogs. The authors get attacked in the most objectifying ways, like commenters commenting on their "fuckability" no matter what serious topic they are trying to cover.

Most recently, a conservative blogger named Ann Althouse attacked Feministing founder Jessica Valenti for her participation in the aforementioned Clinton lunch. It seems she happened to be standing in the front row and was turned at an angle to the camera (as were the others near her), making the shaper of her breasts visible. Since in the worldview of those who attacked the liks of Susan B. Anthony back in the day, women should only succeed in the world based on their looks, and those who look good must be doing so only to get ahead, Jessica was savagely attacked by Althouse and her commenters for "flaunting" her body.

Well, Jessica Valenti has my eternal respect for being a real trailblazer. She puts up with a lot of abuse on her blog in order to expose young people to feminism. And now she is once again setting an example by not letting critics use her looks to silence her words while also not letting enemies make her ashamed of being attractive. Here's Jessica's take-no-prisoners strike back and another great response from another terrific blogger, Feministe.

On the other end of bad behavior we have another little hoopla about the same picture which happened to only include white bloggers. Peter Daou, who organized the event, invited black and Latino bloggers, who unfortunately couldn't attend. It's reasonable to point out the issue, but it opened the door for some people, envious they weren't invited, to harp on race to the detriment of everyone. Unfortunately, we have trouble separating real racial conversation from the tendency of a few people to bring up race every time they aren't personally given the attention they feel they deserve, as Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher says explains in reaction to one such critique.

I'm sad when a prominent figure tries to step into the netroots world and gets savaged from all sides for trivialities. It happened when Mark Warner threw his party at Yearly Kos that would raise no eyebrows in any corporate industry conference but had bloggers self-flagellating over whether they were being "bought". And now, under attack from the right with valiant people like Jessica Valenti defending themselves for being too pretty, we're "shooting ourselves in the foot," as Oliver Willis put it, not just by criticizing the "first black President" for not being concerned enough with racial diversity, but also by jumping on yet another influential public figure trying to reach out.