The "community" has no obligation to keep people in, it is the individual's choice what to do and how to deal with anything resulting from that choice.
As for women vs men, we all take our daily abuse, and in an anonymous online community the level of abuse is just that much higher. We learn to deal with the adolescent abuse because that's the only remedy.
Bullies will be bullies, they hone in on (perceived) weaknesses, when a woman feels harassed in an online community, it's not the fault of the community at large, it's just a fact of the world we live in.
I no longer play games, but I used to play a lot online, the abuse was daily. I and men I know receive non-violent abuse daily in real life well, not to mention the physical threats flying around; know that as a man anyone anywhere has the "right" to threaten you just for being a man. (Check your female privilege.)
Female harassment is a sham, it's just general harassment. Difference is women are allowed to complain and make a fuzz. Ideally we'd all be allowed to do so.
It's not about communities, it's about people who think that they can mask naked misogyny and abusive, abhorrent behavior behind a community and behind some flimsy excuses.
This is always how it's been. Always. The Jews weren't persecuted in Germany without justification. And there were always pretexts for every lynching of a black or asian person in the US. But those justifications and those pretexts always skipped more than a few steps of logic. In every case the "out group" is made to live up to impossible, unrealistic standards of perfection of which failure to live up to serves as justification for them being ostracized and segregated, nevermind that those standards aren't ever applied with the same intensity for members of the "in group".
You can't just blithely use this "oh, everyone is at fault in this whole mess, tut tut" excuse to remove the blame from the people who deserve it.
The fact is that women have long faced double standards that were impossible to live up to. Moreover, they have long faced a heightened level of abuse, especially online. This whole thing is nothing new, it's just an escalation, an intensification, for what's been going on, often without much publicity, previously. I have numerous female friends who've been avid gamers for, in some cases, decades, and they all have stories that I have not experienced. Stories of creeps, stories of unwarranted excessive abuse and intense threats of violence. I've only had one semi-serious threat made against me online in my 20 years of using the internet, but women have routinely faced such threats for years and years.
This is not at all a recent thing. Kathy Sierra spent years maintaining a low public profile due to online threats against her. She's just one of many similar examples. There is a pervasive sub-culture of misogynist assholes who have been actively fighting the influence of women in "tech", and there is an even larger group of idiots who don't realize that's what's happening and pretend like it's just a small problem or some sort of schoolyard tussle where everyone is at fault to some degree.
I will say this, from the perspective of someone who has been around online communities for approaching 20 years and moderating in various online mediums for 10+ years - women get harassed online far too much in most communities. The extent some of the harassment goes is mind boggling.
One of my good friends had a beastiality erotica written about her as part of a campaign to defame her, where the people involved went as far as taking the ip addresses of the moderators and redirecting them to a harmless image whenever they attempted to load the actual image. The primary reason is because a group of people didn't like how she acted, including dating the founder for a short while of the site the community was based on.
Another member of the community was naively coaxed into sending someone else some pictures of her naked, which was then gathered up and used to slut shame her - she was not even 18, which made it distribution of child pornography.
I have had to ban countless harassers who would go on a public TF2 server I run and immediately try to harass the women who had the gall to use a microphone - I take a zero tolerance attitude towards this behavior, harassment of any kind is unacceptable. Whatever positive contributions some of these people might have, it certainly isn't worth accepting that sort of behavior as the norm, driving away good people who did nothing wrong.
In the games industry dealing with abusive online players can get demoralising too. In a lobbby and someone has black sounding voice? Abuse. A woman's voice? Abuse. It becomes an ethical and business issue because these are paying customers on services like Xbox Live and PlayStation Plus. There a ToS and abusive people are a minority but in gaming it can be a large minority. Developers do write algorithms to help deal with these people (won't go into details intentionally) but without outright banning them its not always full proof.
Maybe this is a good time to re-evaluate what sort of communities you want to be associated with. There is a solution for these problems; just segregate yourself from the abusive people. Public multiplayer is not just worth it.
First you identify the real problem. The root problem is not that people are harassing women, the true problem is people are harassing people online. You can argue that you think it is worse when women are effected but that distinction does not get us closer to a solution and only serves to drive a wedge between people. Arguments about who is victimized more are useless.
I see what you're saying. I guess I'm not that hung up on the definition of the word "victim". My point is that those kinds of interactions are just horrible and that nobody deserves to be on the receiving end of such abuse.
We (as geeks, video game culture people, internet culture people, humans, whatever) should be able to get past these childish escalating aggression tantrums. This isn't the bronze age.
I partly agree, but it's also a bit of a cop out, to be honest. Anyone who has been in such an anonymous chat environment (game or otherwise) and has dished out such abuse has undoubtedly received it too and know how it feels. They do it because it illicits a reaction on the other end and they too have felt that reaction and decided they would rather be on the other end of it.
That's true, but it only takes one shut-in to threaten to kill you on the internet to characterize every person who disagreed with you as an abuser. It's a common media tactic, apart from the fact that it's definitely horrible to be a woman or a minority on the internet. That's why we need pseudoanonymity.
I think there is a genuine difference in how men and women interact, online and off - different tolerances for confrontation might be part of it.
More confrontations can lead to trolling or unnecessary flame wars, but also avoid the kind of misunderstandings that lead to festering resentment. I think bad behaviour is a human universal, but how it manifests might be quite different from community to community.
This seems quite condescending; I'm not sure if that's your intent.
I've met people who have "taken refuge" in such communities precisely because of real life interactions. E.g., being bullied continuously through school, being rejected or laughed at by women.
Being online obviously exacerbates the issue (be it radical forums, social media, online dating), but I think saying people only believe X because they're online misses the mark.
Situations like this make me think that public educational systems should experiment with some form of "digital literacy" courses / exercises for young children with the goal of humanizing the processes of online communication. Teaching standards for how to treat others (and how to respond to observed and experienced abuses) may provide some reduction in the number of individuals that seem to be finding their ways to toxic online communities. From a lay perspective it really does seem that people who participate in extremely toxic online communities are exhibiting signs of serious personality deformations; since the internet acts as a significant force multiplier on an individual's ability to spread their perspective, and since the problem of policing online speech without creating a locked-down surveillance nightmare seems unlikely to be solved any time soon, perhaps one of the better options would be to arm adolescents with a proper mentality for handling online harassment under the assumption that it is likely to occur.
I'm not trolling, I've personally suffered psychological harm from online abuse. There are many places on the internet that I'd like to go but can't because people are too abusive and nobody does anything about it. What am I supposed to do if people don't even want to talk about this or acknowledge that it's a real problem that we can solve?
I haven't read all the comments but must say this;
The behaviour she witnessed is not about technology, industry or gender -yet I agree that the women is targeted more. It's just people when they think they are unreachable, they can get away with it. Internet is the perfect place for them to be themselves.
I am not saying it's how it should be but it's kind of unavoidable in the current state of internet. So the best is dealing with this as you do in real life: keep your distance, ignore them as much as possible, use your rights when you can (let the authorities deal with them if there are threats for example) and don't let them get into your skin.
Fair point. You can't really police the Internet. I had more in mind some ridiculous overreactions that have happened in the past in various forums. But you will always have the cowardly, usually anonymous abusers.
I have sympathy for everyone who is harassed online, I do not think anyone is actually being singled out for harassment because of who or what they are. If people really wanted to fix it they need to admit that this fact is true first, because treating this as a sexism problem is disingenuous.
It's extremely relevant for women. Women are harassed more online and the harassment is more personal for women than men. Men get their work attacked, women get their identity attacked:
> According to a 2005 report by the Pew Research Center, which has been tracking the online lives of Americans for more than a decade, women and men have been logging on in equal numbers since 2000, but the vilest communications are still disproportionately lobbed at women. We are more likely to report being stalked and harassed on the Internet—of the 3,787 people who reported harassing incidents from 2000 to 2012 to the volunteer organization Working to Halt Online Abuse, 72.5 percent were female. Sometimes, the abuse can get physical: A Pew survey reported that five percent of women who used the Internet said “something happened online” that led them into “physical danger.” And it starts young: Teenage girls are significantly more likely to be cyberbullied than boys. Just appearing as a woman online, it seems, can be enough to inspire abuse. In 2006, researchers from the University of Maryland set up a bunch of fake online accounts and then dispatched them into chat rooms.
> Accounts with feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7.
> [W]omen’s harassment is more likely to be gender-based and that has specific, discriminatory harms rooted in our history. The study pointed out that the harassment targeted at men is not because they are men, as is clearly more frequently the case with women. It’s defining because a lot of harassment is an effort to put women, because they are women, back in their “place.”
We agree on the principle. I’m just pointing out that much smarter people than you and me have tried and failed to solve this for decades.
My best understanding is; this is human nature, and cannot be solved, only mitigated. Smaller scale and niche games do this with human intervention (server admins) and if the community is small enough, shame can work.
At a certain scale, it breaks apart. Toxicity unpunished leads us to the “toxic gaming culture” we have today.
Like you, I am horrified of the surveillance society being built around us. I genuinely wish there were a better way. Your OP gave me the impression that maybe you had an idea for solution, hence my follow-ups.
Barring that, in the context of gaming — where kids and teens spent a significant part of their lives these days — I’d rather see a non-optimal, opt-out solution that removes the toxic elements, so we don’t grow yet another generation of casual racists and sexists.
As for women vs men, we all take our daily abuse, and in an anonymous online community the level of abuse is just that much higher. We learn to deal with the adolescent abuse because that's the only remedy.
Bullies will be bullies, they hone in on (perceived) weaknesses, when a woman feels harassed in an online community, it's not the fault of the community at large, it's just a fact of the world we live in.
I no longer play games, but I used to play a lot online, the abuse was daily. I and men I know receive non-violent abuse daily in real life well, not to mention the physical threats flying around; know that as a man anyone anywhere has the "right" to threaten you just for being a man. (Check your female privilege.)
Female harassment is a sham, it's just general harassment. Difference is women are allowed to complain and make a fuzz. Ideally we'd all be allowed to do so.
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