Trigger Warning; This post discusses issues such as slut
shaming, cyber bullying, harassment, rape culture and misogyny.
The internet and the rapid expansion of technology has created an opportunity for people to create a separate identity for themselves. Avatar sites such as “second life” and “habbo hotel” give you the opportunity to create characters that represent you. You have complete control over their physical appearance, their actions and their aspirations. You can form relationships and social circles with other users and their characters.
Examples of this phenomenon include the increased popularity of role player games such as the Elder Scroll series and Mass Effect, and the success of online role player games such as World of Warcraft. These games create whole worlds for characters to explore and interact with, giving great feelings of escapism.
Other online phenomenon’s simply offer an expansion of our daily social lives and open other routes of communication with family, friends and co-workers. The popularity of some has mean that they have invasively become a part of our face-to-face lives and have started to affect the way information is transmitted throughout the nation in general. Facebook and twitter have become internet giants, dominating popular culture as we know it today. Twitter seems to have broken down some sort of invisible barrier that existed between celebrities and us, and facebook has meant that networking and creating ties with like-minded people has become easier than ever.
However, due to the fact that the internet gives anonymity there are twice as many negativities then there are positives. Hate speech; sexism, misogyny, homophobia, racism, transphobia , bullying, intolerance, far right politics run wild. Dangerous ideas and dangerous information are easy to grab, such as the anarchist’s cookbook and pro anorexic sites are everywhere. The World Wide Web has been exploited by paedophiles and those who seek “snuff” films and violent pornography. However, for this blog post anyway I will focus on sexism and misogyny.
Let’s just look at one example of what horrific consequences the internet can have. Amanda Todd was the victim of an online hate campaign which started when she flashed her chest at a stranger on chat roulette. This individual saved an image of her doing this, tracked her down and stalked her, sharing the image with her schoolmates. The online campaign lead to physical assault and social isolation, which grew to intense levels when she slept with a boy in her class who was already in a relationship. At the age of fifteen she killed herself. Her story went viral, some people felt for her, the majority mocked her. Her suicide on the /b/ community created a series of memes, jokes, and general bullying. This, to me is a feminist issue. Yes, leaving alone gender politics the story is a tragic and cruel example of cyber bullying within itself, but when we look at the reasons WHY she was bullied, you cannot take feminism out of the equation. Amanda Todd was a victim of slut shaming. She was mocked and demonized for being sexually active online and offline in ways that a teenage boy would not face if he had done this. Her suicide was also seen as vain or unimportant based on photographs of herself that circulated round the online community after her death, in which she wears makeup and revealing outfits. For more information about Amanda Todd check out this blog: http://amandatoddlegacy.org/
Some may say that referring Amanda Todd’s suicide to talk about online hostility towards feminist notions is weak because Amanda was not a feminist. In that case, let’s look at how female feminists are treated on the internet. Case in point: Anita Sarkeesian. Anita is most famous for her online presence in social networking for giving a feminist critique on popular media forms such as TV, Movies and comic books. She recently kick-started a campaign to fund raise a project she wanted to do on youtube on the representation of women in video games, which started a huge online hate campaign against her by male users of youtube and social networking sites. Her sites were flooded with death threats and rape threats, and info pages such as Wikipedia which had a section about her were hacked and replaced with demeaning statements and pornographic images. Users also reported her networking sites as spam in order to get them shut down. What is even more frightening is that there were attempts to hack into her personal information and share her home address and phone number. On newgrounds, a game sprung up called “beat the bitch up” where players literally beat up an image of Anita. Despite of all of this, Anita’s campaign grew stronger, and she has now started to create her youtube series on women’s representations in video games. See this video for more information on what happened to Anita in her own words: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZAxwsg9J9Q
On a personal level I have come across discussions about misogyny in the online gaming community through our Feminist society. We have a good relationship with the gaming society, and the female members have often talked with us online and in person about what it is like to be a female gamer in what seems to be a hostile “no girls aloud” kind of club house. It may not match up to the amount of hate Anita received, but it shows that it is relevant and very much real.
The internet and the rapid expansion of technology has created an opportunity for people to create a separate identity for themselves. Avatar sites such as “second life” and “habbo hotel” give you the opportunity to create characters that represent you. You have complete control over their physical appearance, their actions and their aspirations. You can form relationships and social circles with other users and their characters.
Examples of this phenomenon include the increased popularity of role player games such as the Elder Scroll series and Mass Effect, and the success of online role player games such as World of Warcraft. These games create whole worlds for characters to explore and interact with, giving great feelings of escapism.
Other online phenomenon’s simply offer an expansion of our daily social lives and open other routes of communication with family, friends and co-workers. The popularity of some has mean that they have invasively become a part of our face-to-face lives and have started to affect the way information is transmitted throughout the nation in general. Facebook and twitter have become internet giants, dominating popular culture as we know it today. Twitter seems to have broken down some sort of invisible barrier that existed between celebrities and us, and facebook has meant that networking and creating ties with like-minded people has become easier than ever.
However, due to the fact that the internet gives anonymity there are twice as many negativities then there are positives. Hate speech; sexism, misogyny, homophobia, racism, transphobia , bullying, intolerance, far right politics run wild. Dangerous ideas and dangerous information are easy to grab, such as the anarchist’s cookbook and pro anorexic sites are everywhere. The World Wide Web has been exploited by paedophiles and those who seek “snuff” films and violent pornography. However, for this blog post anyway I will focus on sexism and misogyny.
Let’s just look at one example of what horrific consequences the internet can have. Amanda Todd was the victim of an online hate campaign which started when she flashed her chest at a stranger on chat roulette. This individual saved an image of her doing this, tracked her down and stalked her, sharing the image with her schoolmates. The online campaign lead to physical assault and social isolation, which grew to intense levels when she slept with a boy in her class who was already in a relationship. At the age of fifteen she killed herself. Her story went viral, some people felt for her, the majority mocked her. Her suicide on the /b/ community created a series of memes, jokes, and general bullying. This, to me is a feminist issue. Yes, leaving alone gender politics the story is a tragic and cruel example of cyber bullying within itself, but when we look at the reasons WHY she was bullied, you cannot take feminism out of the equation. Amanda Todd was a victim of slut shaming. She was mocked and demonized for being sexually active online and offline in ways that a teenage boy would not face if he had done this. Her suicide was also seen as vain or unimportant based on photographs of herself that circulated round the online community after her death, in which she wears makeup and revealing outfits. For more information about Amanda Todd check out this blog: http://amandatoddlegacy.org/
Some may say that referring Amanda Todd’s suicide to talk about online hostility towards feminist notions is weak because Amanda was not a feminist. In that case, let’s look at how female feminists are treated on the internet. Case in point: Anita Sarkeesian. Anita is most famous for her online presence in social networking for giving a feminist critique on popular media forms such as TV, Movies and comic books. She recently kick-started a campaign to fund raise a project she wanted to do on youtube on the representation of women in video games, which started a huge online hate campaign against her by male users of youtube and social networking sites. Her sites were flooded with death threats and rape threats, and info pages such as Wikipedia which had a section about her were hacked and replaced with demeaning statements and pornographic images. Users also reported her networking sites as spam in order to get them shut down. What is even more frightening is that there were attempts to hack into her personal information and share her home address and phone number. On newgrounds, a game sprung up called “beat the bitch up” where players literally beat up an image of Anita. Despite of all of this, Anita’s campaign grew stronger, and she has now started to create her youtube series on women’s representations in video games. See this video for more information on what happened to Anita in her own words: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZAxwsg9J9Q
On a personal level I have come across discussions about misogyny in the online gaming community through our Feminist society. We have a good relationship with the gaming society, and the female members have often talked with us online and in person about what it is like to be a female gamer in what seems to be a hostile “no girls aloud” kind of club house. It may not match up to the amount of hate Anita received, but it shows that it is relevant and very much real.
This may sound like an extreme, one-off example, but online misogyny is commonplace, and many women feminist bloggers, tweeters and online journalists have experienced something similar. Youtube alone is very much dominated by anti-feminism. If you type feminism into the search bar you will get tons of backlash videos, from men, women, christians, atheists, left wing and right wing thinkers alike, and very few videos which are at least positive about the subject. When feminist videos don’t have the comments section disabled, they are usually flooded with kitchen and sandwich jokes. Independent journalist Laurie Penny summed this up well in her article title “A woman’s opinion is the mini-skirt of the internet”. http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/laurie-penny-a-womans-opinion-is-the-miniskirt-of-the-internet-6256946.html
I have often been told by friends that they are glad that I do not have an active twitter account, simply because of tweets they have read about me personally or UCLan’s feminist movement. Even though we had a two hour lecture in this module about setting up a twitter account, I cannot bring myself to activate mine and use it due to fears of experiencing a small tweeting backlash. At this point right now potentially opening another channel where people can insult me and harass me is not an option.
Due to anonymity and a lack of inability to censor this media form misogyny and an anti-woman consensus spreads at a much faster and alarming rate on the internet than in real social settings. The internet needs feminism more than ever, and this toxic and alienating environment needs to be dismantled so that female voices can be heard without fears of being silenced by trolls.
However, the internet does hold a place in opening up a new form of feminist activism. As I stated before, Anita continues to create videos despite her hate campaign and due to facebook I can network and befriend student feminists all over the country. Many have speculated that feminism’s fourth wave will take place mainly in the online world, so who is to say that things cannot change for the better?
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