So there's this project which anyone can contribute to which doesn't have a thing I want. But unlike many things, this one doesn't require nearly as many specialized skills to produce, so the chances are pretty good I could make it if I cared to spend the time.
WHAT SHOULD I DO!?!?!?? Please help me, Slashdot. I need a way to feel like this is someone else's fault and I can't do anything about it.
Greenpeace is to the ecology roughly what Autism Speaks is to the autistic community, or what Bennett Haselton is to articles that aren't painfully stupid.
This is not news, and it does not deserve attention or reporting.
Well, one option would be to actually make friends with enough people that you could collect your own data.
I mean, it's an Internet comment thread. People are just reporting what they've encountered. It's just that I've consistently found that what they report is wildly different.
I suspect there's not much actual wanting to kill, just wanting to threaten. And why? Because there's a lot of guys who are very threatened by the idea that women could be as good at stuff as they are.
Oh, he was totally planning to prove a predetermined point. He was going to write about how women were just whining and it wasn't a problem.
None of this is at all true. Go look at actual research data on things like how much people interrupt and get interrupted, or how likely people are to react to something someone says.
Most women who are in professional environments have had the experience where they propose a course of action, and people ignore them and keep talking, and then some guy proposes the same exact course of action, and everyone agrees with it, and concludes that the guy had the idea. Watch carefully in meetings and you can see it too. It's sort of magical.
See, you're complaining that they don't know what your experiences are like. But you don't know what theirs are like, and given how you talk about it, you certainly aren't spending time talking to people to learn enough that you could make the comparison.
You know what I rarely come across? Aspiring software engineers, at all, period. I mean, I'm not in college. It doesn't come up.
But given the level of overt hostility women encounter, my first explanation for an apparent shortage of "good female software engineers" would be that the people who would have been good at it left because they wanted to have a job where people didn't habitually harass them.
Uh.
Actually, it is pretty much the case that women in general are harassed by men.
I'm 42. I've known dozens of women well enough to talk to them about their experiences. I think maybe one or two of them report that harassment stuff like this is fairly rare for them. The rest regard it as pretty ordinary.
It's actually really easy to check this out, because you can use whatever name you want on the Internet.
Someone decided to prove that women were just whining, recently.
What happened? He lasted two hours. Then he deleted the account, because he couldn't take it. The women I've talked to report that what he encountered is normal for them.
They're not even close to the same frequency. I know people of both genders in the game industry. The guys regard death threats as an exceptional event, and might not see one in any given five-year period. The women, if they're at all visible, get them pretty much constantly.
I've been seeing how men treat other men for a very long time now, and it is in general not even remotely similar to the kinds of abuse that the women I know take for granted in gaming communities. Like, for instance, I can post about how I like a game someone else dislikes, or dislike a game they like, and no one who thinks I'm male will threaten to rape me for it.
No, see. The concept of "rape culture" doesn't trivialize rape. But I think it's reasonable to refer to cultural norms and behaviors which do in fact seem to promote the idea that rape is an expected or normal thing as "rape culture".
I admit, I was pretty skeptical of this notion for a long time, because it seemed unreasonably extreme. Then I saw news coverage about some people being tried for rape talking about how it was going to be bad for their careers if they got convicted. Then I saw high school athletic coaches saying they were going to educate their boys on, get this, the importance of not filming or talking about it if they sexually assaulted girls.
Now I concede that, yes, there really is a larger-scale problem that is going to have to be addressed. Yes, personal responsibility is a thing, but the fact is, statistics are also a thing, and if doing one thing at a societal level increases the number of rapes, and doing something else lowers the number, doing the former thing and then complaining that it should be all about personal responsibility seems pretty, well, irresponsible.
And while, yes, we can totally continue to meaningfully blame people for their own choices, I think it's pretty reasonable to think that adults going out of their way to tell boys how important it is to avoid getting caught, rather than how important it is not to sexually assault people in the first place, could create in boys the impression that such choices were accepted and respected.
A non-zero number of rapists do not realize that what they did is actually rape. Because they've been told that it's okay for girls to cry, or that girls owe them sex and it's legitimate to push the issue, or whatever else. And yes, people really get told that.
Maybe I'm just not inventing the radical motivations from whole cloth so I don't have to think the world needs improving?
It's not at all the case that lumping together disparate severities of things in statistics is saying they're "just as bad". It's just saying that they share a common characteristic which makes it useful to study them together. Since "harassment" as a legal category is a usefully studyable thing, that seems like a reasonable way to frame questions when studying the topic. You could also ask different questions, but I suspect that if the questions were sensical at all, you'd end up with overall similar results regardless of which questions you picked.
I don't think they think the "trifling" transgressions are "just as bad". I've never heard anyone say, or even suggest, that they are "just as bad".
On the other hand, I've seen very good evidence presented that the "trifling" transgressions tend to correlate strongly with environments in which people are a lot more comfortable pushing things a lot harder. which means that there is at least some reason to believe that they may contribute to an environment where people will think they can get away with rape. That, and "trifling" transgressions can have a significant cumulative effect over time.
You're failing to distinguish between anonymity and pseudonymity.
You could argue that "seebs" isn't my "real name", although it's the only name I reliably answer to. But I've got ~30 years of history using this name, and nowhere near as much visible history under the name on my government ID, so this is the one I care about.
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.
