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Why Kathy Sierra Matters
By Jeff Fecke | April 16, 2007
Throughout the whole sad spectacle of the Kos idiocy affair, there have been men who have been complaining that this whole thing has nothing whatsoever to do with women’s rights or misogyny or anything of that nature. It’s just the Way of the Internets, as it has been since Og first flamed Grog on alt.unga.unga.grarrrrrrr. Even the incredibly charged sexual nature of the threats Kathy Sierra received are ignored or downplayed. Why, the guys say, it’s just flametards trying to do what they do, hitting where it will hurt the most. If Sierra had been a guy, the men say, she just would have been accused of being wussy or gay.
Now, we’ll save the deep irony of that last conceit for later in the post, and start instead with the main question: is what Kathy Sierra faced just the usual boys-will-be-boys internet flame war, or is it a result of her being a woman?
The answer, of course, is yes.
The guys who flame (it’s always guys who flame) do so for the same reason anyone bullies anyone else–to build themselves up by tearing others down. To this end, trolls and flamers will most certainly behave crassly, attack mercilessly, and go after anyone they perceive to be weak.
But that’s precisely why flamers gravitate like moths to flame when they see a woman–because they invariably do perceive women as weak. And while women are far from that, flamers turn their cannons on full bore when they think they can draw blood.
As E.J. Graff so ably notes over at TPM Cafe, women are attacked by bullies both on and off the internet far more often than men:
All the female opiners that I know, in print as well as online, get hit with amazingly hateful sexual threats, especially (but not only) if they write about women. I’ve done an informal, if unscientific, poll. I was shocked by how many women who have even a mildly public profile have been not just threatened but also stalked, sometimes quite terrifyingly so.
Yes, men get hate mail too, but rarely with the same level of sexual violence implied. *Very* rarely are they actually stalked or realistically threatened with sexual assault. What happens to women is qualitatively different.
All this is entirely consistent with sexual harassment. Once you start reading the details of serious sexual harassment cases, you get very familiar with the pattern. I’m not talking about boorish comments, but being grabbed in your crotch and held aloft, or having someone grind his pelvis against your bottom while you’re standing at the cash register or water cooler (while the other guys laugh), or being stalked into the bathroom, or being asked if you bought those panties at Sears that you looked at over the weekend, or finding that some man has left his emissions on your desk, or finding horrifyingly violent snuff porn (your face taped on it) pasted inside your locker, or having a group of men drop their pants and urge you to go down on them, day after day, when you walk by their desks, as you must, to reach your own, or finding a penis statue (or a pastry shaped like a penis) on your desk.
Violent snuff porn, of course, fits the Sierra case to a T.
Why do the flamers do it? For the same reasons they attack men, only more so. They view the internet as their personal fiefdom, as theirs to control, just as men who harass women in real life do. And while they may tolerate men being here and on an equal footing with them, they can’t stand that a *shudder* girl is allowed to be here on the same level. And since on the internet, you’re anonymous unless you out yourself or do something really stupid, they feel free to let loose on women in ways they might not be able to in real life, sexual harassment being no longer tolerated by most decent human beings.
Kathy Sierra found this in the world of software design, a field dominated by men who felt threatened by her very presence in the boys’ club. Jill Filipovic has been repeatedly threatened with rape and sexual assault for daring to shine a light on the cesspool that is AutoAdmit. Melissa McEwan had stalkers outside her house after the Edwards blog debacle. Even Michelle Malkin, hateful as she is, has received sexualized threats from those who think they’re liberal.
Newsflash: if you attack a woman for being a woman you’re not a liberal. Michelle Malkin’s failure is that she makes the same type of attacks against women, minorities, and Muslims on a daily basis, not that she happens to be female.
Now this doesn’t mean that men don’t get attacked on the internet. I’ve been told I should commit suicide (which, given that I once attempted it, is sort of not very funny), and I’ve been called gay and a woman, neither of which bothered me because neither of them is an insult.
But the last two are what I find interesting. Even when a man is attacked, he’s attacked for being, well, womanly. He’s either truly a woman, or just one of those gay guys who acts like one. Being a woman is viewed by the flamers as the lowest of the low, the worst thing one can be.
Is it any wonder they attack women with such relish and vitriol?
This is why Kathy Sierra matters. Because after years of knowing this in the back of our minds, many of us have seen this issue finally brought to the front where it can be dealt with. Where we can finally unify and consolidate our position: attacking women because they’re women is wrong, and women deserve a bit more support right now because they’re bearing the brunt of the attacks. Women don’t need to hear that they should just soldier through another rape threat. Indeed, women like Marcotte, Filipovic, and–yes–Malkin are already doing so, going in and posting under far more challenging and frightening circumstances than most men could dream of.
That’s why Markos’ causal dismissal of Sierra stung so much, and why the silence of A-list bloggers on this issue, despite outrage from pretty much everyone from Pandagon down in the TTLB ecosystem, stings so much. Because there was a chance for us to take the awful things that happened to Sierra and turn them into a positive. And the men–all men–who sit atop the food chain in the left blogosphere could not be bothered to worry about such minor and trivial things as the safety of women.
Which of course leaves me to wonder why they’re considered liberal bloggers at all.
Topics: Blog Navel-Gazing, Feminism | 2 Comments »
April 17th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
Indeed, women like Marcotte, Filipovic, and–yes–Malkin are already doing so, going in and posting under far more challenging and frightening circumstances than most men could dream of.
Please spare us the “oh, the poor womyn” nonsense. The three women you have mentioned are hatemongers extraordinaire. What goes around, comes around. It’s karma at work. I think their own actions and vile attacks on people are attracting more of the same to them.
April 18th, 2007 at 9:12 am
Really. Can you mention any single time Amanda or Jill threatened to kill anyone? (Malkin has, at least obliquely, so I’ll give you her.)