Citation de MegGomar
Rape and other acts of violence, up to and including murder, as well as
threats of violence, constitute the barrage some men lay down as they
attempt to control some women, and fear of that violence limits most
women in ways they’ve gotten so used to they hardly notice—and we
hardly address. There are exceptions: last summer someone wrote to me to
describe a college class in which the students were asked what they do to
stay safe from rape. The young women described the intricate ways they
stayed alert, limited their access to the world, took precautions, and
essentially thought about rape all the time (while the young men in the
class, he added, gaped in astonishment). The chasm between their worlds
had briefly and suddenly become visible.
Mostly, however, we don’t talk about it—though a graphic has been
circulating on the Internet called Ten Top Tips to End Rape, the kind of
thing young women get often enough, but this one had a subversive twist. It
offered advice like this: “Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might
assault someone ‘by accident’ you can hand it to the person you are with, so
they can call for help.” While funny, the piece points out something terrible:
the usual guidelines in such situations put the full burden of prevention on
potential victims, treating the violence as a given. There’s no good reason
(and many bad reasons) colleges spend more time telling women how to
survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be
predators.
Threats of sexual assault now seem to take place online regularly. In late
2011, British columnist Laurie Penny wrote,
An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the Internet. Having one and flaunting it is
somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell
you how they’d like to rape, kill, and urinate on you. This week, after a particularly ugly
slew of threats, I decided to make just a few of those messages public on Twitter, and
the response I received was overwhelming. Many could not believe the hate I received,
and many more began to share their own stories of harassment, intimidation, and abuse.
Women in the online gaming community have been harassed, threatened,
and driven out. Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic who documented
such incidents, received support for her work, but also, in the words of a
journalist, “another wave of really aggressive, you know, violent personal
threats, her accounts attempted to be hacked. And one man in Ontario took
the step of making an online video game where you could punch Anita’s
image on the screen. And if you punched it multiple times, bruises and cuts
would appear on her image.” The difference between these online gamers
and the Taliban men who, last October, tried to murder fourteen-year-old
Malala Yousafzai for speaking out about the right of Pakistani women to
education is one of degree. Both are trying to silence and punish women for
claiming voice, power, and the right to participate. Welcome to Manistan.
threats of violence, constitute the barrage some men lay down as they
attempt to control some women, and fear of that violence limits most
women in ways they’ve gotten so used to they hardly notice—and we
hardly address. There are exceptions: last summer someone wrote to me to
describe a college class in which the students were asked what they do to
stay safe from rape. The young women described the intricate ways they
stayed alert, limited their access to the world, took precautions, and
essentially thought about rape all the time (while the young men in the
class, he added, gaped in astonishment). The chasm between their worlds
had briefly and suddenly become visible.
Mostly, however, we don’t talk about it—though a graphic has been
circulating on the Internet called Ten Top Tips to End Rape, the kind of
thing young women get often enough, but this one had a subversive twist. It
offered advice like this: “Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might
assault someone ‘by accident’ you can hand it to the person you are with, so
they can call for help.” While funny, the piece points out something terrible:
the usual guidelines in such situations put the full burden of prevention on
potential victims, treating the violence as a given. There’s no good reason
(and many bad reasons) colleges spend more time telling women how to
survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be
predators.
Threats of sexual assault now seem to take place online regularly. In late
2011, British columnist Laurie Penny wrote,
An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the Internet. Having one and flaunting it is
somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell
you how they’d like to rape, kill, and urinate on you. This week, after a particularly ugly
slew of threats, I decided to make just a few of those messages public on Twitter, and
the response I received was overwhelming. Many could not believe the hate I received,
and many more began to share their own stories of harassment, intimidation, and abuse.
Women in the online gaming community have been harassed, threatened,
and driven out. Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic who documented
such incidents, received support for her work, but also, in the words of a
journalist, “another wave of really aggressive, you know, violent personal
threats, her accounts attempted to be hacked. And one man in Ontario took
the step of making an online video game where you could punch Anita’s
image on the screen. And if you punched it multiple times, bruises and cuts
would appear on her image.” The difference between these online gamers
and the Taliban men who, last October, tried to murder fourteen-year-old
Malala Yousafzai for speaking out about the right of Pakistani women to
education is one of degree. Both are trying to silence and punish women for
claiming voice, power, and the right to participate. Welcome to Manistan.
